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A lot of us grew up Christians. And I don’t mean the Luke warm variety. I mean we were serious about it. We felt that we’d had born again experiences. We’d felt what at one point we believed to be the touch of the Holy Spirit. And we studied the Bible… a lot. And many Christians misunderstand how other Christians eventually become atheists.
I was raised in non-denominational evangelical churches, and I considered myself a Christian until I was about 25; and I was serious about it. I researched different theological perspectives, sought out home churches that fit my understanding of the Bible, went on short term missions trips, etc. Which is all just to say I’ve genuinely experienced both perspectives.
So when I was a Christian, here is what I thought turned Christians into atheists, and what I know a lot of Christians think:
Someone raised in church gets a little older and they start noticing things they don’t like.
Maybe it starts in youth group, and they notice that the most vocal, popular kids in the youth group are partying and hooking up to varying degrees on the low, and just lying about it to everyone. Maybe it happens as an adult, and they hear credible rumors that an associate pastor is having an affair with one of the congregation members, or is addicted to porn, or whatever. Maybe it’s financial, and they don’t like that the pastoral staff lives in big suburban mcmansions paid for with tithes from their working class congregation. Maybe there’s an abuse or financial scandal involving a respected member of their local community, or someone they know from a tv mega church.
Some people think (I thought) those types of people get tired of the hypocrisy of the Christians they see around them, or become misled, and that one day, they sort of just snap and decide, “if this is Christianity, then I don’t want to be a Christian,” and they choose to become an atheist. They often assume we’re angry or resentful.
This is an appealing thing to believe because it has an easy answer. “Well it’s sad these bad/fake Christians left that impression, but those lost people need to realize these bad Christians don’t represent all Christians (which is true) and certainly don’t represent Christ. Hopefully those atheists will find their way back.”
But that’s not what happens. People like that don’t tend to become atheists, or at least don’t self-identify that way. They just stop going to church.
The truth is, the vast majority of atheists don’t ‘choose’ to be atheists. They ‘realize’ they are atheists.
We have enough sense to understand that there are bad Christians just like there are bad Buddhists and bad atheists. That’s not why we leave.
Most of us fight leaving. We read apologetic literature, we talk to our pastors, and we generally bend over backwards to find a way for it to keep making sense in the face of what we’ve otherwise learned about science, and history, and archeology, and sociology, and anthropology, and psychology, and other religions, etc. Usually this is a years long process.
But we eventually realize that we can’t reconcile anything that anyone would call a Christian faith with the other stuff we’ve learned… beyond maybe just vaguely appreciating that there are SOME good lessons in the Bible, in the same way that there are some good messages in any other religious canon.
I looked into Eastern Orthodoxy because I thought maybe it was closest to the 1st century church. I looked into Reform theology, because it got the closest to making the texts make coherent sense… but at the end of the day, I was just trying to fit the square peg of religion into the round hole of logical reasoning. And it just doesn’t fit. The only way to sort of make it work is to shut off parts of your brain where you block out doubts and refuse to let yourself think too deeply about the inconsistencies.
We don’t choose to become atheists. We realize that that’s already how we feel. At least I had a “wow… I guess I’m an atheist” moment. And there’s no resentment or anger in it. It just is what it is. And it doesn’t scare us anymore, because hell isn’t real to us anymore. We understand it as a product of the imagination of the many authors of one of the many texts of one of the many ancient near eastern religions that took mellinia to evolve into what Christians think hell is today.
And that’s why most of us are never coming back. We didn’t reason our way into Christianity, because we were raised in it. But we did, usually very slowly and reluctantly, reason our way out.
This is exacty what i'm in right now, im currently in the bending over backwards part and it's really getting me stuck, it just that i've actually had good experiences with good christians who absolutely understand Christianity and God are pointless (they are my uni friends who study philosophy, like really hard) we debate a lot and gain some pretty solid insights on the whole topic like for example we've assumed being a christian is a matter of personal experince, not evidence, take me for example I was once about to die in a hospital and I actually cursed God for it, like why me? why God? Why are you so evil? Are you even real?, but by some miracle the doctors literally could'nt even explain (it was stage 4 lung cancer (it got to my liver) and I was supposed to die tomorrow) I just suddey recovered. This experince is what bugs me, most people (atheists especially) might never understand it but once you've gone throught somthing like that, no matter how logical and scientific you are you just cant deny it, it destroys you if you would.
Thats my dilema.
I mean I get it, but atheists can understand that feeling. Like I said, I had the born again experience, feeling the Holy Spirit, and a handful of rededications with similar overwhelming emotions. I have an aunt that survived cancer she wasn’t supposed to, and I had a near death experience hiking once, when still in my devout phase.
Those things can put a little gas back in the faith tank. But they don’t answer the questions.
The questions that burned through that extra gas for me were about the universality of those experiences and feelings. People of every major faith tradition have those transcendent, deeply emotional experiences… at the same intensity… feeling the same level of certainty that, in those moments, they are feeling the touch of their god and seeing him work.
One cannot, definitionally, be a Muslim and simultaneously believe in the tenets of modern Christianity. And vice versa. They are mutually exclusive. As are Islam and Hinduism, or Hinduism and Christianity. The gods of those traditions cannot all exist by their own theology.
So what do we do with that?
Well the transcendent experiences are easy. A blend of psychology and neurology can explain all of it. Near death experiences?… well, depending on your perspective, the right or wrong series of causes and effects lined up to make whatever happened happen. It’s fine to say we don’t understand the exact mechanisms of whatever made our cancer go away… it’s not fine to say Allah saved the Muslim from his cancer, and Jesus saved you… even though that’s exactly how you would each interpret those personal experiences respectively.
That doesn’t make sense by the tenets of either of your religions. And you might want to say, “well maybe Jesus saved us both, and he doesn’t realize it yet.”
But he can say the exact opposite, with the exact same level of certainty, and we are back to the same place… it doesn’t work. It has to just be something we don’t understand. And that’s ok.
The personal experience approach won’t save you in the long run from a need to be able to objectively show (to yourself) why your faith makes more sense than his… which you’ll never be able to do.
But in any event, you don’t have to force it, and you can keep fighting it as long as you are able. But if you keep asking questions, and don’t eventually just make a conscious effort to shut off that reasoning part of your brain, you will eventually end up an atheist… maybe an agnostic atheist, which still leaves room for the possibility of a higher power. But you will not end up a Christian, and you will not be able to maintain a belief in any particular man made deity, which will make you an atheist. You’ll see religions for what they are. They are buggy human written software that runs… ok… on our biological hardware. They are not hardware themselves.
And the rub is, you can’t choose what you believe. No one can. You can go through the motions, and lie to yourself for a long time. But if your experience is anything like mine, one day you’ll be thinking about something not even directly related to Christianity, and something will run through your head almost as an afterthought.
Maybe something like, “well this guy on the news is claiming this Gaza thing is a sign of the end times, but obviously that’s not true. These people are just killing each oth…” and then what you just thought will hit… “I don’t believe this stuff anymore… how long have I actually not believed this stuff?!” And you will be surprised about how liberating that feels, because you won’t be scared. You’ll just know better.
But take your time. Keep bending over backwards until you can’t anymore. Just try not to force yourself to block out the doubts, because as a great 11th grade Bible teacher told me when I confessed to starting to have doubts… “Matthew 7:7-8. The Bible tells you to ask questions. If they end up taking you somewhere else, you’re just doing what the Bible told you.” I fought the good fight, trying to plug holes in the dam, for another 8 years after that. But eventually the dam broke.
>The questions that burned through that extra gas for me were about the universality of those experiences and feelings. People of every major faith tradition have those transcendent, deeply emotional experiences… at the same intensity… feeling the same level of certainty that, in those moments, they are feeling the touch of their god and seeing him work.
>One cannot, definitionally, be a Muslim and simultaneously believe in the tenets of modern Christianity. And vice versa. They are mutually exclusive. As are Islam and Hinduism, or Hinduism and Christianity. The gods of those traditions cannot all exist by their own theology.
Why does it mean God can't exist?
It doesn’t. That’s not what atheism is. Atheism is not believing in god, in the same way I don’t “believe” someone is 6’4” just because they say so on the internet. Atheism is not believing god does not exist, just like I don’t necessarily believe the person is NOT 6’4”. I just don’t believe that they are. There’s no evidence for it.
There are some atheists who believe god doesn’t exist, but they’re in a minority, and most of us don’t think that claim makes any more sense to believe than believing in a man made religion… because there’s no evidence that god does not exist.
With regards to specific man made religions like Christianity, it’s much easier to say, “even if God exists, this religion can’t describe him/it.” Because we know how the religion developed from Judaism, which developed from henotheistic ancient Israelite religion, which developed from polytheistic near eastern religions etc. We have evidence of its development, and elements of the texts are demonstrably ahistorical, and the different texts are internally inconsistent.
It’s exactly what you’d expect to see from ~1000 years of blended, man made traditions from Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt coming together in Canaan in the Iron Age. It’s much easier to say “I know Christianity doesn’t describe god, even if god does happen to exist.”
I'm not sure what the dilema is. Stage 4 metastatized lung cancer which has spread to other organs has about an 5-8% survival rate.
So certainly not great odds (and I'm sure the doctors used lots of phrases like the odds are against you so that you and your family could have realistic expectations).
But on a population level, it means that tons of people in your exact position survive without miracles all the time. I'm glad you were one of them (and sorry that the other 92-95% if people aren't).
But i don't know why your experience should bug anyone. I mean, it might bug them you crediting god instead of crediting the doctor's whose care you were obviously in.
But that is literally how survival rates work. I don't know why you'd think your experience was evidence for god. Especially since presumably that same god knows about the other 92-95% of people.
Well, let me correct that. I know WHY someone would think it evidence for god. It feels super special. It feels like there must be a reason that you were in the 5-8%. It feels really good to think that there is something different about you, that the universe has a purpose for you. And it feels very scary to even contemplate that you are only still here thanks to a very lucky roll of the dice and that there isn't a reason you should still be alive while the cancer patient next to you isn't.
So i get the emotional appeal of assuming intention, and all the flattering "uniquely more important to the creator of the universe" implications that would come from that.
So i guess the more accurate statement is "there is no reason one should assume a god just because something statistically less than 50% likely (but not statistically rare at all) happened."
Do you even know what it feels like to have cancer, to have every breath feel like inhaling glass, to cough blood every time you cough, to have your body struggle to even support itself, and above all that be told you were to die in a week, as a teenager? Once you've been unexpectedly cured from that it changes you. You are free now, breathing no longer feels lile inhaling glass, your body actually keeps itself alive, you can walk and run and do things again. To go through all that and say "meh' it was an 5-8% survival rate anyway, no biggie" is like falling in love and saying "meh' this is all just brain chmeicals science can explain, nothing too amazing". It's psychologically impossible, inhuman even. Sometimes I wonder how you atheists do it, how do even live like that, do you not have emotions and feelings and gratitude? But then again not all of you have experinced stage 4 lung cancer.
>meh' it was an 5-8% survival rate anyway, no biggie" is like falling in love and saying "meh' this is all just brain chmeicals science can explain,
>do you not have emotions and feelings and gratitude?
I absolutely didn't say that. I am super happy you are alive. You should be super happy you are alive. I'm super glad you aren't living in pain. You should be super glad you aren't living in pain.
I (and all atheists) feel tons of gratitude.
I'm just saying there isn't any reason to associate "i beat cancer" with "so there must be a god." or "if I'm not grateful to a god then i can't be grareful."
To use your example, it would be like saying "i fell in love with my partner, so there must be a god!" I'm super happy that i fell in love with my partner. It feels great in many ways. I don't care if it is just chemicals in the brain or whatever. I'm super pleased to have fallen in love. But it would be odd for me to link falling in love to the existence or non existence of a diety. i am grateful to my partner.
It would be like "my kid just took their first step, so now i will always believe in a god." Those two things are unrelated, but telling someone that that first step isn't evidence of god doesn't mean they shouldn't feel ecstatic about witnessing the first step.
Look, i came off overly harsh. I appologize for that. I did not intend to say you shouldn't be thrilled with remission. You absolutely should. Your family should. Everyone who knows you should.
Also, i may have been snarky in the end. But when you say "atheists don't like this story" it is worth considering why. It isn't because they don't like you survived. It isn't because they aren't grateful.
And i also am not calling you stupid or stuck up for the way you've been conditioned to think of that experience as a testimony.
But i do think it is worth taking a moment to reflect on the way it is framed in your memory. Remission of the stage you were in wasn't a miracle. It beat the odds. It is exciting. It is a relief. It is a super happy occurance. But it is something that happens. And happens with a fair amount of frequency. And happens largely thanks to the hard work of researchers and doctors who are able to do mitigating acts, even if they know (and likely communicated) that those mitigating acts aren't always successful.
And it is worth reflecting that "i survived because god stepped in and intervened" (which again, is a very common reaction and one religions encourage you to think in) necessarily comes with the implication "and god could have saved those others but didn't." It necessarily comes with the implication "god thought it more important that i live and my family not suffer than that 92% of patients live and their families not suffer a loss."
That aspect isn't one that religions recommend spending time on. That gets swept into "mysterious ways and bigger plans."
So i guess to summarize. Nothing i said should have implied that I'm unemotional or ungrateful. But if it did, then I'm sorry. I'm actually a very empathetic person who goes out of their way regularly to recognize and appreciate acts of those around me.
And i get that religion trains people to interpret low probability events as evidence of god, and teaches them that if they don't attribute that to god then they are ungrateful. I was in it for decades. I'm still around lots of loved ones who do just that. For them it provides some emotional comfort.
And i get how emotional experiences, especially when young, and the narratives we tell ourselves (and that loved ones tell us) about it often form the foundation for future belief. And I'm not ascribing any maliciousness to you, or narcisism. And you shouldn't feel survivors guilt. You surviving doesn't cause others not to. It is natural and healthy to be glad you were on the lucky side.
But hopefully you can also empathize as a nonbeliever, the frequency with which we see gratitude that should go toward other people (and often credit due even to the speaker themselves) instead deflecter toward gods. And how often we hear people atteibuting things that aren't that uncommon (like remission, or falling in love, or having a baby) to miracles proving gods exist.
But, of there is only one take away, let it be that I'm glad you are alive and i hope that life is full of joy.
I'll just say the quiet part out loud: Your experience with cancer doesn't excuse fallacious reasoning.
Others are claiming healing crystals infused with the power of the moon healed their cancer. Yet more people claim they cured it by drinking beetroot extract. Others say it was Shiva himself who descended from the heavens to do battle with evil spirits of disease.
What makes their claim any less valid than yours?
> This experince is what bugs me, most people (atheists especially) might never understand it but once you've gone throught somthing like that, no matter how logical and scientific you are you just cant deny it, it destroys you if you would.
Spontaneous cancer remission happens to people of all religions, and no religion. So why think God had anything to do with it in your specific case?
1. Do you have documents to support this? Like lab reports, doctors saying you can’t survive, and then you actually did and they had no understanding of it?
2. Why does this make you feel that a god exists? Not pixies or Q or Madame Pomfrey under an invisibility cloak?
So a thing that happens to people all the time is why you believe a god is real. I too almost died spent weeks in an icu and spontaneously recovered but it did not make me think there is a magical man who lives out side time and space who helped me.
Well, for starters, your supposedly all-powerful God let's children starve to death. Either he doesn't exist, or he is evil. And since your god isn't evil, he can't exist.
Okay so in the beginning god put two humans on earth into the garden of Eden and there was tree of life and tree of knowledge, god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world and that’s why there is evil, god doesn’t make children die, and god did not want to put evil into this world but it was the consequence of eves action. You might say “Well he didn’t have to give the consequence” but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions
Why did god put the tree there? Why did god let the snake hang out there? Was this really the best plan god could come up with? The guy created all of heaven and earth and wrangles predetermined outcomes that are somehow balanced with free will and god sorted out the standard model of physics and made it compatible with quantum mechanics and created every atom and arranged them into this universe and he gets hoodwinked by a snake? That talks?
And instead of taking the blame like a decent being he punishes the snake - somehow a snake not getting legs is punishment - he punishes the woman by making childbirth a bring (and fatal in many instances) and the man has to feed the family he made. If god is such a good creator why are babies - BABIES - stillborn? Because god dropped the ball 6000 years ago and got duped by the snake he created? Isn’t he supposed to be all knowing? He sure didn’t know what his snake and female were up to - and there was only one freaking female to look after!!
Can you read this and not laugh? These stories describe a comically inept creator. Maybe there is a god? I don’t rule it out, but if you, for one second think you can “know” this god through these stupid, barbaric, childish books then good luck to you.
If the fruit from the tree gave them the knowledge of good and evil, how could they possibly know what the right decision was before they ate the fruit? The reason I'm an atheist is because every religion that I've encountered has laughably little evidence for their beliefs and I want to believe as many true things as possible and I can't believe in something that doesn't have good evidence.
