ITT: Atheists
So predictable…
I’m an atheist due Roman Catholic grade school. The teachings about religion were crazy.
I also went to Roman Catholic high school and college but religion was very miner. College required four religion type courses but including courses such as ethics and logic.
I’m an atheist bcs I don’t have a wild imagination.
I believe there is lots of important knowledge about morality etc. embedded inside religious books. This is why is is worth reading those. Also there is lots of shitty and immoral stuff i try to ignore. Why would I try to implement those.
The other important stuff is active community. A single person can only do so much good. But if you are doing good as a whole local community you can do project far bigger than you could pull off yourself.
So it was easy to decide to keep the religion I was raised in. This is the biggest religion with biggest community.
This is about my religious framework and why I have it. However I distinct between my religion and my personal believes. Personally I am ignostic (with I), so I think we almost never use the same definitions for God, Being, to believe, to exist,… I even hold an opinion, by what most atheists define what God is, most grown up Christians are atheists. And the other way around. I think we hold pretty similar believes but we use different meaning for same words.
I want to have an afterlife. I study science, and sometimes I feel like there are things humans won’t get in my lifetime. So I like to think that I can continue on learning even after I die.
I don’t
I spiritually disbelieve in everyone’s religion
I have personally experienced librarians and they have helped me when in need.
I’ve read through the Bible cover to cover three times. Amplified, NIV, and New King James with a copy of Strongs.
I’m an atheist now.
I understand the reaction. The Bible is sold by a lot of churches as “the word of God”, and if it’s the case, God is a lying asshole. But nowhere in the Bible it is written that the Bible is the word of God; according to the Bible the word of God is Jesus-Christ so… it may not be the right approach according to the Bible itself.
I love the Bible, I read it (almost) every day, I use it as a guide in my material and spiritual lives, I studied the story of its interpretation in the university, I even thought about making that my speciality. Yet I don’t understand how someone could believe in biblical inerrancy. It’s very clearly a human work, written by error-prone normal humans. I believe that God spoke to its redactors, but it’s still a human work. And ours is (according to me) to listen to the voice of God through the human form; and that’s why we have the Church, as it’s not something one can do alone.
I like your view.
Though I don’t do church anymore, either they worship the current incarnation of the antichrist or they’re lead by weak leaders who aren’t willing or capable to do what it takes to be a great leader in my experience.
We tried a few liberal / LGBTQ lead churches and I just couldn’t continue to participate. My wife kept going longer than I did but she hasn’t gone in a few years.
What made you an atheist?
I think they are saying reading those books are the reason.
The Bible is pretty fallible when looking at it objectively IMO. But the nail in the coffin was contrasting what the Bible asks of us vs what Christianity does. The tyrannical cheeto is as close to the antichrist as we’ve seen and they’re all gaga for him as an example. But I’ve been disillusioned since Obama’s first election. The terrible and false things “the church” and soon to be former church friends said about him was next level bullshit. Yet when I highlighted that the Bible clearly says the worst relationship we have with man is our relationship with Christ landed in def ears.
Not op, but for me it was the fact that the supposedly ineffable word of God turned out to be pretty effible
It wasn’t the first step towards losing faith, or even the last, but it was pretty troubling to a young me
Because I can at least see spaghetti without DMT.
Since we all have DMT in our brain already you are wrong heretic
I just have a deep rooted appreciation for pasta.
I do not really know. I was not raised in a practicing family, and my country is very secular.
Philosophically, I’m agnostic. I’m not convinced either by arguments for or against the existence of God. I think a being which could exist outside time and space is not approachable by our reason.
But I can’t stay neutral, the question is too important. And I feel the presence of God in my life. This feeling came first, and when I tried to understand it, I went to the culturally nearest place of worship, and it was Protestantism, and I felt at home. I read the Bible, not as a theology manual, but as the story of people who try to understand the presence of God; sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong, but their quest is mine, and theirs inspires mine.
