question for the atheist

Raised Presbyterian in a heavily, heavily Baptist/Methodist culture.

Changed because I was naturally drawn to disciplines like philosophy, logic, science, etc.

Eventually being engrossed in those things you just whittle it down to the fact that there's no evidence for belief.

 

Organized religion is a scam. You can believe in a higher power like I do but I refuse to be a puppet for people without morals and integrity.

 

I had seven years of Catholic school; therefore, I'm now an atheist.

 

More of an agnostic I believe some "God" created the universe we are living in, but I do not believe there is a God that watches over this tiny planet in an insignificant solar system. A "God" that can create billions of galaxies would not care for humans just like we would not worry about single celled organisms.

I Was never raised in any religion while growing up. The part of the organized religion that turns me off most is that people think they know what "God" want.

 

I did not believe in a diety who created the world.

That being said I was not raised religious but I did went to a Christian school and I did go to some Church meetings. When I was young I did believe in a God. But when I grew up a bit (when I was older (I think I was 7) I thought about it. And decided that it did not make sense to me. (For a small period I did believe in a more buddhistic view on life).but when I was 8 or 9 I did not believe in any diety.

 

My best answer to this is a question.

Why don't you believe in Santa anymore?

 

Because there is no bible or koran written about him.

 

i was baptised 3 times: greek orthodox church, maronite church (catholics) & armenian orthodox church

finished high-school in Houston @ a parochial school.

It.did.not.take.

The only person in my immediate family who is remotely religious converted to budhism (studied w/Bhagwan) mid-life & more recently converted to islam. I take her piety w/a grain of salt

Spoiler

http://www.mondanite.net/ExtImages/New Photos/4a.jpg

 

Ending up in Islam is just

 

Yeah, pretty crazy.

Although, i know of someone (a decorated knight of malta, no less) who converted to islam so that he could get into $$$ of building mosques. He made a fortune supplying the natural stone for quite a few of those projects.

Not saying her motivation was financial, but....

 

In that case converting to what ever religion is 100% justified IMO. thumbs up!

 

Raised in a sometimes E&C house. Went to a Methodist Church because it was close to our house. Couldn't have gone more than 20 times as a family.

Then in high school I went a few times to one of those "cool" "youth" churches.

Then in college I one day realized I didn't really believe the things I was supposed to believe, as a Christian.

Called myself agnostic because from reading the various definitions that's what I felt was the most accurate describing my thoughts. Later adopted the label atheist after getting swept up in all the Dawkins/Harris/Dennett/Hitchens so-called "New Atheism" (there was nothing at all New about it; that term came from people who disliked those 4) and reading all their books.

Joined the college's atheist student group, participated in school debates against Christians (largest had over 200 people there to watch; filled an entire auditorium; had no idea turnout was going to be like that). Some fun times doing that stuff.

But my evangelical atheism died as quickly as it was born. Dropped it entirely after about 2 or so years. Still atheist-ish or whatever, but I go out of my way to not talk about it in real life. It's just not at all important to me whether or not I or anyone else is religious.

My wife is religious. She prays before each meal, and has expressed interest in eventually taking our daughter to church, which I am completely ok with. Don't know if I would go too or not, probably would.

 

My whole life (0-19ish) I had refused to ask myself the hard questions about my beliefs cuz faith. I only began to ask them once I lost someone close to me. He was not a very religious person and I wondered if he would go to heaven or not. Based on how I was taught growing up he would be sent to hell to burn for eternity despite being an incredible person. I couldn't handle that and I began to question stuff. Why would a loving and omnipotent God care if two dudes decided to "lay together"? Would a person who was never exposed to religion, therefore never heard the good word and had a chance to believe, be sent to hell? If God is loving AND omnipotent then why is there so much disease/war/famine etc.? Why do highly religious people seem to follow less of Jesus's principles than anyone else? Why does my pastor have a private helicopter?

I began to slowly believe that we are just super evolved self-aware animals. I think religion was created by people to explain the uncertainties of life and the world. Religion is comforting, especially the belief in an afterlife. We don't want to accept that death is lights out, that we have no more afterlife than a squirrel, that our passed loved ones are not somewhere and they are not waiting on us. I don't know for certain that there is not a God, I don't think I can know that. I don't believe it when people said they "spoke to God" in a dream ... that was just a dream. I dreamed that I won a hot dog eating contest last week and that wasn't real either. My brain does not shut down when I sleep, it stays active and dreams up the weirdest stuff. It doesn't turn on my Jesus wifi. We WANT to believe, we WANT a God to be real and we don't want to be alone because it is ****ing terrifying. Religion, to me, is some warm fuzzy blanket that shields us from the brutal and cold reality that we don't matter at all.