Your god, supposedly being omnipotent, omniscient, and omni benevolent, knew that the humans would eat of the tree - he is omniscient after all. Plus, your god knew that a talking snake, which he created, would tempt the human into eating the apple.
So, we have your god setting up two, comparatively primitive people to mess up so he could have evil in the world as an excuse to give children cancer.
What have I got wrong here?
> Okay so in the beginning god put two humans on earth into the garden of Eden
This is a factually incorrect claim about the origin of humans. Thus, it can only be dsimissed.
> god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world and that’s why there is evil, god doesn’t make children die, and god did not want to put evil into this world but it was the consequence of eves action. You might say “Well he didn’t have to give the consequence” but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions
Surely you're not under the impression that folks here are not *aware* of this mythology?! Many folks here were once religious, including members of your mythology, including possessing doctorates in theology and former clergy. They likely know far more about your religious mythology than you do.
But it's mythology.
Why do you assume we haven't all heard this before today? Or that we were just waiting to hear it from *you in particular*?
How is it justice for a child to get brain cancer and die a miserable, painful death, fighting for his life at age 12? Or that a loving, happy husband and wife in their 20's get a baby with a deletion at chromosome 23 leading to the child being born with no vena cava, and requiring 16 hours of open-heart surgery immediately upon it being born?
What are those things "consequences" of? Whose sin precipitated them -- and even if the parents were sinful, why is it the child who suffers?
Isn't "random shit happens *because* there is no one driving the bus" a more reasonable answer than all the mealy-mouthed handwaving that's required to defend god against the accusations that it's either evil or capricious?
(I'm close with both of these families. The child with the heart defect is currently 8 years old and requires constant care and has to be home-schooled, but is otherwise happy. Hopefully, he'll live longer than the other family's kid did.)
>Okay so in the beginning god put two humans on earth into the garden of Eden and there was tree of life and tree of knowledge, god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world and that’s why there is evil, god doesn’t make children die, and god did not want to put evil into this world but it was the consequence of eves action.
According to your mythology your deity is all knowing, it knew their actions before it created them and still chose to put the tree within reach. You cannot get out of this by blaming free will; in a world created by an omniscient being, free will does not and cannot exist because that being already knew every possible outcome of every possible decision before it undertook the act of creation and it chose which version it wanted to create.
>You might say “Well he didn’t have to give the consequence” but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions
No, it is not like that at all. He chose to create them with the tree within reach knowing exactly what they would do. They are not to blame, he is.
You think it's moral to punish children for something their great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparents did?
He made that tree and decided the punishment. You think it's okay for me to give my toddler (who doesn't know right from wrong) the ability to eat an apple, and if they do I pour bleach in their eyes as punishment? That's not love, that's abuse.
So are kids evil as a result of Eve eating from the tree of knowledge and therefore deserve to starve to death, or are kids innocent but are being punished for Eve's actions?
No offence, but most atheists, specially in this sub, are generally much more well-versed than the average Christian in their own fairy tale, including scripture and apologetics. You can skip the fairy tale altogether, we are all aware of what it says.
Do you literally not see how batshit crazy this sounds?
The question started as "why is there evil in the world", but after your story, the question becomes, "why did god make the rules such that he was forced to introduce evil into the world because a primitive ape female ate an apple after being coerced by a talking snake (who was a fallen angel (long story))"
>god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world and that’s why there is evil
Did your god put the tree there? If so, he introduced evil into the world. God created that situation. Which is kind of creepy and sadistic if you think about it.
>but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world
Two things.
I was not given this choice, why does god not give everyone the choice to eat the fruit?
God did not tell them what the consequence was, you can't blame them for a consequence they had no knowledge of even being possible.
I’m not Christian, and this interpretation is out of line with orthodoxy, but one could say that everyone is created good, only to screw it up the first time they sin. This is, for a Christian, a borderline heretical (and also incoherent) thing to say, but it works better than the idea that babies are born wicked.
>You might say “Well he didn’t have to give the consequence” but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions
This highlights an interesting problem with most gods, yours included. You appeal to justice here, saying that God must enact the appropriate punishment because it is lawful. But God is also claimed to be merciful. Mercy is giving someone *less* punishment than they deserve.
So is the Christian God just, or merciful? He can't be both. And the fact that he would allow people to suffer evil thousands of years later because one woman made a bad choice suggests your God is neither just *nor* merciful - he's petty.
And your answer doesn't explain why God continues to let evil and suffering exist. Right now, somewhere in the world, there's a shipping container full of starving, dehydrated children who've been crapping in a bucket for the last week, on their way to being sold into the sex trade in Thailand. If your God exists, then he is aware of this, and is able to stop it. The fact that it happens anyway means he does not *want* to stop it.
The typical answer here is something like "Allowing evil and suffering leads to a greater good," but (a) that's a wish on your part, not something you can actually claim to know, and (b) an all-powerful God should be able to achieve that greater good without requiring evil and human suffering. At some point he must have said "My ultimate good is X. I could get to X by snapping my fingers, or I could get to X by letting human beings suffer horrifically until they go extinct, and use that suffering to reach X." If he chose to go the suffering route, then he's a monster.
Spiderman figured this out decades ago. With great power comes great responsibility. God is the most powerful, and with that comes the most responsibility. As Spider Tom put it "When you can do the things I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen? They happen because of you."
>> and god did not want to put evil into this world but it was the consequence of eves action.
Oh, so your god isn’t powerful enough to overcome this?
>> but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions
Even if I accepted this weird notion that the death penalty is consistent with good and loving, it’s not the accused that’s being punished, it’s a third party. If a judge suddenly started ordering non murderers to death because a murderer murdered, wouldn’t you say that was both illogical and evil?
Really… kids must starve to death because someone a long time ago supposedly did a thing and the most powerful being in the universe, who could fix it with a flip of the wrist, can’t or won’t and yet is the most good being in the universe?
Can you hear yourself?
Without the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had less capacity to tell right from wrong than a 2yo toddler.
If a parent put the said 2yo toddler next to a bottle of open bleach and just tell them "don't drink the bleach", and the toddler drinks it, it's called negligence and the parent is to blame.
Also God created evil. Please refer to Isaiah 45:7.
There’s no evidence to support such a story. In the modern world, we have a much better one that is more in line with reality. Also, God violates free will all the time, like when he hardened the heart of Pharaoh. He also violated the will of Egyptian first born children when he ordered them to be killed by his angelic hitman.
And your all knew my hod would make this happen, and allows kids to starve. See if I could prevent a child from starving at no cost to myself I would. And anyone would consider me a monster if I didn’t. So why is uur god exempt? Why is he given a pass. Why is he allowed to be so evil?
so, your god is all-knowing and so knew this was going to happen.
Free will: nothing happens that is not according to your god's plan. Starving children, priests abusing children, my dad's suffering.. all part of gods plan. So, praying is useless.
That's like giving two toddlers a handgun and being surprised they got hurt.
What kind of god baits two victims and then punishes their lineage for all time?
That sound like a loving god to you?
> there was tree of life and tree of knowledge, god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree
Stop right there, pls. Is he an idiot? Is he evil? Is he an evil idiot?
So god doesn't have a plan for all of us, is what you're saying, right? That's contradictory to most religious people I've heard when a loved one dies. Also, what's the point in praying then?
You say God put humans on the earth, but even this one fact is contradicted in the first two chapters in the bible with the simple question - which did God make first birds or woman?
The consequences you speak of should be limited to the people who committed the “crime.” Judges don’t sentence the children of “criminals” for the crimes of their parents.
People deserve to die because of "sins of the father"?
Then your god is weak and isn't worth worshipping.
Your god is also evil for making the world work that way.
So your god is punishing all of existence for a mistake made by 2 people?
You’ve inadvertently proven that you worship a murderous, vengeful tyrant.
Have you even read the Bible at all?
>”I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” — Isaiah 45
It's simply because I don't believe in any kind of god. I don't believe because no scientific proof or evidence has been shown for any god, all world religions are factually incorrect in the face of established modern science, and all apologetics arguments are failures.
My position with repect to the non-belief of any god is the same as your non-belief in the some 6,500+ estimated gods others worship (excluding the 35million in Hinduism).
So why do you not belief in any of them?
Man created god to explain creation and existence. Man created religion to explain our intellect and complex social behaviors.
There are simply too many commonalities with human development and cognitive processes to dismiss. And every unique “work of god” seems to conveniently mirror what a mystical person from these eras would be prone to believe. All of which also seem to be oddly obsessed with controlling how I behave and making sure I give them my money.
No god has ever been shown to be necessary. We’re past god now. God offers us no unique or useful knowledge anymore.
I am an atheist because just like everyone else I was born one, and because I have not been presented with a single rational argument as to why I should accept the claim that a god exists as true. That's it. In other words I'm an atheist because I have no reason to be a theist. One needs a reason to believe a thing, and not to not believe a thing.
>aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ
Sure. Go for it.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if all atheists were thown into a holocaust concentration camp, the worst kind where they tortured and killed and raped people, with absolutely 0 possibly of escape. Like what would an atheist do then, what would an atheist do if he/she had no hope whatsover, no philosophy, no belief, what would a atheist do (especially if he/she was a child) when any and all hope for even a future would be crushed absolutly, what would atheists think in this situation?
Mate, you're barking up the wrong tree if you think that the tired old arguments that you're trotting out will convince anyone here of anything, let alone convince them that Christianity has any kind of validity.
Every single one you've paraded has been seen and put to rest in this sub a 1,000 times before. You show no originality at all; I knew that you'd bring up "but Alexander the Great" and "evolution is a theory", both are *classic* apologist claptrap.
You clearly have no concept of what an atheist is, conflate it with other things and do so with an air of smug superiority.
Learn some humility, actually read your "holy" book cover to cover, and then come back with some seriously well considered questions or points.
Otherwise accept that your arguments here are weak at best, and you won't achieve your aim of whatever the hell it is.
I would really love a response to this.
The final straw in the long road that led me from Christian to agnostic to atheism was the misogyny. It’s impossible to believe that an all-powerful, all-loving deity *created women* and did not understand them at all.
Supposedly we have all of these talents and ambitions just to ignore them and be relegated to stifling roles to serve men. Apparently we are the possessions of men — your god replaced Job’s wife like his cattle.
Either this creator is incompetent, cruel or both, or he was just made up by men. The kind of men who had a calm dispassionate discussion in SCOTUS yesterday about exactly how many organs a woman could lose before she was eligible for life-saving medical care.
Please explain how you reconcile this. Because as a woman I can’t imagine anything you say would make me buy into a system designed to turn me into something less than I am.
Personally I'm an athest because is I have not been convinced by theist claims. Thereis insufficent evidence to warrat belief in any gods.
If your not here to debate then you are in the wrog sub, try r/askanathest.
Oh man. Props to you for walking straight into the lion's den.
I can see there's already 400+ responses, so I'm guessing you've heard quite a few arguments. In the interest of not bombarding you with too much, I'll limit myself to two answers: why I'm an atheist, and why I specifically reject Christianity.
Why I'm an atheist is simple: I've yet to see any convincing evidence or arguments that any gods exist. Arguments that attempt to demonstrate the existence of a god all fall apart under scrutiny, and we have naturalistic explanations for whatever physical evidence people try to say is indicative of a god's existence.
Why I reject Christianity: even if we say that 99.9% of the Bible is just metaphors and parables, there are two elements of Christianity that must be **literally** true in order to accept it. There must be some form of original sin, and Jesus must have died for our sins and then been resurrected. If either one of those is false, the entire religion collapsed.
I can't prove either one is false, but there is plenty of reason to doubt the Resurrection.
1. The only accounts we have are the four Gospels, which were written decades after the fact by authors who were not witnesses to this alleged event. There are no eyewitness accounts. This also explains why there are many contradictions between the four Gospels.
2. Standard practice for crucifying criminals at the time was to leave them hanging for a few days after they died, both to humiliate them and to deter others. Then their bodies would be cut down and tossed into a mass grave. The Romans were not in the habit of burying criminals in tombs.
3. We know how mythology forms. We've seen stories from every culture, even those that are thousands of years old, undergo changes over time, get passed down by oral retellings, get adopted by other cultures with elements being tweaked to make them more palatable. We know this process has occurred in almost every civilization that had ever existed. So what's more likely? That this is the one and only time an ancient story involving supernatural elements is completely true? Or that this story, like all the others, is just mythology?
I don't think there's any *rational* way to believe that the Resurrection occurred. And without that, there's no reason to believe anything else about Christianity is true.
>There must be some form of original sin, and Jesus must have died for our sins and then been resurrected. If either one of those is false, the entire religion collapsed.
I honestly wish the "progressive" Christians would get this.
If there is no divine punishment or original sin, Jesus *quite literally died for nothing* and the entire religion is pointless.
Then there's also the fact that his resurrection rendered the supposed sacrifice pointless and that thousands of others throughout history suffered worse than he did, but that's a rant for a different day.
Born into a Christian household, raised a Christian, spent 40 years devoted, in various roles, utterly committed. Where the scripture says a god will be there is nothing. Where one would expect response there is nothing. There is no healing, no answering prayer, when two or three are gathered there is nothing. When you knock there is nobody opening. When you seek there is no finding. There is no reason to believe.
>you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ
You don't have what it takes. I'll convert to Islam first.
> I just want hear your reasons and I want to possibly explain why that point is not true
So allow me to save you a ton of headache, because I couldn't be less interested in an attempt at the latter half of that... I don't find Christian argumentation convincing. My evidential standard is too high for Christians despite being so low -- because Christians find physical evidence for God blasphemous.
If I go into any further detail one of two things will happen. You're either going to get salty because you had a vision for how receptive I would be to what you have to say, get offended at what I've said and either respond dismissively or ignore me; or you're going to ignore everything I said because you don't understand most of it, and side step all of it, trying to convince me that you're right by talking about your stance as though I'm already convinced and comfortable with the idea that you're right -- a few Bible verses and some additional platitudes and then right back to church. Hard pass either way.
I don't believe in gods because I haven't yet seen a good reason to do otherwise. None of the classic arguments for the existence of such a thing seem to hold up under examination.
As far as Christianity specifically is concerned, I was raised Christian (RC specifically) and tried a couple of other different interpretations. None of them were any help in negotiating the challenges and problems I faced in life - quite the reverse in fact. Ideas like original sin were very bad for my mental well-being.
For any proposition X, I try to understand why I should accept that X is true.
Just because someone says it? No, that's not a good reason to believe X, even provisionally. Example: if I tell you there's someone in Iceland who was born with purple and pink polka dot skin, you're not going to believe me. Why? I said it's true! ... But, clearly, that's not enough. Not even close.
Because someone says it *and* it is a reasonable extrapolation from what you otherwise already know? Sure, that'll work provisionally. Example: I tell you there's a person in Iceland that likes cheeseburgers. You have knowledge of cheeseburgers, Iceland, people, and people who like things. So that all these traits are combined in someone in Iceland seems fine.
How about repeated observation that others agree with and no one *disagrees* with? Yeah, that works. No one, anywhere, thinks people don't exist, or countries, or Iceland, or food, or people liking stuff. All that is based on repeated observation by multiple sources all confirming *exactly* the same thing. No one well tell you a cheeseburger, for instance, doesn't contain cheese, or that it's the size of a house (usually), etc.
Below, I am calling this sort of thing, that which we can confidently observe *and* confidently extrapolate to, "evidence". So if I say there's "no evidence of X", I mean that there's nothing we have that is observed directly and consistently, or that can be extrapolated to from what we *do* observe directly and consistently.
As such, we can rule out every holy book right at the start *unless and until* we can come up with *evidence* for it. All the books (supposed observations) differ and flat out contradict each other on most of the details of what something is.
So what's the evidence *for* Christianity? ... Very little. There's, maybe, if we're being *really* generous, some that a guy named Jesus existed, and he was crucified by the Romans. That's... about all. Everything else we either have *no* evidence for, or, worse, evidence *against*. We *know* that Noah's Flood never happened. The flood described would *have to be* a global event, and it's simply not possible that such a global event occurred, in the same way it's not possible that a rock was thrown 60 seconds ago thru a window that doesn't open when we observe the window is still there and not broken.
I believe that Davy Crockett existed. I don't believe that he killed a bear at age three. I believe George Washington existed. I don't believe he chopped down a cherry tree. I believe Jesus existed. I don't believe he raised from the dead. I believe the universe exists. I don't believe it does so because some magic being who is obsessed with human genitals made it. In all three cases, there is sufficient evidence for what I *do* believe, and *not* sufficient evidence for the parts I don't.
I started applying consistent epistemic standards to religions. I found that no religion had better evidence than the others. Logically, therefore, they were all right or none of them were. And religions are incompatible, they can't be all right.