I feel the same way reading the Bible. Even as early as Genesis I was like damn Abraham I don’t understand why you tried to pimp out your sister-wife ONCE but also why did you KEEP DOING IT? Somebody recently commented that they find the Bible boring and I was like you need to find a modern translation because if you can even vaguely understand what’s actually going on that shit is WILD. Turns out humans have always been crazy AF and personally I actually find that kinda comforting. Another great example is the whole Onan thing because somebody decided to make it about masturbation when if you really get down to it it’s a story about a dude who thinks he’s being slick by obeying the letter of the current law to screw his widowed sister in law out of her rightful property and THAT story is TIMELESS.
I rejected christianity sometime as an early teen.
I don’t remember my full reasoning but I did not like the idea of getting up early Sunday morning to do the church stuff.
It never got replaced by anything.
I find it funny that there was a time where atheists on the internet were just called edge lords (or still, idk) for not believing in god and voicing that opinion. I remember being like 8 years old and thinking: wow that is stupid, why would anyone believe that. That was pre internet, i didn’t have to be influenced by other edge lords and i didn’t read any books about it. But somehow it’s in certain parts of the world weirder to come to that conclusion than believing in the all mighty super being.
During that time period it wasn’t so much being an atheist that made someone an edge lord, but in how they went about communicating that to others.
Same. My mother actually sent me to Sunday school and I even did 1st grade at a Catholic School. I too remembering how silly it all seemed even at that age. Luckily the school closed down after that first year or she would have kept sending me there. I always wonder if the indoctrination would have taken if I’d have to keep going year after year.
I used to, because my parents did and I went to church and all that.
But then I started to actually think about it.
Now I don’t believe in anything supernatural.
There are parts of nature we don’t understand (yet) but I don’t think there’s any ‘higher power’ that created the universe, and especially not earth or humankind specifically.My religion isn’t really based on belief, just practice. And I do the practices because they make me feel better and more connected.
I don’t have a religion, but consider myself to be “religiously neutral.” Either smart men from all over are running the same scam — or there are common bits of wisdom in most religions and there may be something to that. Either way, I ultimately believe in Humanism, I suppose. That humans are inherently good, or want to be, and/or enough actually are.
I do not believe in anything original myself. It’s all academic to me.
or there are common bits of wisdom in most religions and there may be something to that.
The entire point of religion is to make important rules followed.
When a food is banned, it’s because that food was killing people when the rules were written. Abrahamic religions don’t like sex that doesn’t make babies, because they all start as persecuted cults by the main branches and the fastest way to grow is to have kids born into it.
It’s obviously all outdated, but it boils down to how you’d convince a kid not to do something when you can’t watch them 24/7: follow the rules or Santa will find out.
Like there’s always jokes about Jewish Sabbath, but honesty that was just the equivalent to modern union mandated lunch breaks. The only way to guarantee a day off back in the day, was to explicitly outlaw doing anything. Pretty much all anyone in the household could do was just relax and hang out together.
Like I said, it’s all way outdated. But every time you try something new suddenly the ATF starts hanging around…
“'Cause, in those days, a pork chop could kill ya!” - Chris Rock
The really weird one is shellfish.
Shellfish allergy is a big deal, And prior to refrigeration it wasn’t a common food unless right near da beach.
So people could not try it till they were adults, and just keel over on the spot. But since shellfish allergy is weirdly genetic, the populations most at risk for it now, are the ones who spent centuries avoiding it. Because everyone else kept losing at least some of the people who were allergic
Either smart men from all over are running the same scam — or there are common bits of wisdom in most religions and there may be something to that.
Or C: There was an original scam that not so original humans copied over and over through the years.
The scam of self-restraint, says the Western man.
Exactly what I think. Otherwise, I just attempt to follow the Scriptures (both to the left and right of Matthew), with exceptions due to geographic restrictions, political power restrictions, or divine decrees of course.
