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Why are you an atheist?
#11
RE: Why are you an atheist?
Children will imagine gods without religious prompting. Additionally, the first person to ever believe in a god had no other believer to push that belief on them - and that happened in multiple locations throughout time all over the world, sometimes more than once in a single region.

It's certainly not the default state of any human being to be religious in any specific sense...but it probably is a default state for many of us to construct gods, at some point. The existence of the subject is actually pretty hard to explain if that's not the case. Leaving some of us who don't, or who don't make the connection between our constructs and intuitions and theism, or who don't receive a specific religious indoctrination (or all three)..thinking like the religious believers are all in on some joke.

LOL, relieved to hear someone else say that, btw. I think I made it to around the same age before I realized that people were actually serious about that shit. May have been an older teen...I'm slow on the uptake.
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
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#12
RE: Why are you an atheist?
I was sent to a Catholic school as a child, about the age of 7 it became obvious that people were; lying / making it up on the spot / making claims to win approval.
Nothing could be verified and some claims didn't even make sense.
As such  I became a non-believer.

Fast forward to Uni and a house mate who was a strong believer who made more claims and annoyed me enough to research the origins of monotheism. This pretty much killed off any possibility of the usual suspects ever converting me as it became obvious that it directly contradicts the physical evidence to at least the time of Alexander.
Quote:I don't understand why you'd come to a discussion forum, and then proceed to reap from visibility any voice that disagrees with you. If you're going to do that, why not just sit in front of a mirror and pat yourself on the back continuously?
-Esquilax

Evolution - Adapt or be eaten.
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#13
RE: Why are you an atheist?
Um....I went to Catholic schools for 12½ years.  Read
"The world is my country; all of humanity are my brethren; and to do good deeds is my religion." (Thomas Paine)
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#14
RE: Why are you an atheist?
(February 19, 2020 at 1:44 am)Ongietan Wrote: Hi Everyone,

I am really interested to hear how you ended up as atheists at this point in your lives.  I didn't grow up going to church or in a religious home (though my mom claimed she spoke to spirits), but I had a belief in God from an early age nevertheless.  Of all the various beliefs and religious that one can hold to, why has atheism won?

Hi Ongietan and welcome to the forum. I hope you decide to make start an introduction thread so we can get to know you better.

I was raised Pentecostal and was quite devout at a young age, I believed it all and spoke in tongues and prayed a lot. I believed so much that I made a project of reading the Bible, cover-to-cover. I did that twice. It cured me of being a Christian, I had too high an opinion of God to believe the Bible was inspired by an omnibenevolent deity when it was clearly an imaginary being indistinguishable from a heavenly middle eastern potentate with too much power. I didn't become an atheist, but for about 20 more years I was what I would now call an 'agnostic theist': didn't know but still believed.

Having never been taught any degree of incredulity, I believed in pretty much everything that I now think is imaginary. Ghosts, alien visitation, Bigfoot, Nessie, ancient aliens, ESP, you name it. I was in my twenties before I got an inkling of skepticism when a couple of teenagers proved the Duke University studies which seemed to support ESP statistically were childishly simple to deceive and the effects that they observed disappeared when they changed their protocols to eliminate deception. As the years went on I started to develop standards of evidence for what I would accept to be real. Gradually, I stopped believing in ghosts, alien visitation, Bigfoot, Nessie, ancient aliens, and ESP. I still believed in some kind of creator deity though, all this couldn't have arisen by chance though? And you can't prove God doesn't exist, everyone knows that. I didn't want to be one of those close-minded atheists, so I kept some headspace for the possibility of God.

In college I learned a bit about cosmology and found out there were actually plausible natural explanations for the origin of the universe. I had a comparative religion professor who said he wasn't going to cover atheism because it wasn't true, and cited that the atheist, if they had a 'god detector', would have to search the entire universe before they could conclude there is no God. It occurred to me that if you have a 'god detector', it would prove that the omnipresent deity I believed in didn't exist the first time you turned it on. It was a stupid analogy in some ways, and if the prof had said he wasn't covering atheism because it wasn't a religion, I might not have been interested in further research. Instead, I thought I'd check out a book on atheism myself (The Case Against God by George Smith) and see what it's really about. I learned about 'soft atheism' or 'agnostic atheism': doesn't know, doesn't believe. No unwarranted certainty or close-mindedness there. In the meantime I was also taking a class on logical fallacies and the burden of proof, and started to realize the religion prof who kept trying to argue for the existence of God didn't have ANY arguments that were actually sound.

Around the end of that semester, I came to the realization that at some point I had stopped believing in God. I didn't have that 'headspace reserved for possibility of God' anymore. I'm still willing to be convinced, but I don't believe, and that makes me an atheist. I've actually become a hard/strong/gnostic atheist on the literal tri-omni Abrahamic God; it's logically incoherent, but the God of Deism, eh, maybe but probably not.