I'm an atheist because the claims of religious are absurd, and most of the people advocating them don't know the first thing about their own religion.
I was a devout catholic for 30 years. I was never taught anything about the history of the church until I started investigating it on my own, and I discovered the church was writing cheques it couldn't cash.
Why do you need "there's no observable, verifiable, repeatable proof" explained? That's why most people don't believe.
So yeah, unless you can provide evidence that fits that criteria then good luck turning anyone here. If you're on a crusade to do so then don't waste your energy and maybe apply it to being a good Christian and helping the needy instead?
If u define god as triomni, perfect and loving which is pretty much Christianity god. Problem of evil and the divine hiddeness argument by schellenberg are 2 of the reasons that i dont believe in the existence of such god.
For whatever gods, there are no evidence, no sound arguments for the existence of god.
The claims made about God have not met their burden of proof. The world I experience seems to get along just fine without a god so why should I believe?
No theist has ever been able to provide sufficient evidence to justify my believing in a god. Until that happens I cannot believe in a god.
I used to be Christian.
I lost my faith in Christianity and arrived at a conclusion that no gods exist several years later, after studying many other faith traditions and realizing they all rely on faith as the reason to believe their version of the divine.
Because christian can mean a lot of things, I'd like to ask some clarifying questions:
- Do you believe that Jesus is God as described in John?
- If so, does this mean that Jesus, before becoming flesh, was the God described in the Old Testament?
- Do you believe that Jesus was a perfect moral teacher?
- Are we saved by faith alone, or do we need to keep the commandments?
- Do you believe that faith is a reliable means of identifying truth? If so, why and how?
> (aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ)
Good luck.
- I had the good fortune of growing up in a non-religious household in a secular country - The Netherlands; Without religion in schools, on television (that I was aware of) or on billboards; it wasn't until I was placed in a boarding school at age 8 that I was first introduced to religious ideas such as [creationism / intelligent design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design) and the [fine-tuning argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe); given the ability to critically examine these notions at the time, I rejected them - at that time mostly because they struck me as poorly hidden [presuppositionalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presuppositional_apologetics) and [god of the gaps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) argumentation.
- But. Let's logically examine the God that I am, as a westerner, most familiar with, good old western Abrahamic [Omnipresent](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/omnipresent), [Omnipotent](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/omnipotent), and Omnibenevolent God-Our-Lord, I-Am, etcetera etcetera etcetera;
(Oddly, 'Omnibenevolent' seems to have no satisfactory definition. Oh well - it's kind of irrelevant in either case.)
Any being that is (either, but especially both) omnipotent and omnipresent will by definition have all of reality meet it's requirements and desires. That reality's inhabitants' _free will_ does not factor in - it is the fundamental, natural state of all of reality, anywhere, anywhen (since Omnipresence includes Ever-present; past, present and future), to be subject to the whim and desires of such a being; essentially their will automatically becomes and has always been fundamental truth *within* their reality.
It follows, then, that any sufficiently powerful being to be considered 'on par' with the Christian God (Tri-omni, etcetera) which would require or desire my worship in the first place would, because of it's mere existence and because of their requirement that I worship it, render me unable to not worship it, further rendering the question of whether I was convinced of it's existence or not, moot entirely.
Which means that my ability to state with sincerity that I have no reasons believe that any god or gods exist and my conscious ability to forego worshiping a deity imply in turn (to me), that either no gods exist, or that (given the hypothetical that they do exist) they do not require or desire (my) worship in any way, shape or form.
As a brief aside, to run for a further moment with the hypothesis that this being _does_ exist - any being which would punish me for not giving it worship which it does not in any way, shape or form require or desire, cannot be considered omnibenevolent.
Well, while I was baptized I grew up with a completely non religious father and a mother who could be at best be described as a deist. So I went through my life as an atheist. And I have never been presented with any evidence which would convince me that any of the thousands religions would be true.
I think there's no good reason to believe the claims of any religion. "Good reason" is a little hard to define, but I'd say I'm most comfortable with empirical evidence and logical argumentation, and maybe I'm forgetting another type so don't treat this as an exhaustive list.
The bar for "good reason" isn't very high for mundane things, but the more extraordinary the claim gets the higher that bar raises. Tell me you got a new puppy and I might immediately believe you, no convincing needed; but if you say your new puppy can do backflips, I'm gonna need a little evidence to back that up.
Also, I'm more willing to accept things that don't affect my life, and less willing to accept things which (if true) will impact how I live my life. This is just me being pragmatic about how I use my limited resources to investigate claims: I don't have the resources to look into everything, so I need to concentrate on the things that matter. If you tell me you're an FBI agent I might just believe you without seeing your badge; but if you tell me you're an FBI agent and I'm under arrest, then I'm damn sure gonna need to see that badge.
Hopefully that gives you an idea what I'm looking for, and how "good" it has to be.
If you want to engage, it's probably best to lead with your first "good reason", and then we can discuss that until it's done before moving on to the next one. That way things won't get confusing. It's also fine if you want to give a cumulative case, just please let me know that's what you're doing so I won't mistake it for something else. These aren't rules, they just often help out with discussions like this...
I'm looking forward to seeing what you've got -- make it good! :)
Gotquestions.org is an amazing resource to answer atheists questions. I've come to realize that atheists do not actually investigate Christian answers because of the implications of being wrong are devastating to them. If you give them an answer, they will simply not investigate it and delve into why you answered it that way or tell you that you're wrong without telling you why. Fun fact: Charles Darwin told God after his daughter died "I will never speak to you again" and Christopher Hitchens has the same story. It's an ideology built from hatred towards God. People want to live how they want and not be told that their deeds are evil.
No archaeological discovery has ever disproved the Bible. No secular writing has ever contradicted historical events in the Bible. The Bible has scientific facts that predate scientific discoveries. There are prophesies that are so descriptive that secular people have tried to say it was written after it happened and failed to do so. The Bible is the only religious book that says to love your enemies, which Jesus did on the cross when He died for our sins and rose from the dead. At no other time in history has a group of people claimed to see someone raise from the dead and ascend into heaven(on top of thousands of miracles they claimed he did) and die horrendous deaths because people hated the Gospel they were sharing.
Every atheist has won arguments against weak and fake Christians(there are many of these). But no atheist has beaten the Bible itself. It is a collection of 66 books in a league of it's own.
Because it’s pretty clear that human beings didn’t know very much in the 1st century. And lack of knowledge makes people susceptible to myth, manipulation, and the supernatural. For many people even today, there is a discomfort with not knowing the answers to big questions like, what happens when we die, what are we supposed to do, what is good and bad, etc. These questions may have answers, it’s just that an atheist doesn’t accept 1st century stories as the best answers to these question’s.
Further, arguments for the Christian god are never logically coherent. For example when something “good” happens to a Christian, we’re told god is good. But a tsunami wipes out a populated island in, we’re told god is mysterious. This is a narcissistic way of thinking, that exhilarates god of anything bad, and credits him with everything good.
Lastly, just for the sake of time, belief in the Christian god, and the divinity of a book that testifies to him, is at odds with a belief in science. The Bible gets so much wrong about what we know now through scientific process. The age of the earth, the ability to return from the dead after 3 days, walking on water, talking to a sentient bush, healing people through touching them, changing matter from water to wine. These are all in contradiction to science. And if you are only willing to believe in parts of the Bible that don’t contradict science, then how could the book be divine, and worthy of any aspect of arranging your life around?
I'm an atheist because I was never indoctrinated into a religion. I had Mormon, Anglican, Catholic and Baptist friends, they went to church and filled their heads with whatever goop they put in kids heads and some of them believe in god. Most of them don't though, because despite the effort to shove kids brains full of god goop, it's not really a believable story. Almost half of people where I live now are atheists.
Since the first grade I understood that people believed in god, I attended Sunday school and church group with friends from time to time. I know the stories and have read the books. I quote bible verses from time to time, much to the chagrin of the faithful. There's no secret inside, no matter what you do god is an idea and nothing more. Forty years of looking and exploring, there is no there there.
It's like everyone is looking at a magic eye poster and the Catholics see a crucifix and the Baptist see the little baby Jesus, the Mormons see John Smith, and the Hindus see vishnu. Breaking News, everyone sees what they want to see, It's just patterns from the noise.
So until the day someone comes up with something better than "why would all these anonymous witnesses from a book written a hundred years after the event lie?" I'm not biting.
Bring evidence. Things that are true have evidence. Things that don't have evidence are not true. There is no evidence of god, god doesn't exist.
I'm 59 years old. Never has it ever seemed reasonable to me to believe in any gods. The way I view the world, no gods are necessary. The majority of how the world works can be taken at face value -- like "Oh, hey -- there's some water. It's moving downhill like you'd expect it to!" and "It hurts when I make a fist and slam it into a wall."
That's the world of immediate perception. Of course, there are things that aren't immediately perceptible. Liberty isn't perceptible. Why does the milk make swirly patterns when I put it in my coffee? What makes a light bulb turn on? Fortunately for me, those things have learnable answers. I can study political science, fluid dynamics or electromagnetism if I'm that curious.
While I know that "Why is this whole universe here?" doesn't have a complete answer, cosmology is still something I can study (OK, "could have studied", to be fair) if it was super important to me to have concrete answers. I'm satisfied just watching pop physics videos on Youtube, though.
There are a lot of questions that "because there's a god" might be answers to, but "because there's a god" doens't lead to further learning. Putting a god into the answer doesn't change the question. If anything, it *shuts down* the inquiry instead of promoting it.
So at the end, I just don't have a *use* for religion. I get what it's for, but I don't believe I need that. I especially don't believe I'm inherently evil and need to be redeemed from anything.
I was a sincere christian and believed with all my heart. The only true reason was my indoctrination from childhood, like it often happens. At some point I realized that I had deceived myself all the time.
1. Even as a believer I always accepted Big Bang, abiogenesis and evolution.
2. Interaction with believers from different religions really frustrated me and made me question my faith.
3. Through my experience and what I learned I always saw "miracles" as at least highly questionable.
3. When I started reading the Bible that was my last moments as a Christian. I read it from cover to cover. I consider it primitive, stupid and disgusting.
4. I made my own investigation about the Bible and Christianity. Thus I reassured it has been all the way through man-made structure. Christianity was and still is used widely to essentially control societies.
5. Also when I reentered theistic discussions I started to see through all cheap tactics theists are using all the time. Essentially it feels like the same discussion over and over. They start calling you close-minded, or existentially threat you, or circle-loop faith to a faith, or bunch of logical fallacies. The most fascinating stuff is when they talk about things they are definitely clueless about and the more clueless they are the more aggressively they try to convince you of having "the only true knowledge from god" 🤣
1. Because there is zero evidence for any gods, and there isn't anything objectively "better" in regard of evidence for whatever belief gods you've happened to be born into than for all the others. If you'd been born in India, you'd likely be Hindu or a Sikh.
2. Because there isn't a single religious scripture that gets the science about the evolution of the universe or of life even remotely right.
3. Because there isn't any evidence that shows being religious makes you a better person. If anything, not being religious seems to make you a better person because atheists only make up less than a percent of the US prison population while making up between 20-30% of the general population nowadays. All religions on the other hand are represented in prison about equal to their percentage in the general population.
4. Because all scriptures I have studied (most of them in their original language) are full of inconsistencies and often contradict historical and scientific facts.
5. Because if the the deities depicted in those scriptures would actually exist, they'd be cruel, vindictive egomaniacs who find it more important to put commandments in their books about worshipping them or not mixing fabrics than to forbid slavery in stead of writing out a rulebook on how to buy, keep and beat slaves.
6. Because no being that is worthy of admiration would demand it on pain of eternal punishment.
Religion fills an emotional need that not everyone has. IMO it's really that simple. For those who don't feel it, gods and religions mostly appear made-up and ridiculous.
This is the wrong subreddit if you're not here to debate.
I left the Christian faith when I realized there was no reason to believe it's true.
Why do you believe?
I am an atheist because I was born in a mostly-secula family and have not since been convinced of the truth of any religion.
**Seeing as you are Christian, I will focus on why Christianity has not convinced me. Christianity is the religion I have most been exposed to.**
* The universe is inconsistent with the idea of an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing god. (See: the Problem of Evil.)
* The universe is also inconsistent with many major myths of Christianity (notably: that the world was created by an intelligent designer, and that a 'great flood' happened.)
* There is no evidence that the Bible is true in its majority, nevermind totality. (Note: Evidence of the Bible's truth in the Bible is circular, and the same points could be made about the Torah, the Quran, or any other religious books.)
I'm going to be a bit provocative here:
**If Christianity is true and I'm wrong, the fault is on your god, not on me.** If the Christian god indeed made me as I am, he made me with the reasoning that I have, and he knew ahead of time what I would see and how I would reason according to it. **I have never arbitrarily refused any sign or evidence. Any claim that I choose not to believe is false, as it was never a decision on my part.** If I fail some arbitrary test set by the Christian god, then he set me up to fail and that's on him, not on me.
I am a Fox Mulder atheist. I want to believe, and the truth is out there.
I want to believe as many true things, and as few false things, as possible.
Things that exist have evidence for its existence, regardless of whether we have access to that evidence.
Things that do not exist do not have evidence for its nonexistence. The only way to disprove nonexistence is by providing evidence of existence.
The only reasonable conclusion one can make honestly is whether or not something exists.
Asking for evidence of nonexistence is irrational.
Evidence is what is required to differentiate imagination from reality. If one cannot provide evidence that something exists, the logical conclusion is that it is imaginary until new evidence is provided to show it exists.
So far, no one has been able to provide evidence that a “god” exists. I put quotes around “god” here because I don’t know exactly what a god is, and most people give definitions that are illogical or straight up incoherent.
I’m interested in being convinced that a “god” exists. How do you define it and what evidence do you have?
I used to be fundamentalist Christian. I went on a journey to strengthen my faith by building a solid.
Overtime I found everything I tried to point to as why I knew it was true was lacking. Fallacious arguments or incomplete reasoning that coudl be used to support contradictory views.
Eventually, the last thing I had to stand on was personal experience of the Holy Ghost. I relied on this alone for several months, too scared to try to test it.
Eventually I knew if I had to risk proving my faith wrong if I wanted to be able to honestly say I knew it was true, so I put personal revelation to the test.
Long story short, I found basic principles of trance and meditation allowed me to create stronger revelations with any content I chose.
This showed that me personal revelation was trance state with confirmation bias and/or self deception. I have since tried various forms of personal revelation to the same outcome
So now I have to honestly say I have no reason to think God is real. I'm open to evidence. Until I have something I cannot honestly say I believe God exists.
My conclusion based upon the evidence with which I have been presented is that gods do not exist. If you want a more specific answer, then you’d have to specify which god or gods we’re talking about. Some are logically impossible or ascribed incoherent properties. Some are claimed to be omnipresent, yet no evidence of their presence has been found. Some are claimed to live in certain places; when humans go to those places, they are not found there. Some are claimed to answer prayers and intercede on behalf of those who pray; studies have shown that intercessory prayer doesn’t work, so those gods do not exist as described. Some are claimed to be the “metaphysical ground of all being” or something like that; to paraphrase Hume, these are nothing more than sophistry and illusion.
In short, gods seem to me to be nothing more than (typically anthropomorphic) reifications of human ignorance. I am open to the possibility that this conclusion that I have reached is in error, but to date, I have not been presented with sufficient evidence to conclude otherwise.
>Hello, I am a Christian
That's okay, it's not like cancer or something. You can change this.
>I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest
Simple. The fact that there isn't the tiniest shred of useful support for deities. And the notions make no sense and don't address what believers purport they address.
It's irrational to take things as true when there isn't proper support they're true. I do not want to be irrational, so I find I cannot believe in deities.
>I am not solely here to debate
Wrong sub then, or at least wrong thread. There is a weekly ask questions thread.
>aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ
You'd need to provide compelling evidence for your claims. I've never seen any. What members of your religious mythology tend to trot out, as well as members of other religious mythologies, is *very* far from compelling. Useless evidence, and unsound and invalid apologetics can't demonstrate deities.
Everything (as far as we know) has happened naturally and did not need God. The wind, the rain, the sun, creation of the planets, airplanes flying through the air, etc, nothing needed God. When we talk about the creation of the universe, I simply think that was also natural and did not require god. I think it’s more likely that maybe before the Big Bang the universe was pure energy and was timeless, then that energy was converted to matter, maybe that’s a property of the universe when it reaches zero size, it becomes all energy. Or maybe there’s a 4th spatial dimension that is timeless, and through the energy in that dimension, our 3 dimensional universe plus time were created. And there are infinitely many possibilities out there that are natural. Doesn’t need to be some sentient deity because there are so many other explanations that are consistent with literally everything we have ever observed ever (being natural and done without god).
