Why I became an atheist: Why did you not?

Wait, ants can't perceive us? Then I guess that those people who die from fire ant stings must be imagining their own deaths because the ants couldn't have perceived them and thus couldn't have stung them. Nice to know that these deaths are really suicides. *voice drips with sarcasm*
 
I began as a Catholic, became an atheist in my teen and twenties, and then became agnostic. If you think of it logically, it takes more brain power to do two things than just one, with the center position of agnosticism requiring using two conflicting data set at once. The masses and the children will take the easy way, which I did in my younger years, and pick one. It only needs half a brain for half the data.

The way I resolved these two conflicting POV's and conflicting data sets, was you cannot always go literal when it comes to the bible, since all this does is polarize. The literal approach is designed to maintain division. The ancient texts, were written with symbols, which are open concepts instead of closed literal concepts.

Christ compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed. If you take this literally, it makes heaven very small which would imply we must shrink when we die and go to heaven. This sounds silly but would follow logically. As an open symbol, this means something that starts small, is organic/alive and grows into something large that adds spice to life.

The symbol of Christ on the cross ,between the two thieves, would be a good symbol of the present debate. Each one sided approach (half the data) robs its minions of the full data base, with only one of the two thieves repentant. The other thief is more self centered and tries to con a sign for his freedom. The wise man is in a state of suspension in the middle using this tension for continuous creation/rebirth.

Religion and symbolism is more right brained while science and atheism is left brained. If you do both you make more conscious use of both sides of the brain. This adds more depth to both.
 
Dinosaur said:
Various recent threads in some forums have discussed Atheism, which prompts me to explain my POV (already posted in other places).

When I was circa 9-10 years old, I was introduced to the story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son. My father & I were very strongly bonded with both love & respect. The thought of such a sacrifice appalled me & I argued with the Sunday school teacher.

I could not imagine such a request being made. I could not imagine a father not rejecting such a request.

The attempts to explain the story were the begining of my becoming an atheist.

I am posting here rather than in a religious forum due to knowing the POV of the folks there. I am interested in other points of view.
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Because I don't see the choices in such narrow terms.
 
wellwisher said:
I began as a Catholic, became an atheist in my teen and twenties, and then became agnostic. If you think of it logically, it takes more brain power to do two things than just one, with the center position of agnosticism requiring using two conflicting data set at once. The masses and the children will take the easy way, which I did in my younger years, and pick one. It only needs half a brain for half the data.

The way I resolved these two conflicting POV's and conflicting data sets, was you cannot always go literal when it comes to the bible, since all this does is polarize. The literal approach is designed to maintain division. The ancient texts, were written with symbols, which are open concepts instead of closed literal concepts.

Christ compares the kingdom of God to a mustard seed. If you take this literally, it makes heaven very small which would imply we must shrink when we die and go to heaven. This sounds silly but would follow logically. As an open symbol, this means something that starts small, is organic/alive and grows into something large that adds spice to life.

The symbol of Christ on the cross ,between the two thieves, would be a good symbol of the present debate. Each one sided approach (half the data) robs its minions of the full data base, with only one of the two thieves repentant. The other thief is more self centered and tries to con a sign for his freedom. The wise man is in a state of suspension in the middle using this tension for continuous creation/rebirth.

Religion and symbolism is more right brained while science and atheism is left brained. If you do both you make more conscious use of both sides of the brain. This adds more depth to both.
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I like that analogy
 
@Forests --

Sweet, evil Jesus. Do I really have to spell it out for you?

My post was a sarcastic response to an earlier post which claimed that animals(specifically ants) can't perceive us. Given that this is patently false, I felt that a sarcastic response would do well.

@Arauca --

It's no more or less "crap" than anything else in the bible is.
 
Why I became an atheist? Through serious and devoted Bible study. The more I learned, the more absurd it became.
 
I think many skeptics including the moderators have changed their views on god.

Years ago this might be considered a religious topic, but now we all agree it is science and belongs in the General Science and Technology Sub Forum.

I have always said god/telepathy/etc., is just science we have not yet measured to our knowledge.

This Thread is a good comfirmation of this enlightened viewpoints from resident skeptics..

That religion thread was becoming too crowded with bickering anyways. We need to examine god from a scientific perspective and this is a good place for it.

I knew you would all see the light..

Yay!
 
@Forests --

I am a believer why should I become an atheist ?
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I never said that you should, the only thing I can tell you is that I live a much more fulfilled life without having any gods or religions in it than I did before when I was a believer.

Not having to focus on things which can only possibly matter after I die frees up much more time for actually enjoying my life and for helping those around me when I'm able.

Atheism does not give me any sense of hope nor confidence
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Why does that matter? Is the most important thing about your faith that it comforts you? I'm more worried about whether or not my beliefs have any resemblance to reality and less so about whether or not I like the implications of them. Reality is what it is regardless of whether we like it or not.
 
I've always liked that story of Abraham. To me, its about virtue versus obedience. If God was testing him he failed miserably. I'd like to think it was more of a lesson meant for Isaac. What I get from the story is that you shouldn't go around doing things that are absurd even if you hear a voice in your head who you think is God. A god worth anything wouldn't expect something like that from you.

I probably went through a similar thing as I was raised roman catholic and went to catholic school for 10 years. Instead of abandoning religious thought altogether I formed my own beliefs about things and found that i was far from the first to develop similar ideas about god and religion. This was probably influenced by the emotional experiences involved with my relationship with the world.

To the telepathic guy, I can certainly relate. When i first hit puberty, I had a few crazy things happen with the feeling that I had been through it all before. I had this dream where I had experienced that same emotion. I remembered it in great detail because of the intensity of the situation. It was one of those dreams you were glad you awoke from to find it was just a dream. Well, about 3 weeks later, that dream played out with precision. That's when i realized the feelings of Deja Vu were dreams before they played out in reality. Once I made the correlation between the feelings and the dreams, i would take more recognition of the dreams i had that involved the deja vu feeling. My thoughts about the dreams would often be within the dreams themselves which made it hard for me to do anything different in the dream. The only time I ever managed to change anything was a dream i had about losing an item and searching for it in a house that was new to me. I manage to save a little time and a few arguments by remembering the dream and where i had eventually found the item. It was a very oddball place, and had fallen into a magazine rack between some pages of a magazine. However, maybe the dream could have been me remembering the other dream and i merely remember the whole dream because i thought about it in the dream of the dream. Who knows, but this is actually a pretty common phenomenon. I'm an agnostic kind of person, so I don't know if its something to do with our understanding of time and how the past present and future can actually feed back off each other somehow. Or, maybe its some kind of malfunction in sequencing memories? I don't know but it definitely opened my mind to the possibilities at a very early age.
 
Arioch said:
@Forests --




? I'm more worried about whether or not my beliefs have any resemblance to reality and less so about whether or not I like the implications of them. Reality is what it is regardless of whether we like it or not.
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Atheist select a reality , that there is no thing beyond this life so they don't have to give an account for their life . The believer selects a reality that there is some on to whom we have to give an account for out doing . So the atheist freed himself of gilt feeling because he thinks there is no one beyond death. Wile the believer is attempting to follow the golden rule best to its ability and have hops to be rewarded. Both have their own reality . The question comes how sure is the atheist reality . We the believers base our selves , that nature have a Creator and us been part of the creation we are subjected to the Creator
 
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