Atheist's corner

[ollieplimsoles]

Can I post this here?

Had a look through some of the other pages and couldn't see anything similar, so starting this off, don't know if ill get many replies but we'll see.

Basically a thread for non believers, skeptics and people who have left religion/ escaped religious cults and turned to atheism.
To chat, friendly respectable debate, and to ask questions. People of faith obviously also welcome!

They smack him as well, ive reported them once but they don't know it was me.

What a very 'christian' thing to do.... I wonder what Jesus would say?

Hello!

Fellow friendly atheist here. Grew up in a Catholic family- they weren't active in the religion at all, but participated in the sacraments because they were "the done thing" and they liked a party. My parents are divorced, and I remember questioning how they could still participate in a religion that condemned the breakdown of their marriage.

They just shrugged.

They also went onto cohabitate with other people, and neither of them particularly cared about what the Church says about that.

They do believe it's wrong to have sex before marriage, abortion, gay marriage, or for children to not be baptised though.

And that God answers their prayers. Whenever something good happens for them, it's because they prayed and their very thankful to God. Bad things are everyone else's fault.

The hypocrisy of it all irked me even at a young age, so it lead me to my path of nonbelief. I can't abide by the idea that everything is in God's hands, and yet God will judge you for your life.

Like you said upthread, OP, I respect people's beliefs, but I don't respect the belief itself.

It gets difficult to explain this to people, though.

Xpost!

That's awful

I'm an athiest! I guess this is the only place I can say how truly baffled I am by people believing. For me it's like Santa, a nice little story to make people happy and feel part of stuff, but not real. I sit in church and look around going 'whaaaaaaat the heck am I seeing here' (I go to church for family stuff).

Welcome new people! :D

I always find prayer very interesting, I find many believers are convinced god answers their prayers but when something bad happens its nothing to do with him, or its a 'test' (wtf)
'The revealed truth' bullshit does my head in no end, I first came across it I Catholicism but other branches have it too.

Hi errol Ive seen you pop up on other threads but didn't know your position on faith.

I'm glad your family were a more tolerant branch of Christianity.

Youre what church do your family belong to?

Pooch, a poster made a statement about a man. The statement was incorrect. I said that it was incorrect. I don't know how much clearer I can be.

Hello fellow atheists! I like the idea of having a corner, hope you don't mind if I join in!

I was raised in a very religious household (Church of the Nazarene) where almost all of my parents' socialising was done within church circles. We went to church at least 5 days a week (if not for services, then to kids clubs, quizzes, book groups etc). Looking back, I think that when my dad admitted he was an alcoholic and got sober before my dsis was born, they didn't have any non-sober friends and that's why they became so close to people in the church. That and they were obviously very religious lol

I loved being a part of the church, it was great fun. There was always something going on, and we had loads of friends. For my sisters and I, it was more about fun than god, but of course everything was centred around religion and sin, we just didn't notice. I was on a quiz team that would go up against kids from other churches - it was basically just learning to recite passages for the bible! It means I have read nearly the entire bible though, I don't think many can say that! Then when I was 7 I was sexually abused for 2 years by a member with authority, who used my faith to manipulate me and keep me quiet. Obviously that skewed my perception of god somewhat, and as I was discovering science, I started reading books stopped believing pretty quickly.

My parents found out about the abuse a few years later, but unfortunately we had been asked as a family not to return to the church because my sister had been outed as a lesbian by her religious studies teacher. (But that's a whole other infuriating kettle of fish!)
Even if I hadn't stopped believing in god by then, that definitely stopped me from believing in the people of organised religion. The way they hated and humiliated her, a teenage girl, for being 'sinful' was awful, and it spread like ripples through the church community until complete strangers were telling my parents that maybe we should move.
My parents didn't move, and the area has changed a hell of a lot in 15 years, so the community isn't as strongly tied to the church, and for us at least it's a lot nicer!

As for how I feel about religion now, I don't like organised religion. However, if someone has faith, and that faith brings them joy and inspires them to bring joy to others, then I think it's a wonderful thing and I'd like to see more of it!
Personally, I prefer science. I love biology, physics, chemistry... anything that examines and explores our world and let's us understand the complexity of life around us, I find it fascinating and far more wondrous than any religion I've found.

Holy crap, sorry about the essay!
Guess I lost track of how long I'd been typing.