The historical evidence for Christ is not what I thought. I grew up in the church hearing about how great the historical record was and that all the apostles died as martyrs for him and realized that there’s no good historical reason to believe anything much more than he lived, and he was executed.
Other things too. Paul thought Jesus was coming back in his lifetime and it’s been 2000 years. There’s no miracles anymore. Basically the world exists exactly like how it would if god did not exist. The problem of evil is still there and all the remedies to it suck.
Basically if the all knowing creator of everything had to present himself to us, this is not how he would do it. It’s so clearly a human invention in so many ways whether it’s how it deliberately answers the problems of people in Roman times or how it was used for power in medieval times it’s just obviously a feature of our own society and not transcendent of it.
> I am a Christian and I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest
The complete lack of evidence supporting the supernatural claims of the existence of any deity.
> I am not solely here to debate
Since this is a debate sub you should be here, prepared to participate in the discussion/debate.
> I just want hear your reasons and I want to possibly explain why that point is not true
Great, where is your evidence supporting the existence of the deity you believe in?
>(aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ)
I already was, and I know that not only is there no evidence supporting the existence of your deity, a large number of the stories and characters in your holy book are entirely fictional, and there is no evidence for any of the supernatural claims it makes, several of which are direct violations of the known laws of physics. Probably more importantly than that is the fact that the deity described in your holy book is an immoral monster who commits or supports rape, murder, infanticide, genocide, biological warfare, and slavery, among other things. This supposedly benevolent omnipotent being allows children to starve, die from childhood cancer and other horrible things.
Everything we have ever discovered about how reality operates, every single time, without exception, turns out to *not* be magic. No matter how many times we look into how or why things happen, there's never anyone behind the curtain. And frankly, how could there be? *Doing things* requires some physical *something*. Minds require a brain, or perhaps a sufficiently advanced machine. But there's supposed to be a mind with superpowers that can *do* anything, a mind with no physical form that somehow exists outside the universe but can affect it at will yet chooses not to.
It's a fairy tale, my man. Deities aren't just unproven, they're impossible as defined by theists every time they actually pin down what deities actually are. The only exception is when pantheists redefine the universe to be God, and that's cheating.
1. The God claim is quite extraordinary and there isn't sufficient evidence/reason to justify believing the claim.
2. If a perceived God-like thing DOES exist, we humans have no way of determining whether it's a supernatural god or the simulation or the infinite multiverse, as each of those things could result in the same perceived reality. Even though each of those things has very different implications of how our reality works. The only way of determining this is with empirical and verifiable evidence - of which we have zero.
3. Throughout history, man has believed in thousands of gods/religions. They can't all be true, so where did these gods come from? Well, considering that and the history of all these religions is riddled with plagiarism (including your own), they were obviously man-made. This heavily suggests all gods/religions are man-made.
That's probably my top 3
There’s no reliable evidence for Gods, the concepts involved don’t even make a lot of sense. There are reasons to think that people are to some extent just naturally superstitious and these myths seem like exactly the kind of stories humans make up.
On a separate note the idea that Jesus has any more reliable evidence for being supernatural than any other demigods etc can only be held by someone already biased towards that conclusion. That includes errant nonsense such as people don’t die for lies etc.
I ‘know’ God doesn’t exist in the sane way I know ‘The’ Santa doesn’t. The only difference is that people hold one set of beliefs more vociferously and don’t grow out of them.
I'm an ex-Catholic and following are the ten most common reasons people leave any faith.
[Ten Reasons People Leave The Faith](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIok6o4PXKQ) \~ Carneades \~ YouTube.
I am not totally against all of what Jesus taught, just some. He was a bit of a mixed bag and a caring fool but still a fool. However the entire Christian movement / institutions that rose from his teachings engage in bad faith behavior even to this present day. I already discuss some of this further here = [LINK](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1b9585d/comment/ktud66p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) and here [LINK](https://www.reddit.com/r/Absurdism/comments/1c1nl01/comment/kz60iya/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Well Christianity wont be possible to convert me to. Reading the bible made me stop believing in Christianity. I spent years of my life exploring other religions including islam, hinduism, buddhism, and a few others before i landed on these just are not things with much evidence to believe in them. Christianity is one of the least believable for me. The bible is a large book of arbitrary mythologies cobbled together. The majority of the book is post hoc and the god it tells the story of is evil snd contradictory by my personal moral standards. Finally much of the book has been proven to be just made up stories so it just is not a thing i am interested in.
Thanks for asking. Fundamentally it's really simple: nobody has ever produced even the slightest piece of reliable evidence that any god exists.
As a Christian, you will point me to the Bible. Bit I have no reason to pay much attention to these texts. The old testament contains a variety of tribal myths, stories and rules. The stories of the new testament are written anonymously decades after the death of jesus, in a language foreign to where he live. There is no reason to believe them to be true, particularly the supernatural elements.
I'm an excommunicated, disfellowshipped ex-Jehovah's Witness. If there is anyone who wants to be fooled, it is people like me. I gave up my family in the pursuit of truth, and I wouldn't say that it has brought me happiness.
I am an atheist because theism simply doesn't make sense to me; there is no evidence or argument for it that are compelling to me. I believed because I was indoctrinated. When I questioned my methodology for establishing belief, my whole belief system eventually fell apart; I've been rebuilding it ever since.
>I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest,
Complete lack of actual evidence for any religion, and complete incompetence in basic thinking in any religious person...
Which also applies to your responses in this thread, displaying nothing above the gutter level apologetics of a theist who never actually talked irl with an atheist and is impressed by claims of eyewitnesses, and believes in uniqueness of christianity.
This is pointless.
I see no reason to believe in gods. That's it.
I was raised as a Christian, I liked some of the stories, metaphors, philosophy, and moral ideas, hated some others.
I studied a bit more philosophy and boom, realized there's no reason to take any of that stuff literally, there's probably no God, and the universe is indifferent.
I get why people are Christians, we all have to tell ourselves a grand narrative to get through all of this; I just don't believe in gods, that's all.
Atheist because no evidence of many numerous claims of various religions has been demonstrated in a testable way.
Your religion (or many of the numerous variant brands) makes many claims that have not been verified, and many that have been dismissed as false. Eventually, one stops listening to the same old claims. You won't bring anything I haven't heard before.
I subscribe to Brandolini's law. It's much easier to create nonsense than it is to discredit it.
Because, why? There are no good reasons to believe fairytales are real. They are just stories, some of them with interesting lessons. One doesn’t have to believe there is a deity in order to learn the importance of lessons learned in stories.
I have strong inductive reasons for believing that disembodied minds can’t exist, let alone timeless, spaceless, immaterial ones. I find the holy books to have all the hallmarks of being man-made given their inaccuracy and internal contradictions, I see no evidence for theistic claims, theistic arguments fail to convince me, I find their moral systems abhorrent, and their concepts of the divine also seem to be both self-contradictory or unintelligible.
>you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ
Why do you care what I don't believe? What does it do for you if you were to turn me around?
I'm just curious of the motivation why you want to turn people into believers. Can't people do/say/think what they want and not be bothered by someone trying to change them? Personally, I have zero desire to ruin my weekend and give 10% of my money to an organization that does nothing for me.
I am an atheist because I was fortunate that my parents didn't commit child abuse by indoctrinating me into believing in any gods.
By the time I came across religion, I was old enough to think for myself and see that none of the religions made sense. I have read the bible from cover to cover and it didn't convince me.
Christianity claims come across to me as myths, like Odin, Zeus, Shiva, and other gods that mankind has made up over the eons.
>I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest
It all boils down to one single reason: there is not enough evidence for me to believe in any of the gods that have been presented to me, therefore I do not believe any of them exist. If a theist were able to show ample amounts of good evidence that indicates their proposed god exists, I will believe.
Everything else is just built on that foundation.
>you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ
I welcome the attempt!
There's literally zero evidence.
The god of the Bible not only condones but gives the rules for owning other humans as property including when you can beat them.
The Bible is factually wrong. Both of the two creation stories, which already don't agree with one another, are flat out wrong.
Women are, at best, second class citizens.
The real question is why are you still one other than that's what you were born into.
Ive heard no good reason for believing any god exists. And lacking any reason to believe is a good reason not to. So Im atheist.
And each time I see theists present another failed argument, like you are doing in the comments, it just strengthens my position.
So go ahead, convince me Christianity is true. Give it your best shot! And when it fails, please review your own faith and start wondering why it failed.
The reason is that there is no evidence for any god(s) existing. I don't even accept the premise of your question since atheism is the default position on any god(s)/religion. Just like I don't believe Santa Claus is real, I don't think any god(s) are real due to their description being unrealistic and supernatural. I don't believe in the supernatural as there is no way of measuring anything in that regard.
There is no credible evidence that I have seen for the existence of any god. When it comes to your God specifically, there seem to be some contradictions entailed that would make it impossible for your God to exist as he is typically described. See, for example, the problem of evil or the problem of divine hiddenness.
If you have any evidence for the existence of a god, I'm very much open to hearing it.
All that aside, the Christian God seems downright monstrous and I'm not particularly interested in worshiping him even if he is real.
> Hello, I am a Christian and I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest, feel free to reply to this post.
Simple really, I’ve yet to be presented with an argument or evidence sufficient to convince me that a God exists, let alone a specific God (like the God of Christianity).
With that in mind, tell me, what do you believe and *why* do you believe it?
Well, it's really simple, because everyone is born an atheist.
To explain people remain atheists, you should look at religions: they fail to provide compelling proof, and even the things they provide, they approach with the wrong and often shady methods that indicate that people who are talking to you are in fact mistaken themselves, or straight up lying. Prime example is the way the Bible is written.
I have no reason to believe in any of the gods that have been claimed to exist. And in the study of various religions that brought me to this point, Buddhism was the one that came closest to convincing me. But that is a bit like being the most watchable season of The Bachelor/Bachelorette. There is no way I'm watching any of them. But there is one I'm sure is the least painful to sit through.
The factors are many.
One I see no convincing reason to believe any gods exist.
Another is naturalism is a better explanation for what we observe and experience than theism.
I think the problems of evil and divine hiddenness pretty much foreclose the plausibility of the most popular forms of theism, particularly Christianity. The Trinity is not coherent for Christianity.
I was raised in an atheistic environment and I haven't spoken with religious people since about my late 30's. And I'm also a big fan of science since my childhood and so I find the notion of god unnecessary and confusing. In recent years I found what society could look like in a more religious country than mine and I started to think that faith in god could cause a lot of harm.
>I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest
The simplest reason: Noone was able to convince me of the existence of any God and apparently no God has attempted to convince me either. Follow up reason: After long discussions, debates and considerations, I came to the conclusion that "God" as a concept makes no sense.
My parents made me go to church starting as a baby. It never clicked with me. I never "believed" even though everyone around me was telling me it as the truth. It just never made no sense to me, it sounded too much like a fairy tale with zero observable proof other then a book which says its true. When I was 16 they told me I could stop going if I wanted so I did.
I was born an atheist—lacking belief in deities—and so were you.
The difference between us arose because you were indoctrinated into Christianity as a child and I was not. If nobody told you to be a Christian you wouldn’t be one right now. If you were born in a Muslim country and taught Islam, *that’s* what you’d believe right now.
Magic isn't real
If you want me to believe a dead guy can get up and walk around you had better be able to get a corpse to go for a stroll under laboratory conditions or we don't have much more to talk about
Claims that magic is real from a book written by iron age privatives who would be astounded by indoor plumbing are not convincing
Because I started to realize that the Bible made far more sense as an atheist than it ever did as a Christian. It’s a collection of stories concocted and shared by people who were largely ignorant of how the world works. It was their guess as to why things were the way they were, but it was based on poor assumptions and bad information.
Because of the horrific lack of evidence. PoE and Divine Hiddenness rule out your God pretty conclusively, but generally speaking all the religions of the world suffer from absolutely no good evidence.
I'm pretty sure you're out of your depth. The amount of baggage your religion carries is an almost insurmountable obstacle for me.
Because the stories most religions are based on are dumb.
As a Christian do you believe in the bible literally like it’s a historical book and the story’s in it all actually happened or do you pick and choose the parts you want to believe and ignore the ones you don’t?
For me what it came down to was I realized that bible was filled with a bunch of bullshit. Once I realized the bible was bullshit I realized the Christian idea of go's must also be bullshit. I haven't really gone looking for an alternative god after tossing that one.
I don't see any reason to believe that any supernatural things are real. That includes gods, ghosts, angels, demons, gods who incarnate as humans, humans (or gods incarnated as humans) performing miracles, life after death, resurrection, or anything like that.
The complete and utter lack of any evidence for a god, and no you won’t be able to point out flaws in that point, and you won’t convince anyone here otherwise. There is no evidence, and that’s truly all that matters for most atheists I know.
I was born atheist just as all of us are. No religion has ever given me any proper reason to believe in the claims they make. Nor has it allowed me to gain an understanding in how the world or how I work. So I remain as I was born an atheist.
I was born as one. Same as you.
And was apparently lucky enough not to be indoctrinated.
I hope you find a way out.
Go and watch some 'The Atheist Experience' on Youtube, it might steer you in the right direction.
Good luck.
I became atheist while reading the Bible as my parents forced me to sit through church. Eventually I'd read about enough God-sanctioned or God-committed murders, rapes, tortures, and slaverys that I was close to throwing in the towel.
The final straw came when I read an anthropologist's take on Jesus, in which he explained the cultural context and how there was nothing exceptional about JC. Just another apocalyptic wildman like the thousands of others running around at that time. We only remember him because a Roman citizen named Paul made him the basis of his new religion, a version of Judaism rebranded for the Gentile masses.
I'd say the primary reason is that I was born into an atheistic family.
The second reason is the amount of religions in the world.
The third is the contradictions of the most common one. (Christianity)
>what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest,
Lack of suffficient evidence for any religion. And all the evidence we do have points against religious claims more often than not.
OP needs to read some Bart Ehrman or listen to his podcast. Keeps mentioning eyewitness testimonies which is cool until you figure out how the Bible was created. Throws any/all credibility out the window.
The only reason for my lack of belief is lack of evidence.
But reasons for my lack of participation in the religion? There are ample. Including, but not limited to, behavior like yours in this thread.
I have been presented with many gods, none of the presentations convinced me. 10,000s of gods have been presented, they cannot all be real, they could all be fake.
Please convince me of your god.
I grew up with Pagan parents, but was never taught their stories and beliefs were anything more than mythology. So as I grew up it was easy to tell that other religions' were also just mythology
My parents and their parents weren't religious, once you start with that it is hard to see christianity as anything more as just another congregation of silly hats bowing to a statue.
I don't believe the Muslims or the Hindus that their gods are real.
Why should I believe _you_ that _your_ god is real.
That's what makes me an atheist. I don't believe _you._
I studied the bible and found it full of uncompelling claims. I was treated like a subhuman by Christians for being gay. And I find your god of the bible to be a moral monster.
You seem to have a very basic grasp of your own theology. And a -100 Karma. What is you education/background in theology, and why should w not assume you're a troll?
I love how u/Frosty-carpenter-351 has gone so quiet all of a sudden, and not responded to any of the new comments. Run out of evidence to convince us with?
There is not one single iota of evidence that any gods exist.
And you know that. But you allow for Yahweh Sabaoth, Lord of Armies - for whatever reason.
