Apologies for my late response.
No apology necessary; we all have lives outside of TypeC!
Thanks for sharing your perspective and thank you for inviting me to ask you questions.
First, your position doesn't sound exactly like atheism to me, especially the third paragraph? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you. Second, I can see why someone who chooses not to believe would argue against religion. This is not an issue of my misunderstanding a) lack of belief or b) the strong stance atheists can take when it comes to religious practice. I think you should be free to not believe and free to be vocal about it. Conflict is great, we should have more of it.
Haha, I like to joke that "I'm an atheist or an agnostic depending on the day of the week." But that's a commentary on my mercurial attitude toward organized religion, rather than my opinions, which don't shift quite that frequently.
I used to be more of a hardline atheist, but I've learned that the supernatural is a bottomless rabbit hole. Religion and spirituality can be argued around and around in circles, and still not definitively disproven.
My issue goes back to the first post I made in this thread. It is the certainty and the assumed authority, that by logic and science, an atheist could feel intellectually superior to a believer. And this is done by painting an image of foolishness on those who believe in God all the while making a mockery of science as whole by asking for empirical evidence or using the lack of as some profound revelation of truth when it comes to the immaterial.
Admittedly, there is an element of superiority to my non-belief. I've never had faith, and everything I've learned points toward non-belief being the most reasonable stance. Every debate I've witnessed or been a part of has demonstrated that non-belief is the most defensible position. I remember telling a religious grade school friend that "Religion is a crutch." (It's amazing that he remained friends with me after that!) I'm mild-mannered when it comes to just about everything else in life, often to a fault, but when it comes to religion I can be a huge dick.
I find it
very difficult to not make blunt statements or ask pointed questions when I see assumptions, half-truths, glib but meaningless adages, double standards, and outright contradictions being spouted, apparently without any self-awareness. (As has already happened several times in this thread. *twitch*) As Hard mentioned, many believers have an entirely different set of standards when it comes to religion -- specifically, their own religion.
Which I think is where the superiority comes from. From my PoV, religion -- and spirituality, to a lesser degree -- is so self-evidently improbable. Living in this world, surrounded by people with varying degrees and types of faith, is like...if you can imagine an alternate Earth where everyone is a fan of one science fiction story or other. Some of them love their favorite so much that they're
believers. The Trekkies believe that the vulcans are out there and that we'll form the Federation shortly after encountering them, the Matrix people believe that we're all jacked into the Matrix to power the machines, the Star Wars fans believe in the Force and in a galaxy with humans that is somehow far far away and long ago, and so on. Sure, you can't definitively disprove any of these...but how seriously would you take any one of them?
This isn't to say that my attitudes toward organized religion is wholly driven by whatever superiority complex I may have. History has proven that religion
is dangerous, whatever else it is, and I'm not at all convinced that religion does more good than harm. Pragmatically, I'm not sure that a humanity without religion is possible, but I do absolutely believe that we'd all be better off with more self-aware belief. I.e., "Religion is something I practice because it's part of my culture, it gives me comfort, it provides community, etc.." I also firmly believe that we need the separation of church and state clearly and in no uncertain terms written into our fundamental societal manifestos. I'm not sure about other countries, but here in the U.S. we have nutcases who believe that
civil servants are ministers of God, we have religious individuals blatantly abusing tax-exemptions at the expense of their communities, and we have people believing that
long-standing religions deserve special treatment. Even when religion isn't being used to oppress or kill people, it has a habit of undermining our most important social values.
In fact, I find that people who often hold that opinion tend to be very, very biased and deluded, hence "the need to not believe". Too often we throw around the idea that believers are indoctrinated when in reality our society in terms of education is secular. We are raised on secularism. We like to believe that we are objectively rejecting and accepting arguments, but really, how many people who don't believe in a higher power can say that they have investigated religion? So far, no one has said it in this thread. The only person who claims to have done so has copy/pasted verses from a book that he/she failed to read or understand. Piggy-backing off of someone else's work. How many people of faith can say that they have entertained the opposing view? Based on my experience, not many. This idea of objectivity is a sham if you haven't done the work.
To a point, I agree. Being able to entertain opposing views is a valuable and important skill. (I believe [MENTION=21639]Kullervo[/MENTION] used to have a signature to this effect.) The question is: How long need they be entertained before one can reasonably judge them? When it comes to spirituality and religion, there are an infinity of possibilities and nothing is certain, so how certain do you need to be to make a decision? (You can treat these as rhetorical or real questions, as you choose.)
Everyone except agnostics do make a decision, whether conscious or not, so this is an interesting question. Personally, I grew up loving classical mythology; unicorns, the Trojan War, divine pharoahs, greek gods, and so on. But I didn't find them convincing as belief-systems. (Later I learned that classical cultures didn't think of religion the way that we in the modern western world tend to.) Growing up, my family celebrated Hanukah and Passover as well as Christmas and Easter, so I learned a bit about Moses and Elijah. But none of it really stuck with me. In school, I wrote a paper on Buddhism; it was interesting, but it doesn't strike me as Truth. (Though again, I don't think that people in the east think of religion the same way we do in the west.) I grew up in a very Christian area and ended up reading the first gospel, but again, I didn't find any of it compelling as Truth. I love fantasy and I have an active imagination, so I've considered the infinity of
possible religions that may yet be. Some of them I'd like to believe in, but I can't think of one that's much more likely than the current pickings. In my last semester in school, I took a class called
Faith and Reason, and among other things studied the three big arguments for God. I loved discussing them, and even included them in my final paper, but ultimately they're a bottomless rabbit hole which can at most conclude in a non-specific supernatural entity. Even Emmanuel Kant, the eminently Christian philosopher, recognized this fact.
So given that truly perfect objectivity is impossible, due to the impossibility of fully investigating each and every one of infinite supernatural possibilities...do I have
enough objectivity to make a judgment? I think I do.
