The Abraham/Isaac story started me on the road to atheism when I was circa 7-8 years old. My father was almost 50 when I was born & he had more time for me than most fathers. Compared to other families, there was a much stronger than usual bond between us. I was appalled by the request that Abraham kill his son. I was certain that my father would have considered the source of such a request to be demonic. The more my Sunday school teacher tried to justify the request, the more convinced I was that her views were wrong & that religion was suspect. For years, I called myself an agnostic. When circa 13-14, I read the following probably from the Reader's Digest. From that time on, I called myself an atheist. While I consider theists deluded, I envy them for being able to sincerely say It took me a while to make peace with my mortality. Their erroneous belief in the after life provides an easy coping mechanism if/when they think about their inevitable death. I was never an evangelistic atheist. If the subject of religious belief was being discussed, I would mention my POV & defend it if challenged. I never started such discussions. Atheists are a rare breed & I have encountered few of them. I have often wondered about how others came to such a POV.
Well I was brought up Catholic and was lucky enough to live in a literary household. This enabled me to see the bible as a literary work and to read various sections of it as allegories or stories from ancient people and thus requiring interpretation and not necessarily applicable in raw form to us today. My beliefs grew somewhat weaker at university, though I never felt much difficulty accommodating them to my study of science. The problem was largely that the strictures about sexual behaviour started to seem unnatural, unhealthy and absurd. I was of course looking for justification in breaking them! My belief was then dealt an almost mortal blow by the years I spent in the Middle East and my visits to the Far East, during which time it became obvious that there are billions of people who believe other things and are equally adamant that their version of belief is the only true one. Why should I be right and they all be wrong? It seemed ridiculous. However as I've grown older I have found the art and culture of the Christian church, and its practices and rituals, do seems to serve an aesthetic and emotional purpose, in linking one to the common heritage and history of our ancestors and linking us to all the triumphs and disasters of life that they experienced as we do and how they supported one another. Also, having a son made me ask myself whether I wanted him to grow up with inside knowledge of Christianity - even if the beliefs cannot be taken literally - or be an outsider from his own history and culture. And the teaching of Christ has always seemed to me a sound basis for a moral compass. So I now find myself what I might describe as a "cultural Catholic", while being agnostic in terms of belief. To those who say, puritanically, that I must make up my mind one way or the other, I reply that in science we use a variety of models, none of them perfect - and some mutually incompatible - to account for our experience of the physical world - I just do a bit of that in my life outside science, too. Maybe I will make up my mind or maybe I won't.
Life after death, compared to death after life, impacts the way you approach life, since each POV causes the mind to extrapolate to the future, in different ways. As an analogous example, say you go to college with no concern for what may occur after college. If fact, you hope you make t through freshman year. You will approach things differently, than someone planning to get a certain job, right after four years of college. The job seeker will more likely postpone most of the partying, to keep their grades up. If one is not planning anything beyond college, one may decide fraternity parties are the thing to do, as long as their don't fail out. The time scale of planning impacts how you approach life. When I was a teen, I became an atheist/agnostic. I tried to be good to others, but not by the book of all religious rules. The reason for the change was not to walk a higher road, but to indulge myself with pleasures of the world, without feeling guilty. Most people do not go into atheism to climb, but rather it is to descend downhill to a shorter term path that takes less effort in life, and gives more quick returns. As a new teen atheist, I did not have to think about long term planning, beyond life. I did not have to plan for the job after college of life. Rather the goal was to live in the now, a notch or two above an animal, ready for action. Later in life, after sowing my will oats, my actions seemed rather low level; anyone could do this, so I decided to up my game, and climb back to the higher road. This road is harder, which is why atheism is appealing; lazy and less will power. Another example of planning differently based on time scale for life is, say a doctor said you had one year to live, when you had always expected to live another 50 years. Now your priorities will change. There is no point saving for that house in five years, since a mortgage and house is beyond you. Instead, why not use the savings to buy a sports car and drive 150 mph. If you learned your cancer went away, you will begin to plan life differently, maybe slowing the driving down, since there would extra life beyond your former assumed point of death. The longer term planning of the religious causes them to have this steady crawl toward their goals, without too much ups and downs. The shorter term atheists is more impulsive like a freshman who is so excited to be away from home, often forgets to keep his grades up. Atheists are more stressed from unconscious fear if their internal deadline.