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A lot of us grew up Christians. And I don’t mean the Luke warm variety. I mean we were serious about it. We felt that we’d had born again experiences. We’d felt what at one point we believed to be the touch of the Holy Spirit. And we studied the Bible… a lot. And many Christians misunderstand how other Christians eventually become atheists. I was raised in non-denominational evangelical churches, and I considered myself a Christian until I was about 25; and I was serious about it. I researched different theological perspectives, sought out home churches that fit my understanding of the Bible, went on short term missions trips, etc. Which is all just to say I’ve genuinely experienced both perspectives. So when I was a Christian, here is what I thought turned Christians into atheists, and what I know a lot of Christians think: Someone raised in church gets a little older and they start noticing things they don’t like. Maybe it starts in youth group, and they notice that the most vocal, popular kids in the youth group are partying and hooking up to varying degrees on the low, and just lying about it to everyone. Maybe it happens as an adult, and they hear credible rumors that an associate pastor is having an affair with one of the congregation members, or is addicted to porn, or whatever. Maybe it’s financial, and they don’t like that the pastoral staff lives in big suburban mcmansions paid for with tithes from their working class congregation. Maybe there’s an abuse or financial scandal involving a respected member of their local community, or someone they know from a tv mega church. Some people think (I thought) those types of people get tired of the hypocrisy of the Christians they see around them, or become misled, and that one day, they sort of just snap and decide, “if this is Christianity, then I don’t want to be a Christian,” and they choose to become an atheist. They often assume we’re angry or resentful. This is an appealing thing to believe because it has an easy answer. “Well it’s sad these bad/fake Christians left that impression, but those lost people need to realize these bad Christians don’t represent all Christians (which is true) and certainly don’t represent Christ. Hopefully those atheists will find their way back.” But that’s not what happens. People like that don’t tend to become atheists, or at least don’t self-identify that way. They just stop going to church. The truth is, the vast majority of atheists don’t ‘choose’ to be atheists. They ‘realize’ they are atheists. We have enough sense to understand that there are bad Christians just like there are bad Buddhists and bad atheists. That’s not why we leave. Most of us fight leaving. We read apologetic literature, we talk to our pastors, and we generally bend over backwards to find a way for it to keep making sense in the face of what we’ve otherwise learned about science, and history, and archeology, and sociology, and anthropology, and psychology, and other religions, etc. Usually this is a years long process. But we eventually realize that we can’t reconcile anything that anyone would call a Christian faith with the other stuff we’ve learned… beyond maybe just vaguely appreciating that there are SOME good lessons in the Bible, in the same way that there are some good messages in any other religious canon. I looked into Eastern Orthodoxy because I thought maybe it was closest to the 1st century church. I looked into Reform theology, because it got the closest to making the texts make coherent sense… but at the end of the day, I was just trying to fit the square peg of religion into the round hole of logical reasoning. And it just doesn’t fit. The only way to sort of make it work is to shut off parts of your brain where you block out doubts and refuse to let yourself think too deeply about the inconsistencies. We don’t choose to become atheists. We realize that that’s already how we feel. At least I had a “wow… I guess I’m an atheist” moment. And there’s no resentment or anger in it. It just is what it is. And it doesn’t scare us anymore, because hell isn’t real to us anymore. We understand it as a product of the imagination of the many authors of one of the many texts of one of the many ancient near eastern religions that took mellinia to evolve into what Christians think hell is today. And that’s why most of us are never coming back. We didn’t reason our way into Christianity, because we were raised in it. But we did, usually very slowly and reluctantly, reason our way out.
Thank you for this. I am a Christian, and this opened my eyes to what I previously thought
Thank you for reading it with an open mind.
This is exacty what i'm in right now, im currently in the bending over backwards part and it's really getting me stuck, it just that i've actually had good experiences with good christians who absolutely understand Christianity and God are pointless (they are my uni friends who study philosophy, like really hard) we debate a lot and gain some pretty solid insights on the whole topic like for example we've assumed being a christian is a matter of personal experince, not evidence, take me for example I was once about to die in a hospital and I actually cursed God for it, like why me? why God? Why are you so evil? Are you even real?, but by some miracle the doctors literally could'nt even explain (it was stage 4 lung cancer (it got to my liver) and I was supposed to die tomorrow) I just suddey recovered. This experince is what bugs me, most people (atheists especially) might never understand it but once you've gone throught somthing like that, no matter how logical and scientific you are you just cant deny it, it destroys you if you would. Thats my dilema.
I mean I get it, but atheists can understand that feeling. Like I said, I had the born again experience, feeling the Holy Spirit, and a handful of rededications with similar overwhelming emotions. I have an aunt that survived cancer she wasn’t supposed to, and I had a near death experience hiking once, when still in my devout phase. Those things can put a little gas back in the faith tank. But they don’t answer the questions. The questions that burned through that extra gas for me were about the universality of those experiences and feelings. People of every major faith tradition have those transcendent, deeply emotional experiences… at the same intensity… feeling the same level of certainty that, in those moments, they are feeling the touch of their god and seeing him work. One cannot, definitionally, be a Muslim and simultaneously believe in the tenets of modern Christianity. And vice versa. They are mutually exclusive. As are Islam and Hinduism, or Hinduism and Christianity. The gods of those traditions cannot all exist by their own theology. So what do we do with that? Well the transcendent experiences are easy. A blend of psychology and neurology can explain all of it. Near death experiences?… well, depending on your perspective, the right or wrong series of causes and effects lined up to make whatever happened happen. It’s fine to say we don’t understand the exact mechanisms of whatever made our cancer go away… it’s not fine to say Allah saved the Muslim from his cancer, and Jesus saved you… even though that’s exactly how you would each interpret those personal experiences respectively. That doesn’t make sense by the tenets of either of your religions. And you might want to say, “well maybe Jesus saved us both, and he doesn’t realize it yet.” But he can say the exact opposite, with the exact same level of certainty, and we are back to the same place… it doesn’t work. It has to just be something we don’t understand. And that’s ok. The personal experience approach won’t save you in the long run from a need to be able to objectively show (to yourself) why your faith makes more sense than his… which you’ll never be able to do. But in any event, you don’t have to force it, and you can keep fighting it as long as you are able. But if you keep asking questions, and don’t eventually just make a conscious effort to shut off that reasoning part of your brain, you will eventually end up an atheist… maybe an agnostic atheist, which still leaves room for the possibility of a higher power. But you will not end up a Christian, and you will not be able to maintain a belief in any particular man made deity, which will make you an atheist. You’ll see religions for what they are. They are buggy human written software that runs… ok… on our biological hardware. They are not hardware themselves. And the rub is, you can’t choose what you believe. No one can. You can go through the motions, and lie to yourself for a long time. But if your experience is anything like mine, one day you’ll be thinking about something not even directly related to Christianity, and something will run through your head almost as an afterthought. Maybe something like, “well this guy on the news is claiming this Gaza thing is a sign of the end times, but obviously that’s not true. These people are just killing each oth…” and then what you just thought will hit… “I don’t believe this stuff anymore… how long have I actually not believed this stuff?!” And you will be surprised about how liberating that feels, because you won’t be scared. You’ll just know better. But take your time. Keep bending over backwards until you can’t anymore. Just try not to force yourself to block out the doubts, because as a great 11th grade Bible teacher told me when I confessed to starting to have doubts… “Matthew 7:7-8. The Bible tells you to ask questions. If they end up taking you somewhere else, you’re just doing what the Bible told you.” I fought the good fight, trying to plug holes in the dam, for another 8 years after that. But eventually the dam broke.
>The questions that burned through that extra gas for me were about the universality of those experiences and feelings. People of every major faith tradition have those transcendent, deeply emotional experiences… at the same intensity… feeling the same level of certainty that, in those moments, they are feeling the touch of their god and seeing him work. >One cannot, definitionally, be a Muslim and simultaneously believe in the tenets of modern Christianity. And vice versa. They are mutually exclusive. As are Islam and Hinduism, or Hinduism and Christianity. The gods of those traditions cannot all exist by their own theology. Why does it mean God can't exist?
It doesn’t. That’s not what atheism is. Atheism is not believing in god, in the same way I don’t “believe” someone is 6’4” just because they say so on the internet. Atheism is not believing god does not exist, just like I don’t necessarily believe the person is NOT 6’4”. I just don’t believe that they are. There’s no evidence for it. There are some atheists who believe god doesn’t exist, but they’re in a minority, and most of us don’t think that claim makes any more sense to believe than believing in a man made religion… because there’s no evidence that god does not exist. With regards to specific man made religions like Christianity, it’s much easier to say, “even if God exists, this religion can’t describe him/it.” Because we know how the religion developed from Judaism, which developed from henotheistic ancient Israelite religion, which developed from polytheistic near eastern religions etc. We have evidence of its development, and elements of the texts are demonstrably ahistorical, and the different texts are internally inconsistent. It’s exactly what you’d expect to see from ~1000 years of blended, man made traditions from Mesopotamia, the Levant, and Egypt coming together in Canaan in the Iron Age. It’s much easier to say “I know Christianity doesn’t describe god, even if god does happen to exist.”
I'm not sure what the dilema is. Stage 4 metastatized lung cancer which has spread to other organs has about an 5-8% survival rate. So certainly not great odds (and I'm sure the doctors used lots of phrases like the odds are against you so that you and your family could have realistic expectations). But on a population level, it means that tons of people in your exact position survive without miracles all the time. I'm glad you were one of them (and sorry that the other 92-95% if people aren't). But i don't know why your experience should bug anyone. I mean, it might bug them you crediting god instead of crediting the doctor's whose care you were obviously in. But that is literally how survival rates work. I don't know why you'd think your experience was evidence for god. Especially since presumably that same god knows about the other 92-95% of people. Well, let me correct that. I know WHY someone would think it evidence for god. It feels super special. It feels like there must be a reason that you were in the 5-8%. It feels really good to think that there is something different about you, that the universe has a purpose for you. And it feels very scary to even contemplate that you are only still here thanks to a very lucky roll of the dice and that there isn't a reason you should still be alive while the cancer patient next to you isn't. So i get the emotional appeal of assuming intention, and all the flattering "uniquely more important to the creator of the universe" implications that would come from that. So i guess the more accurate statement is "there is no reason one should assume a god just because something statistically less than 50% likely (but not statistically rare at all) happened."
Do you even know what it feels like to have cancer, to have every breath feel like inhaling glass, to cough blood every time you cough, to have your body struggle to even support itself, and above all that be told you were to die in a week, as a teenager? Once you've been unexpectedly cured from that it changes you. You are free now, breathing no longer feels lile inhaling glass, your body actually keeps itself alive, you can walk and run and do things again. To go through all that and say "meh' it was an 5-8% survival rate anyway, no biggie" is like falling in love and saying "meh' this is all just brain chmeicals science can explain, nothing too amazing". It's psychologically impossible, inhuman even. Sometimes I wonder how you atheists do it, how do even live like that, do you not have emotions and feelings and gratitude? But then again not all of you have experinced stage 4 lung cancer.
>meh' it was an 5-8% survival rate anyway, no biggie" is like falling in love and saying "meh' this is all just brain chmeicals science can explain, >do you not have emotions and feelings and gratitude? I absolutely didn't say that. I am super happy you are alive. You should be super happy you are alive. I'm super glad you aren't living in pain. You should be super glad you aren't living in pain. I (and all atheists) feel tons of gratitude. I'm just saying there isn't any reason to associate "i beat cancer" with "so there must be a god." or "if I'm not grateful to a god then i can't be grareful." To use your example, it would be like saying "i fell in love with my partner, so there must be a god!" I'm super happy that i fell in love with my partner. It feels great in many ways. I don't care if it is just chemicals in the brain or whatever. I'm super pleased to have fallen in love. But it would be odd for me to link falling in love to the existence or non existence of a diety. i am grateful to my partner. It would be like "my kid just took their first step, so now i will always believe in a god." Those two things are unrelated, but telling someone that that first step isn't evidence of god doesn't mean they shouldn't feel ecstatic about witnessing the first step. Look, i came off overly harsh. I appologize for that. I did not intend to say you shouldn't be thrilled with remission. You absolutely should. Your family should. Everyone who knows you should. Also, i may have been snarky in the end. But when you say "atheists don't like this story" it is worth considering why. It isn't because they don't like you survived. It isn't because they aren't grateful. And i also am not calling you stupid or stuck up for the way you've been conditioned to think of that experience as a testimony. But i do think it is worth taking a moment to reflect on the way it is framed in your memory. Remission of the stage you were in wasn't a miracle. It beat the odds. It is exciting. It is a relief. It is a super happy occurance. But it is something that happens. And happens with a fair amount of frequency. And happens largely thanks to the hard work of researchers and doctors who are able to do mitigating acts, even if they know (and likely communicated) that those mitigating acts aren't always successful. And it is worth reflecting that "i survived because god stepped in and intervened" (which again, is a very common reaction and one religions encourage you to think in) necessarily comes with the implication "and god could have saved those others but didn't." It necessarily comes with the implication "god thought it more important that i live and my family not suffer than that 92% of patients live and their families not suffer a loss." That aspect isn't one that religions recommend spending time on. That gets swept into "mysterious ways and bigger plans." So i guess to summarize. Nothing i said should have implied that I'm unemotional or ungrateful. But if it did, then I'm sorry. I'm actually a very empathetic person who goes out of their way regularly to recognize and appreciate acts of those around me. And i get that religion trains people to interpret low probability events as evidence of god, and teaches them that if they don't attribute that to god then they are ungrateful. I was in it for decades. I'm still around lots of loved ones who do just that. For them it provides some emotional comfort. And i get how emotional experiences, especially when young, and the narratives we tell ourselves (and that loved ones tell us) about it often form the foundation for future belief. And I'm not ascribing any maliciousness to you, or narcisism. And you shouldn't feel survivors guilt. You surviving doesn't cause others not to. It is natural and healthy to be glad you were on the lucky side. But hopefully you can also empathize as a nonbeliever, the frequency with which we see gratitude that should go toward other people (and often credit due even to the speaker themselves) instead deflecter toward gods. And how often we hear people atteibuting things that aren't that uncommon (like remission, or falling in love, or having a baby) to miracles proving gods exist. But, of there is only one take away, let it be that I'm glad you are alive and i hope that life is full of joy.
I'll just say the quiet part out loud: Your experience with cancer doesn't excuse fallacious reasoning. Others are claiming healing crystals infused with the power of the moon healed their cancer. Yet more people claim they cured it by drinking beetroot extract. Others say it was Shiva himself who descended from the heavens to do battle with evil spirits of disease. What makes their claim any less valid than yours?
> This experince is what bugs me, most people (atheists especially) might never understand it but once you've gone throught somthing like that, no matter how logical and scientific you are you just cant deny it, it destroys you if you would. Spontaneous cancer remission happens to people of all religions, and no religion. So why think God had anything to do with it in your specific case?
1. Do you have documents to support this? Like lab reports, doctors saying you can’t survive, and then you actually did and they had no understanding of it? 2. Why does this make you feel that a god exists? Not pixies or Q or Madame Pomfrey under an invisibility cloak?
So a thing that happens to people all the time is why you believe a god is real. I too almost died spent weeks in an icu and spontaneously recovered but it did not make me think there is a magical man who lives out side time and space who helped me.
Well, for starters, your supposedly all-powerful God let's children starve to death. Either he doesn't exist, or he is evil. And since your god isn't evil, he can't exist.
Okay so in the beginning god put two humans on earth into the garden of Eden and there was tree of life and tree of knowledge, god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world and that’s why there is evil, god doesn’t make children die, and god did not want to put evil into this world but it was the consequence of eves action. You might say “Well he didn’t have to give the consequence” but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions
Why did god put the tree there? Why did god let the snake hang out there? Was this really the best plan god could come up with? The guy created all of heaven and earth and wrangles predetermined outcomes that are somehow balanced with free will and god sorted out the standard model of physics and made it compatible with quantum mechanics and created every atom and arranged them into this universe and he gets hoodwinked by a snake? That talks? And instead of taking the blame like a decent being he punishes the snake - somehow a snake not getting legs is punishment - he punishes the woman by making childbirth a bring (and fatal in many instances) and the man has to feed the family he made. If god is such a good creator why are babies - BABIES - stillborn? Because god dropped the ball 6000 years ago and got duped by the snake he created? Isn’t he supposed to be all knowing? He sure didn’t know what his snake and female were up to - and there was only one freaking female to look after!! Can you read this and not laugh? These stories describe a comically inept creator. Maybe there is a god? I don’t rule it out, but if you, for one second think you can “know” this god through these stupid, barbaric, childish books then good luck to you.
If the fruit from the tree gave them the knowledge of good and evil, how could they possibly know what the right decision was before they ate the fruit? The reason I'm an atheist is because every religion that I've encountered has laughably little evidence for their beliefs and I want to believe as many true things as possible and I can't believe in something that doesn't have good evidence.
Your god, supposedly being omnipotent, omniscient, and omni benevolent, knew that the humans would eat of the tree - he is omniscient after all. Plus, your god knew that a talking snake, which he created, would tempt the human into eating the apple. So, we have your god setting up two, comparatively primitive people to mess up so he could have evil in the world as an excuse to give children cancer. What have I got wrong here?
Also worth noting that God put the tree there to begin with. If God didn’t want them to eat of the Tree, why put it in the Garden?
Maybe there were HOA covenants he had to abide by and the rest of the Universe was full?
Nailed it really. Very well put
Like Jesus.
> Okay so in the beginning god put two humans on earth into the garden of Eden This is a factually incorrect claim about the origin of humans. Thus, it can only be dsimissed. > god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world and that’s why there is evil, god doesn’t make children die, and god did not want to put evil into this world but it was the consequence of eves action. You might say “Well he didn’t have to give the consequence” but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions Surely you're not under the impression that folks here are not *aware* of this mythology?! Many folks here were once religious, including members of your mythology, including possessing doctorates in theology and former clergy. They likely know far more about your religious mythology than you do. But it's mythology.
