Atheist preparing to own the label

[Guest1]

As far as if human life is inherently valuable/more valuable than a roach-I need to be careful how I say this. Yes. I view human life as valuable and more valuable than a roach.

But it is Just your view.

Logically to be honest with yourself you’d must admit that they are presumably “equal” ( Nothing in value) in the grand scheme of things.

Can you live out that truth?

We started out extremely tribal and as only seeing our immediate family/group as inherently valuable and only over ages of interaction have we started to see people as worthwhile because they are people

Why should I care about people?

Why not more so the bees?

What if I am like mr. Smith from The Matrix?

I don’t believe in moral absolutes in the sense that there is some definitive standard by which we could say that Action A is right or wrong.

Can you live that out?

Next time you see someone committing a crime on the news for example will you hold your tongue from speaking condemnation?

some horrible things might never get questioned, such as slavery.

From The Atheist point of view slavery is ultimately not morally wrong. It’s down to individual opinion.

To say slavery is wrong or not wrong is a moral judgment.

To say it’s good that America did away with african slavery is a mere human opinion and worth nothing.

Assuming a historical Jesus, that might distinguish Christianity from Hinduism a little bit but it’s tricky because Hinduism is ancient. It’s older than Judaism if I remember right. So in a sense, Hinduism has the weight of history even more on its side just by having been around the longest. If there really is one true religion, why wouldn’t it be the oldest one? Hinduism isn’t even the oldest, it’s just the oldest still existing major religion.

One would have to presume that the Hindu gods are true and that the Trinity didn’t later reveal to humanity Catholicism and Judaism.

 

[Guest1]

 

[Guest1]

There were a fair amount of rejected versions of Jesus’s life that did not make it into the Bible, and as far as why those versions did not make it into the Bible, it is my understanding that the Church chose which books belonged in the Bible based on divine inspiration, meaning they took on faith which ones belonged in there and by extension as a Catholic I was supposed to take on faith that the choices they made based on faith were correct.

Are you talking about the books such as the gospel of Thomas?

 

[PaladinSword]

K, I would like to hear further opinion on the historicity of religion. like what would your opinion be on say the works of further open minded catholics such as Joseph Campbell be? I’m unclear as to how if nihilistic you are or are not from your previous posts. what about non theistic religion such as Buddhism? do you not think we have an innate desire for God? or is it purely instinct or psychological? have you ever had any dismissed mystical experience? if I may are you a lesbian and unacceptance or strife affected your position because of this?

 

[Guest1]

As to the last three questions: I’m unsure. I’ve heard some noises about multiverses. But I’ve also heard noises about some scientists saying it came from nothing. I’m honestly not sure. But, I don’t feel like this is the trump card I used to think it was when I was a believer. This is that tiny percent that I admit to when I say that it’s possible there’s something out there we don’t understand. But, even if it turned out that there was something supernatural out there, there’s a lot of logical steps that would need to be taken to connect the dots between we don’t know how we got here therefore Hinduism is correct or Catholicism is correct.

Do you know about Anthony Flew ?

Antony Flew obituary

Humean philosopher and atheist who ultimately came to believe in intelligent desig

n

“He announced in a video entitled Has Science Discovered God? that aspects of biological order, especially in DNA, had led him to believe in intelligent design after all.”

• Antony Flew obituary | Philosophy | The Guardian
  What are your thoughts for such things as being evidence for believing in Theism?

 

[Divine3]

Welcome Karl to CAF . You mentioned that you could take some hard words or questions. I guess you are in the company of some atheists that have been around for a long time. I am not speaking about atheists who have come back to the faith or converted to Catholicism. Like Saint Edith Stein who was brilliant and thank God wise. She had the humility and wisdom to be open to faith–to God.
Other atheists I wouldn’t find as an example of virtue that you are running to join are the Pharisees who hated Jesus (except for a few), Hitler and his army of Gestapo, who hated religion and hated Jews as well as other people. They really hated Catholics and priests too. There must be a very large group of atheists abortionist, communist, and a slew of others you are going to walk with. Yes, there is no doubt that there are atheists who never were Catholic and never grew up in any religion who are moral, kind and honest people. But you are choosing to leave Jesus, his Church and the mother of God…you are leaving the pearl of great price for a path filled with husks. Will pray Karl , that you will return one day to your beloved Father who loves you and keeps looking for your return . And what a party there will be when you come home with a humble heart.

 

[Frankie65]

KarlEen did you ever really believe in God? I don’t mean that in any sarcastic way. I mean so that you prayed without parents telling you to, and you trusted that it was good to pray, and you truly believed Jesus was present in the blessed Sacrament?
Sorry if that’s been asked upstream I just read your post

 

[FiveLinden]

There’s moral and immoral atheists. But from an atheist perspective how can an atheist condemn the actions of another person?
Who are you to tell me that something is wrong?
I mean in the sense of subjective versus objective morality …and if all we are is just evolved animals with no value except what individuals believe.

