To be an atheist is a pretty bold stance-- I’m curious for the atheists on the forum, what is your story? How did you become one? Or, for those who weren’t brought up on religion, what makes you continue to be an atheist despite a world where religion plays a pivotal role?
Very curious of people’s experiences.
Thanks in advance!
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Hi, @beach_side, welcome to AR.
Being an atheist is not a bold stance. It’s just what I’m called because I don’t hold belief in any of the many gods accepted as real by others.
I’ve never had any gods and see no reason to believe any exist.
Well, there are a lot of things that play a pivotal role in many cultures that I don’t embrace…racism, sexism, warfare, etc. Religion is no different.
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When I was in college, something didn’t happen that should have if there was a god. The only explanation that fit was that there wasn’t a god.
Since that time, that explanation still makes sense concerning the things that happen and the things that don’t happen. No deity required.
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Why? I would rather claim that it is a pretty bold stance to believe in a supernatural being for which there so far has been presented no credible empirical evidence in favor of its existence. To withhold the belief in the supernatural seems to me to be the much more natural stance.
This is getting shorter and more condensed each time I tell it, but: I just don’t see any good reasons to belive in – or to belive there is – a god, any god. After having read up on natural sciences (i.e. taken an education) I basically found that a god is not necessary to explain what we observe. And concurrently, I realised that many of the claims of religion do not fit in with what we can actually observe. And then there is the whole thing about internal inconsistencies in the religious narrative, with e.g. the Bible contradicting itself. Also, the judeo-christian god is being promoted as infinitely good in the glossy advertisements, while if you read the Bible, he is actually depicted as a total asshole.
It’s not like that everywhere. I live in a part of the world where, according to the latest polls, a majority of the population is non-religious(*). The society I live in is largely secular, religion is a private matter, and shoving your religion down the throat of others is frowned upon. So no, religion does not play a pivotal role here.
Religion only plays “a pivotal role” in certain parts of the world because too many religious people insist that they – and only they – are right or can be right, insist on forcing religion into everything and anything, ostracising non-believers, and insisting that there is the religious way or no way.
(*) for example, a 2018 poll showed 55% non-religious/non-believers, 26% religious/believers, 13% unsure, 6% declined to answer. In addition, 46% of those who responded that were members of the by far largest church community in this country(**) said they were non-believers.
(**) it’s complicated
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I am not sure I’d call it a stance of any kind, theism is a claim, I simply don’t accept that claim, and consequently lack belief in any deity or deities. Is your lack of belief in the countless deities you don’t believe exist a “bold stance”?
I was born an atheist, and have seen nothing to convince me belief in any deity is justified.
I don’t believe any deity or deities exist.
Why do you believe a deity or deities exist?
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I never believed. I was given religious instruction, but I never believed the stories were real. It seemed like a scam then, and all these decades later it still does.
Probably hard to believe but I had perfect attendance at church/Sunday school for years as a child.
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To put it simply, the foundation of my atheism can be summerised into a single sentance.
“Human beings make up gods”
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Lol – I am experiencing a similar evolution. The details of what precipitated any one person’s atheism (assuming they even ever WERE a believer to begin with) hardly even matter. Belief in such things either never forms, or collapses under the weight of contrary evidence at some point. The kinds of things that will clarify one’s thinking on such topics, depend on the individual and their lived experience to SOME extent, but I have found believers tend to have the misconception that atheism MUST be a misunderstanding, a rebellion, a poor response to a deep wound, or some other anomaly rather than what it is: not finding any reason at all to believe the dogma. Believers assume that theism is a natural state and atheism is the outlier, when the inverse is actually true. It just doesn’t look that way from within their bubble, and in a world where they have constructed enormous edifices to prop up their teachings.
I have never believed in gods. My parents weren’t religious and religion was never discussed at home. I’m also a skeptic and require evidence before I’ll accept something as true or plausible.
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Once I began deciding what played a pivotal role for me and not for the rest of the world, having no need for gods was an extremely short putt from there.
Hey Cyber thanks for responding. I can understand rejecting religion and the gods of those religions. I’m curious if you believe in the supernatural at all, energy, or the concept of consciousness without matter? Those don’t necessarily have to fit in them realm of religion.
I’m curious if you ever considered instances that can’t be explained by science, such as testimonies of people who’ve had near death experiences (i.e. people who were pronounced clinically dead but came back, and were able to describe what was going on in the room). The idea of consciousness without matter is something someone can believe in without believing in a god.
No, I don’t. I’ve not been presented with evidence I find compelling by those who assert their existence.
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They can absolutely be explained by science, that a person’s brain remains alive and continues to store memories, after they suffer cardiac arrest is explicable by science.
Again being being resuscitated after a heart attack can be explained by science, clinical death is when your hear stops beating.
I’d need more than a bare claim before I believe this, what objective evidence can you demonstrate this happened? I have only ever heard personal anecdotal testimonies, nothing approaching objective or peer reviewed evidence, and of course even if you could offer such evidence all you’d have is something you can’t explain.
So are mermaids and the tooth fairy, but they all fall into the same category, and all for the same reason.
(moved to a new thread to avoid hijacking existing thread)
Mistakenly deleted post while correcting grammer
- I would need the existence of any risk from any deity to be demonstrated before I’d consider it needed mitigating.
- It is axiomatic that even were we to accept a deity or deities existed, belief without knowing which deity or deities existed, would not mitigate this percieved risk, as humans have imagined countless deities.
- Hypothetically, if a posthumous reward or eternal punishment, required me to abandon my concepts of morality, then I couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. Nor could I worship any deity insisting I do so.
- Since morality appears to be both subjective and relative, to talk of a perfect morality would render the word meaningless to me.
Pascal’s wager is deeply flawed for these reasons.
I have considered it.
There are many things that I don’t know. Inserting a deity doesn’t change the fact that “I don’t know”.
I think consciousness requires matter - a brain/nervous system. Humans have consciousness. At least some animals have consciousness. I don’t think plants have consciousness.
Do amoebas have consciousness? I don’t know and I don’t know how we would find that out. I’ll leave that for others much more knowledgeable. Once again, inserting a deity doesn’t change the fact that I don’t know.
And before I would accept an explanation that involves a deity, I would need convincing evidence that such a deity exists. I’ve been looking for a long time and no such evidence has shown up.
So allow me to turn the tables: You’re listed as a theist. Which deity and why that one? Have you considered the other ones? If so, why did you reject those?
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Since definitionally anything outside nature can only be asserted and not substantiated and so is unfalsifiable, it matters not a whit who or what is making bare assertions about the supernatural, religious or otherwise; it is still a bare assertion. In my view, religious faith is just a special case of a broader failed epistemology that we might term “making random things up”.
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Here again – why would anyone afford belief to something this is asserted but not only isn’t demonstrably true, but definitionally can NOT be demonstrably true? I mean this not in the sense of “I can’t imagine it’s true”, but in the sense of, “how would anyone demonstrate it to be true”?
I’d suggest that what people are doing is not believing in such things, as belief requires a preponderance of evidence to work with. They are just going along to get along. Religious faith and adjacent ideologies are what people want when their inner yearning is for someone else to do the heavy lifting – to just tell them what to believe, what is right or wrong, rather than to substantively consider those questions for themselves, in some way grounded in the real world.