street epistemology

[drfuzzy]

Delicate, are you really not tired of repeating the same lie, over and again?

Most of the board members here are former Christians, and we understand the religion quite well, especially now that we're on the outside looking back at the reasons we once chose to believe. I would suggest, then, that it is you who fails to understand, because you blind yourself with the culture and thought-limitations imposed by any system of belief.

Atheism has no system of belief; it is the absence of a belief. You too are an atheist, with regard to all the other religions that we also don't believe in (e.g. Islam), and that lack of faith in the other religions is not a thing, for you, either. How hard is this to understand?

It is true that, as atheists, there are things we commonly accept, such as the findings of science, because we have no preset reason to reject those findings as tentatively true, and we believe them only to the degree that they are actually proved (or suspected of being true, based on inferences from data, a much lower level of acceptance... an example would be Dark Matter/Energy). But we do not have leaders, or even a true group identity-- we are as likely to disagree on every other subject as we are with you.

The one thing we do agree on is that your ideas about God are as transparent and false as all those other religions you already reject. You just can't see that the same thing applies to your own, and the mental programming you have installed on your operating system protects itself by keeping you from seeing it. One day, you may gain a greater understanding, as we did when we left Christianity behind.

You should also really work harder at not trying to tell us that faith is knowledge, when it is already defined in Hebrews 11:1 as "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." In other words, you simply believe it's a fact even though it's not detectable, and is actually just the product of your hope. That's pretty much the definition of imaginary.

In the meantime, by all means, keep insisting that it is we who have a lack of understanding. I'd be curious to know what part of Christianity you think I (and most of us here) fail to grasp. Vicarious atonement? Original (and heritable) sin?

Thanks Rocket.  Very well said.  I was trying to remember that Hebrews verse, too tired and lazy to google it . . .      thanks for finding it for us!