Unsure whether my time at AF and TTA has been positive or negative.

[archangle]

lmao

I rest my case

Dude. Why do you have to be such a dick?

Simple. Look around here and see how others treat people. It seems like I have to constantly say I am an atheist but not one of "them" kind. Because of the teaknow types

Look at rampids rant. I tell people what I believe. And if they say I am going to hell; I always answer I can't go to a place that doesn't exist. I did this since the 6th grade.

In person I am polite. I blame people. People treat him like a dick head. Nothing else. So I ask why would you hang around people that treat you like a dickhead?

Also, I have many friends that don't agree with me. I am not "suck a punk's ass" that I have to be right. We are ok with playing wall ball together with me thinking their god is a joke and them thinking I am going to hell. In fact, we joke on each other about it. Like when I strike out. They say, "that swing sent that ball right to hell... NOWHERE" boy do we have fun.

I have not seen one shred of evidence that evil things are done by anything else than a person.

[Losty]

Why on earth would that be a reason to be a dick?
You were asked why you are a dick and your response was, because I am superior to other atheists because I've never known anyone to use religion as an excuse to be horrible and therefore I deal with religious people better than you all.

Congratulations. I am truly glad that you have never seen religion cause the kind of harm I have seen it cause. Go ahead and think you're better than me because you're more tolerant of religious people than I am.

It still don't see why that's a reason to come here and be a dick to someone who is genuinely reaching out and and seeking advice and support.

[Rampant.A.I.]

Recently, I was involved in a life-changing series of events. I'm a lifelong agnostic apistavist, and have been since before I discovered a word to describe what I was.

I grew up thinking there was something seriously wrong with me. I could not find a religion I agreed with or even believed the premises of. I have been told for 20 some odd years that I am going to hell for any number of contradictory reasons. And I learned pretty quickly to only tell people I have known and trusted that I'm agnostic.

I have experienced confusion to outright rejection for merely using the adjective, and have been told it's simply not possible to "not believe in anything."

I have watched the utter hypocrisy of people who claim to be religious, but only when it suits them. And I kept it under wraps for a very long time.

I have friends, family, co workers and acquaintances who I deeply respect, who are religious enough I don't think I can clearly state my views around without damaging interpersonal relationships, putting my career at risk, or otherwise ostracizing myself.

This came to a head today, when during a vaguely related fight, I laid into my wife with the grievances and hypocrisy I see in her relatively mild Christian faith, and absolute horror and inhumanity the religion apologizes out of sight.

Without going into too much detail, I have always surrounded myself with predominately female friends (just get along with women better) and for some accursed reason have the type of personality that I can board a city bus, and someone will sit down next to me and tell me their life story, and close friends will reveal lurid details I could live a perfectly happy life without ever having been exposed to.

Suffice it to say, I remember being 13, knowing hell didn't exist, and having my best friend's little sister describe experiences that made me wish it did.

I don't know if I can hold my tongue any longer. For decades, I have watched and listened to horror stories that "turned out alright" because God, and because God will punish terrible human beings whenever he's good and ready and gets around to it.

I hate knowing that karmic retribution, hell and heaven are bullshit.

I hate knowing the statistics of sex abuse,
https://www.rainn.org/statistics

And that 97% of people who commit the most heinous, horrific, destructive act possible to another human being will go unpunished. And it was hard not to cheer out loud watching the end scenes of "Descent" with Rosario Dawson tonight.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(2007_film)

I have become more outspoken with friends and family, even when it complicates things. I have to endure constant ribbing and chiding from a close friend whose mother is dying, over "nihilism and anger at God," because I can't force myself to believe in the same nebulous deistic god he does, I don't want him to have to face facts.

But I'm fucking angry. I'm livid. At religion, at what it allows people to do to each other, because of a false cosmic do-over that I don't think exists.

I even hear it from my father. My lapsed catholic gnostic atheist father, who is pushing 60, grumpy as fuck, the embodiment of the "angry atheist" caricature religious people portray, and still wants to know "why I care what other people believe."

