AIBU to find this slightly odd behaviour from atheist friends?

[handsandknees]

I am an Evangelical Christian. People who know me well know that. I am happy to talk about it if people want to, but I don't go on about it.

Last Easter one of my friends posted a long status on facebook basically ranting against the Christian Easter message and saying that she didn't want or need Jesus to have died for her, thank you very much. Up to her what she writes of course, but the tone was very aggressive and I wondered why. I didn't comment but later she sent me a personal message asking me what I thought of her post.

Then this week another friend posted a photo on my wall which said "Proud to say I'm an atheist". I haven't responded but just wondering why would someone do this? I am not offended just find it a bit strange.

Why do you think they would do this?

I have no idea if you are, Seeker, but what I said is true. It's a social media "thing" right now. Of course you don't have to believe me. You can believe whatever you choose to believe. Everyone can.

You do make it sound very exciting SGB because it gets you so worked up. If I was your DC I would be asking lots of family members about your childhood and I would be wanting to explore the subject to find out what all the fuss was about. I know that you will turn up on any thread about religion with vitriolic comments about 'imaginary friends'. There is no tolerance, no 'live and let live', no respect for other views. I can't see why people can't just be free to have their own beliefs. It all shows why OP was wise to make no comment on FB.
In RL it is much better to keep off politics and religion and stick to a bland phrase like 'we are all different'.
People are looking for different things in life. If you want proof you are not going to get it. I have never expected to have 'noticeable activity'- it hadn't crossed my mind that we ought to have any!

Exoticfruits - people KNOW BETTER and they have to let everyone know how CLEVER THEY ARE and how STUPID OTHER PEOPLE ARE

twas ever thus

Exotic again: you can prove (mathematically) that the Christian God doesn't exist, but like you say it's all about faith. If it was easy or obvious or even not hard, you wouldn't need faith.

That's the point where people should just smile and shake hands and say "each to their own". Unfortunately some people just can't leave it alone.

Very true. It is the same with any subject on MN - people make a decision and justify it by thinking it is the right decision for everyone. The right decision for me is totally wrong for many other people.
The moral of the story is that if someone is trying to provoke you with a comment do not raise to the bait. The best thing with FB would be to say 'sorry, I didn't see it'

With FB, if asked I would have said 'sorry, I didn't notice- which date did you post'? And then ignore again.They would have to be very pushy to bring it up again, to which you could say 'sorry, forgot to look back'.

An over-simplification, but I believe that, except proximately, Science only answers questions of "How?". It doesn't, and cannot, answer ultimate questions of "Why?", or, indeed, whether or not there is an ultimate question "Why?".

Yes indeed. Some of us aren't fazed by the idea that there is 'no why', and a that point much of religious thought becomes redundant.

The 'two magisteria' idea propounded by Gould is attractive up to a certain point but I'm not sure it works too well in the real world.

Brycie, it's just that it is socially acceptable to be public about being an atheist. It's not a fashion, it's progress!

Even when I was a child, which was longer ago than most mumsnetters but not very long in historical terms, being an atheist was something most people would not admit to.

And as I have repeatedly said, people are of course free to adhere to whatever faith they want, so long as they don't ask for special privileges for it, or impose it on other people.

Yes...we're emerging from the 'don't ask, don't tell' mentality.

THat more young people are unashamedly atheist is a sign of progress as well as a healthy reaction to the sort of revolting bullshit being spouted by a lot of American right wing men (all those rape myths, all that misogyny).

Human beings are generally evolving beyond the need for imaginary friends. It's only people in difficult situations, extreme poverty, lack of education and prospects, who are inclined to turn to superstition when they've got fuck all else. Sadly, turning to superstition is more likely to make their situation worse.

Exoticfruits, if you were the child of someone involved in anti-racism campaigning, do you think you would find the idea of becoming a racist exciting? WOuld you trot round asking everyone if your parent had been beaten up by racists and think it was quite a thrill?

Of course, up to a point, children do seek out things that they know their parents dislike or disapprove of when they hit their teens, but not many take it to really pernicious extremes.

SGB- I agree with practically everything you say. But the trouble is that using ...intemperate..language allows those that want to focus on the language, not the message. Whenever they accuse atheists of being aggressive, there you are, proving their point! Your arguments are cogent and compelling- why not rely on them?

My faith is a little more nebulous than many of my friends and we manage our differences. T

What bothers me is that my son comes home talking about creationism because those beliefs have been given to his friends. I find myself trying to explain evolution to a 7 yr old because that's my belief. Perhaps it's telling that I haven't debunked Santa Claus & the tooth fairy but I'm fairly sure at his age I went along with those two without really believing. I was a very mercenary child.

I was hoping he would be able to make his own choice on religion when he's developed enough critical faculty but I suppose it's like swearing, you know they're going to hear it so you have to let them know where you stand with it. I am not a fan of organised religion, I may start a disorganised one.

