How can unbelievers come to believe in God?

By explaining theistic morality this way, atheists are simply asserting strong atheism: there is no God (or at least noone has contact to God), therefore everything anyone claims to be divine or from God, is an act of delusion, even an act of deliberate delusion.

And the atheist oulook does not have the concepts to render that.

Yes, there are issues to bring up with the critics of "sheeple mentality."

No matter how much atheists like to call theists (and other religionists) "sheeple," it doesn't even seem to be possible for an actual human to be a "sheeple."

A programmed robot might fit the description of a "sheeple," but not a living human.

Agreed.

 

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Correlation does not automatically imply causation.

If we ignore what that higher education is in, and if we ignore any religiously relevant criteria for measuring religiosity.

What's wrong with trying to protect your family, and considering this more important than the life of strangers?

The phenomenon of people currently being religious, and the phenomenon of how people have become religious in the first place, are closely related.

So you hold that an externalist analysis of conscious entities, an analysis that ignores the conscioussness of those entities, is perfectly adequate?

Do you believe that an etic account is perfectly sufficient, and that the emic one can be ignored?

Prove that.

And yet there is an ongoing struggle within all major organized religions to recognize and avoid those people who are "wolves in sheep's clothing" - people who are active members of religious organizations, who openly profess belief and who even generally act in accordance with the religious norms, but who nevertheless have caustic doubts, question the authority and cause discord among members.
The Hindu term for such people is "dharma-dvaji."

That is the general impression one gets from mainstream versions of Abrahamic religions.
The texts, however, have quite a bit more to say on the matter.

So?

Inquiry won't bring you 72 virgins either.

So what kind of inquiry could possibly lead a person to conclude that "the gods of human religion are false"?

I am sure this is what it looks like to you, from the outside.

Apparently you have not participated in many intra-faith discussions on various issues, especially those of faith and ethics, nor have you read much about those.

There is a vast amount of Christian (and other) self-help and self-cultivation literature and other venues for discussing various problems of faith and ethics.

Have you ever practiced the Jesuit spiritual exercises or participated in the group sessions of those?

Or read a book like this, or this or this?

 

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None of this invalidates JDawg's statement. He speaks of the vast majority. You counter with exceptions.

Most theists are taught their faith before they are old enough to make their own decisions. What they do after that is biased by their indoctrination.

 

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A positive correlation? As Mark Twain is supposed to have said, "There's lies, damned lies, and statistics".

In the United States, 27% of the total adult (over 25) population are university graduates.

31% of adults with no religious adherence are university graduates. So the atheists and agnostics do better than the general population. Your "positive correlation" is proven.

Except...

When we break religious adherents down by denomination, things get more interesting.

At the low end, we have Pentecostals and Charismatics, with 13% university graduates.

Baptists show 16% university graduates.

Catholics come in at 25% university graduates. But these numbers are being pulled down by a huge Mexican population in the US who often have little education. The Irish and Italian Catholics would probably do significantly better if they were separated out.

Mormons/LDS show 31% university graduates, equalling the 'nones'.

'New Religious Movements and other' come in at 33% university graduates. So the credulous and eclectic 'new agers' and the 'wicca' witches do marginally better than the atheists and agnostics.

"Mainline" Protestants show 35% university graduates, again slightly better than those with no religious adherence. These are the old-stock Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans and Methodists.

Religious Jews really excel, at 57% university graduates.

And the top spot is occupied by 'eastern religions' (most of these in the US are Buddhist) at 59% university graduates. That's almost twice the figure for atheists and agnostics.

The numbers are from table 11, page 16, of the pdf version of the 2008 ARIS Survey, available (here).

 

Everyone is in that same situation.

Everyone is biased by some indoctrination or another.


You are merely romantically idealizing people who grow up in atheistic communities and those who become atheists later on.

 

No. The majority of atheists grow up indoctrinated by their parents, and ultimately reject that indoctrination.

Whatever influences them to choose atheism is not classified as indoctrination, because it doesn't occur until they are old enough to make decisions for themselves, not just take it as - well - doctrine.

 

And accept another one.

"Old enough to make decisions for themselves" - when is that? When they are 18? 21? 65?

Does being of a certain age automatically make one "old enough to make decisions for themselves"?

Surely those people who are born into theistic families and who then remain theists throughout their lives, also reach an age when they are "old enough to make decisions for themselves" - and yet they don't all opt for atheism.

If age would be the deciding factor, then everyone past a certain age would be an atheist. But they are not.

