Are we born atheists?

That depends on what that assertion is, what the definition of the terms in it are.

If you believe that "external sapient life form that exhibits one or more of the following traits: omnipotence, omniscience, and / or omnnipresence" is the correct definition of "God,"
then you cannot consistently reject it or refuse to accept it, as it is beyond your human scope to do.

In comparison, you could reject "old man in the sky with a beard."

 

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There's also a what it's like to be a bat in terms of outer relations or being perceived external to itself by other bats and non-bats, and that doesn't garner a commitment/promise of afterlife or personal continuance from the disinterested universe, either. Thus the dependence upon pre-natural or super-natural speculation (filling in an unknown with precise falderal), portrayed with the kind of overconfidence that facilitated its political-social purposes. Which by no means is intended to sidestep the telling of less formal folklore to children to diminish their fear of death and helping them to abide the misery of primitive life, but it's the more organized versions for adults that would have aided multiple tribal integration slash in-common cultural identification and stimulation of the building of larger communities and proto-cities in fertile areas, meso-American jungles, etc.

Concepts like justice and democracy serve a synoptic function of connecting various documents, arguments, schemes and their prescribed actions, responses, organizations (their empirical or concrete instances of occurring) under an applicable term/category. An integrated summing-up and convenient lingual representation of distributed items, behaviors, and patterns as if they were a spatially discrete entity. With naturalism discarding any commitment or necessity of generalizations having to correspond to a real, intelligible entity in either the observed world or another realm.

The very unsettled nature of "free will", even in terms of agreement as to what it means or covers, as expressed in multiple contexts that war with each other without concern for commensurability, assures flexibility for the scientist who wallows in contingency, anyway. "[The scientist] therefore must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist..."--Einstein

 

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For one, you seem to come from the position that it is certain that all religion is mad-made, an invention of human imagination, and not perhaps a suggestion of something more than that. You seem to be coming from the position of strong atheism, that there is no God.

Secondly, and this is why I mentioned "What it is like to be bat?", I do believe you are projecting onto ancient people needs, interests and concerns that some people nowadays have, but that the people back then did not necessarily have or not in such extent as some do today. We don't live in circumstances like theirs, so we can't really know what their needs, interests and concerns were.

"The misery of primitive life"? If a modern Westerner were to be forced into living in conditions similar as ancient people, then, surely, he would feel miserable. But that doesn't automatically mean that the people of old did. I'm inclined to believe that they were far more straightforward and much less stressed out about the struggle for survival than we are nowadays.

And a "disinterested universe"? In some primitive tribes, they believe that the people belong to the land, not the land to them. They also express gratitude to the natural forces for rain, crops, everything they have. These are hardly examples of a belief in a disinterested universe.

 

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Why would it be beyond my "human scope" to not accept the claim that "a sapient omnipotent, omniscience, and / or omnipresent external life form exists" ?

 

Because it is not within the human scope to accurately assess whether "a sapient omnipotent, omniscience, and / or omnipresent external life form" exists or not.

 

Apparently even cargo cult leaders had to formulate their own religion or modify existing practices -- since the "strange" advanced emissaries of the gods didn't do it for them. "Cargo cults typically were created by individual leaders, or strong men in the Melanesian culture, and it is not at all clear if these leaders were sincere, or were simply running scams on gullible populations." --Wikipedia

But supposing an "entity from beyond" actually cared about delivering a religion to humankind, rather than just passing by and unknowingly getting factored into a concoction of the indigenous population, then: What option do you suggest as an alternative to man-made, for introducing this belief system? An oak tree growing a dense set of leaves with doctrinal instructions displayed on them? An angel presenting gold plates to J Smith? A telepathic tesseract that resides in Dimension-QX delivering a complex vision to a hollywood celebrity? Another Seth or Ramtha dispensing wisdom to a spirit channeler? Visiting ETs from another planet? A sapient dinosaur civilization that survived underground for tens of millions of years wanting to be worshipped via surrogate god figures?

