(June 27, 2025 at 9:26 pm)Rizen Wrote: Hi. A little bit about myself and why I decided to join: To summarize: there aren't many people like me. I'm a man interested in women and on dating sites I proudly identify as "Atheist". I was texting with a woman who said she's spiritual but nonreligious and was having trouble being around religious people so I replied "Religion is the antithesis of critical thought. In science we adapt a scientific method to prove facts which involves peer review, experimentation, analysis, and most importantly, the option to adjust theories when new information is discovered. Religion rigidly believes unalterable teachings as facts that don't hold up to modern science. For example, the story of Noah's Ark suggests that by collecting pairs of animals and saving them from a flood they could repopulate a species. We can now disprove that because we're aware, through science, of inbreeding and that we need significantly more to ensure genetic diversity. Science disproves religion all the time." ...and she ghosted me. It's hard to be an atheist in a country full of Christians who are adamant about forcing Christianity on everyone else. I feel extremely isolated. So I looked up Atheist forums. There's very few people I can talk to about this kind of thing.
Hiya.
I've never been on a dating site, but I suspect it's probably best not to give too much weight to people's behavior there.
I mean, she might have ghosted you because of what you wrote. But she also might have been a fat old man attempting to catfish you, and he decided you seem too smart to waste time on. Or maybe the site kicked her off because she was really 12 years old. You never know.
As for what you say about religion, it easy to agree with you as far as it goes. But what you're calling "religion" is only a very small part of an enormously varied phenomenon. There have been many many Christians in history who would agree with you that the Noah story is a scientifically impossible fable. So you can't dismiss "religion" based simply on literal readings of Genesis. But we're not supposed to go into that stuff on intro threads, so maybe it will come up later in a different discussion.
