This Has to Stop

[KevinM1]

I am genuinely sorry if I gave the impression that I thought people on this forum where a bunch of idiots, it is clearly not the case. After spending 30 years of my life clearly believing something was 100 percent true despite the evidence to the contrary, it is me that is the idiot.
After spends many hours watching people with an opposing worldview to mine the penny has started to drop and to be honest it is a real shock. I'm not even really sure that I know why I am on this forum. My click of friends are predominantly Christian and I now feel like a hypocrite and a pariah when I am around them (which is no fault of theirs - they have no idea what is going on in my mind and treat me just as kindly as ever). My first point of contact when I came here was Astonished - and to be honest he just confirmed many (no doubt irrational) prejudices I have about non-theists. Anyway, that's enough of that. I really like Carl Sagan and the way he was able to dismantle fallacies that people build about themselves without attacking them personally. The world was a better place for having someone like him on it.

I think the number 1 thing to realize is that atheism - a lack of belief in a god or god - is really the only thing atheists share. Atheism comes in two main varieties:

1. Agnostic atheism - open to the possibility of something, but hasn't encountered any proof of it, so lacks belief. Reserves the right to change their mind when presented with new evidence.

2. Gnostic atheism - there is no god of any kind (it's an assertion whereas agnostic atheism is not).

There are, of course, other nuances (I'm more or less an apatheist stemming from ignosticism), but those tend to be the main branches.

I say all this because theists often come here with this view that we're all the same. Yes, there are frothing neckbeards, and, yes, a lot (most?) of us are secular humanists. But there's no atheist creed or hierarchy or anything else. No doctrine. Even on this forum we have Trump voters and social/political conservatives. We have people who are gung-ho about their atheism, to the point of activism, and those that don't really care. People who used to be religious and deconverted, and those who never believed in the first place.

We're pretty varied once you get to know us. We're just people who don't believe in a god. For a lot of us, it's pretty far down the list of what defines us as people.