I’m not saying atheist don’t have feelings and a conscience by the way.

I support or condemn the actions of others and myself on the basis of choice and acceptance, to a significant extent, of democracy. I choose to seek the greatest good for the greatest number, to preserve the earth, to reduce pain and suffering, to be loyal to those with whom I live and work and to avoid negative and false prejudices and ideas. I try to make decisions based on an acceptance of science and to avoid belief not based on fact established or indicated by the direction science. How would belief in a god help? And which god would help most? ‘Morality’ by its nature is not ‘objective’.If you accept that ‘from god’ means 'objective, you can argue in that way but the reasoning is circular and means no more than ‘this is moral because I believe it to be moral’. I say ‘this is moral because I choose it to be moral, and can explain why in the interests of all - people and other life’.

 

[Larry1700]

It’s great that you posted here, even if your intent is to get practice answering questions about your “deconversion.”

I know you said your family is well-versed in apologetics, but there is a ton of information available which they may not be aware of, or may not be proficient at presenting to you. (My wife, a life-long Catholic, couldn’t answer most of my questions to my satisfaction.) Identify your objections to Christianity as specifically as possible, write them down, and research them one by one, starting with the most fundamental question(s) first.

For example, if you’re convinced that the sciences addressing evolution, paleontology, biochemistry offer strong arguments against intelligent design , view the video by James M. Tour, PhD, synthetic organic chemist, at A world-famous chemist tells the truth: there’s no scientist alive today who understands macroevolution. His bona fides are found here: James M Tour. He clearly admits that intelligent design cannot be proven with today’s tools, but also says evolution, as currently understood, cannot either.

Plausible explanations supporting creation and/or refuting many commonly-held beliefs which attempt to disprove it can be found at Center for Scientific Creation. The author, Walt Brown, Ph.D., does a great job providing endnotes which show scientists from many fields (as well as one or two well-known atheists) admitting problems with various commonly-held precepts.

Lee Strobel’s “Case for Christ” is a good account of an atheist/agnostic journalist trying to prove that Jesus’ death and resurrection were a fallacy, only to conclude that it actually happened.

Scientific studies regarding Jesus’s shroud can be found at Shroud of Turin Research Project and at National Geographic: Why Shroud of Turin’s Secrets Continue to Elude Science

Contemporary accounts of the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima are also available. A synopsis provided by EWTN is here: https://www.ewtn.com/fatima/sixth-apparition-of-our-lady.asp

Tests of the eucharist at Lanciano show real flesh, real blood, etc. http://www.therealpresence.org/eucharst/mir/lanciano.html

The tilma of Our Lady of Guadalupe has undergone scientific tests.

There is a plethora of books (yes, apologetics books) explaining various proofs for Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. Authors such as Scott Hahn, Patrick Madrid, Peter Kreeft and others are great and easy to read.

 

[huck]

“In terms of what makes something wrong, the majority vote?” I don’t believe in a higher power that hands down universal moral codes. I don’t believe in moral absolutes in the sense that there is some definitive standard by which we could say that Action A is right or wrong.

Hello KarlEen,
I believe I was Jewish during previous lifetimes. One of the laws is for men not to wear women’s clothes and vice versa. For some reason as a child I had the feeling it was wrong to wear opposite sex clothing. This right or wrong issue was never promoted to me from my recollection. Are you claiming that there was never an action A that you view as wrong that was not a result of society promotion?

 

[1Lord1Faith]

. I grew up “drowing in apologetics.” My family was a huge fan of catholic answers for a while and a fair amount of the social group I am in is the same way.

I’m going to go out on a limb and identify this as a problem. As well intentioned as CA is, it’s not going to draw most people in. Apologetics in general has a very limited scope, especially when it’s being done by laity.

I’ve read some of your remarks about your beliefs. They strike me as typical, unoriginal and shallow. They are similar to what I would have believed at one time when I was your age, so I understand and don’t mean any offense.

As for your reason for posting here…you’re implying that you are going to have to be defensive with your friends and family. That’s a little troubling on its surface, and I hope you don’t think that your friend’s and family’s possible obtuseness is in any way indicative of Catholicism.

As you can see, I don’t think there is anything particularly interesting about your story. Gay people usually feel maligned by Catholicism. That’s a shame, and it’s usually the result of poor teaching. I can’t say for sure if you were poorly taught, but your mention of CA leads me to believe that.

