Why materialists are predominantly materialists

[Pat Mustard]

The number of atheist I know of who present materialism as an alternative to religious belief: 0. This includes public atheists, atheists I've ineracted with online and atheists I know personally. The whole materialism as a substitute for religion thing is a fundie slander, as they associate materialism with want for things.

People are asked to accept that they are material things because the evidence is increasingly saying that that is the case. For example neurology has pretty much shown that the brain does everything ascribed to souls. We should no more accept the validity of belief in souls than we do the validity of belief in phlogiston.

Perhaps that's not how they present it, or even intend to present it, but o the believer the "arguing atheist" is presenting, not some logically derived worldview, but rather an alternative reality and an alternative conception of what one is.  You and I may think of materialism as having a kind of rational basis, but to many believers it is just another worldview - one that flies in the face of one they believe in . 

I don't know that science can account for any one, single thing I experience.  Since no aspect of anything I experience - thoughts, color, sensation, etc. - can even be described in physical terms - mass, distance, time, charge, spin - there can be no physical theory of anything I experience.  Materialists like to believe that (what they believe to be) material brains can "do everything ascribed to souls," but that's just a belief.  (I won't even bring up the fact that, if materialism is right, I can't even FIND the material brain my experiences supposedly happen in, or the world such a brain would exist in - if it even existed.)

First of all let me point out that what you believe is over here, whereas what reality is is way off over in the distance. And it doesn't matter what you or anybody else believes when talking about "materialism as a replacement for religion" because materialism has about as much to do with religion as gravity has to do with the colour dusky yellow, they do not match up at all. Materialism is simply an underlying axiom in science which is necessary in order for us to be able to know anything. Religion on the other hand is a belief in things where there is no evidence.

Oh, and science accounts for your brain, which accounts for your consciousness, which accounts for every single thing you experience. Science has shown the existence of the computer you use, the air you breathe, the rock you stand on and countless other externalities which make up your experience. Just because you, in your scientific illiteracy and wilful ignorance, believe that science does not explain things that it is very good at explaining it doesn't follow that you are even remotely close to being right.