Because what some people believe allows for pain, suffering, and absolution of things no mortal deserves to be absolved of.

So I find it harder and harder to hold my tongue, from face-to-face, to Facebook, to friends posting pictures of sunsets as proof of God on Instagram.

And it's me. I'm the immoral one, never mind my nonexistent criminal record, who remembers the decades gone by where I held your daughter's hair back as she puked in the gutter from the drug addiction she used to get away from the images of her pastor father creeping into her room at night, an addiction so strong I eventually cut ties with her.

And I now sleep next to a woman who wakes up screaming several nights a month, stuck in the past, yet convinced there's someone else in the room.

And yet I'm the broken one, because I don't believe in God. The one who cried and prayed and begged to be shown what to believe in for countless nights on end.

And I just don't know if I can hold my tongue any longer. I just don't have enough faith to pretend I might wake up and believe one day, any longer.

Hey Rampant, I recognize you from TTA.

A very powerful rant, and I'm right there with you, on many points.

I wish there was something I could say to make this easier for you! I hope it helps for you to know, that many of us do understand.

Thanks: If it wasn't obvious already, I've been mostly drunkposting ITT, to get my rant on. To paraphrase Ricky Gervais, it's really alienating to be told to shut up any time you offend someone's belief system, while surrounded by people wearing funny hats and scarves, and constantly shoving their beliefs in your face.

[Marsellus Wallace]

IT WAS NEGATIVE, IT WAS NEGATIVE, DO YOU HEAR ME ? IT WAS NEGATIVE .

---

JK LOL

---

[Minimalist]

[The Grand Nudger]

Welcome aboard rampant...and what can I say? What would really cover all of that? Not a goddamned thing.

You aren't the first person to reach this point, you wont be the last. Nothing has changed between yesterday and today. Reach down hard, man up, and do what you can to prevent this particular narrative from repeating itself. It's unfair, and no judgement on you, but here you are with what you have to say.

Thx for sharing.

[ManMachine]

Recently, I was involved in a life-changing series of events. I'm a lifelong agnostic apistavist, and have been since before I discovered a word to describe what I was.

I grew up thinking there was something seriously wrong with me. I could not find a religion I agreed with or even believed the premises of. I have been told for 20 some odd years that I am going to hell for any number of contradictory reasons. And I learned pretty quickly to only tell people I have known and trusted that I'm agnostic.

I have experienced confusion to outright rejection for merely using the adjective, and have been told it's simply not possible to "not believe in anything."

I have watched the utter hypocrisy of people who claim to be religious, but only when it suits them. And I kept it under wraps for a very long time.

I have friends, family, co workers and acquaintances who I deeply respect, who are religious enough I don't think I can clearly state my views around without damaging interpersonal relationships, putting my career at risk, or otherwise ostracizing myself.

This came to a head today, when during a vaguely related fight, I laid into my wife with the grievances and hypocrisy I see in her relatively mild Christian faith, and absolute horror and inhumanity the religion apologizes out of sight.

Without going into too much detail, I have always surrounded myself with predominately female friends (just get along with women better) and for some accursed reason have the type of personality that I can board a city bus, and someone will sit down next to me and tell me their life story, and close friends will reveal lurid details I could live a perfectly happy life without ever having been exposed to.

Suffice it to say, I remember being 13, knowing hell didn't exist, and having my best friend's little sister describe experiences that made me wish it did.

I don't know if I can hold my tongue any longer. For decades, I have watched and listened to horror stories that "turned out alright" because God, and because God will punish terrible human beings whenever he's good and ready and gets around to it.

I hate knowing that karmic retribution, hell and heaven are bullshit.

