had my faith very aggressively tested tonight.

[SpaceDinosaur]

This is not about the action, I'm fine with what happened. This is about how I feel now.

What's just happened.
I gave a friend a lift home as I was driving and he was quite drunk.
Midway home he asked how we (group of friends) cope with a mutual friend being religious...she's getting married in a church.
I replied that I was religious, he attended my church wedding 6 months ago.
"You can't be religious, you're supposed to be intelligent"
Sorry?
"You're a scientist, you have an analytical mind, why are you acting like a brainwashed idiot?"
God love him he loves a soap box so I was then treated to a tirade of how there was no God, how if there was a God we would be perfect, how God couldn't exist because of the diseases babies in Africa die of. (That was his pet topic)

No responses from me were heard so I allowed him to rant himself out including a full session of calling God all the names under the sun, asking God to smite or kill him now and laughing at me.

I am at peace with the event. Shocked but not upset. He'll apologise for being so aggressive, confrontational and rude tomorrow (if he remembers)

I felt tested. I wanted to come home and open my bible and see where it fell (something I did a lot as a teenager) but I can't find it which makes me sad. I wanted to find the verse and chapter about not testing God.

I would like to ask for a verse or chapter to read. I have a digi bible. I can't explore the book, I can't find it right now.

All children are born atheists.

I imagine you could characterise atheists as passive and active - the former don't really think about God (or the perceived lack thereof) much and have no active belief, while the latter have actively decided that there is no God and will actively expound that view to everyone their family and raise their children with that in mind. Hence, being raised as an atheist.

You sound like you were very calm under pressure, op.

It would be lovely to be a "passive" atheist.

However the church has power and influence in our society, and as much as I would like my children to grow up without religious indoctrination , the church has made sure that is not possible.

I therefore have to be more "active" in my approach

He was drunk. You can't debate with drunk people. You can't be expected to. Forget about it.

Thanks Pearly, I think I see your point.

In a way it is a bit like feminism. I want to raise my children as feminists so that they view women as real people and equal to men. I would think that all children are born feminists but in our society we have to actively teach it because there are influences out there that would contradict the idea that women are equal to men.

Is that kind of how you view atheism? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Totally agree littlejeopardy, a good analogy.

Even though I bring my children up free of faith I have had them coming home from school sating things like " Jesus made it sunny today" or "God loves us all", my DD thought Noah's Ark tale was a history lesson.
My children trust their teachers to tell them the truth, so I have to spend time unpicking and debunking .

I know what you mean pearlylum. We are a non-religious household, but my son (5yo) came home from his overtly non-religious school chatting about the foolish man who built his house upon the sand. I'm not sure how much of that is proselytising and how much is just cultural Christianity, though. I think cultural Christianity has a place if you choose in a Christian country tbh.

choose TO LIVE IN, that should say. I do prefer it when they clearly distinguish between fact and more faith-based matters, though.

I am not sure where you live contessa, but in the UK we don't have non religious schools, not state ones anyway.
State schools are non- denominational:
"The law in the UK provides that children at all maintained schools "shall on each school day take part in an act of collective worship". Even in schools with no religious designation, the worship must be "wholly or mainly of a Christian character"."

In practice this gives teaching staff a free rein to indoctrinate as much or as little as they wish.

I'm in the UK pearlylum but didn't go to school here myself so have little experience of the system. I understand that the school has to be of Christian character but I've observed (from their websites etc) that some take this to a greater extreme than others. I naively thought our local school was pretty much irreligious but that's clearly not so.....

Lumpylumperson On previous post I was referring to the 'gospels' when I said we don't know who the authors were. Because Strobel and Morison are bias we cannot know the documents and evidence that they discuss genuinely conclude what they say they do because that involves interpretation. But bias aside having read both books they do not present good arguments, if you think I am wrong please give a good one one and I will demonstrate this.

littlejeopardy When documents were written and how many of them were produced helps find out if they are genuine documents, it does NOT have much bearing on the veracity of it words. For example there are a lot of believers that write and produce a lot of books about UFO's, that does not make them factual books.

You seem to be saying that because some people wrote something down that they didn't see, fifty years after it happened then it must be true! That's so flimsy its as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Faith without doubt isn't much of a faith imo. - Why would you base your whole life on something you doubt is true?

dizzytomato I am not trying to prove Jesus did or didn't exist, I have no idea either way, I am just pointing out that there is no proof he did exist. And even if you think his teachings are good the same cannot be said of the teachings from the bible. So yes I am suggesting it would be better for society if we didn't apply religious morality to our lives.

Belief and knowledge are not the same thing:
A theist believes in a god.

An atheist does not accept there is any reason to believe a theists claim, they do not believe there is no god.
An agnostic doesn't know if there is a god or not. So you can have an agnostic theist i.e. you might believe there is a god whilst still accepting you don't know for sure. Most atheists would also be agnostics i.e. they don't accept there is evidence to belief in a god but they don't know either way. One could argue that its only really extremists/fundamentalists that would say they know there is a god.
An antitheist believes there is no god, and then there is also the agnostic antitheist...
Humanism is the belief system that one might think an atheist or antitheist would raise their children in but most don't simply because a belief in god, or not, does not crop up in most lives its a trivial detail like believing in fairies or unicorns.
A lot of people who go to church, even call themselves religious, when asked "do you believe in a god?" say "I don't know", which makes them atheist's.