You can give a simple explanation of evolution to a 4 year old - especially if you go to museums with fossils etc they can easily get the basic idea. If they've seen a dinosaur and had a bit of explanation, then creation myths are more likely to be seen for what they are.

While most of us want our children to make their own choices concerning religion, they don't grow up in a vacuum. Grounding them with solid, not-really-controversial science will give them a better context for further understanding. They may turn out like Frank (unbeliever -> christian) or me (christian ->unbeliever) or anywhere in between but at least there's a greater chance they won't fall for shut-your-eyes-to reality nonsense like Young Earth Creationism.

HT is explaining evolution to a 7 year old difficult? More to the point, why doesn't a 7 year old know about evolution already?

Grimma - "Yes indeed. Some of us aren't fazed by the idea that there is 'no why', and a that point much of religious thought becomes redundant."

Of course. You have every right to your viewpoint, which I don't find at all "ridiculous".

It was actually my basic viewpoint for the first 28 years or so of my life - which is why I was a theoretical "Agnostic", but practical "Atheist".

Some personal experiences convinced me that the basic Christian revelation of the existence and nature of God [i.e. without all the accretions added by power-hungry "hierarchies"] is true.

Could I be mistaken? Of course! We are all fallible human beings, and the sooner those who seem to claim infallibility, whatever their ideological and/or political viewpoints, stop claiming such, the better a place the world would be (IMHO).

My comments on Science, with which I have been involved with longer than I have been a Christian, are merely to point out that, contra Dawkins, there is no basic conflict between Science and Faith (although there clearly is between Science and some varieties of faith, such as Young Earth Creationism).

Science will never in itself be able to decide between your Atheistic viewpoint and my Christian one. We should agree to differ and get on with more important practical issues to do with the betterment of humankind, not forgetting the other species which have to share this world with us.

[I love the arrogant idea current among the type of Atheist I have termed "fundamentalist", that they somehow represent a more evolved type of human!
I too believe that human evolution has not come to an end - but perhaps Homo sapiens is actually evolving into a kinder, less violent, more egalitarian species, more tolerant and less contemptuous of others who may disagree with our basic faith or non-faith viewpoints - always provided of course that those viewpoints don't themselves advocate violence and hatred (e.g. no tolerance for such as Nazism)

If Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature [2011], is correct, this might actually be happening. Let's hope he's right on this.]

We started from - chimpanzees are apes & humans are apes & we are related, then went through diagrams on the internet. We haven't really gone in depth into 'survival of the fittest', primordial soup and self replicating molecules, sometimes I struggle to pitch at the right level.

The questions a 7 year old poses can leave you open to quite detailed answers and he probably already knows more about the periodic table than he needs to.

primordial soup and self replicating molecules
when you get back beyond evolution to abiogenesis that's a bit harder since science has not got to the bottom of that - yet.

I too believe that human evolution has not come to an end - but perhaps Homo sapiens is actually evolving into a kinder, less violent, more egalitarian species

I hope so. I'd also hope 'more rational' - which does not preclude faith, as you say.

Science will never in itself be able to decide between your Atheistic viewpoint and my Christian one

true - but science does seem to have a tendency to erode the necessity for faith. It has already provided explanations which remove the need for a 'creator'. The further we look into how the mind works the less weight we can give to subjective experiences...

seeker - explaining evolution to a 7 year old shouldn't be too difficult. It's simple logic really.

Those who worry about their kids getting weird ideas from others are often over-reacting. These days, it's harder to brainwash kids than it might have been at one time.

And forcing stuff on children often puts them off. Although my family background was non-religious, I ended up at C of E schools where Christian RE was taught. Did it make me a Christian? No!!! Actually it acted as a sort of vaccination against it - so that, by the time I arrived at University, my position was as an Atheistically-inclined Agnostic, glad to escape the boredom of organized religion as I had experienced it.

[Much more worrying is the dominance of the commercial media by a few large media organisations with more or less the same political viewpoint, and who sell their products partly by appealing to the worst side of human nature. Whatever one thinks of the Leveson enquiry, the attitude of most of the press to it, has been hypocrisy of the most revoltingly shameless type. I worry more about the "brainwashing" of adults than of children.]

"I think anyone should be free to believe whatever they want. Just so long as it doesn't impinge on other people. I also think that people should be free to smoke behind their own closed doors if they want to. However they are not free to drift their smoke, or their religion, over other people whether they want it or not. Or to claim special privileges or positions in public life for their religion- or their smoke. Nobody is saying that you can't have a personal religion. But in my experience, that's not all that people want."

I'm interested in the fact that on threads like this, posts like the one I've C and Ped tend to be conveniently ignored, with people of faith focussing on the bad manners of atheists, or on supposed attacks on faith, and demands for "respect" for beliefs. Is anyone up for addressing the points above?

