I am an atheist.
Being raised under Christianity and having actually read the Bible like a book (as in just front to back like a novel; but boring) is what led me to it.
Raised mormon, did the mission thing, moroni’s promise was bullshit so I switched to general christianity, realized that it’s just another brand of bullshit. Currently agnostic/atheist/who cares.
IF there’s a god, he’s not a fucking primate with a sphincter- humans are so freaking narcissistic to think the “ultimate” being of all time is just like them.
IF there’s a god, why would he be omniscient/omnipresent? You created this post, do you actively control how it interacts with people’s minds?
IF there’s a god, and he’s the christian idea of a god, he’s evil. No loving being would send their “children” to a test (omniscient, knowing the future) knowingly sending them to a place where the result would be them suffering for eternity.
IF there’s a god, their existence doesn’t answer the question of where we came from, what came before god? If your answer to this question is “god just always was” you’re an idiot who missed the point.
Strong atheist. Not only I believe there are no Gods, I think religions are bad for humanity and society as a whole.
With you on this.
I don’t think religion causes war, but I definitely think it’s used as an excuse to do unthinkable things to living, breathing and feeling people en masse, not to mention the damage to the planet and it’s other inhabitants. Like you say religion is used to control people, people are willing to die for their religion, willing to turn on their children or vice versa.
Though I do get that for some people it brings them hope, allows them to be part of a community and other benefits. And even though it also fuels pure hatred, bigotry and racism and gives people personal allowances to commit atrocities. I wouldn’t hold any negative feelings to those that do choose to take part in religion. Providing the religion stops before the evil starts, nothing too extreme, ya know. There’s a line but hard to say where it’s drawn.
To add to this the absolute worst thing religion does is try to force itself on others. Wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it was just kept to itself. But nope. Like the saying; religion is like a penis, it’s fine to have one, it’s fine to be proud of it. But if you start waving it around outside and start trying to push it down my throat, we’re going to have a problem!
Reformed Christian. I was raised in a Christian family, and always believed in the basic concepts of God, heaven, hell, etc. But I mistakenly thought Christianity was about trying to be “good enough” for God until my mid teens. Around this time I realised that I couldn’t be perfect, which was super distressing for a time. But then I read Ephesians 2:8-9 which says:
For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— not by works, so that no one can boast.
This was a big relief, as it meant that I didn’t need to rely on trying to be good enough for God. I just needed to accept God’s free gift of salvation. That’s the moment I would say I became a Christian.
Since then, I’ve had times where I’ve questioned it all, but I always come back to the resurrection of Jesus. I find the non-miraculous explanations of the resurrection account to be so implausible that it makes more sense to accept that it’s a historical fact. And if the resurrection’s true, then it makes sense to believe the rest of it as well.
I have had bad experiences with Christianity personally such that it has left a permanent bad taste in my mouth, but it makes me happy to see people like you, who have found genuine solace in some of its teachings.
This seems like faulty logic to me. What other things in your life do you affirmatively believe “by default” just because their counter-arguments seem implausible to you? Doesn’t it make more sense to not hold belief in something until you have evidence supporting that belief?
It’s not so much that I believe it ‘by default’. Rather, when I’ve examined the historical case for the resurrection, the arguments that it really happened seem stronger than the arguments that it was a hoax, or a mass hallucination, or that he fainted etc.
I’m sorry if this comes off as rude or blunt, but here goes:
I am not aware of any evidence that resurrection is possible, or indeed that anything that could be called “supernatural” is real. Don’t you need to establish that before you can claim that arguments for a flipping resurrection seem strong? What am I missing here?
Atheist.
No arguments that I’ve heard for the existence of a deity have met their burden of proof. For some of these deities (the Abrahamic god, gods of most eastern religions, Zeus, Xenu), I actively assert they do not exist, while for others (e.g. a deistic god) I can’t honestly claim they don’t exist due to the lack of falsifiable claims involved, but I still don’t believe claims that they do exist.
I have no religion. I have no real spiritual belief. The little bit of “supernatural” I ““believe in”” is conjecture beyond the bounds of the universe, and are more like “ya I think this is my best answer for things” or “what if?” rather than an actual belief.
Within the bounds of the universe, I generally subscribe to scientific consensus, I’m not nearly smart enough to really argue against people who’ve spent their careers building upon the theories of those before them.
Buddhism. I first learned about it when someone was discussing whether it’s a religion or a way of life. They specifically mentioned that it doesn’t necessarily prevent you from being Christian (which I was) at the same time.
3 years later and I disagree with that statement, to a certain extent. You could choose to ignore the “supernatural” parts of Buddhism and just learn from the lessons. But I think the more you learn, the more it just kinda makes sense.
For instance, buddhist believe in “re-incarnation” but there’s a lot of debate about what that is. I prefer death and rebirth. Which I interpret as: I’m a different person than I was 10 years ago. The old me died and was reborn as what I am now.
