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atheist: why are you atheist?

prplchknz

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and if you're christian, budhist, hindu, any other relgion why?

why i'm an atheist: because to me religion doesn't make since, it has nothing to with what other people believe, because me being atheist because i'm annoyed by christians doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

and i would like to follow about i'm only annoyed by 10% of christians the ones who shove their religion down my throat, but i'm also annoyed by atheist who do the same.
 

ZPowers

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I can't force myself to believe something that doesn't make logical sense to me even if I wanted to. That rules out essentially every major religion.

As for the idea of a God in general: I am technically an agnostic with an atheistic lean. The idea there is a God doesn't have any solid support, the idea of a God with any interest in human affairs takes a turn towards unlikely for me. There's some more more specific and pedantic reasons why I lean a little more toward atheism, but I won't bore you. It boils down to "makes more sense to me personally."
 

prplchknz

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I can't force myself to believe something that doesn't make logical sense to me even if I wanted to. That rules out essentially every major religion.

As for the idea of a God in general: I am technically an agnostic with an atheistic lean. The idea there is a God doesn't have any solid support, the idea of a God with any interest in human affairs takes a turn towards unlikely for me. There's some more more specific and pedantic reasons why I lean a little more toward atheism, but I won't bore you. It boils down to "makes more sense to me personally."

ah, so basically the same reasons, as myself?
 

ZPowers

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ah, so basically the same reasons, as myself?

More or less. Though people attempting to shove any belief system down my throat has no real effect on how I view that system so much as how I view that person (or group).
 

sprinkles

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I'm going to be what I am until such a time that I start being something else. I don't really see it as a choice.

I could blahblahblah about logic and rationality and reason all day long but in the end that doesn't really matter - I'm either convinced or not, and being convinced is quite relative, and depends on my inner values meshing with outer values.

I find that belief is not a choice in this case. It's rather an alignment. If I were to be convinced then I already would be convinced because it would be really weird to refuse to believe something in the face of being convinced.
 

prplchknz

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More or less. Though people attempting to shove any belief system down my throat has no real effect on how I view that system so much as how I view that person (or group).

me either, i wasn't saying that was why i was saying that people who shove their beliefs annoy me, not that i'm atheist because people shove their beliefs. that would be stupid imo
 

Stanton Moore

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I'm an atheist because religion is arbitrary. Why is one version of the 'sky father' better or more accurate than another? Why is the Christian god more accurate than those of the ancient world? Why not believe in the demiurge? Why not worship rocks and trees?
I see and hear so many rationalizations for religious beliefs, but they all come back to justifying or trying to label or codify via reason, something that is ineffable and cannot be proven by reason. It amount to an attempt to prove a felt-sense of reality, and that is completely individual.
I have no problem with people believing in something. I think that humans need to have a belief in something higher than ourselves in order to evolve, at least on a personal level, and possibly as a species. People need a spiritual life. But that doesn't mean that there is a sky father, or a god under the sea.
On the other hand, atheism often throws spirituality away in deference to a mechanistic view of life and reality, that I think is also inaccurate and often dangerous, despite the technology that has resulted from it.
 

prplchknz

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I'm an atheist because religion is arbitrary. Why is one version of the 'sky father' better or more accurate than another? Why is the Christian god more accurate than those of the ancient world? Why not believe in the demiurge? Why not worship rocks and trees?
I see and hear so many rationalizations for religious beliefs, but they all come back to justifying or trying to label or codify via reason, something that is ineffable and cannot be proven by reason. It amount to an attempt to prove a felt-sense of reality, and that is completely individual.
I have no problem with people believing in something. I think that humans need to have a belief in something higher than ourselves in order to evolve, at least on a personal level, and possibly as a species. People need a spiritual life. But that doesn't mean that there is a sky father, or a god under the sea.
On the other hand, atheism often throws spirituality away in deference to a mechanistic view of life and reality, that I think is also inaccurate and often dangerous, despite the technology that has resulted from it.
I believe, one can be both spirtual and atheist. I'm not spirtual but i believe it's possible.
 

Cellmold

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and i would like to follow about i'm only annoyed by 10% of christians the ones who shove their religion down my throat, but i'm also annoyed by atheist who do the same.

Important point that. Ive always said that dogmatic atheism is as frustrating and annoying as dogmatic theism.
 
G

garbage

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Because whatever God is, it's much more abstract than we could ever hope to describe tangibly anyway. I guess that atheism (or igtheism) is an appropriate label.

Yeah, the Western view also tends to neglect other spiritual concepts such as Taoism's Void, Nirvana, Sunyata, etc.
 

Blank

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If there is a god, I don't believe humans have a personal relationship with it.