Clearly, some other factor is at work as to why some people reject the belief and value system they were raised with.



A person being born into an atheist family is indoctrinated into atheism.

Such a child learns not to believe in God.

 

It's not about when they are allowed to. It is about when they do.

An 8, 14, or 21 year old who adheres to the same beliefs as her parents may or may not be making the decision independent of her parents' teachings.

An 8, 14, or 21 year old who rejects the beliefs of her parents is by definition making the decision independent of her parents' teachings.

True. It is not a symmetric relationship.

Yes. That's the primary point here. The factor at work is that they did not choose what they were raised with. When they feel they are capable of deciding for themselves, that is when most atheism occurs.

Yes but again, this is not the way most people become atheistic. Most atheists started off as believing the tenets heir parents taught them.

 

So you seem to be saying that whenever people decide for themselves, they necessarily become atheists; whereas theism is necessarily an act of not deciding for oneself?

If someone is a theist, this means that they have not decided for themselves?

If someone is an atheist, this means that they have decided for themselves?

 

There are atheistic communities? Where?

 

Personally, I'd straddle that difference. I don't believe in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. I'll go even farther and say that I believe that mythical figure doesn't correspond to anything in reality. (I can't know that with 100% certainty though. It just seems vanishingly unlikely to me.)

Having said that, I don't think that theistic ethics is mere bullshit that should simply be dismissed with an atheistic sneer.

There are valuable ideas in theistic ethics that atheists can easily rework into atheist form. (That's assuming that they can stop bragging about their intellectual superiority for long enough to actually think about something.) That's my view.

I wrote:

"Instead, Christians always seem to be talking about the need for "faith" and about their "holy spirit". Something else is happening."​

I'm an atheist and I wrote it. Our concepts do seem to derive in some part from our tradition and from our language and culture. Atheists live in the larger culture and speak the same languages that theists speak. We hear theists talking all the time. And atheists can study the theological traditions and learn the technical words and distinctions.

But sure, maybe the Christians' holy spirit really does exist. Maybe it does descend on certain favored individuals. Maybe that experience of being touched by the divine kind of fills out the religious vocabulary somehow, giving it an experiential reference that less-favored individuals like myself can't understand. I don't believe that's happening, but I'll acknowledge the hypothetical possibility.

I wrote:

"The distinction that I've been making in this thread compares external rule-following on one hand, against the reformation of one's heart, of one's internal motivations on the other. It's about not merely possessing a conscience, whether natural or God-given, but about having the ability and the internal resources to actually heed it, and not simply be swept away by one's own personal desires."​

The "sheeple" thing is an insult, an expression of attitude thrown around by a certain kind of atheist-fundamentalist on internet discussion boards. It's a caricature, kind of a rhetorical "fuck you", analogous in its perjorative use to the Christians' word "heathen".

Not entirely. But I do think that it's possible for people to try to hand over their own moral responsibilities to a supposed higher power. A strong rule-following regime might approximate it. If there's any question about anything in life, just pull out your life-manual and look up the appropriate rule or algorithm.

Of course no such manual exists or has ever existed in Christianity.

But it's nevertheless true that a certain kind of Christian fundamentalist does appear to try to use their Bible that way, searching for a verse to address every situation. I don't think that Christian ethics can simply be reduced to that kind of behavior though.

(For one thing, the average Christian rarely even saw the cover of a Bible until the 15'th century invention of the printing-press.)

Edit: I should also add that just because a Christian picks up his or her Bible in a moment of stress doesn't imply that he or she is looking for a rule. More often they are looking for inspiration. That's different.

This is why I suggested to Dawg that if he dialed back his hyperbole a bit and pulled in his horns, I might start to agree with him. His criticisms of religious ethics obviously don't apply to religious ethics as a whole. Buddhist ethics bear no resemblance to what he criticizes. Even Christian ethics are far more subtle than he imagines. But Dawg's remarks probably do have some cogency if they are applied to a certain narrow kind of Biblicist fundamentalist. And even more so to the corresponding sort of Islamic fundamentalist. His remarks about religious ethics aren't totally without merit in my opinion, just over-stated and over-broad.

 

No. Here is the whole matrix.

A theist, raised by theists (common), may or may not have made their own decision.
An atheist, raised by atheists (rare), may or may not have made their own decision.
A theist, raised by atheists (rare) has definitely rejected the beliefs of their caregivers.
An atheist, raised by theists (common), has definitely rejected the beliefs of their caregivers.