I hate knowing the statistics of sex abuse,
https://www.rainn.org/statistics

And that 97% of people who commit the most heinous, horrific, destructive act possible to another human being will go unpunished. And it was hard not to cheer out loud watching the end scenes of "Descent" with Rosario Dawson tonight.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_(2007_film)

I have become more outspoken with friends and family, even when it complicates things. I have to endure constant ribbing and chiding from a close friend whose mother is dying, over "nihilism and anger at God," because I can't force myself to believe in the same nebulous deistic god he does, I don't want him to have to face facts.

But I'm fucking angry. I'm livid. At religion, at what it allows people to do to each other, because of a false cosmic do-over that I don't think exists.

I even hear it from my father. My lapsed catholic gnostic atheist father, who is pushing 60, grumpy as fuck, the embodiment of the "angry atheist" caricature religious people portray, and still wants to know "why I care what other people believe."

Because what some people believe allows for pain, suffering, and absolution of things no mortal deserves to be absolved of.

So I find it harder and harder to hold my tongue, from face-to-face, to Facebook, to friends posting pictures of sunsets as proof of God on Instagram.

And it's me. I'm the immoral one, never mind my nonexistent criminal record, who remembers the decades gone by where I held your daughter's hair back as she puked in the gutter from the drug addiction she used to get away from the images of her pastor father creeping into her room at night, an addiction so strong I eventually cut ties with her.

And I now sleep next to a woman who wakes up screaming several nights a month, stuck in the past, yet convinced there's someone else in the room.

And yet I'm the broken one, because I don't believe in God. The one who cried and prayed and begged to be shown what to believe in for countless nights on end.

And I just don't know if I can hold my tongue any longer. I just don't have enough faith to pretend I might wake up and believe one day, any longer.

Religion is only a convenient excuse people use for acting like humans. I don't mean in the sense that all humans are vile but that humanity is.

MM

[Rampant.A.I.]

Good point. I made a longish facebook post the other night about objective morality being a standard to strive toward, not an actual construct.

It was nice to see some of my friends actually shared it.

As near as I can tell, the lady thinks Jesus is an ideal she tries to emulate, and that other religions have the same type of ideal figures.

I'm down with that. In my opinion, every major religious figure is a series of tall tales built around someone who was fed up with the status quo, and wanted to change it.

The whole idea of sin is lost on people who want to use it to grovel in front of a higher power.

We all make mistakes, and have really good reasons for justifying them. The sin idea reminds us that even with the best intentions, we can hurt other people, and should balance it out by trying to do as much good as possible.

"See you can live your life in control and be nice
But even that will not promise you a happy life
You may think yourself in general to be a nice guy
But I'm telling you now - that right there is a lie
Even the nicest of guys has some nasty within them
You don't have to be backlit to be the villain
Whether it be greed, lust, or just plain vindictiveness
There's a level of malevolence inside all of us"

- S. Pip

[The Grand Nudger]

Personally, I'm not so sure that having "an ideal person" to strive towards is actually all that helpful at all. Suppose we do spend our time trying to emulate that person? Trying to be superhumans, something that we are not. Are we likely to succeed? No. Meanwhile, we've been actively avoiding that part of ourselves which we hope to modify rather than accepting it as a feature - and not a bug- of the human machine.

An analogy I like to use to describe why I feel that this sort of thing is not only pointless but counterproductive goes abit like this. Suppose two men have before them a steam engine. They both use it to do work. Both steam engines have leaks, here and there. One man can't stand it -spends all of his time trying to plug those leaks, and assuming that he succeeds, all he's done is increased the pressure within the boiler - which is fine...so long as the boiler isn't going to explode, but doesn't necessarily translate into any more work being done. The second man says "so be it", brings the steam engine into his greenhouse, and uses that escaping steam for some productive purpose like heating or humidifying.

In the context of a human being, who has the better idea? The guy who contributes to the internal pressure while accomplishing no additional work, or the guy who accepts the flaws in his system, looks for ways to turn them into an advantage, and then actually makes something out of them? Meh, personally...I'd go with the second guy. So, again this is just me, I'm not looking to "avoid sin" - I'm wondering what sort of productive things my "sin" could be doing.