RE: What was it like being an atheist?
April 5, 2013 at 10:42 am
(This post was last modified: April 5, 2013 at 11:21 am by Mister Agenda.)
(April 2, 2013 at 12:42 pm)jstrodel Wrote: FallenToReason you don't think that atheism entails existence is objectively meaningless?
Meaning is subjective. Existence doesn't have any meaning on its own, the only meaning it can have is the meaning it has TO someone. You're a someone, too.
(April 2, 2013 at 12:42 pm)jstrodel Wrote: What is beauty? How do you distinguish beauty from carnal self gratification?
If you think others can't distinguish appreciating a starry night from carnal self gratification because they don't believe in your deity, your theory of mind may be impaired.
(April 5, 2013 at 10:28 am)CapnAwesome Wrote: I also think that Christians (and Muslims) generally lie about having been Atheists. A couple of things make me doubt. Number one, the similarity of the narrative that you hear from people about having been an Atheist. I've been involved in the Atheism debate for a while and I've come to the conclusion that people are regurgitating the same story. Look at JDStrodel's story of being an Atheist. Does it sound similar to anything that real Atheists on this board write about their life experience? No. This isn't a realistic story. A common idea amongst Christians is that they were 'angry with God' when they were Atheists. Also this shows when they believe Atheists are currently angry or rebelling against God. However no Atheist that I know actually expresses these ideas. I think this story is being fed to people one way or another.
The second and perhaps more compelling reason that makes me think this is a lie is the pure numbers. There are polling numbers about trends in Atheism and Christianity in the US and Europe. If all these Christians used to be Atheists, there would be much more Atheists around to start with, and you'd think that polling numbers would show a shift towards Christianity. On the contrary, the reverse is true. While undoubtedly there are a few Atheist to Christian conversions, I think most stories that we hear about 'having once been an Atheist' don't hold much water and are a thinly veiled attempt at converting Atheists.
You raise good points, but I don't think its dishonesty. Many pastors tell their flocks that an atheist is someone who is mad at god and doesn't really disbelieve, because no one could possibly sincerely disbelieve there's no God and there's that bit in the NT about it being self-evident so no one has an excuse not to believe. People who start to take their faith more seriously can sincerely believe their previous, more apathetic state really was atheism, even though they believed God was real at the time.
I know of a very few conversions of atheist to Christian or Muslim where there wasn't really any doubt the person was genuinely an atheist before. They never have some killer argument that convinced them, it was always something emotional and personal, and to my knowledge, the ones I know of had been theists before and returned to the faith they were raised in.
As a former Pentacostal I set the bar very low for what would bring me back: the right words from the right person would at least convince me to make a sincere effort to 're-convert' myself. My reasons for making it so easy are a promise I made 'to God' years ago, and I don't intend to go back on my word, even though I know the other end of the deal could be fulfilled by coincidence.
(April 3, 2013 at 2:25 am)apophenia Wrote: Ignoring this last little altercation and getting back to the OP a little, it occurs to me that the questions suggest that, to the poster, Germans, atheism implies more than simply "lack of belief."
If more 'former atheists' understood that atheism is a lack of belief in God and that the position isn't made up just to avoid the burden of proof, it would be easier to believe they used to be atheists.
Getting them to say 'I didn't believe God was real' instead of just 'I used to be an atheist like you' tends to be an uphill climb.
Most of the people who say they used to be atheists don't even know what an atheist really is. Instead, they usually fall into the 'of course I was an atheist, you wouldn't believe all the drugs I did' or 'I was hateful and my life was empty' camp.
Now there will be people who were atheists whose experience won't resonate with us skeptics because it is so different: people who were atheist because they were raised atheistic communists, for example; but at least with them it is obvious why their experience was different, they may not sound like rational skeptics, but they won't sound like posers, either.
If you used to be an atheist, I'd be very surprised if you couldn't convince even Germans of it.