You can not raise a child in the belief system of atheism because it has NO BELIEFS. It would even be a stretch to say antitheism is a belief system because it only has one belief and therefore is not a system of beliefs.

There is a lot of privileged ignorance over raising a sceptical open minded child. Most religions think you are raising your child to be anti-christian (or any other religion) just because you have to correct factual errors that primary schools put in their heads about a god. No we just want to raise our children to be open minded and only believe things that are proven to be true, it really has nothing to do with religion.

Feminism isn't a brilliant comparison to atheism because it has turned into a movement with lots of beliefs. Maybe think of all the gods you have ever heard of and don't believe in, do you teach your children to believe they do not exist, I imagine you don't even mention most of them. Atheism is like that only we lump all gods into that category of not bothering to teach them not to believe.

No you cannot have an agnostic theist or an agnostic athiest!

An athiest is a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings. If they don't know either way then they are not athiests, they are agnostics. A theist is a person who believes in the existence of a god or gods. If you believe there is a god whilst still accepting you don't know for sure then you are not a theist you are an agnostic.

An agnostic is a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.

There is no factual information about god, errors or otherwise.

we just want to raise our children to be open minded and only believe things that are proven to be true. You sound like my mother, I am sorry to say that the belief that things in the world are proven true is not a very informed one. I accepted this too until I studied neurology and realised that we believe a lot of things that are not proven to be true.

There is a lot of privileged ignorance over raising a sceptical open minded child.

No two people raise their children in the same way, there are not models that open minded sceptics have ultimate knowledge about and raise their children in the same way as all the other open minded sceptics. Every family is different.

There is a lot of privileged ignorance over raising a sceptical open minded child

What privileges does the ignorance give?

Google "Bro athiest" ... a serious humanist put me on to the term because they were disgusted by the damage it does to atheism and humanism.

Sounds a bit like this person.

Essentially it's a toxic masculine atheist who looks to challenge people of faith for the sake of it. Favourite foci 'low hanging fruit' e.g. corruption, child abuse, earthquakes... quick to use things like 'sheeple' and calling people idiots. Fond of memes.
However less fond of seriously explaining reasons for their atheism or having a proper 'debate' such as you might expect of 2 educated people - and their activism stops as blandly insulting people of faith and memes. No care IRL for victims of anything they shout about.
Sometimes hypocritical e.g. 'religion is sexist' ... FB page full of lads mag sexist drivel.

...completely different of course to an active atheist or Humanist.

Or maybe he was just being a drunken arse.

UrbanFox All I was trying to say the early dates and number of early copies of the texts we have are a good indication that this Jesus really did exist. Especially as it appeared people of the time did not seem to dispute his existence, what they did dispute is that he was more than a man.

But you are right that early copies mainly verify their date of origin rather than truthfulness so then you need to look at other criteria.

It's hard to know if humanity does have a default philosophy or belief system or no beliefs at all, as nearly all children are raised by societies with their own culture, history and constructs. And it is good in general for children to be raised in society, the only example of children born without societies that I can think of are feral children.

I really don't see why it matters whether there was an actual person called Jesus around at the time or not. The issue is whether he was the son of God, and whether he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

If by "sketchy" you mean "non existent"......

"I thought atheists believed that there was no god"

I'm an atheist. I don't see any evidence or reason to think any of the gods man has claimed to know are real. It's not a belief in the way religion is. I will change my mind upon sufficient evidence whereas a theist is unperturbed by a lack of evidence.

It's not a matter of belief. All the evidence currently available indicates that there is no God. Therefore as far as I am concerned, there is no God. I don't have to believe that there isn't- I just look at the evidence.

dizzytomato - Agnosticism is not a third alternative to theism and atheism because it is concerned with a different aspect of religious belief. Theism and atheism refer to the presence or absence of belief in a god; agnosticism refers to the impossibility of knowledge with regard to a god or supernatural being. The term agnostic does not, in itself, indicate whether or not one believes in a god. Agnosticism can be either theistic or atheistic.

So yes, you can have an agnostic theist.

"I studied neurology and realised that we believe a lot of things that are not proven to be true." - Yes, belief and knowledge are two different things, that is exactly what I am saying."

"What privileges does the ignorance give?" - Exactly my point, I am referring to the christian privilege in this country that most people are ignorant of. So I assume that your comment was sarcastic, if not read the threads on mumsnet about it.

littlejeopardy - "It appeared people of the time did not seem to dispute his (jesus) existence."

One in five Britons think Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple and even Blackadder were genuine historical figures. A character in a book or story is not something abnormal or controversial, why would anyone at the time contest his existence? His supernatural powers were controversial, so might be more prone to disbelief.

If that is your best proof for Jesus, then it stands that there is still no proof he even existed.

MyHovercraftIsFullOfEels - Very good information

BertrandRussell - "I really don't see why it matters whether there was an actual person called Jesus around at the time or not. The issue is whether he was the son of God." - Am I missing something, if he didn't exist then he couldn't be the son of god, because he didn't exist?