Grimma - "true - but science does seem to have a tendency to erode the necessity for faith. It has already provided explanations which remove the need for a 'creator'. The further we look into how the mind works the less weight we can give to subjective experiences..."

I must respectfully disagree - somewhat.

Science certainly cuts the ground away from such primitive concepts as the "God of the Gaps" - never intellectually defensible.

But as for the idea of the "creator", it all depends on how such a concept is viewed. Any anthropomorphic view is, I would accept, "ridiculous". But the idea of some sort of "ultimate cause" isn't. It's highly debatable that science has already removed the need of such - but in any case it hasn't removed the possibility, indeed probability, of such. One of the most intractable questions at the base of Science is the problem of existence, why there is anything at all, rather than nothing. No theories about the nature of the Big Bang actually deal with this - the most any can do is to put back the problem to another dimension.

As for "how the mind works" - here again we are on ground which is very shaky, to say the least. Many of the conclusions depend on very fine tuning of instruments being accurate, and debatable theories of "Consciousness". Actually, if some of the more extreme conclusions are true, then the ground is removed not just from "faith", but from all knowledge of any sort, including scientific knowledge.

In any case, it doesn't surprise me that "subjective experiences" of all types - not just "religious" - can be identified in brain wave patterns etc. I tell my students that "pair-bonding" and "love" are associated in the brain with oxytocin, vasopressin and their receptors. And not to worry that it somehow makes "love" less important - it doesn't. Surely one would expect strong emotions to be traceable in brain chemistry and physics? The fact that thirst and hunger can also be so traced does not ipso facto make food and drink merely a subjective experience!

Subjective personal experiences are not necessarily just a matter of the "mind". Those which led to my "conversion" to Christianity, and have led to me remaining such, are of a varied nature which are more than just a matter of "feeling" and "thinking". As such have clearly not happened for you, I entirely understand that you can't accept my experiences for yourself.

I thank you for your interesting and stimulating posts.

seeker - I think anyone should be free to believe whatever they want. Just so long as it doesn't impinge on other people. I also think that people should be free to smoke behind their own closed doors if they want to. However they are not free to drift their smoke, or their religion, over other people whether they want it or not. Or to claim special privileges or positions in public life for their religion- or their smoke. Nobody is saying that you can't have a personal religion. But in my experience, that's not all that people want.

I don't demand any more "respect" or special privileges for my position than for any others. I am embarrassed when Christians do so. I was very glad, for instance, that the law on Blasphemy was repealed.

Many Christians, and Moslems, Hindus etc., are arrogant and rude. So are many Atheists, and in my experience, they are not content to leave it that religion is a personal viewpoint. They want to condemn it as an evil, and some want the state to help them in their particular propaganda.

On the other hand - thank goodness - there are many Atheists, as well as Christians, Moslems etc., who aren't like that.

Frank so you're opposed to faith schools, compulsory RE and collective worship in schools, and bishops in the HofL?

seeker

If bishops are to remain in the HofL then I would like to see representatives of other faiths, and of Atheist organisations as well. I think there is a good argument that the HofL shouldn't just consist of political appointees

However as far as faith schools are concerned - and especially as far as C of E schools are concerned - the situation isn't quite as many Atheists tend to portray it. None of the C of E schools I have known - quite a few - have been in the business of making converts. One even had a head teacher who was a Buddhist!

Compulsory RE is also, or should be, about studying many faiths in a non-evangelistic manner. If Christianity has a special place in the study, it is because it has had such in the history of this country, and so, for better or worse, has had a historic influence which e.g. Islam or Buddhism haven't. In a hundred years time - who knows?

As for compulsory "collective worship", if done badly, and it often is, it actually turns kids off religion. It certainly did in my case. Perhaps Atheists should encourage more "collective worship"!

A survey a few years ago showed that attending a C of E school made very little difference to the "faith" of young adults. In fact, in one category, so-called "Voluntary Controlled" schools, they were actually slightly less likely to be "believers".

C of E schools were started in the 19th century largely not as vehicles of "evangelism" but as a public service in areas which would not have had schools. They are still regarded in the C of E mainly in this way. Freeing the Church from this responsibility would actually be release from a burden, which, for better or worse, would enable more of its energies and finances to be directed into other spheres.

Would I support a move for the C of E to turn over all the schools to the state? Well, yes. But it would have to be done very carefully and gradually - and there are many legal barriers (people may have left land/legacies to a school). And, for whatever reason, Church schools tend on average to perform better academically. For the sake of the children involved, I wouldn't want to see these standards lowered in any transfer.

The same questions apply even more to Catholic, Jewish, and (growing number) Islamic schools - especially as, much more than C of E schools, they are meant specifically to cater for particular faith communities.