Ollie, I came to faith very quickly. One day I went into my kitchen an atheist and came out believing in God. Something happened that made me believe and it happened in an instant.

Halfpint.

Wow, you seem to have come out of that with remarkable resilience and lack of bitterness.

I'm a scientist too... Yes, there's so much real to marvel at, and yet to discover.

Thank you to both of you
Errol I've had a lot of therapy lol and probably have a lot more to come! Really though, I've been bitter, and angry, and just about every negative emotion possible, but in the end I was only hurting myself. So now I try to look at the positives of every situation before letting myself notice the negative.

Halfpint how awful.

Religion really has a lot of things to answer for.

People often conflate religion with belief in God, ritualism and identity. You can have any combination of these aspects. You can even be an atheist member of some religions.

BTW Einstein considered himself Jewish, he simply did not practice nor did he believe in a personal god:

Einstein did not believe in the commonly accepted anthropomorphic conception of God. “I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the harmony of all being, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men,”

To go back to Einstein, he doesn't believe in organised religion but doesn't rule out a higher power, just not one related to humanity. Are people aiming that at me when they're saying theists are trying to hijack him? I'm an atheist, but I do know that scientists can believe in god - it's not a crazy assumption. I think people are getting organised religion confused with believing in some higher power.

I firmly believe it's organised religion which has all the native impacts, and that shouldn't be interchangeable with some people believing in a some sort of god, which while I don't agree with, it's basically harmless.

I don't agree that it's specifically organised religion that is the problem. I think problems arise when religion rejects plurality of faith or practice.

I think it's mostly theistic and particularly monotheistic religions with defined sacred texts and dogma which are problematic.

Non-theistic religions such as Buddhism can allow for people to follow their practices and adopt their philosophies as far as you find them helpful, without requiring irrational beliefs.

'Spinoza's god deism' has no real dogma attached;it's unprovable either way, the god of agnosticism. This 'god' is compatible with rational thought. Believe it or not, it's sort of irrelevant.

ACubed I’m with you on the subject of Einstein. I think many people will have picked up an idea of Einstein’s position on God from the God Delusion. Dawkins, in turn, cites the book Einstein and Religion by Max Jammer. But a perusal of this original source - and other material – suggests that Dawkins has given a somewhat distorted picture of Einstein’s views and has, from a certain perspective, ridden roughshod over him.

What Dawkins got right is Einstein’s refutation of a personal God and the revelations of organised religions. He found all that primitive. Yet at the same time Einstein did say, ‘I am not an atheist’.

A quote from Jammer’s book:

In view of such harmony in the cosmos which I, with my limited human mind, am able to recognise, there are yet people who say there is no God. But what really makes me angry is that they quote me for support of such views.

His views seem to have been subtle and equivocal. He talked about a ‘superior spirit’. Perhaps a metaphor? But what else have we when contemplating the ineffable.

Einstein was always humble about the limits of his own mind and did not share ‘the crusading spirit of the professional atheist’. He was content to let others find their way to transcendence via religion.

So I do feel that Dawkins could have given a more balanced account of Einstein's thoughts in this area.

On the other hand Dawkins also mentions the atheistic views of Stephen Hawking in the God Delusion and this seems fair. Hawking identifies as an atheist and is, moreover, alive and capable of defending his views if necessary.

Errol, why irrelevant?

Ollie, my family is Church of Ireland, both my grandfathers were clergy so quite involved family in the church. It's the mildest of religions in Ireland though, very inclusive and no bull about sin. My family would be very welcoming of people from any faith. I married into a Catholic family. My DH does actually have faith which is weird for me. We stay off the topic but our kids go to a local catholic school, fine by me, it's an excellent school. The kids are too young to ask me the right questions so it will be interesting to see what happens when they do. I won't lie to them. My DH may be upset but he will be respectful I'm sure of my differing (non) belief.

I didn't claim that Einstein was an atheist, I merely disproved the previous claim that he was religious. He used the word "god" many times, but mostly in the context of wonder at the universe. He patently didn't believe in the god of the bible, but was maybe agnostic about the possibility of other powerful beings.

I thought, however, that it was important to destroy the claim that he was religious, as it seems apparent from his own writings that this particularly annoyed him.

Many people seem to be trying to find things to criticise on this thread. There is much here to criticise, but people seem to be reading their own wrong interpretations into what people are saying and attacking their own straw men.

In fact, the previous claim was that Einstein was "famously" religious!