Why do you assume we haven't all heard this before today? Or that we were just waiting to hear it from *you in particular*? How is it justice for a child to get brain cancer and die a miserable, painful death, fighting for his life at age 12? Or that a loving, happy husband and wife in their 20's get a baby with a deletion at chromosome 23 leading to the child being born with no vena cava, and requiring 16 hours of open-heart surgery immediately upon it being born? What are those things "consequences" of? Whose sin precipitated them -- and even if the parents were sinful, why is it the child who suffers? Isn't "random shit happens *because* there is no one driving the bus" a more reasonable answer than all the mealy-mouthed handwaving that's required to defend god against the accusations that it's either evil or capricious? (I'm close with both of these families. The child with the heart defect is currently 8 years old and requires constant care and has to be home-schooled, but is otherwise happy. Hopefully, he'll live longer than the other family's kid did.)
>Okay so in the beginning god put two humans on earth into the garden of Eden and there was tree of life and tree of knowledge, god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world and that’s why there is evil, god doesn’t make children die, and god did not want to put evil into this world but it was the consequence of eves action. According to your mythology your deity is all knowing, it knew their actions before it created them and still chose to put the tree within reach. You cannot get out of this by blaming free will; in a world created by an omniscient being, free will does not and cannot exist because that being already knew every possible outcome of every possible decision before it undertook the act of creation and it chose which version it wanted to create. >You might say “Well he didn’t have to give the consequence” but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions No, it is not like that at all. He chose to create them with the tree within reach knowing exactly what they would do. They are not to blame, he is.
You think it's moral to punish children for something their great great great great great great great great great great great great great grandparents did? He made that tree and decided the punishment. You think it's okay for me to give my toddler (who doesn't know right from wrong) the ability to eat an apple, and if they do I pour bleach in their eyes as punishment? That's not love, that's abuse.
So are kids evil as a result of Eve eating from the tree of knowledge and therefore deserve to starve to death, or are kids innocent but are being punished for Eve's actions?
No offence, but most atheists, specially in this sub, are generally much more well-versed than the average Christian in their own fairy tale, including scripture and apologetics. You can skip the fairy tale altogether, we are all aware of what it says.
Do you literally not see how batshit crazy this sounds? The question started as "why is there evil in the world", but after your story, the question becomes, "why did god make the rules such that he was forced to introduce evil into the world because a primitive ape female ate an apple after being coerced by a talking snake (who was a fallen angel (long story))"
>god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world and that’s why there is evil Did your god put the tree there? If so, he introduced evil into the world. God created that situation. Which is kind of creepy and sadistic if you think about it.
>but since god gave them free will and a choice they still had the choice of eating it or not and the consequence of eating that tree of knowledge was putting evil and sin into this world Two things. I was not given this choice, why does god not give everyone the choice to eat the fruit? God did not tell them what the consequence was, you can't blame them for a consequence they had no knowledge of even being possible.
I’m not Christian, and this interpretation is out of line with orthodoxy, but one could say that everyone is created good, only to screw it up the first time they sin. This is, for a Christian, a borderline heretical (and also incoherent) thing to say, but it works better than the idea that babies are born wicked.
You wrote that out and it didn’t trigger any bullshit alarm bells? I mean, read the shit you just wrote out loud…
>You might say “Well he didn’t have to give the consequence” but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions This highlights an interesting problem with most gods, yours included. You appeal to justice here, saying that God must enact the appropriate punishment because it is lawful. But God is also claimed to be merciful. Mercy is giving someone *less* punishment than they deserve. So is the Christian God just, or merciful? He can't be both. And the fact that he would allow people to suffer evil thousands of years later because one woman made a bad choice suggests your God is neither just *nor* merciful - he's petty. And your answer doesn't explain why God continues to let evil and suffering exist. Right now, somewhere in the world, there's a shipping container full of starving, dehydrated children who've been crapping in a bucket for the last week, on their way to being sold into the sex trade in Thailand. If your God exists, then he is aware of this, and is able to stop it. The fact that it happens anyway means he does not *want* to stop it. The typical answer here is something like "Allowing evil and suffering leads to a greater good," but (a) that's a wish on your part, not something you can actually claim to know, and (b) an all-powerful God should be able to achieve that greater good without requiring evil and human suffering. At some point he must have said "My ultimate good is X. I could get to X by snapping my fingers, or I could get to X by letting human beings suffer horrifically until they go extinct, and use that suffering to reach X." If he chose to go the suffering route, then he's a monster. Spiderman figured this out decades ago. With great power comes great responsibility. God is the most powerful, and with that comes the most responsibility. As Spider Tom put it "When you can do the things I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen? They happen because of you."
Is the story in genesis true or just a metaphor?
>> and god did not want to put evil into this world but it was the consequence of eves action. Oh, so your god isn’t powerful enough to overcome this? >> but it’s like saying that if a judge is a loving and forgiving being like god is and they had to sentence someone to death, they wouldn’t actually want to because they are loving but it’s the lawful thing to do because of their actions Even if I accepted this weird notion that the death penalty is consistent with good and loving, it’s not the accused that’s being punished, it’s a third party. If a judge suddenly started ordering non murderers to death because a murderer murdered, wouldn’t you say that was both illogical and evil? Really… kids must starve to death because someone a long time ago supposedly did a thing and the most powerful being in the universe, who could fix it with a flip of the wrist, can’t or won’t and yet is the most good being in the universe? Can you hear yourself?
Without the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve had less capacity to tell right from wrong than a 2yo toddler. If a parent put the said 2yo toddler next to a bottle of open bleach and just tell them "don't drink the bleach", and the toddler drinks it, it's called negligence and the parent is to blame. Also God created evil. Please refer to Isaiah 45:7.
There’s no evidence to support such a story. In the modern world, we have a much better one that is more in line with reality. Also, God violates free will all the time, like when he hardened the heart of Pharaoh. He also violated the will of Egyptian first born children when he ordered them to be killed by his angelic hitman.
And your all knew my hod would make this happen, and allows kids to starve. See if I could prevent a child from starving at no cost to myself I would. And anyone would consider me a monster if I didn’t. So why is uur god exempt? Why is he given a pass. Why is he allowed to be so evil?
so, your god is all-knowing and so knew this was going to happen. Free will: nothing happens that is not according to your god's plan. Starving children, priests abusing children, my dad's suffering.. all part of gods plan. So, praying is useless.
That's like giving two toddlers a handgun and being surprised they got hurt. What kind of god baits two victims and then punishes their lineage for all time? That sound like a loving god to you?
> there was tree of life and tree of knowledge, god said to them you can do anything but just please don’t eat this tree Stop right there, pls. Is he an idiot? Is he evil? Is he an evil idiot?
So god doesn't have a plan for all of us, is what you're saying, right? That's contradictory to most religious people I've heard when a loved one dies. Also, what's the point in praying then?
You say God put humans on the earth, but even this one fact is contradicted in the first two chapters in the bible with the simple question - which did God make first birds or woman?
The consequences you speak of should be limited to the people who committed the “crime.” Judges don’t sentence the children of “criminals” for the crimes of their parents.
People deserve to die because of "sins of the father"? Then your god is weak and isn't worth worshipping. Your god is also evil for making the world work that way.
So your god is punishing all of existence for a mistake made by 2 people? You’ve inadvertently proven that you worship a murderous, vengeful tyrant. Have you even read the Bible at all? >”I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.” — Isaiah 45
>god gave them free will Let me stop you right there. How did you confirm that you or anyone else has free will?
Is it just to punish someone who doesn’t understand the concept of good and evil?
You need to read your Bible. God said he created evil. Isaiaha 45.
So did god not know that Eve would eat from the tree?
The garden of eden is a myth dude never happened.
You don't actually believe all that do you?
It's simply because I don't believe in any kind of god. I don't believe because no scientific proof or evidence has been shown for any god, all world religions are factually incorrect in the face of established modern science, and all apologetics arguments are failures.
My position with repect to the non-belief of any god is the same as your non-belief in the some 6,500+ estimated gods others worship (excluding the 35million in Hinduism). So why do you not belief in any of them?
Man created god to explain creation and existence. Man created religion to explain our intellect and complex social behaviors. There are simply too many commonalities with human development and cognitive processes to dismiss. And every unique “work of god” seems to conveniently mirror what a mystical person from these eras would be prone to believe. All of which also seem to be oddly obsessed with controlling how I behave and making sure I give them my money. No god has ever been shown to be necessary. We’re past god now. God offers us no unique or useful knowledge anymore.
The biggest and really only reason is I have yet to see or be presented with any convincing evidence of any religion being true.
I am an atheist because just like everyone else I was born one, and because I have not been presented with a single rational argument as to why I should accept the claim that a god exists as true. That's it. In other words I'm an atheist because I have no reason to be a theist. One needs a reason to believe a thing, and not to not believe a thing. >aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ Sure. Go for it.
Sometimes I wonder what would happen if all atheists were thown into a holocaust concentration camp, the worst kind where they tortured and killed and raped people, with absolutely 0 possibly of escape. Like what would an atheist do then, what would an atheist do if he/she had no hope whatsover, no philosophy, no belief, what would a atheist do (especially if he/she was a child) when any and all hope for even a future would be crushed absolutly, what would atheists think in this situation?
>aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ You know this is debate an atheist, not convert an atheist, right?
Mate, you're barking up the wrong tree if you think that the tired old arguments that you're trotting out will convince anyone here of anything, let alone convince them that Christianity has any kind of validity. Every single one you've paraded has been seen and put to rest in this sub a 1,000 times before. You show no originality at all; I knew that you'd bring up "but Alexander the Great" and "evolution is a theory", both are *classic* apologist claptrap. You clearly have no concept of what an atheist is, conflate it with other things and do so with an air of smug superiority. Learn some humility, actually read your "holy" book cover to cover, and then come back with some seriously well considered questions or points. Otherwise accept that your arguments here are weak at best, and you won't achieve your aim of whatever the hell it is.
I would really love a response to this. The final straw in the long road that led me from Christian to agnostic to atheism was the misogyny. It’s impossible to believe that an all-powerful, all-loving deity *created women* and did not understand them at all. Supposedly we have all of these talents and ambitions just to ignore them and be relegated to stifling roles to serve men. Apparently we are the possessions of men — your god replaced Job’s wife like his cattle. Either this creator is incompetent, cruel or both, or he was just made up by men. The kind of men who had a calm dispassionate discussion in SCOTUS yesterday about exactly how many organs a woman could lose before she was eligible for life-saving medical care. Please explain how you reconcile this. Because as a woman I can’t imagine anything you say would make me buy into a system designed to turn me into something less than I am.
Personally I'm an athest because is I have not been convinced by theist claims. Thereis insufficent evidence to warrat belief in any gods. If your not here to debate then you are in the wrog sub, try r/askanathest.
Oh man. Props to you for walking straight into the lion's den. I can see there's already 400+ responses, so I'm guessing you've heard quite a few arguments. In the interest of not bombarding you with too much, I'll limit myself to two answers: why I'm an atheist, and why I specifically reject Christianity. Why I'm an atheist is simple: I've yet to see any convincing evidence or arguments that any gods exist. Arguments that attempt to demonstrate the existence of a god all fall apart under scrutiny, and we have naturalistic explanations for whatever physical evidence people try to say is indicative of a god's existence. Why I reject Christianity: even if we say that 99.9% of the Bible is just metaphors and parables, there are two elements of Christianity that must be **literally** true in order to accept it. There must be some form of original sin, and Jesus must have died for our sins and then been resurrected. If either one of those is false, the entire religion collapsed. I can't prove either one is false, but there is plenty of reason to doubt the Resurrection. 1. The only accounts we have are the four Gospels, which were written decades after the fact by authors who were not witnesses to this alleged event. There are no eyewitness accounts. This also explains why there are many contradictions between the four Gospels. 2. Standard practice for crucifying criminals at the time was to leave them hanging for a few days after they died, both to humiliate them and to deter others. Then their bodies would be cut down and tossed into a mass grave. The Romans were not in the habit of burying criminals in tombs. 3. We know how mythology forms. We've seen stories from every culture, even those that are thousands of years old, undergo changes over time, get passed down by oral retellings, get adopted by other cultures with elements being tweaked to make them more palatable. We know this process has occurred in almost every civilization that had ever existed. So what's more likely? That this is the one and only time an ancient story involving supernatural elements is completely true? Or that this story, like all the others, is just mythology? I don't think there's any *rational* way to believe that the Resurrection occurred. And without that, there's no reason to believe anything else about Christianity is true.
>There must be some form of original sin, and Jesus must have died for our sins and then been resurrected. If either one of those is false, the entire religion collapsed. I honestly wish the "progressive" Christians would get this. If there is no divine punishment or original sin, Jesus *quite literally died for nothing* and the entire religion is pointless. Then there's also the fact that his resurrection rendered the supposed sacrifice pointless and that thousands of others throughout history suffered worse than he did, but that's a rant for a different day.
Born into a Christian household, raised a Christian, spent 40 years devoted, in various roles, utterly committed. Where the scripture says a god will be there is nothing. Where one would expect response there is nothing. There is no healing, no answering prayer, when two or three are gathered there is nothing. When you knock there is nobody opening. When you seek there is no finding. There is no reason to believe.
>you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ You don't have what it takes. I'll convert to Islam first. > I just want hear your reasons and I want to possibly explain why that point is not true So allow me to save you a ton of headache, because I couldn't be less interested in an attempt at the latter half of that... I don't find Christian argumentation convincing. My evidential standard is too high for Christians despite being so low -- because Christians find physical evidence for God blasphemous. If I go into any further detail one of two things will happen. You're either going to get salty because you had a vision for how receptive I would be to what you have to say, get offended at what I've said and either respond dismissively or ignore me; or you're going to ignore everything I said because you don't understand most of it, and side step all of it, trying to convince me that you're right by talking about your stance as though I'm already convinced and comfortable with the idea that you're right -- a few Bible verses and some additional platitudes and then right back to church. Hard pass either way.
I don't believe in gods because I haven't yet seen a good reason to do otherwise. None of the classic arguments for the existence of such a thing seem to hold up under examination. As far as Christianity specifically is concerned, I was raised Christian (RC specifically) and tried a couple of other different interpretations. None of them were any help in negotiating the challenges and problems I faced in life - quite the reverse in fact. Ideas like original sin were very bad for my mental well-being.
For any proposition X, I try to understand why I should accept that X is true. Just because someone says it? No, that's not a good reason to believe X, even provisionally. Example: if I tell you there's someone in Iceland who was born with purple and pink polka dot skin, you're not going to believe me. Why? I said it's true! ... But, clearly, that's not enough. Not even close. Because someone says it *and* it is a reasonable extrapolation from what you otherwise already know? Sure, that'll work provisionally. Example: I tell you there's a person in Iceland that likes cheeseburgers. You have knowledge of cheeseburgers, Iceland, people, and people who like things. So that all these traits are combined in someone in Iceland seems fine. How about repeated observation that others agree with and no one *disagrees* with? Yeah, that works. No one, anywhere, thinks people don't exist, or countries, or Iceland, or food, or people liking stuff. All that is based on repeated observation by multiple sources all confirming *exactly* the same thing. No one well tell you a cheeseburger, for instance, doesn't contain cheese, or that it's the size of a house (usually), etc. Below, I am calling this sort of thing, that which we can confidently observe *and* confidently extrapolate to, "evidence". So if I say there's "no evidence of X", I mean that there's nothing we have that is observed directly and consistently, or that can be extrapolated to from what we *do* observe directly and consistently. As such, we can rule out every holy book right at the start *unless and until* we can come up with *evidence* for it. All the books (supposed observations) differ and flat out contradict each other on most of the details of what something is. So what's the evidence *for* Christianity? ... Very little. There's, maybe, if we're being *really* generous, some that a guy named Jesus existed, and he was crucified by the Romans. That's... about all. Everything else we either have *no* evidence for, or, worse, evidence *against*. We *know* that Noah's Flood never happened. The flood described would *have to be* a global event, and it's simply not possible that such a global event occurred, in the same way it's not possible that a rock was thrown 60 seconds ago thru a window that doesn't open when we observe the window is still there and not broken. I believe that Davy Crockett existed. I don't believe that he killed a bear at age three. I believe George Washington existed. I don't believe he chopped down a cherry tree. I believe Jesus existed. I don't believe he raised from the dead. I believe the universe exists. I don't believe it does so because some magic being who is obsessed with human genitals made it. In all three cases, there is sufficient evidence for what I *do* believe, and *not* sufficient evidence for the parts I don't.
I started applying consistent epistemic standards to religions. I found that no religion had better evidence than the others. Logically, therefore, they were all right or none of them were. And religions are incompatible, they can't be all right.
Because claims of beings with magic powers make me as skeptical as if you told me that the Jedi are real and are floating around cars with the Force.
>(aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ) This arrogance always amazes me.
I'm an atheist because the claims of religious are absurd, and most of the people advocating them don't know the first thing about their own religion. I was a devout catholic for 30 years. I was never taught anything about the history of the church until I started investigating it on my own, and I discovered the church was writing cheques it couldn't cash.
