Is being pubicly atheist a recent thing, especially re. collective worship?

[wanderings]

Firstly, I'm taking no sides - I had strong atheist views when I was younger, but gradually changed my mind.

There are many threads on MN about this, especially annoyance by atheist parents about collective worship in schools, and I have been wondering if it's recent that people have felt so strongly about it. I find it hard to imagine buses in the 1980s and 90s saying "there probably is no God", or parents taking their children out of assembly, or people muttering and sneering in the back row when attending baptisms (under duress): if it happened I was blissfully ignorant.

Speaking for myself, I rebelled with my heart and soul when my parents suddenly dragged me to catholic church every Sunday when I was 9. I saw the whole thing as utter nonsense, and a waste of valuable weekend time. However, I gradually changed my mind as an adult, but went CofE rather than catholic. I took the view that you did not have to take a literal view of the Bible and the church's teachings; as a child I was very literal-minded. I also love the sense of community in church.

Does anyone think it is because a generation of young adults are remembering being forced to obediently sing hymns, hear prayers from their school days, had to learn "impossibilities" such as the great flood, and are now making sure their children won't have to do the same, now that they have the right to say something which they didn't as a child?

Erm

Calling women "hysterical" is also not, you know, great. From a feminist perspective. I'm getting that you think feminism is a bit shit. I'm getting that quite strongly

On the swallowing thing, why don't you ask the poster who said it? Or have you just sort of rolled up all the posters who have reacted negatively to your posts into one entity in your head? Or do you think there is sock-puppeting going on (if so, report, rather than imply).

I didn't say it was a faith.

I said it is a belief system. A positive belief that there is no God. Even though it is not possible to 'test' for a god or gods.

So their existence - or non-existence - is a matter of belief. There is no evidence for the existence of gods. There is no evidence for the absence of gods.

(Agnosticism, OTOH, which accepts that at present we do not have the answer, is not a belief system. It's the rational, tolerant, evidence-based position).

Why, in this instance, is agnosticism the 'rational stance' ?

I would say it is an open-minded stance for people who feel that there may be a God.

But for an atheist, the proposition for God is that many people believe there is a god. The whole point of 'faith' is that it can't be proven. That is it's value, in many ways, that it requires 'faith'. It is a 'spiritual' commitment to something which cannot be proven. Christians do not, in my experience, spend hours trying to prove the existence of God, they do not conduct experiments to prove or disprove god, they accept that their relationship with God is based on faith - trust in god that God exists.

To an atheist, sheer faith is not the basis of a belief. Scientists spend all their time analysing known facts and attempting theories on the basis of those facts. We may not have discovered the exact origins of the universe or the basis of conscious thought in a material brain, but atheists accept that it is an exploration and a journey. Who knows; at the end of that exploration, astro-physicists may discover, and be able to prove, a God. In which case atheists will embrace the fact. That is different from setting out to believe something for which there is no evidence or theory a all except the belie of believers.

I cannot see that atheism is less rational than agnosticism.

And personally, I don't condemn people of faith as 'silly'. I am interested on the concept of faith as a philosophy.

Yeah like I say, not sure I buy that one.

You are saying it's not rational, not to give some amount of credence to every thing that anyone anywhere might believe?

I can say in passing "well anything's possible" and mean it. But when I say "anything's possible" I mean literally anything and that the chances of it being that way are so vanishingly small as to be not worth considering.

Agnosticism to me implies more than that, that you think the existence of God is a real possibility, not a vanishingly small theoretical one in the same box as "we're all a figment of someone else's imagination" or whatever.

I met a Cosmologist once who found that his work supported his belief, Blu. I found that really interesting.

A surprising number of people in the astrophysics / cosmology type world do seem to have faith, IME and that really is just IME which is a fairly small sample! But still, interesting.

I said it is a belief system

No it isn't. What part of atheism is a system?

Implicit atheism is the lack of belief in a deity- such as the atheism that new born babies are born with.
Atheism can also be the rejection of a deity, but there remains the fact that atheism is the default position.

Is the fact that I don't think unicorns exist is not a belief system either.

I suppose it comes down to this theory that some people just are spiritual and some just aren't. And those who are will seek to fulfil that and those who aren't will find the whole thing baffling. And of course whether you are that sort of person or not has little impact on what sort of things you are interested in or good at.

Culture surrounding this stuff, much more so, obviously. So the fact of being a spiritual person wouldn't make you more or less interested in science, your upbringing and education and so forth would.

When I say "he found his work supported his belief" I mean that the beauty he found and the way the maths fell out made him feel that there was a higher power.

Not that he found any evidence for it!

Although i suppose it depends what you take as evidence doesn't it, many people point to the natural world as "evidence" of a higher power.

Thanks to those who have given answers to what I originally asked. I wasn't expecting this to turn into a bunfight (which is why I didn't post in AIBU). Again, I did not say that either side was right or wrong.

