Hi everyone!
March 9, 2013 at 9:58 pm
(This post was last modified: March 9, 2013 at 10:05 pm by ATL.)
So hi everyone. I'm 17 year old atheist from Finland. I haven't ever been really religious so I guess I never believed in a God or anything. Well most of my childhood is simply didn't give a fuck. I mean I knew the model of christian God or well something about it. But when you are like for example something like 10 years old you don't really think that kind of things. You just want to do what you enjoy(I played ice hockey at time). Anyways I remember that somewhere around 12-14 I once or few time tried to pray. Well I mean, I hardly lost nothing doing it and I mean if it would help me to get what I wanted, why not? Little that I know the time, that it was basically pascal's wager.
I have always listened a lot of music. I guess I picked rap from my brother at age of 5 and have listened it since. I also started listening especially English rap at very young age. Like 9 or 10 remembering that English wasn't my mother language. Anyways I was somewhere around age of 15 in situation that I still haven't really thought about any God stuff or anything. At that time I found out about very good rapper, J. Cole. His music was very religious at times, but it was also philosophical. Shortly after I found other same kind of rapper with a bit different style. Hopsin.
Because rap is often music where you pay a lot attention to lyrics I started also think about myself that could God actually exists, but I guess I was too lazy to actually care at that time. I remember that I took often God just as concept. Like saying "Bless you" or something like that would mean "Have a good luck". I guess I didn't even fully realize that these people was actually believing in that.
Then at our schools religion class is where it all started for me. (Do they teach religion in USA like going trough different religions and so on?) Well our subject at that class was atheism and our teacher was explaining what it was and I was not caring like usual. Then he showed very short clip of Greydon Squares dundas parts and that's naturally what caught my attention.
Later at home I searched it on youtube and started to find out about this guy. To me it was even at that point, just new nice rapper to listen. And I was watching this part 2 of dundas(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al6OgqAX_kg) and somewhere at about 2 minutes there comes pascal's wager part. And that was crushing to me. Because I actually followed trough the whole part and then he showed how childish my thinking was at that point
.
So here's how it gone
"Then they try and hit me with the wager
Who? Pascal's wager. Who? Pascal's wager.
Now that's a fool's bet
And against the intelligent it's used less
Really? You bet
This ain't nothing new, they use it on kids
But for those who don't know it goes a little like this"
-So this was just introduction and I didn't really understand this at time because I never heard Pascal's wager before.
"Wouldn't you rather believe in god and be wrong
Than to not believe in god and be wrong
If you believe in god and your wrong you've lost nothing
But if you don't believe and you're wrong it's all suffering"
-Well I went full retard trough it like, "that actually makes sense, good point." And I was pretty convinced for something like a second.
"The problem is you can try it on anything
Switch the gods around and apply it to anything
The Flyin Spaghetti Monster, Zeus, Amun, Ra
Krishna, Odin, Baal and Allah
Which one of 'ems our God?
None of 'em, all false"
-Aaand here's where I felt so embarrassed..
Well I love arguments.. I have always loved and always used to be kind of good at them. (or at least I have thought so ^^). So naturally now realizing I was atheist I basically looked what I could find about it on youtube.
For my bad before those informative good videos I somehow managed to gone to some kind of religious part of youtube where was some "atheism is wrong" type of video. And as you expect, on comment section there was war. I picked up some random believers comment and start argument with him.
Problem was that I did everything possible wrong. I didn't know that atheism is default position. That was my first mistake. My logic wasn't really sharpened at that point which led to me going where he wanted basically. And soon we were talking about evolution even it have nothing to do with actual question, but didn't realize it at that time.
Oh and I didn't know a lot about evolution at that time so there was one brick wall fast for me.
No time at all and I was with no answer against these basic overused arguments. At the end I was lost with the argument "Haha you can't prove that no God exists" because of failing to know about default position and logical rules.
After getting myself beated up there and probably like over half of fallacies used against me without spotting them I started actually watch these informative videos. Atheist Experience for biggest thing I guess. Later some talkers themselves or in debates like dawkins, dillahunty and so on.
And I guess that's where I'm now. Having fair amount of knowledge about all this stuff that seems to surrounding atheism. Hope I can have some questions answered here and some great discussions.