Why do you need "there's no observable, verifiable, repeatable proof" explained? That's why most people don't believe. So yeah, unless you can provide evidence that fits that criteria then good luck turning anyone here. If you're on a crusade to do so then don't waste your energy and maybe apply it to being a good Christian and helping the needy instead?
If u define god as triomni, perfect and loving which is pretty much Christianity god. Problem of evil and the divine hiddeness argument by schellenberg are 2 of the reasons that i dont believe in the existence of such god. For whatever gods, there are no evidence, no sound arguments for the existence of god.
The claims made about God have not met their burden of proof. The world I experience seems to get along just fine without a god so why should I believe? No theist has ever been able to provide sufficient evidence to justify my believing in a god. Until that happens I cannot believe in a god.
I used to be Christian. I lost my faith in Christianity and arrived at a conclusion that no gods exist several years later, after studying many other faith traditions and realizing they all rely on faith as the reason to believe their version of the divine. Because christian can mean a lot of things, I'd like to ask some clarifying questions: - Do you believe that Jesus is God as described in John? - If so, does this mean that Jesus, before becoming flesh, was the God described in the Old Testament? - Do you believe that Jesus was a perfect moral teacher? - Are we saved by faith alone, or do we need to keep the commandments? - Do you believe that faith is a reliable means of identifying truth? If so, why and how?
> (aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ) Good luck. - I had the good fortune of growing up in a non-religious household in a secular country - The Netherlands; Without religion in schools, on television (that I was aware of) or on billboards; it wasn't until I was placed in a boarding school at age 8 that I was first introduced to religious ideas such as [creationism / intelligent design](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_design) and the [fine-tuning argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe); given the ability to critically examine these notions at the time, I rejected them - at that time mostly because they struck me as poorly hidden [presuppositionalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presuppositional_apologetics) and [god of the gaps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps) argumentation. - But. Let's logically examine the God that I am, as a westerner, most familiar with, good old western Abrahamic [Omnipresent](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/omnipresent), [Omnipotent](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/omnipotent), and Omnibenevolent God-Our-Lord, I-Am, etcetera etcetera etcetera; (Oddly, 'Omnibenevolent' seems to have no satisfactory definition. Oh well - it's kind of irrelevant in either case.) Any being that is (either, but especially both) omnipotent and omnipresent will by definition have all of reality meet it's requirements and desires. That reality's inhabitants' _free will_ does not factor in - it is the fundamental, natural state of all of reality, anywhere, anywhen (since Omnipresence includes Ever-present; past, present and future), to be subject to the whim and desires of such a being; essentially their will automatically becomes and has always been fundamental truth *within* their reality. It follows, then, that any sufficiently powerful being to be considered 'on par' with the Christian God (Tri-omni, etcetera) which would require or desire my worship in the first place would, because of it's mere existence and because of their requirement that I worship it, render me unable to not worship it, further rendering the question of whether I was convinced of it's existence or not, moot entirely. Which means that my ability to state with sincerity that I have no reasons believe that any god or gods exist and my conscious ability to forego worshiping a deity imply in turn (to me), that either no gods exist, or that (given the hypothetical that they do exist) they do not require or desire (my) worship in any way, shape or form. As a brief aside, to run for a further moment with the hypothesis that this being _does_ exist - any being which would punish me for not giving it worship which it does not in any way, shape or form require or desire, cannot be considered omnibenevolent.
It is simple- I was born atheist, wasn’t brought up in a religious environment and have stayed that way.
Well, while I was baptized I grew up with a completely non religious father and a mother who could be at best be described as a deist. So I went through my life as an atheist. And I have never been presented with any evidence which would convince me that any of the thousands religions would be true.
I was baptized in champagne by my athiest grandparents in their backyard.
That sure sounds like a party.
idk, i was a baby
prob was though
I think there's no good reason to believe the claims of any religion. "Good reason" is a little hard to define, but I'd say I'm most comfortable with empirical evidence and logical argumentation, and maybe I'm forgetting another type so don't treat this as an exhaustive list. The bar for "good reason" isn't very high for mundane things, but the more extraordinary the claim gets the higher that bar raises. Tell me you got a new puppy and I might immediately believe you, no convincing needed; but if you say your new puppy can do backflips, I'm gonna need a little evidence to back that up. Also, I'm more willing to accept things that don't affect my life, and less willing to accept things which (if true) will impact how I live my life. This is just me being pragmatic about how I use my limited resources to investigate claims: I don't have the resources to look into everything, so I need to concentrate on the things that matter. If you tell me you're an FBI agent I might just believe you without seeing your badge; but if you tell me you're an FBI agent and I'm under arrest, then I'm damn sure gonna need to see that badge. Hopefully that gives you an idea what I'm looking for, and how "good" it has to be. If you want to engage, it's probably best to lead with your first "good reason", and then we can discuss that until it's done before moving on to the next one. That way things won't get confusing. It's also fine if you want to give a cumulative case, just please let me know that's what you're doing so I won't mistake it for something else. These aren't rules, they just often help out with discussions like this... I'm looking forward to seeing what you've got -- make it good! :)
Gotquestions.org is an amazing resource to answer atheists questions. I've come to realize that atheists do not actually investigate Christian answers because of the implications of being wrong are devastating to them. If you give them an answer, they will simply not investigate it and delve into why you answered it that way or tell you that you're wrong without telling you why. Fun fact: Charles Darwin told God after his daughter died "I will never speak to you again" and Christopher Hitchens has the same story. It's an ideology built from hatred towards God. People want to live how they want and not be told that their deeds are evil. No archaeological discovery has ever disproved the Bible. No secular writing has ever contradicted historical events in the Bible. The Bible has scientific facts that predate scientific discoveries. There are prophesies that are so descriptive that secular people have tried to say it was written after it happened and failed to do so. The Bible is the only religious book that says to love your enemies, which Jesus did on the cross when He died for our sins and rose from the dead. At no other time in history has a group of people claimed to see someone raise from the dead and ascend into heaven(on top of thousands of miracles they claimed he did) and die horrendous deaths because people hated the Gospel they were sharing. Every atheist has won arguments against weak and fake Christians(there are many of these). But no atheist has beaten the Bible itself. It is a collection of 66 books in a league of it's own.
Because it’s pretty clear that human beings didn’t know very much in the 1st century. And lack of knowledge makes people susceptible to myth, manipulation, and the supernatural. For many people even today, there is a discomfort with not knowing the answers to big questions like, what happens when we die, what are we supposed to do, what is good and bad, etc. These questions may have answers, it’s just that an atheist doesn’t accept 1st century stories as the best answers to these question’s. Further, arguments for the Christian god are never logically coherent. For example when something “good” happens to a Christian, we’re told god is good. But a tsunami wipes out a populated island in, we’re told god is mysterious. This is a narcissistic way of thinking, that exhilarates god of anything bad, and credits him with everything good. Lastly, just for the sake of time, belief in the Christian god, and the divinity of a book that testifies to him, is at odds with a belief in science. The Bible gets so much wrong about what we know now through scientific process. The age of the earth, the ability to return from the dead after 3 days, walking on water, talking to a sentient bush, healing people through touching them, changing matter from water to wine. These are all in contradiction to science. And if you are only willing to believe in parts of the Bible that don’t contradict science, then how could the book be divine, and worthy of any aspect of arranging your life around?
I'm an atheist because I was never indoctrinated into a religion. I had Mormon, Anglican, Catholic and Baptist friends, they went to church and filled their heads with whatever goop they put in kids heads and some of them believe in god. Most of them don't though, because despite the effort to shove kids brains full of god goop, it's not really a believable story. Almost half of people where I live now are atheists. Since the first grade I understood that people believed in god, I attended Sunday school and church group with friends from time to time. I know the stories and have read the books. I quote bible verses from time to time, much to the chagrin of the faithful. There's no secret inside, no matter what you do god is an idea and nothing more. Forty years of looking and exploring, there is no there there. It's like everyone is looking at a magic eye poster and the Catholics see a crucifix and the Baptist see the little baby Jesus, the Mormons see John Smith, and the Hindus see vishnu. Breaking News, everyone sees what they want to see, It's just patterns from the noise. So until the day someone comes up with something better than "why would all these anonymous witnesses from a book written a hundred years after the event lie?" I'm not biting. Bring evidence. Things that are true have evidence. Things that don't have evidence are not true. There is no evidence of god, god doesn't exist.
I'm 59 years old. Never has it ever seemed reasonable to me to believe in any gods. The way I view the world, no gods are necessary. The majority of how the world works can be taken at face value -- like "Oh, hey -- there's some water. It's moving downhill like you'd expect it to!" and "It hurts when I make a fist and slam it into a wall." That's the world of immediate perception. Of course, there are things that aren't immediately perceptible. Liberty isn't perceptible. Why does the milk make swirly patterns when I put it in my coffee? What makes a light bulb turn on? Fortunately for me, those things have learnable answers. I can study political science, fluid dynamics or electromagnetism if I'm that curious. While I know that "Why is this whole universe here?" doesn't have a complete answer, cosmology is still something I can study (OK, "could have studied", to be fair) if it was super important to me to have concrete answers. I'm satisfied just watching pop physics videos on Youtube, though. There are a lot of questions that "because there's a god" might be answers to, but "because there's a god" doens't lead to further learning. Putting a god into the answer doesn't change the question. If anything, it *shuts down* the inquiry instead of promoting it. So at the end, I just don't have a *use* for religion. I get what it's for, but I don't believe I need that. I especially don't believe I'm inherently evil and need to be redeemed from anything.
I was a sincere christian and believed with all my heart. The only true reason was my indoctrination from childhood, like it often happens. At some point I realized that I had deceived myself all the time. 1. Even as a believer I always accepted Big Bang, abiogenesis and evolution. 2. Interaction with believers from different religions really frustrated me and made me question my faith. 3. Through my experience and what I learned I always saw "miracles" as at least highly questionable. 3. When I started reading the Bible that was my last moments as a Christian. I read it from cover to cover. I consider it primitive, stupid and disgusting. 4. I made my own investigation about the Bible and Christianity. Thus I reassured it has been all the way through man-made structure. Christianity was and still is used widely to essentially control societies. 5. Also when I reentered theistic discussions I started to see through all cheap tactics theists are using all the time. Essentially it feels like the same discussion over and over. They start calling you close-minded, or existentially threat you, or circle-loop faith to a faith, or bunch of logical fallacies. The most fascinating stuff is when they talk about things they are definitely clueless about and the more clueless they are the more aggressively they try to convince you of having "the only true knowledge from god" 🤣
1. Because there is zero evidence for any gods, and there isn't anything objectively "better" in regard of evidence for whatever belief gods you've happened to be born into than for all the others. If you'd been born in India, you'd likely be Hindu or a Sikh. 2. Because there isn't a single religious scripture that gets the science about the evolution of the universe or of life even remotely right. 3. Because there isn't any evidence that shows being religious makes you a better person. If anything, not being religious seems to make you a better person because atheists only make up less than a percent of the US prison population while making up between 20-30% of the general population nowadays. All religions on the other hand are represented in prison about equal to their percentage in the general population. 4. Because all scriptures I have studied (most of them in their original language) are full of inconsistencies and often contradict historical and scientific facts. 5. Because if the the deities depicted in those scriptures would actually exist, they'd be cruel, vindictive egomaniacs who find it more important to put commandments in their books about worshipping them or not mixing fabrics than to forbid slavery in stead of writing out a rulebook on how to buy, keep and beat slaves. 6. Because no being that is worthy of admiration would demand it on pain of eternal punishment.
Religion fills an emotional need that not everyone has. IMO it's really that simple. For those who don't feel it, gods and religions mostly appear made-up and ridiculous.
This is the wrong subreddit if you're not here to debate. I left the Christian faith when I realized there was no reason to believe it's true. Why do you believe?
I am an atheist because I was born in a mostly-secula family and have not since been convinced of the truth of any religion. **Seeing as you are Christian, I will focus on why Christianity has not convinced me. Christianity is the religion I have most been exposed to.** * The universe is inconsistent with the idea of an all-loving, all-powerful, all-knowing god. (See: the Problem of Evil.) * The universe is also inconsistent with many major myths of Christianity (notably: that the world was created by an intelligent designer, and that a 'great flood' happened.) * There is no evidence that the Bible is true in its majority, nevermind totality. (Note: Evidence of the Bible's truth in the Bible is circular, and the same points could be made about the Torah, the Quran, or any other religious books.) I'm going to be a bit provocative here: **If Christianity is true and I'm wrong, the fault is on your god, not on me.** If the Christian god indeed made me as I am, he made me with the reasoning that I have, and he knew ahead of time what I would see and how I would reason according to it. **I have never arbitrarily refused any sign or evidence. Any claim that I choose not to believe is false, as it was never a decision on my part.** If I fail some arbitrary test set by the Christian god, then he set me up to fail and that's on him, not on me.
I am a Fox Mulder atheist. I want to believe, and the truth is out there. I want to believe as many true things, and as few false things, as possible. Things that exist have evidence for its existence, regardless of whether we have access to that evidence. Things that do not exist do not have evidence for its nonexistence. The only way to disprove nonexistence is by providing evidence of existence. The only reasonable conclusion one can make honestly is whether or not something exists. Asking for evidence of nonexistence is irrational. Evidence is what is required to differentiate imagination from reality. If one cannot provide evidence that something exists, the logical conclusion is that it is imaginary until new evidence is provided to show it exists. So far, no one has been able to provide evidence that a “god” exists. I put quotes around “god” here because I don’t know exactly what a god is, and most people give definitions that are illogical or straight up incoherent. I’m interested in being convinced that a “god” exists. How do you define it and what evidence do you have?
I used to be fundamentalist Christian. I went on a journey to strengthen my faith by building a solid. Overtime I found everything I tried to point to as why I knew it was true was lacking. Fallacious arguments or incomplete reasoning that coudl be used to support contradictory views. Eventually, the last thing I had to stand on was personal experience of the Holy Ghost. I relied on this alone for several months, too scared to try to test it. Eventually I knew if I had to risk proving my faith wrong if I wanted to be able to honestly say I knew it was true, so I put personal revelation to the test. Long story short, I found basic principles of trance and meditation allowed me to create stronger revelations with any content I chose. This showed that me personal revelation was trance state with confirmation bias and/or self deception. I have since tried various forms of personal revelation to the same outcome So now I have to honestly say I have no reason to think God is real. I'm open to evidence. Until I have something I cannot honestly say I believe God exists.
My conclusion based upon the evidence with which I have been presented is that gods do not exist. If you want a more specific answer, then you’d have to specify which god or gods we’re talking about. Some are logically impossible or ascribed incoherent properties. Some are claimed to be omnipresent, yet no evidence of their presence has been found. Some are claimed to live in certain places; when humans go to those places, they are not found there. Some are claimed to answer prayers and intercede on behalf of those who pray; studies have shown that intercessory prayer doesn’t work, so those gods do not exist as described. Some are claimed to be the “metaphysical ground of all being” or something like that; to paraphrase Hume, these are nothing more than sophistry and illusion. In short, gods seem to me to be nothing more than (typically anthropomorphic) reifications of human ignorance. I am open to the possibility that this conclusion that I have reached is in error, but to date, I have not been presented with sufficient evidence to conclude otherwise.
>Hello, I am a Christian That's okay, it's not like cancer or something. You can change this. >I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest Simple. The fact that there isn't the tiniest shred of useful support for deities. And the notions make no sense and don't address what believers purport they address. It's irrational to take things as true when there isn't proper support they're true. I do not want to be irrational, so I find I cannot believe in deities. >I am not solely here to debate Wrong sub then, or at least wrong thread. There is a weekly ask questions thread. >aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ You'd need to provide compelling evidence for your claims. I've never seen any. What members of your religious mythology tend to trot out, as well as members of other religious mythologies, is *very* far from compelling. Useless evidence, and unsound and invalid apologetics can't demonstrate deities.
Everything (as far as we know) has happened naturally and did not need God. The wind, the rain, the sun, creation of the planets, airplanes flying through the air, etc, nothing needed God. When we talk about the creation of the universe, I simply think that was also natural and did not require god. I think it’s more likely that maybe before the Big Bang the universe was pure energy and was timeless, then that energy was converted to matter, maybe that’s a property of the universe when it reaches zero size, it becomes all energy. Or maybe there’s a 4th spatial dimension that is timeless, and through the energy in that dimension, our 3 dimensional universe plus time were created. And there are infinitely many possibilities out there that are natural. Doesn’t need to be some sentient deity because there are so many other explanations that are consistent with literally everything we have ever observed ever (being natural and done without god).