Other things that I like about it: it is encouraged that you have skeptisicm about what you learn. I’m fact, you shouldn’t just accept it because without questioning what your being told, you can not come to a true understanding and belief. The lessons all revolve around how to be a better person. How to achieve nirvana through your thoughts, actions, views, etc. Many of the principles were first introduced when buddha was alive 2500 years ago. Today, psychology studies have shown that many of them really do have long lasting, extremely beneficial effects. Think meditation and mindfulness (not necessarily invented by Buddhism, but popularized by it)
For me it really resonates. A lot of the things I care about are discussed. From mental health to treating life with respect to the environment to forgiveness. I also don’t find much hipocracy.
You put why Buddhism resonates with me into such good terms.
I think that interpretation (dying and being reborn as a new “you”) in particular resonates with me on both a physical and spirit/soul level. While there are fundamental parts of us that remain for long periods of time, our bodies are constantly breaking down and rebuilding themselves on a cellular level, and on a more personal level, our minds are constantly growing, changing, evolving, and forgetting as we learn and experience new things. I’m still not entirely sure what death as an experience will be like, but looking at it this way (the current or future “me” ending and taking on some new form) makes the most sense right now.
Mental health and personal growth-wise, I also really like the focus it has not on worshipping a certain being or beings, but about learning, understanding, and trying to be a good person. It makes things feel more… reachable, if that makes sense. More down-to-earth.
Muslim born, but now an atheist.
Hail Satan! God is dead.
Pastafarian. I’ve preferred alfredo to marinara ever since I was a kid and loved pirates. I just knew that my colander had a sacred use: as a hat!
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I see no compelling argument for believing any particular religion.
I’ll pick out the good parts of philosophy if you have any but I’ll leave the dogma and rituals.
Hindu, I believe in it because it actually makes sense. I know there is a lot of nonsense in Hinduism like it’s there in every religion. Because religions are ultimately jsut tools to power. But i like Hinduism for some of the core beliefs. Some of the important things I like to believe.
- Change is the only constant in the universe, nothing else stays conatsnt.
- God is a construct that is unknowable by definition, it’s larger than the largest thing, and it’s smaller than the smallest thing. It’s infinitly big and infinitesimally small at the same time.
- The morals of how to live life is not something that is defined by God, and God doesn’t care one way or the other if someone follows any.
That being said I understand this is not traditional Hinduism. But I find this to the core with anyone that is willing to discuss Hinduism at length will reach at.
Catholic raised. It was while studying St. Thomas Aquinas and his philosophy that I realized that the underlying philosophy was not very compelling… I then tried to find a more compelling source, but found Richard Dawkins instead.
I’m mostly atheist, bluntly, if a god, in whatever form you believe in one, exists, then either they don’t care about humans at all, or will not help humans for any reason. To that end, my opinion is that whether or not a god exists, it doesn’t matter, so I will proceed as though there is no God and make the best choices I can regardless.
I got to this point by making an objective examination of the available religions, which, almost all of them say that their God is the one true God, and all others are false; which obviously cannot be true. If all religions say that all other religions follow false gods then the majority of people/religions believe your God is a false one, which logically leads me to the conclusion that none of the gods exist, or at the very least it is impossible to know which is actually correct.
With no physical evidence for or against any religion, there’s no tiebreaker… Therefore it is impossible to know, and without a way to isolate which may be correct, and effectively zero comment from God itself, then there is no correct decision, so I won’t subscribe to any belief system that has no basis, beyond essentially a book of stories, to exist.
If God did exist, with all the false religion that exists (assuming one religion is correct), it would be logical to provide some way for humans to determine which one to follow beyond blind faith in a book of stores; this causes me to believe that if a god exists, they don’t care what you believe, aka, there is no “correct” or “true” religion in God’s eyes. But it’s equally possible that no God exists at all.
All of this circles around the fact that, knowing whether God exists, and/or knowing what God wants you to believe, is impossible to know at best.
Therefore, QED, religion is inconsequential, belief in God is irrelevant, and believing in such things is, at best, superstition.
So instead, I behave the same or similar to an atheist. I’m more agnostic, but bluntly, I’d rather proceed in the same way as if I had no belief than allowing for the toxic mind virus of religion to be given any quarter. Frankly, religion has done, and continues to do so much evil in the world, that at this point humanity would do well to abolish religion. Societal progress and science especially has been set back years or decades, several times because of the influence from religion and it’s followers; and society continues to be negatively impacted by religious zealots. IMO, it has no place in modern society, and hasn’t had a place in society that serves any practical purpose for hundreds of years.
Religion is only holding us back at this point.
Wouldn’t exactly say “Religion has done, and continues to do, so much evil in the world” because that’s like saying if you leave your gun unsupervised, it (the gun itself) is going to go on a killing spree. The problem is people using religion as a cover to do attrocius things. It’s always been people; some of us kinda suck, frankly. Religion itself isn’t a problem, when one understands that no one religion has remained unaltered from whatever original message it started with (which, I’m not gonna pretend was perfect or anything, unless it was firmly “people ought to be kind and love one another regardless of their differences”, but just saying, there wasn’t originally a concept of Hell as a place of suffering and damnation in any of the Abrahamic Religions, not even Judaism as far as I remember–that came from outside beliefs and got added in later by people who NEEDED it to be that way for whatever reason).