Beyond that, there's no reason to believe in any one religion over another and there are a myriad of reasons to not believe in any of them.
 

tinker683

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I was a fundy Lutheran but couldn't reconcile my beliefs with my own observations of the world around me and couldn't take the cognitive dissonance any longer. I've had many moments where I've flirted with the idea of going back but allllllll the old thoughts and feelings come rushing back and then I'm reminded of why I left in the first place.

Currently, I've been exploring Taoism and and other eastern religions but I don't attach a lot of weight to all of the supernatural aspects of it. I just find the point of view and the perspective to be very refreshing and have begun applying some of the concepts from the Tao De Ching in my own life and have found the effects beneficial.
 

Stanton Moore

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'How do you define spirituality? '


I define it through my relationship to the natural world, coupled with my understanding of the universe, cosmology and physics.
I think this is something for the individual to find, through exploration and experience.
That's what I meant by a 'felt-sense' of reality. For me it's an integration of reason and feeling.
A few weeks ago, I went for a walk down the hill, south towards the locks between Puget Sound and Lake Washington, in North Seattle. To the east there were small, tattered clouds, bright white on top, light grey on the bottom, drifting east, framed against the blue vault of the sky. Something about them stopped me. I was struck by the perfection of the natural world, and that I’m a part of it.
This doesn't come from knowledge, but is reinforced by it. It comes from moving in the world and feeling integrated into something bigger than I am, something indefinable and mysterious. I know about clouds. I know why the sky is blue. I know about the precession of the earth, why summer is different from winter; all of that is part of it.
I used to be a devout atheist, and rejected things that weren’t defined by science. Then I had a few experiences and met a few people that reduced my rational mind to ashes. So I learned to think and be differently.
 

Mole

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Detached and Engaged

We are atheists because literacy has taught us the habit of mind called detachment. And so it is only natural we become detached from God.

Literacy also allows us to become detached from objects and so become objective. Literacy has enabled us to become detached from power and so gave us liberal democracy. Literacy has enabled us to become detached from fear of usury and gave us modern economics. And literacy enabled us to become detached from the body and gave us modern medicine. And literacy evens allows us to become detached from each other and so become alienated.

Yes, the detachment of literacy has made us aliens. We are fascinated by aliens in the movies, but the aliens are us.

But as you have noticed, the new electronic world is one of engagement. We are once again emotionally engaged with one another. We are once again involved. There is no room for detachment. So alienation is over - we live and die together - for good or ill.
 

Polaris

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I think I'm an atheist mainly for semantic reasons. People will tell you that God is love, the universe, a feeling of union with a larger entity, etc. All of those are things that I experience as being more or less real, but I don't typically refer to them as God. Specifically, I don't need to *personify* them (unless they're inherently personified, such as if someone considers consciousness to be God, in which case my difference with the theist in question would be almost purely semantic, although even that difference isn't quite absolute, as I think that God can be a genuinely good label for certain things, although I recognize the label as denoting something basically conceptual and therefore imaginary, which is probably where my deepest difference would lie), and if I personify them at all, I do it in a more whimsical than serious way, regarding the personification as an imaginary *representation* rather than something that is identical to the things it stands for. I also am familiar with many of the same stories about God that theists are familiar with, and these stories and the characters in them exist "in my head," just as they do for theists; they're just as real to me, in that sense, as they are to theists. The difference, in that regard, between myself and a theist is, in large part, my response to those thoughtforms. I don't proclaim those stories to be real, objective events; they're imaginary to me; they exist only in my head. They're not even memories of mine about the objective world, or at least things that I heard second-hand. It isn't so much that I'm skeptical about them; it's that they're simply not real to me, in any way whatsoever, except in the way that any "mere" story might be real to me. And I have to say that most of the stories about God impress me as being a great deal *less* realistic than many of the stories I encounter, particularly stories meant to describe events from popular history, such as the French Revolution. In short God, seems fictional to me, which is practically just to repeat that I'm an atheist. Even if "God" were to appear before me, in some form, it would just be someone calling themselves "God." In what sense would they *really* be God? They would merely be someone named God. It seems to me that I never could really meet God, because it would always just be someone calling themselves by that name, even if they happened to possess extraordinary powers. I hardly even know what God is supposed to be. There are lots of theological things said about him, but theology seems to me to be little more than a sophisticated form of glossolalia: words that may sound pleasant, but which don't communicate anything clear or coherent. At times, theological descriptions even contain genuine mistakes of reasoning, and if you want to know the truth, I think this is usually the case. So I'm left with a description of a powerful being that, for all I know, might exist, although it seems extremely doubtful, and I don't feel any particular reason to call him God. That, in a nutshell, is why I consider myself an atheist.
 
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