The Long and the Short of it.

[TheDarkestOfAngels]

Why? Why do theists believe? Why don’t atheists? What makes us so different?

Drop the inter-cranial philosophical stuff and explain yourself. What are the reasons that you believe? What are the reasons you do not? Those ‘reasons’ are certainly debatable, but let’s try to be forthright and forego the pedantic/semantic sparring and the philosophical meanderings that do not do anything to answer the original question. Just to see if it can be done.

Personally, I think theists believe because they want to believe in a higher power at the very least and someone who made humans to exist for a purpose. I think that they think it gives meaning to our lives where it would otherwise have none.

Atheists don't because we recognize the above for some reason or another. Personally, I am an atheist because I like the idea that I have power over my own life and not simply in the context of what someone - anyone - else has defined for me.

I've never also liked philosophy very much perhaps for the reason I never liked literary analysis very much, despite both of these things being an effort in critical thinking and analysis. It spends all those mental resources concerning yourself with a deeper meaning of something when sometimes a flower is just a damn flower and not an existential symbol of the protagonist's struggles against reality that needs a bunch of emo kids talking about how important it is.
If you've seen the south park episode "scrotie mcboogerballs" - you know exactly what I'm talking about.

I do not believe because I value science and thinking for yourself and really the ability of mankind to achieve something more than what we are. To think that one of the closest living relatives to the chimpanzee, forty one years ago, landed on the moon is absolutely astonishing.
And it's not just about technological progress but that after all the random changes and adaptations to the earth's environment that a single species could ever have been born that had the ability to immediately and irrevocably render itself capable of becoming completely immune to the kinds of extinction events that have wiped out more than half of all life on this planet.

Not to say that an errant asteroid couldn't kill us all, but we're the only species on earth capable of detecting and avoiding any such catastrophe proactively. Whether we do this by nudging the asteroid out of the way or by avoiding the catastrophe by moving to the Moon or Mars.

Better yet, most of the above has only been opened up as possibilities within the last few decades, since we've come to identify many of these extinction events as real things. To think of what we will be capable of in both the near future and long after I'm dead (you know, the day before immortality is discovered) and even what we're capable of now is truely astonishing. Just to be able to recognize that we can do these things.

Yet, when I talk to theists, they can't seem to acknowledge that humans are capable of anything without god's influence - that anything good that happens to us is only because god was in a good mood that day and wasn't concocting a plan to genocide agaisnt more sodomites when we're not being punished for being what we were supposedly created to be.

I like the idea that every time some fantastic thing is created by a person - the airplane, the space shuttle, velcro, eight-tracks, and nanotechnology, that there's always someone, somewhere, at some point in time going "Yeah, nanotechnology is great, but we might be able to make something more awesome."
I don't need or want the idea that we're special because god made us so and for a purpose. We've made our own purpose in our existance, proven that we can overcome more and more every single day, and that we still have the potential to do anything. I don't believe anything is impossible given time, patience, and the inscruitible and insaciable human curiosity that makes us unsatisifed with anything we have and the desire to know and understand.

We've made our world the way it is and I like where things are going. No god is necessary to explain anything. That's why I'm an atheist.