You're right, they were like enigmatic aliens from another planet back then -- human in form only. Even isolated populations of the late 19th and early 20th century still living in low-tech circumstances were more psychologically similar to us than them, and thus provided no genuine study examples of ancient peoples. And anthropologists and archaeologists, are, of course, just quacks pretending knowledge extracted from bones, campsite artifacts, ruins, etc.

Yes, I'll grant that a certain kind of male in any patriarchal cultures might have been less affected by the mortality rate of his children, as long as his grieving baby machine (or plural) was still young enough to crank out more, or she hadn't died yet as in the course of multiple childbirths. But OTOH, boys might be scarce for some, and thus losing a future field-hand, co-hunter, or jungle forager had to be somewhat distressing for even the most callous, practical-minded SoB. And remembering above that these are really ancient, alien humanoids that have little in common with their contemporary counterparts, they certainly didn't share a desire to meet departed loved ones again in another life -- that's purely modern wishful concoction; or have any other problems and needs which chantings, prayers, rituals, spells, etc., might magically satisfy.

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All this round-a-boutness just to affirm a comment from my initial, earlier post? "...organizing and motivating people would have been easier by making them feel special [...] rather than their being insignificant and fleeting occurrences in the universe." That is, any mention of "disinterested universe" refers not to what ancient peoples believe but what has been noted today by science / naturalism in regard to such. But part of my point in that earlier comment was that even if their leaders had shared a similar view back then, it would hardly be in their interest to promote it. Not much of a motivator to tell a primitive population plagued by disease, parasites, hordes of insects, high child mortality rates, non-existent surgery, maggot-infested meat when salting was rare and moldy unrefrigerated food, vulnerable to famine, poisonous snakes, predator beasts, and weather and earthly disasters... that there is nobody listening behind the scenes who cares either, and no sugar cookies waiting at the end of that final bus trip to nowhere.

 

Therefore an assertion of "it does exist" or "it does not exist" should not be accepted.

 

The way I see it, the problem with discussing religion is that sooner or later, but not rarely, right at the beginning, the atheists come forward as hostile and sarcastic.

When they display an attitude like that, it is hard to consider them superior and worthy of following.

I'd like to meet an atheist who is not angry, who is not sarcastic, who is not nihilistic.

Personally, I cannot relate to the theists, as their faith in God is not something I could relate to or understand. But nor can I relate to the atheists, because of their anger, sarcasm, contempt.
I really do not think that a superior human would practice anger, sarcasm, contempt.

 

Sure. But this also means that a person holding the above has to remain silent in regards to their stance on God, in order to be consistent; such a person is neither an agnostic nor an atheist (and not a theist either).

 

At first glance, modern life may seem better than theirs, but anyone with some practical wit knows that our affluence and safety are merely temporary and that we're headed in that direction of material deprivation as well.
Add to this the many stresses of modern life, many of them subtle.

Is it somehow better, more mature, to take for granted and to tell ourselves that we are insiginifcant and that nobody cares about us, in the grand scheme of things?

There is, no doubt, a measure of soothing in such nihilism, at least for some time. It's also a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

Debatable... Humans contain only a statistical confidence of around ten elements. If one of us is smart enough to realize ten elements could not make any accurate classification over the other the other 108 that exist, then maybe one of us has a chance of proving ourselves as a whole to eventually become the triple omni's ourselves.

I wonder how much more intelligent I would be if I had them all intrinsically to work from with experience.

If Jesus were to return he would appear as man, and lead us all as Gods and equals.

All three points point pretty much in the same direction.

 

I think you mean not a *strong* atheist (i.e. the positive belief). Regarding theism or agnosticism, well, honey-badger don't care about those ;3.

