Each persons lack of faith is unique, although it tends to boil down a very limited pool of reasons:
- you may come to realize that the concept of god is used by people to manipulate the general ignorant population.
- you may come to realize that the attributes that these people imbue in god are self-contradictory (there's a very long, but recent, thread around this forum about the omni-potency of god, that you might find interesting). My personal version was the realization that there were cameras everywhere, god was also supposed to be everywhere... how come no camera ever captured god?! (I was 10 at the time, so excuse the lack sophistication of the argument... nonetheless, it was the seed that planted disbelief.
- you may come to realize that there are several religions, each trying to impose their own version of the divine "truth". Imagine you're an alien and find yourself on earth and all these people trying to make you believe this or that god. How do you choose? Certainly, many (if not all) of them are mutually exclusive. If you choose one, then all others are supposed to be false. Repeat the step and choose another. Perform a logical OR on the two sets of false religions that you get and you arrive at "all religions are false".
- you may compare scientific facts about the world with what is written on the same subject in holy books and realize that the holy book is giving you a completely erroneous account. If that one particular thing is wrong, what else is wrong in that book? Remember that holy books are "inspired" by the divinity of that particular religion and so should be spot on with reality. Since they are not, there's a good likelyhood that the whole thing of "inspiration" is equivalent to the inspiration of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster when they started writing about superman.
can't remember any more... I think Min would do a great job at completing this list.
- you may come to realize that the concept of god is used by people to manipulate the general ignorant population.
- you may come to realize that the attributes that these people imbue in god are self-contradictory (there's a very long, but recent, thread around this forum about the omni-potency of god, that you might find interesting). My personal version was the realization that there were cameras everywhere, god was also supposed to be everywhere... how come no camera ever captured god?! (I was 10 at the time, so excuse the lack sophistication of the argument... nonetheless, it was the seed that planted disbelief.
- you may come to realize that there are several religions, each trying to impose their own version of the divine "truth". Imagine you're an alien and find yourself on earth and all these people trying to make you believe this or that god. How do you choose? Certainly, many (if not all) of them are mutually exclusive. If you choose one, then all others are supposed to be false. Repeat the step and choose another. Perform a logical OR on the two sets of false religions that you get and you arrive at "all religions are false".
- you may compare scientific facts about the world with what is written on the same subject in holy books and realize that the holy book is giving you a completely erroneous account. If that one particular thing is wrong, what else is wrong in that book? Remember that holy books are "inspired" by the divinity of that particular religion and so should be spot on with reality. Since they are not, there's a good likelyhood that the whole thing of "inspiration" is equivalent to the inspiration of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster when they started writing about superman.
can't remember any more... I think Min would do a great job at completing this list.