Life after death, compared to death after life, impacts the way you approach life, since each POV causes the mind to extrapolate to the future, in different ways. As an analogous example, say you go to college with no concern for what may occur after college. If fact, you hope you make t through freshman year. You will approach things differently, than someone planning to get a certain job, right after four years of college. The job seeker will more likely postpone most of the partying, to keep their grades up. If one is not planning anything beyond college, one may decide fraternity parties are the thing to do, as long as their don't fail out. The time scale of planning impacts how you approach life. When I was a teen, I became an atheist/agnostic. I tried to be good to others, but not by the book of all religious rules. The reason for the change was not to walk a higher road, but to indulge myself with pleasures of the world, without feeling guilty. Most people do not go into atheism to climb, but rather it is to descend downhill to a shorter term path that takes less effort in life, and gives more quick returns. As a new teen atheist, I did not have to think about long term planning, beyond life. I did not have to plan for the job after college of life. Rather the goal was to live in the now, a notch or two above an animal, ready for action. Later in life, after sowing my will oats, my actions seemed rather low level; anyone could do this, so I decided to up my game, and climb back to the higher road. This road is harder, which is why atheism is appealing; lazy and less will power. Another example of planning differently based on time scale for life is, say a doctor said you had one year to live, when you had always expected to live another 50 years. Now your priorities will change. There is no point saving for that house in five years, since a mortgage and house is beyond you. Instead, why not use the savings to buy a sports car and drive 150 mph. If you learned your cancer went away, you will begin to plan life differently, maybe slowing the driving down, since there would extra life beyond your former assumed point of death. The longer term planning of the religious causes them to have this steady crawl toward their goals, without too much ups and downs. The shorter term atheists is more impulsive like a freshman who is so excited to be away from home, often forgets to keep his grades up. Atheists are more stressed from unconscious fear if their internal deadline.
I am surprised a chemist would think that low of nature and adapt to the gullible position and ignoring on the difficulty in reacting simple compounds to make them in compounds that produce life. Then put himself onto a common a acceptance time and primordial soup.
"My belief was then dealt an almost mortal blow by the years I spent in the Middle East" Do you want me to post in Arabic ?
I think about long term planning, why not? Anyway, short story, I've always been an agnostic, but interested in religions, dabbled in Buddhism and Taoism. Richard Dawkins gave me the arguments that convinced me of atheism in his book "The God Delusion". I also owe Christopher Hitchens a great deal for his book, "God is not Great".
I'm sorry, again I cannot see how it follows that you can call yourself an atheist if you reject Abrahamic religions. A religion is not God, God is something else. I think instead what someone who says something along those lines actually means is they haven't decided what God is, but they have not rejected God by rejecting a version of God. Think about how you still can't really define what you think God is, what then have you rejected? Jesus H on a goddam stick!
You do speak a mountain of hooey, don't you! You think atheism takes less effort? That it gives more quick returns? It is surely less effort to follow the path trodden by the sheople before you, a journey about which a great number of books have been written to guide you on what to think and say. Sure, there are no traditions to adhere to as an atheist, no formalities to go through, but that is nothing to do with belief in God but to do with not being part of a religion. So basically you were unable to control yourself while an "atheist" (and I use that word doubtfully as I think you are confusing religion with belief in God), unable to live a life you felt was fulfilling, and so you jumped back into something that gave you the structure you felt was needed in your life. That's great - but that talks to your personal weaknesses, to your personality, not to the issue of atheism / theism. It is clear you think your theism puts you above us mere atheists. Your disdain for us drips from every fluid ounce of drivel you utter. You do not seem to have any true notion of what it is to be an atheist, rather you draw some caricature of what you wish atheism was like to help keep you on your path. What I think happened to you was not a lack of belief in God itself but a reaction to organised religion. So you rebelled, but I would hazard that you still believed in God. And you are forever conflating God with religion. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! Do you actually ever support this drivel you spout?
I have no trouble being an A-theist. Anymore than I have trouble being an A-unicornist, an A-mermaidist, and an A-satyrist. I see God as a product of the literary imagination, the same as with these other mythical beings. My journey questioning God's existence pretty much resulted from my study of philosophy in my early twenties. Long Saturdays and Sundays in the college library reading Nietzsche, Whitehead, Jung, Sartre, and Heidegger. I am not agnostic about literary characters. I'm pretty sure they exist only in books and stories. What I remain agnostic about is the nature of reality. I just don't know to what extent this is all an illusion, and to what extent this is all real. I have settled into taking the postmodern approach of just accepting the game of believing in the real. It's what we evolved over a million years to do. We play the game of knowing things, even though we don't really know anything for sure. Such is the state of my quest, at least at this point. To dwell peacefully in the presence of the Unknown, unwilling to reduce it to some worldview I am only projecting on it from my own subjective needs. “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.” ― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
We get most of our ideas of god from religions. We get the definitions of god from religions. We certainly can't debunk every possible conception of god, but if we can debunk the most common ones, those are all strong points in favor of there not being any such thing.
And you believe this Unknown isn't connected at all to what you think God is? You also say . You really think what you say here isn't about our evolved "need" to explain the world, and even where that need is connected to the existence or nonexistence of God? It looks pretty obvious to me that you're talking about God after all.
Can an individual believe in God without be religious ? Can I be an atheist of religion but believe in God ?