I think I come from different standpoint as many others here(if other world is actually that crazy on religion as I have image) that my parents never really talked a lot about religion. I don't even know their religious views. Basically it was just that we are part of church because it's tradition, we want to get married there and we want to get traditional funeral. So it was never forced to me in any way and I didn't really have to deal with it anyway(more than sometimes sit in like christmas church which was booring) before I chose to look at it myself.
I have always listened a lot of music. I guess I picked rap from my brother at age of 5 and have listened it since. I also started listening especially English rap at very young age. Like 9 or 10 remembering that English wasn't my mother language. Anyways I was somewhere around age of 15 in situation that I still haven't really thought about any God stuff or anything. At that time I found out about very good rapper, J. Cole. His music was very religious at times, but it was also philosophical. Shortly after I found other same kind of rapper with a bit different style. Hopsin.
Because rap is often music where you pay a lot attention to lyrics I started also think about myself that could God actually exists, but I guess I was too lazy to actually care at that time. I remember that I took often God just as concept. Like saying "Bless you" or something like that would mean "Have a good luck". I guess I didn't even fully realize that these people was actually believing in that.
Then at our schools religion class is where it all started for me. (Do they teach religion in USA like going trough different religions and so on?) Well our subject at that class was atheism and our teacher was explaining what it was and I was not caring like usual. Then he showed very short clip of Greydon Squares dundas parts and that's naturally what caught my attention.
Later at home I searched it on youtube and started to find out about this guy. To me it was even at that point, just new nice rapper to listen. And I was watching this part 2 of dundas(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al6OgqAX_kg) and somewhere at about 2 minutes there comes pascal's wager part. And that was crushing to me. Because I actually followed trough the whole part and then he showed how childish my thinking was at that point
.So here's how it gone
"Then they try and hit me with the wager
Who? Pascal's wager. Who? Pascal's wager.
Now that's a fool's bet
And against the intelligent it's used less
Really? You bet
This ain't nothing new, they use it on kids
But for those who don't know it goes a little like this"
-So this was just introduction and I didn't really understand this at time because I never heard Pascal's wager before.
"Wouldn't you rather believe in god and be wrong
Than to not believe in god and be wrong
If you believe in god and your wrong you've lost nothing
But if you don't believe and you're wrong it's all suffering"
-Well I went full retard trough it like, "that actually makes sense, good point." And I was pretty convinced for something like a second.
"The problem is you can try it on anything
Switch the gods around and apply it to anything
The Flyin Spaghetti Monster, Zeus, Amun, Ra
Krishna, Odin, Baal and Allah
Which one of 'ems our God?
None of 'em, all false"
-Aaand here's where I felt so embarrassed..
Well I love arguments.. I have always loved and always used to be kind of good at them. (or at least I have thought so ^^). So naturally now realizing I was atheist I basically looked what I could find about it on youtube.
For my bad before those informative good videos I somehow managed to gone to some kind of religious part of youtube where was some "atheism is wrong" type of video. And as you expect, on comment section there was war. I picked up some random believers comment and start argument with him.
Problem was that I did everything possible wrong. I didn't know that atheism is default position. That was my first mistake. My logic wasn't really sharpened at that point which led to me going where he wanted basically. And soon we were talking about evolution even it have nothing to do with actual question, but didn't realize it at that time.
Oh and I didn't know a lot about evolution at that time so there was one brick wall fast for me.
No time at all and I was with no answer against these basic overused arguments. At the end I was lost with the argument "Haha you can't prove that no God exists" because of failing to know about default position and logical rules.
After getting myself beated up there and probably like over half of fallacies used against me without spotting them I started actually watch these informative videos. Atheist Experience for biggest thing I guess. Later some talkers themselves or in debates like dawkins, dillahunty and so on.
And I guess that's where I'm now. Having fair amount of knowledge about all this stuff that seems to surrounding atheism. Hope I can have some questions answered here and some great discussions.
I think I come from different standpoint as many others here(if other world is actually that crazy on religion as I have image) that my parents never really talked a lot about religion. I don't even know their religious views. Basically it was just that we are part of church because it's tradition, we want to get married there and we want to get traditional funeral. So it was never forced to me in any way and I didn't really have to deal with it anyway(more than sometimes sit in like christmas church which was booring) before I chose to look at it myself.