And I stand by my view that I was a highly questioning child but changed my mind about some things later, and I reserve the right to change my mind again if it suits me (awaits the invites of "come over to the atheist side, we have )

They're bound to be better than church biscuits wanderings, more's the pity

"as the atheism that new born babies are born with. Atheism can also be the rejection of a deity, but there remains the fact that atheism is the default position."

We don't know whether babies are born in complete communion with God, and that changes, or they are born atheist. Because that is not subject to enquiry.

So a belief in one over the other, either way round, is exactly that. A belief.

There is no known 'default' either way round either. Though most of the many sides believe it goes their way.

(Won't quibble over rejection of word 'system' because of course there is no one atheism any more than there is one theism).

Well the RC thought they weren't surely? They were born with original sin.

So there's another option for babies.

What does "in complete communion with God" mean? I'm trying to get to grips with it and I've not heard it before.

Is it like achieving Nirvana for Buddhists?

How would it manifest?

It roughly means communing with a God in a state of complete mutual understanding. That may or may not include awareness Original Sin (which is only doctrine of one denomination of one faith; and so not a key part of the concept that the existence of a newborn soul, let alone what it is like, is not currently known).

Because some things are just beyond our current levels of enquiry and understanding.

But I do think Dawkins rather Biblically-founded investigations into the Christian (though other beliefs exist) allegorical 'Word' which caused the Big Bang to happen are the nearest there is to proving a god's existence.

Sorry I didn't really understand much of that.

You think that babies might be born with a full and complete mutual understanding with God?

Why would anyone want to think that? This is where it gets weird for me. Babies are born with the full mutual understanding of an omnipotent being? I just, you see I don't know where to start with that. It's very very alien, something like that, to me.

Does that communion start at conception? Or when it's born? When does it stop? How does it manifest?

I don't know anything about what Dawkins gets up to apart from making profoundly unhelpful comments about women and victims of sexual assaults from time to time, but if there is a "moment" when the universe came into being, it's not a surprise that some Christians will take that to align with God kicking it all off, to me.

The fact that the universe started isn't in itself proof of God. Although, as I say, some people who study Cosmology do find that it bolsters their faith, due to the massive amazingness of it all being, to them, proof there must be something behind it all.

Although "started" of course is a word that we attach a certain understanding to, what happened, may well not be something we have the capability to comprehend. It might not have started in the way a person might usually mean started. And that's fine too

There's plenty of sci fi to read along these themes

The point is, is that we don't know what babies are born with. Could be full of god X, full of god Y, full of many gods, empty, or some other permutation of which there are no doubt many.

If you are agnostic, you tend to acknowledge that we don't know.

If you have a particular belief, you tend to find the beliefs of others incomprehensible, because it does not map to your own. And there's no reason why it should. Because all are unproven.

I mentioned Dawkins because he has said he is seeking to establish what caused the Big Bang to happen. That might be give evidence about the existence (or otherwise) of a god or gods. Right now we don't know.

Is he now!

The entire cosmological community will be pleased to hear he's about to finish off decades upon decades of work for them singlehanded

Man sounds like a complete pratt from what I've heard.

For me, the starting point of looking at a baby and thinking "well literally anything that anyone can think of is entirely possible" is a tiring and pointless way to live your life.

Like those jokes about those with very deep philosophical thoughts being unable to do things like leave the house as they can't decide whether the door is really a door, whether the outside will still be there and what form it might take and so forth.

When dd1 was 5 she asked me if I believed in God. She looked confused when I asked her 'which one?' and explained there were thousands of them and no, I didn't believe in any of them. She started crying. I asked her why she was crying, apparently her teacher had told her anybody who didn't believe in God was going to hell. Her headteacher was not impressed that one of her teachers was teaching this rubbish to infants.

Swallowing, my DCs were not baptised, even though many older relatives pressured us and even offered bribes to us to do so. Their mother and I felt they should be allowed to choose which god, if any, they wanted to follow.

You say that Jesus died for my sins. How could he have? I wasn't born till nearly 2000 years later.

"have also read on here that swallowing during fellatio (and, according to some radfems, performing fellatio full stop) is to subjugate oneself and can never be a feminist choice."

Never heard this. But I suspect that you don't know what a radical feminist is anyway.

My reference to women swallowing was a mild joke based on Genesis 38.9.

They're bound to be better than church biscuits wanderings, more's the pity

I disagree: the biscuits at our church are so good that the vicar himself sometimes can't wait until the end of the service: he's been known to grab one as he and the servers process past the coffee table!

I know exactly what a radical feminist is, and believe me, they (at least a number of them on Mumsnet) consider me to be a '1950s handmaiden' because I confessed to doing all the night feeds whilst on maternity leave so my husband can get a quality night's sleep.

I really don't think you do!