Atheism isn't a belief or religion to hold to, it didn't really 'win out' in any sort of contest between competing beliefs, it's just the brain state that I defaulted to when I stopped believing any version of God (or gods) was actually real. The flaws that make the Christian version of God unbelievable (lack of credible evidence for its existence, all arguments for its existence are flawed) also make all the other god ideas unbelievable as well. I wasn't going to start believing in Brahma when I realized Yahweh wasn't real, after all. I did wind up a nontheistic Unitarian Universalist for some years, though my connection to them now is mostly that I give them money every year so they will continue to let me use one of their classrooms for meetings of the Freethought Society of the Midlands every other Thursday.
I'm not anti-Christian. I'm anti-stupid.
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#15
RE: Why are you an atheist?
(February 19, 2020 at 1:44 am)Ongietan Wrote: Hi Everyone,

I am really interested to hear how you ended up as atheists at this point in your lives.  I didn't grow up going to church or in a religious home (though my mom claimed she spoke to spirits), but I had a belief in God from an early age nevertheless.  Of all the various beliefs and religious that one can hold to, why has atheism won?

0/10  You're going to have to try harder.
"For the only way to eternal glory is a life lived in service of our Lord, FSM; Verily it is FSM who is the perfect being the name higher than all names, king of all kings and will bestow upon us all, one day, The great reclaiming"  -The Prophet Boiardi-

      Conservative trigger warning.
[Image: s-l640.jpg]
                                                                                         
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#16
RE: Why are you an atheist?
(February 19, 2020 at 1:44 am)Ongietan Wrote: Hi Everyone,

I am really interested to hear how you ended up as atheists at this point in your lives.  I didn't grow up going to church or in a religious home (though my mom claimed she spoke to spirits), but I had a belief in God from an early age nevertheless.  Of all the various beliefs and religious that one can hold to, why has atheism won?

It's not that Atheism won, but that theism lost.  It isn't true.  I was raised in the Methodist church and what happened was that I learned that what I had been taught in church wasn't true, so I stopped believing it.  And atheism isn't a religion or a belief system, its a position on a single issue.  Important to remember.
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#17
RE: Why are you an atheist?
You know how some folks are asexual? Show them a Farrah Fawcett poster and nothing happens. I'm that way with gods. Just can't get it up. Though Jesus is kinda cute.
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#18
RE: Why are you an atheist?
(February 19, 2020 at 1:44 am)Ongietan Wrote: Hi Everyone,

I am really interested to hear how you ended up as atheists at this point in your lives.  I didn't grow up going to church or in a religious home (though my mom claimed she spoke to spirits), but I had a belief in God from an early age nevertheless.  Of all the various beliefs and religious that one can hold to, why has atheism won?

Welcome to the forum.

At the age when rational thought and logic kicked in (12/13) I realized that what I was being told could not actually have happened. It's not that atheist won, but more that gods failed the existence test.

But as far as I'm concerned you're more than welcome to your beliefs if you need them. Just don't try to get me to validate them. If you do, I tend to get snarky.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem.
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#19
RE: Why are you an atheist?
(February 19, 2020 at 1:44 am)Ongietan Wrote: Hi Everyone,

I am really interested to hear how you ended up as atheists at this point in your lives.  I didn't grow up going to church or in a religious home (though my mom claimed she spoke to spirits), but I had a belief in God from an early age nevertheless.  Of all the various beliefs and religious that one can hold to, why has atheism won?

Atheism can be a belief, but for many (maybe most?) atheists, atheism is a rejection of claim. It is not necessary for atheists to believe no gods exist, but simply not being convinced by theists' arguments, that a god does exist, defines one as an atheist. Atheism is not, a belief system, world view, has no doctrine, dogma, tenets, leaders, holy books. At its most basic, it is just not being convinced that the claim that a god exists is true.

What lead to my atheism, is the correct application of critical thinking, skepticism, and rationality, when applied to the god claim.

I grew up pretty religious, but I was also very skeptical with regards to other supernatural claims (ghosts, alien abductions, telepathy, bigfoot, etc, etc).

When I reached my early to mid 20's, I came to the conclusion, that I never applied the same level critical thinking to my theistic beliefs/claims as I did to those other claims. I was not being intellectually honest. When I did so, I came to the conclusion, that, not only were my theistic beliefs not supported with demonstrable and falsifiable evidence, or valid and sound logic, but the existence of a god in general (deistic god), wasn't either

I soon came to the conclusion, that I was not warranted in believing in unsupported god claims anymore, and those beliefs just fell away.

You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
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#20
RE: Why are you an atheist?
(February 19, 2020 at 1:34 pm)Ranjr Wrote: You know how some folks are asexual?  Show them a Farrah Fawcett poster and nothing happens.  I'm that way with gods.  Just can't get it up.  Though Jesus is kinda cute.


.....hot jesus

[Image: AWdg877.jpg]
I am the Infantry. I am my country’s strength in war, her deterrent in peace. I am the heart of the fight… wherever, whenever. I carry America’s faith and honor against her enemies. I am the Queen of Battle. I am what my country expects me to be, the best trained Soldier in the world. In the race for victory, I am swift, determined, and courageous, armed with a fierce will to win. Never will I fail my country’s trust. Always I fight on…through the foe, to the objective, to triumph overall. If necessary, I will fight to my death. By my steadfast courage, I have won more than 200 years of freedom. I yield not to weakness, to hunger, to cowardice, to fatigue, to superior odds, For I am mentally tough, physically strong, and morally straight. I forsake not, my country, my mission, my comrades, my sacred duty. I am relentless. I am always there, now and forever. I AM THE INFANTRY! FOLLOW ME!
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