 

[SPBlitz]

Hey, KarlEen, welcome to the forums! While I’m sure everyone here will be happy to help out, might I suggest reflecting on the reasons you think that Theism is false/Atheism is true, and then start individual topics on each of those reasons? As you can see, general topic threads like this one usually result in a ‘shotgun’ approach to questions, where multiple different questions on multiple different topics all get asked at once, resulting in you (understandably )only being able to provide a brief comment/rebuttal to each one. I think you’ll find it more fruitful to break up your concerns into multiple different topics.

 

[KarlEen]

That is a good point. Hindsight 20/20. I’ll try to answer as many of the questions I have already gotten, respond to answers people gave as I can, then I’ll step back and think about how/if I want to try again with a more specific forum post.

 

[KarlEen]

Hi!
I think there are some things we get instinctively, but even instincts aren’t enough obviously. People want to protect their children (or at least tend to-there are abusive parents who demonstrate that this instinct is unfortunately not something everyone understands which is why we have to develop agencies like Child Protective Services, because we can’t trust that everyone will innately have that instinct or even follow that instinct if they have it) People tend to have empathy towards other people, especially people we see as having something in common with us. We tend to have to work a little harder consciously to be understanding towards people who are significantly different than us. Our empathy tends to carry towards animals and we don’t enjoy seeing animals in pain (unless we are sociopaths, which again speaks to the value unfortunately not being universal. It is a good value to hold, but it is a value we have only because enough of us have that ability to experience empathy and listen to that instinct.
I think that values that aren’t directly tied to that empathy instinct or protection of family/young are really learned, and your men vs women’s clothing is a good example. Because no one ever told you, it feels innate. But even though no one verbally told you that certain articles of clothing are only appropriate to men and certain items are only appropriate to women, you would have been learning by example, right from the moment you became self-aware. You would have seen that the people who were most like you tended to wear one thing, and the people who looked different from you tended to wear this other kind of clothing. You also would have not been able to dress yourself for the first few years of your life, so you would have already gotten used to wearing the kinds of clothes you family chose to dress you in by the time you were old enough to dress yourself and make your own choices.

 

[KarlEen]

what would your opinion be on say the works of further open minded catholics such as Joseph Campbell be?

I’m not too familiar with Joseph Campbell other than the name and stuff like the hero’s journey. I’ve liked the stuff I heard and think he would be an interesting read when I get around to him. If you would like to recommend a starting point I would be happy to add it to my reading list.

I’m unclear as to how if nihilistic you are or are not from your previous posts. what about non theistic religion such as Buddhism?

Regarding nihilism, it’s kind of the same as Campbell. I have a very surface level understanding and have been meaning to research but have not had the chance yet. As I understand it, nihilism as a philosophy means that there is no ultimate purpose in life. This sounds scary on the surface, but I found having a meaning assigned to me that didn’t fit with reality as I was experiencing it, and trying to bend my mind and go out of my way to interpret my life in a way that supported continued belief much bleaker than simply admitting that I have no proscribed meaning to my life and I can choose to find things I find meaningful/worthwhile to do for myself and others while I am alive.

While I was still Catholic, I liked to look at Buddhism and Hinduism from the outside, mainly because I really liked the idea of reincarnation, so I was less about the philosophy part and more about the religion part. I found it more emotionally appealing than Heaven. The idea that we only get at best maybe 75 years-ish of life, and then die and spend eternity either suffering in eternal torment or in living in eternal bliss on the basis of the choices we made in our short lives seemed so bleak. In the face of eternity, 75 years might as well have been five seconds, and I remember the dread of feeling that any amount of time on Earth was too much because every second on Earth was another second I might mess up and end up in the wrong state of mind and die suddenly and end up in Hell. I’m aware now that the teaching of Hell and what it takes to end up there is more nuanced than that, but when I was trying to hold onto my faith, nuance went out the window and the panic about my doubts and the desire to preserve my faith whatever the cost led my brain to some pretty dark places. Compared to that, the idea of getting potentially infinite do-evers and everyone having the chance to “get there” eventually seemed really appealing. But I never seriously thought about converting. It was more of a “man, I wish it could be like that . . .” Once I left Catholicism, I didn’t think about converting either, because I would have had to take it on faith, and living as if I had infinite do-overs if there’s a strong possibility this life really is all I get is a bad decision.

 

[KarlEen]

do you not think we have an innate desire for God?

I think there might be something to the idea that we have innate tendency to abstract things and look for patterns and causes, and that might play into a tendency for people to attribute things to supernatural forces that are just things that happen. I don’t think we inherently have a tendency to desire God specifically, but because I was raised from birth Catholic, my desire felt to me like it was innate for the longest time. It’s really hard to untangle innate from taught from birth because they can both feel the same.

have you ever had any dismissed mystical experience?