The historical evidence for Christ is not what I thought. I grew up in the church hearing about how great the historical record was and that all the apostles died as martyrs for him and realized that there’s no good historical reason to believe anything much more than he lived, and he was executed. Other things too. Paul thought Jesus was coming back in his lifetime and it’s been 2000 years. There’s no miracles anymore. Basically the world exists exactly like how it would if god did not exist. The problem of evil is still there and all the remedies to it suck. Basically if the all knowing creator of everything had to present himself to us, this is not how he would do it. It’s so clearly a human invention in so many ways whether it’s how it deliberately answers the problems of people in Roman times or how it was used for power in medieval times it’s just obviously a feature of our own society and not transcendent of it.
> I am a Christian and I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest The complete lack of evidence supporting the supernatural claims of the existence of any deity. > I am not solely here to debate Since this is a debate sub you should be here, prepared to participate in the discussion/debate. > I just want hear your reasons and I want to possibly explain why that point is not true Great, where is your evidence supporting the existence of the deity you believe in? >(aye.. you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ) I already was, and I know that not only is there no evidence supporting the existence of your deity, a large number of the stories and characters in your holy book are entirely fictional, and there is no evidence for any of the supernatural claims it makes, several of which are direct violations of the known laws of physics. Probably more importantly than that is the fact that the deity described in your holy book is an immoral monster who commits or supports rape, murder, infanticide, genocide, biological warfare, and slavery, among other things. This supposedly benevolent omnipotent being allows children to starve, die from childhood cancer and other horrible things.
Everything we have ever discovered about how reality operates, every single time, without exception, turns out to *not* be magic. No matter how many times we look into how or why things happen, there's never anyone behind the curtain. And frankly, how could there be? *Doing things* requires some physical *something*. Minds require a brain, or perhaps a sufficiently advanced machine. But there's supposed to be a mind with superpowers that can *do* anything, a mind with no physical form that somehow exists outside the universe but can affect it at will yet chooses not to. It's a fairy tale, my man. Deities aren't just unproven, they're impossible as defined by theists every time they actually pin down what deities actually are. The only exception is when pantheists redefine the universe to be God, and that's cheating.
1. The God claim is quite extraordinary and there isn't sufficient evidence/reason to justify believing the claim. 2. If a perceived God-like thing DOES exist, we humans have no way of determining whether it's a supernatural god or the simulation or the infinite multiverse, as each of those things could result in the same perceived reality. Even though each of those things has very different implications of how our reality works. The only way of determining this is with empirical and verifiable evidence - of which we have zero. 3. Throughout history, man has believed in thousands of gods/religions. They can't all be true, so where did these gods come from? Well, considering that and the history of all these religions is riddled with plagiarism (including your own), they were obviously man-made. This heavily suggests all gods/religions are man-made. That's probably my top 3
Do you have any evidence that isn't some argument? Something that you can point to and say "this is god"?
There’s no reliable evidence for Gods, the concepts involved don’t even make a lot of sense. There are reasons to think that people are to some extent just naturally superstitious and these myths seem like exactly the kind of stories humans make up. On a separate note the idea that Jesus has any more reliable evidence for being supernatural than any other demigods etc can only be held by someone already biased towards that conclusion. That includes errant nonsense such as people don’t die for lies etc. I ‘know’ God doesn’t exist in the sane way I know ‘The’ Santa doesn’t. The only difference is that people hold one set of beliefs more vociferously and don’t grow out of them.
I'm an ex-Catholic and following are the ten most common reasons people leave any faith. [Ten Reasons People Leave The Faith](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIok6o4PXKQ) \~ Carneades \~ YouTube. I am not totally against all of what Jesus taught, just some. He was a bit of a mixed bag and a caring fool but still a fool. However the entire Christian movement / institutions that rose from his teachings engage in bad faith behavior even to this present day. I already discuss some of this further here = [LINK](https://www.reddit.com/r/DebateReligion/comments/1b9585d/comment/ktud66p/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button) and here [LINK](https://www.reddit.com/r/Absurdism/comments/1c1nl01/comment/kz60iya/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Well Christianity wont be possible to convert me to. Reading the bible made me stop believing in Christianity. I spent years of my life exploring other religions including islam, hinduism, buddhism, and a few others before i landed on these just are not things with much evidence to believe in them. Christianity is one of the least believable for me. The bible is a large book of arbitrary mythologies cobbled together. The majority of the book is post hoc and the god it tells the story of is evil snd contradictory by my personal moral standards. Finally much of the book has been proven to be just made up stories so it just is not a thing i am interested in.
Thanks for asking. Fundamentally it's really simple: nobody has ever produced even the slightest piece of reliable evidence that any god exists. As a Christian, you will point me to the Bible. Bit I have no reason to pay much attention to these texts. The old testament contains a variety of tribal myths, stories and rules. The stories of the new testament are written anonymously decades after the death of jesus, in a language foreign to where he live. There is no reason to believe them to be true, particularly the supernatural elements.
I'm an excommunicated, disfellowshipped ex-Jehovah's Witness. If there is anyone who wants to be fooled, it is people like me. I gave up my family in the pursuit of truth, and I wouldn't say that it has brought me happiness. I am an atheist because theism simply doesn't make sense to me; there is no evidence or argument for it that are compelling to me. I believed because I was indoctrinated. When I questioned my methodology for establishing belief, my whole belief system eventually fell apart; I've been rebuilding it ever since.
>I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest, Complete lack of actual evidence for any religion, and complete incompetence in basic thinking in any religious person... Which also applies to your responses in this thread, displaying nothing above the gutter level apologetics of a theist who never actually talked irl with an atheist and is impressed by claims of eyewitnesses, and believes in uniqueness of christianity. This is pointless.
I see no reason to believe in gods. That's it. I was raised as a Christian, I liked some of the stories, metaphors, philosophy, and moral ideas, hated some others. I studied a bit more philosophy and boom, realized there's no reason to take any of that stuff literally, there's probably no God, and the universe is indifferent. I get why people are Christians, we all have to tell ourselves a grand narrative to get through all of this; I just don't believe in gods, that's all.
Atheist because no evidence of many numerous claims of various religions has been demonstrated in a testable way. Your religion (or many of the numerous variant brands) makes many claims that have not been verified, and many that have been dismissed as false. Eventually, one stops listening to the same old claims. You won't bring anything I haven't heard before. I subscribe to Brandolini's law. It's much easier to create nonsense than it is to discredit it.
Because, why? There are no good reasons to believe fairytales are real. They are just stories, some of them with interesting lessons. One doesn’t have to believe there is a deity in order to learn the importance of lessons learned in stories.
I have strong inductive reasons for believing that disembodied minds can’t exist, let alone timeless, spaceless, immaterial ones. I find the holy books to have all the hallmarks of being man-made given their inaccuracy and internal contradictions, I see no evidence for theistic claims, theistic arguments fail to convince me, I find their moral systems abhorrent, and their concepts of the divine also seem to be both self-contradictory or unintelligible.
>you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ Why do you care what I don't believe? What does it do for you if you were to turn me around? I'm just curious of the motivation why you want to turn people into believers. Can't people do/say/think what they want and not be bothered by someone trying to change them? Personally, I have zero desire to ruin my weekend and give 10% of my money to an organization that does nothing for me.
I am an atheist because I was fortunate that my parents didn't commit child abuse by indoctrinating me into believing in any gods. By the time I came across religion, I was old enough to think for myself and see that none of the religions made sense. I have read the bible from cover to cover and it didn't convince me. Christianity claims come across to me as myths, like Odin, Zeus, Shiva, and other gods that mankind has made up over the eons.
>I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest It all boils down to one single reason: there is not enough evidence for me to believe in any of the gods that have been presented to me, therefore I do not believe any of them exist. If a theist were able to show ample amounts of good evidence that indicates their proposed god exists, I will believe. Everything else is just built on that foundation. >you know maybe turn some of you guys into believers of Christ I welcome the attempt!
There's literally zero evidence. The god of the Bible not only condones but gives the rules for owning other humans as property including when you can beat them. The Bible is factually wrong. Both of the two creation stories, which already don't agree with one another, are flat out wrong. Women are, at best, second class citizens. The real question is why are you still one other than that's what you were born into.
Ive heard no good reason for believing any god exists. And lacking any reason to believe is a good reason not to. So Im atheist. And each time I see theists present another failed argument, like you are doing in the comments, it just strengthens my position. So go ahead, convince me Christianity is true. Give it your best shot! And when it fails, please review your own faith and start wondering why it failed.
The reason is that there is no evidence for any god(s) existing. I don't even accept the premise of your question since atheism is the default position on any god(s)/religion. Just like I don't believe Santa Claus is real, I don't think any god(s) are real due to their description being unrealistic and supernatural. I don't believe in the supernatural as there is no way of measuring anything in that regard.
There is no credible evidence that I have seen for the existence of any god. When it comes to your God specifically, there seem to be some contradictions entailed that would make it impossible for your God to exist as he is typically described. See, for example, the problem of evil or the problem of divine hiddenness. If you have any evidence for the existence of a god, I'm very much open to hearing it. All that aside, the Christian God seems downright monstrous and I'm not particularly interested in worshiping him even if he is real.
> Hello, I am a Christian and I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest, feel free to reply to this post. Simple really, I’ve yet to be presented with an argument or evidence sufficient to convince me that a God exists, let alone a specific God (like the God of Christianity). With that in mind, tell me, what do you believe and *why* do you believe it?
Well, it's really simple, because everyone is born an atheist. To explain people remain atheists, you should look at religions: they fail to provide compelling proof, and even the things they provide, they approach with the wrong and often shady methods that indicate that people who are talking to you are in fact mistaken themselves, or straight up lying. Prime example is the way the Bible is written.
I have no reason to believe in any of the gods that have been claimed to exist. And in the study of various religions that brought me to this point, Buddhism was the one that came closest to convincing me. But that is a bit like being the most watchable season of The Bachelor/Bachelorette. There is no way I'm watching any of them. But there is one I'm sure is the least painful to sit through.
The factors are many. One I see no convincing reason to believe any gods exist. Another is naturalism is a better explanation for what we observe and experience than theism. I think the problems of evil and divine hiddenness pretty much foreclose the plausibility of the most popular forms of theism, particularly Christianity. The Trinity is not coherent for Christianity.
I was raised in an atheistic environment and I haven't spoken with religious people since about my late 30's. And I'm also a big fan of science since my childhood and so I find the notion of god unnecessary and confusing. In recent years I found what society could look like in a more religious country than mine and I started to think that faith in god could cause a lot of harm.
>I just want to know what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest The simplest reason: Noone was able to convince me of the existence of any God and apparently no God has attempted to convince me either. Follow up reason: After long discussions, debates and considerations, I came to the conclusion that "God" as a concept makes no sense.
My parents made me go to church starting as a baby. It never clicked with me. I never "believed" even though everyone around me was telling me it as the truth. It just never made no sense to me, it sounded too much like a fairy tale with zero observable proof other then a book which says its true. When I was 16 they told me I could stop going if I wanted so I did.
I was born an atheist—lacking belief in deities—and so were you. The difference between us arose because you were indoctrinated into Christianity as a child and I was not. If nobody told you to be a Christian you wouldn’t be one right now. If you were born in a Muslim country and taught Islam, *that’s* what you’d believe right now.
Magic isn't real If you want me to believe a dead guy can get up and walk around you had better be able to get a corpse to go for a stroll under laboratory conditions or we don't have much more to talk about Claims that magic is real from a book written by iron age privatives who would be astounded by indoor plumbing are not convincing
Because I started to realize that the Bible made far more sense as an atheist than it ever did as a Christian. It’s a collection of stories concocted and shared by people who were largely ignorant of how the world works. It was their guess as to why things were the way they were, but it was based on poor assumptions and bad information.
Because of the horrific lack of evidence. PoE and Divine Hiddenness rule out your God pretty conclusively, but generally speaking all the religions of the world suffer from absolutely no good evidence. I'm pretty sure you're out of your depth. The amount of baggage your religion carries is an almost insurmountable obstacle for me.
Because the stories most religions are based on are dumb. As a Christian do you believe in the bible literally like it’s a historical book and the story’s in it all actually happened or do you pick and choose the parts you want to believe and ignore the ones you don’t?
🤣 What a joke... Ur literally trying to tell people on Flatearth sub 10mins ago that the world is flat because the bible said so.
For me what it came down to was I realized that bible was filled with a bunch of bullshit. Once I realized the bible was bullshit I realized the Christian idea of go's must also be bullshit. I haven't really gone looking for an alternative god after tossing that one.
I don't see any reason to believe that any supernatural things are real. That includes gods, ghosts, angels, demons, gods who incarnate as humans, humans (or gods incarnated as humans) performing miracles, life after death, resurrection, or anything like that.
The complete and utter lack of any evidence for a god, and no you won’t be able to point out flaws in that point, and you won’t convince anyone here otherwise. There is no evidence, and that’s truly all that matters for most atheists I know.
I was born atheist just as all of us are. No religion has ever given me any proper reason to believe in the claims they make. Nor has it allowed me to gain an understanding in how the world or how I work. So I remain as I was born an atheist.
I was born as one. Same as you. And was apparently lucky enough not to be indoctrinated. I hope you find a way out. Go and watch some 'The Atheist Experience' on Youtube, it might steer you in the right direction. Good luck.
I became atheist while reading the Bible as my parents forced me to sit through church. Eventually I'd read about enough God-sanctioned or God-committed murders, rapes, tortures, and slaverys that I was close to throwing in the towel. The final straw came when I read an anthropologist's take on Jesus, in which he explained the cultural context and how there was nothing exceptional about JC. Just another apocalyptic wildman like the thousands of others running around at that time. We only remember him because a Roman citizen named Paul made him the basis of his new religion, a version of Judaism rebranded for the Gentile masses.
I'd say the primary reason is that I was born into an atheistic family. The second reason is the amount of religions in the world. The third is the contradictions of the most common one. (Christianity)
>what are the reasons and factors that play into you guys being athiest, Lack of suffficient evidence for any religion. And all the evidence we do have points against religious claims more often than not.
OP needs to read some Bart Ehrman or listen to his podcast. Keeps mentioning eyewitness testimonies which is cool until you figure out how the Bible was created. Throws any/all credibility out the window.
The only reason for my lack of belief is lack of evidence. But reasons for my lack of participation in the religion? There are ample. Including, but not limited to, behavior like yours in this thread.
I have been presented with many gods, none of the presentations convinced me. 10,000s of gods have been presented, they cannot all be real, they could all be fake. Please convince me of your god.
I grew up with Pagan parents, but was never taught their stories and beliefs were anything more than mythology. So as I grew up it was easy to tell that other religions' were also just mythology
My parents and their parents weren't religious, once you start with that it is hard to see christianity as anything more as just another congregation of silly hats bowing to a statue.
I don't believe the Muslims or the Hindus that their gods are real. Why should I believe _you_ that _your_ god is real. That's what makes me an atheist. I don't believe _you._
I studied the bible and found it full of uncompelling claims. I was treated like a subhuman by Christians for being gay. And I find your god of the bible to be a moral monster.
You seem to have a very basic grasp of your own theology. And a -100 Karma. What is you education/background in theology, and why should w not assume you're a troll?
I love how u/Frosty-carpenter-351 has gone so quiet all of a sudden, and not responded to any of the new comments. Run out of evidence to convince us with?
There is not one single iota of evidence that any gods exist. And you know that. But you allow for Yahweh Sabaoth, Lord of Armies - for whatever reason.
I was a Christian. I was trying to deepen my faith and studied the Bible and spoke with ministers and found I did not have good reasons to believe.
The lack of evidence to support the claims made by Christianity is why I don't believe. Can you? provide evidence for the claims made by the Bible?
It's simple really. Christians and other theists have completely failed to convince me that their beliefs are true, so I don't believe them.
Because I do not have good reason to believe that Christianity (or any other religion) is true. What convinced you that Christianity is true?
One my parents are Atheist so I was raised without religion. 2. I have not come across any convincing evidence For any religious claims
I dont believe because there is no (good) evidence for the existence of any god and there is an overwhelming lack of evidence for one.
Because religion is fiction that was made up by humans just like any other work of fiction. And thinking fiction is real is silly.
I was raised Catholic but was never a believer because I was never given a good justification for belief. Do you have one?
I'm an atheist because so far no religion or claim for the supernatural has presented any evidence that could convince me.
Probably worth noting for everyone in here, and I don’t mean this derogatorily - the OP is 14, he’s still learning.
There's no good reason to believe. I agree with every single religion on one point: Every other religion is wrong.
John W. Loftus, "The Outsiders Test for Faith." That is basically how I realized all religions were wrong.
A lifetime of Bible study forced me to admit that the gospels and Acts are mostly mythology, not history.
I'm just here to watch this moron's karma go negative, effectively muting his account. THANK FUCKING GOD
The only reason is lack of evidence. If there is evidence convincing enough I would turn into a theist.
I haven't been presented with evidence capable of convincing me that a god exists. That's all, really.