I don't judge people for being religious and I don't EVER talk about being an agnostic/atheist in person (just the occasional D&D post). I don't even think about religion/atheism very often because it has so little bearing on my life.

 

I was baptised into the Catholic church 3 days after my birth and was sent to private Catholic school up until college. I always had questions that could at best be answered in a murky, "it's a mystery" sort of way that did not leave me satisfied. Because I really do like to think about creation stories. I think the creation story in the Bible has some beauty to it with the idea that this whole universe is made for humankind. It's not correct, but it's a beautiful story nonetheless. But it always left me wondering what the correct creation story to us is. Catholicism only took me to the Big Bang where it mostly only discusses that George Lemaitre was a Catholic Jesuit priest that came up with the Primeval Atom idea that would later be refined as the Big Bang theory. It cared more about the history of the guy that made the discovery than what the actual discovery was and I just found myself more and more interested in the sciences.

Scientists test things. You're actually encouraged to be wrong which you can then learn from. Take for instance this video below.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/15_aJXoC0LM" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

So right away failure can still be learned from. It leads to more refined guesses that eventually lead you to the correct guess as evidence is discovered. And it's done more for the progress of humankind in just 500 years time than religion has done in tens of thousands of years. It's contributions extend globally from all different ethnicities throughout the course of human history. Every single race and gender has made significant contributions to the sciences in some form despite institutional discrimination throughout human history. Nature does not discriminate even if its children do.

I wouldn't say I'm an atheist but I am definitely agnostic. That said I'm near 100% certain that any idea from any religion in human history is wrong given what we know today. It wasn't that long ago that people believed the earth was the center of the universe and that creationism was widely believed. It wasn't until carbon dating and that there are parts of the earth as old as 4.5 billion years that creationism was being widely debunked. Because how could the earth be 4.5 billion years old if God created the universe in 5,000 years? Likewise for the theory of evolution. How could Noah fit two of every animal in an ark with all the diverse life out there? How come there's evidence of a large quantity of life some 63 million years ago that was wiped out from a heavy bombardment of asteroids if God made the universe 5,000 years ago? *scratch head*

When creationism was debunked, some religions then said okay the earth isn't really 5,000 years old. But the universe is still made for us. The earth is the center of the universe. The stars revolve around us. Everything revolves around the earth. Then astronomers discovered that the earth revolves around the sun. That we are in fact heliocentric. Then evidence began to pile up that the sun was 5 billion years old. As telescopes improved in quality it was then discovered that all those stars out there are distant suns like ours. That those suns likely have planets like our sun does in our solar system. Possibly even life. That life is capable and common elsewhere in our universe and perhaps is not as unique and sacred as we hold it to be.

As telescopes continued to improve they then discovered that some distant objects they thought were stars were actually large clumps of billions of stars called galaxies. Again as telescopes continued to improve they then discovered that there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable universe and that the universe is in fact far larger than what we're even capable of seeing because of the finite speed of the speed of light. They carbon dated the light emitted from these stars in deep space and discovered that some were billions of years older than the sun. When the Cosmic Microwave Background was accidentally discovered they found the earliest light which gave it a signature about the earliest conditions of the universe not even a second after it emerged.

It's through experiments done at the LHC and other particle colliders that we can understand conditions of the universe in it's earliest stages. So while the working theory of the Big Bang doesn't explain the actual creation past a singularity all the hypotheses regarding that answer are far more interesting to me than what I was raised through religion.

What going to those schools helped me do is instill a good moral code I do my best to live by. But I don't need reward in the afterlife nor fear of going to Hell to do what I feel is morally right. To me it means you're only trying to do good for manipulative reasons instead of doing good for goodness sake, which is and should be the reward itself.

 

I'm more agnostic than atheist and the more i'm around/see/hear/the loudest "religious" people, the more i'm convinced there is no god.

I was raised going to 7th day Adventist church, then later baptist, then went to Catholic churches and with friends/girl friends etc. I'd have to say Pentecostal was the most entertaining but farthest out there also.

Now I'm not saying all religion is bad, or all religious people are bad. Those religious people that are out on missions building houses for those in need, or feeding the needy, or trying to help others, those are the people who "get it." That's WWJD.

Its the radicals, or the people who claim to be religious that hate gays, or people of other races, etc. Those are the people who really give religion a bad name and make me want to create some WWJH (who would jesus hate) t-shirts so I can get rich on their misguided hatred.

 

Are you Lebanese?

 

Exactly where I fall - raised Methodist - realized when studying ACTUAL history that all religions are phony and meant to control the ignorant masses.

Didn't want to be in the masses any longer, chose to believe in God, but not man made religion.

DD

 

Same here except I was raised Buddhist and still subscribe to Buddhist philosophy.

 

Lebanese/Greek/Armenian