The result is that
- most theists are raised by theists, and may or may not have made their own decision.
- most atheists are raised by theists, and have rejected the beliefs of their caregivers.

 

AlexG makes a valid point, which I've mentioned before. Atheists have no unifying body. They have no organization, no hierarchy , no nothing. That is not to say they won't come together because of common ideas and beliefs, but atheists have no establishment.

There are lots of people who don't believe in unicorns, but that does not mean there is a no-unicorns community.

 

Well, I mean, maybe not in a general sense, but in this case it most certainly does. You can guess what someone's religion is based on where they are from with a startling amount of accuracy.

Look at this map of religious distribution in the world.

http://www.wadsworth.com/religion_d/special_features/popups/maps/matthews_world/content/map_01.html

There's nothing to indicate what subjects a person is educated in has any bearing on the findings, and they take into account several definitions of "religious." And I actually was wrong about the correlation between atheism and higher education. The relevant study concludes that higher education tends to make people skeptical of their faith, and more liberal in terms of their spirituality (ie not adherent to any one set of tenets) but not necessarily less religious in terms of believing in a higher power. It just gets a lot less specific the higher the education level.

There is a correlation, however, between high IQ and low religiosity. In other words, the smarter the person, the less likely they are to be religious.

The point is that the woman isn't really a witch, it's just superstition. By participating in her murder or exile, I'm not doing what is truly good, but this is only because I don't know any better. In other words, my ignorance prevents me from doing the right thing.

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I'm simply saying that if you ask a religious person how they came to their faith, they'll have some long, lovely story about finding Jesus or Buddha or whatever, but if you were to actually look at their situation, they were almost always raised by parents of the same faith, attended religious services as children, performed religious rituals as adolescents, and been a part of religious ceremonies as adults. In other words, they came to their faith by being born into that particular household, and if they had been born to the Hindu couple next door, they'd be Hindu instead.

And how do you suppose I do that? Here, I'll pose an equally ridiculous option: Prove that they do.

This rebuttal only makes sense if I had said that no one questions religious authority. But I didn't. I said the majority don't.

I also said that the people who do question often find themselves on the outside looking in, in terms of their church (or temple, or whatever) or community, and you do a fine job elaborating on that for me.

Really? Like what?

I don't know what that is even supposed to mean. The point is that you cannot question your faith and come to the conclusion that it is correct.

The parochial nature of any faith is a big indicator. The "whole world" always seems to be a very small patch of land in the religions of antiquity, and the morals contained within any guiding text centers around the way of life in the very particular areas from which they originate, and do not translate well across the ages.

The Abrahamic religions claim to be the absolute truth and the word of their god, yet we find better morals in modern society, thousands of years removed, and find their explanations for natural events pitifully lacking. Education renders the infallible quite fallible.

The fact that the Quran is essentially a plagiarism of the New Testament, which in itself is a sort of plagiarism of the Old Testament, and the genesis (pardon the term) for stories in all three can be found in earlier religions of the region, is another huge red flag.

You're talking about an infinitesimally small minority. These are exceptions to the rule.

 

Most claims of 'God's existence come from books where 'God' claims the content is its inerrant word. The moment the inerrant word of 'God' is demonstrated to false by reality not agreeing (ex. the Christian 'God' "creating" the world in 7 days) is the moment a particular claim of 'God' is rendered false.

There are various methods of placing 'God' out of bounds by removing its mark on actual reality; however, if its completely removed then its no longer useful. If it has any interaction with reality then it can be subject to falsification via a number of methods.

The bottom line is that reality has verified that human-made claims of a 'God' are false. As to whether or not a non-human claimed life form exists that would seem 'God'-like to us, I really wouldn't know; however, I don't view it as probable.

Um... yeah...

 

In my case I made a vow to not to strive for any other thing than to find the TRUTH.
Life just turned around, no more working until I knew the truth.
That threw my life into chaos.
Some of the ancient prophets also went through moments like this.
Jesus' hunger strike.
Buddha sitting under the tree.
Mohammed in the cave.

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Mohammed in the cave.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad

 

Buddha sitting under the tree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhi_Tree

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http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/buddhism/pbs2_unit03.htm

 

"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra"

http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Darmok_(episode)

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(No disrespect, just couldn't resist.)

 

Jesus' hunger strike or The temptation of Christ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temptation_of_Christ

From Matthew's Gospel.
http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew 4:1-11&version=NIV

All very dramatic stories.