 

There is no question our modern lives are better than our ancestors. In the first world we have plenty of food, clean water, electricity, all the media we could ever want, and a level of comfort literally never achieved before in the history of humanity. We're all expected to live well into our 70s or 80s, and we have social programs to protect those who can no longer work or never could to begin with.

Perhaps someday the cities will fall and we'll be a mess, but that's of no concern to you, me, or anyone else on this forum, because none of us are ever going to see that day, if it comes.

No one in their right mind would argue that we don't have it better than people even a hundred years ago.

False dichotomy. You imply that someone who understands that there is no celestial daddy or spiritual force behind the world to coddle us when the darkness comes must necessarily also take their lives for granted. Not true. Or, not entirely true. I'm sure there are some things we all take for granted, but overall I think most people understand how good they have it.

But yes, it is more mature, and more rational and reasonable, to accept that there's probably nothing waiting for you on the other side; indeed, that there is probably no "other side" at all. The implication you make here is that this isn't the mature way to feel, but rather the immature, and presumably unenlightened way to feel. You won't answer, because you're a troll, but what exactly is so mature or enlightened about grasping at straws? What evidence do you have that there's anything else going on except human's crafting false gods to help them sleep at night? How is the assumption that they must "be onto something" the mature one, and not simply the wish-thinking of a frightened child?

 

I think the "practical wit" element comes in acknowledging that the degree of affluence and so-called comfort is short lived (and if you plan on living 40 more years, you will probably spend your time reflecting on the the good ol days ... and not simply because you will be an old man by then) and in many cases contributing (socially, ecologically and logistically) to the hard fall caused by a society full of nothing but artificial needs.

IOW if you wake up tomorrow without petrol there is a good chance that you have neither the resources, knowledge or capacity to so much as bake a loaf of bread (despite owning an ipad)

 

But the chances are that I won't wake up tomorrow without petrol. The US isn't going to collapse in 40 years, nor is our oil going to run out. Yes, perhaps our affluence and comfort (there is nothing so-called about it) is temporary, but you're talking on the level of a civilization. It's not likely that any of us are going to find ourselves in some post-apocalyptic scenario. I mean, it could happen, but so could an asteroid strike, or a volcanic eruption. Any and all of those things might happen in my lifetime, but they probably won't.

 

You miss the point - namely that modern industrial living has not only rendered whole societies incapable of meeting their basic needs (in lieu of meeting unnecessary ones) but has and is continuing on (despite heaps of evidence to point this out) to consume, waste or otherwise destroy the very things on this planet that do bestow the basic needs of life.

IOW on one hand you have a system of living that has gone on for thousands of years and on the other one where its inevitable to consume not only itself but also most of the planet .

Its kind of like saying that a boat ride is pleasant when you are really talking about the 5 minutes of pleasant paddling before you go over the waterfall

 

And millions and millions of unemployed people are facing that scenario as we speak.

Tell that to the millions and millions of unemployed people, who experience extreme poverty right now.


Perhaps the presidents of a number of countries should hire you as their minister of propaganda.

 

You're the one making it.

I asked a question - and surprise, surprise - you did not reply. Instead, you project stances onto me that I do not hold, and then argue against those.

You won't answer, because you're a troll.

 

What do you mean we're incapable of meeting our basic needs? Since when? You realize we pay farmers to not grow crops in this country?

Vague nonsense.

Again, the analogy fails, because we are not five minutes from the edge of a waterfall.

 

Where's the spit-take smiley? You're suggesting that millions of unemployed Americans are living in a post-apocalyptic scenario? The same people collecting unemployment benefits each week?

There are less than three million Americans experiencing extreme poverty right now, and those numbers are counted prior to government benefits. There are no Americans who live under the same conditions as, say, Somalians do. Even the craziest, bridge-dwellingest drunkard has it better than a third-worlder.

Anyway, these people are the exception to the rule, and even they have access to emergency care that people 200 years ago could only dream of.

Perhaps you should do some pro bono work for those millions and millions you seem to care so much about, yet likely do nothing for.