I had smaller experiences here and there as a kid but I only had one really stand out experience as an adult. In my sophomore year in college I went to a retreat in the hopes of strengthening my faith. I felt giddy warmth and happiness at the end of the retreat which I took at the time to be a kind of experience of God. But my senior year of college, I was volunteering at that same retreat. I came there trying to do for the incoming new attendees what had been done for me before by praying for the attendees, writing out words of encouragement, and eventually talking to them about their experience at the end when we all met up. But when I sat down to pray, I found that I couldn’t do it. I tried. But the more I tried to just think about the attendees and lift them up, I kept coming back to the same thing-how do I know my prayers are going anywhere? I got stuck on that. And the more I tried to get un-stuck, the worse it got. I white knuckled my way through that retreat, did my best to at least act ok. But while I was going through the motions, I found myself thinking how did I know any of the things I had taken to be evidence of God active in my life including that experience my sophomore year weren’t just me choosing to believe that’s what they meant because I had wanted to believe. I came out of that retreat pretty defeated. I still kinda believed by the time I left college but it was in a very Pascal-wagerey kind of way. I didn’t feel like I could trust any religious experiences anymore after that and decided to just follow the rules just “in case” because I was still very scared of Hell and almost equally scared of how I imagined my family would react if they found out about where I was with regards to my faith.

 

[KarlEen]

if I may are you a lesbian and unacceptance or strife affected your position because of this?

That’s alright. I am a lesbian, but I was very slow to come to terms with it. I became aware that I might not be straight my junior year in college, after I’d already gone through several bouts of seriously questioning my faith and bouncing back and thinking everything was ok and then questioning and bouncing back. Because I was already freaking out about my faith, and I was afraid of adding more fuel to the fire, I made a choice at the time to put any exploration of what my orientation was or how I was to deal with it on hold until I’d come to some stability regarding my faith. I ended up not fully admitting to myself that I was gay until a year after I finally admitted to myself I was atheist.
That’s not to say that it didn’t play in at an unconscious level. I’m sure it did. But there was never a point where I thought “I’m going to leave my faith because I feel unwelcome because I’m gay.”

 

[KarlEen]

Out of curiosity, how did you come to go from being Atheist to being religious? What was your final realization that made you make the jump? I’ll try to get to your other questions but since you’ve been especially good about giving me a ton of questions I can work with I feel like I should give you the chance to say what you think (if you want to.)

 

[KarlEen]

arlEen did you ever really believe in God? I don’t mean that in any sarcastic way. I mean so that you prayed without parents telling you to, and you trusted that it was good to pray, and you truly believed Jesus was present in the blessed Sacrament?

I definitely believed in Confession. I got a little too invested in it, to the point of scrupulosity. I was hung up on the idea of thoughts being potentially sinful and couldn’t figure out at what point an angry thought was just an angry thought and how long I had to allow it to stay in my head before it was considered “dwelling” and therefore sinful. Also when I was just starting confession I was under the impression that it was sinful to fail to confess even venial sins, and when I forgot to confess something I would question if I really forgot or if I “forgot”, which would lead me to keep a running of sins I forgot to confess and the sin of forgetting to confess the sin. I am aware now that I had a misunderstanding of confession as a kid but it was definitely a misunderstanding that wasn’t helped because any time I asked people if if I really had to confess something, they would always tell me if I wasn’t sure then I just needed to confess to be safe, which just make my worry worse. It might have helped if someone had informed me at the time that accord to Church teaching venial sins are forgiven at each Mass.
I believed Christ was actually present in the Eucharist and attended Mass every Sunday up until the point when I finally decided to make a complete break because I had stopped believing.

 

[KarlEen]

I mean so that you prayed without parents telling you to, and you trusted that it was good to pray,

Prayer was complicated. I would go through phases where I would pray the rosary or the chaplet every day on my own that would last a couple weeks,then I would fall into just a small prayer of some sort each day or ven go a couple days or weeks where I was only praying when my family was praying. I believed up until my crisis of faith hit that prayer was something I should do. That it was good and important to praise God or pray for people even when it didn’t feel like God was there. I just trusted/hoped God was listening. But even when I was young, I had doubts about whether I even should ask for direct guidance in prayer from God. I had seen people in my life insist that they had the right to do things that were clearly wrong by secular standards and Church teaching, and the reason they thought they were ok to do wrong was that they had prayed about it and insisted they felt God telling them their actions were acceptable. And when I was dealing with my issues with confession as a kid and trying to pray to God to see if I really had to be as worried as I was, I couldn’t tell if what I was hearing was God or if I was just trying to tell myself what I wanted to hear. It seemed like trying to pray specifically for guidance was a good way to trick myself into just doing whatever I wanted anyway so instead of going to God for advice in prayer I would instead turn to parents or the Bible, or the Catechism, because I thought my own judgement of whether I was actually hearing God’s instruction or just talking to myself couldn’t be trusted.