I just wanted to clarify something out about Atheist

[AdamStgg]

I don’t claim to speak for everyone but

The reason someone is an Atheist is due to lack of EVIDENCE. That is the only thing that can lead you to become an atheist.

If someone says “I believe God doesn’t exist” that person is not an Atheist for the simple reason that believing in something doesn’t have any effect on that thing actually existing or not.

It’s true that there are things that are Impossible for mere mortals to disprove such as: God, unicorns, dragons, gnomes

The evidence for the existence God is the same as the evidence for the existence of unicorns, dragons and gnomes.

An atheist will never say that God, dragons, unicorns and gnomes don’t exist because it would be an oxymoron. However is perfectly fine to assume they do not exist as long as you keep an open mind and constantly look for new evidence.

 

[kmleo]

I agree with you that many atheists will claim to see no evidence of God, but there is a big difference between evidence for God and evidence for unicorns.

When you hold your newborn child in your arms or sit in the hospital room of a dying parent or experience a perfect sunset on a beach, you aren’t tempted to consider that a gnome, unicorn or leprechaun has a hand in your life.

By the way, your statement leaves out all the folks who are atheists after leaving a religion for reasons such as, “I can’t believe in a God who would allow suffering” or “God took my daughter, I hate Him, I am an atheist” or “That Pope is wrong about contraception, therefore there is no God.” There are many reasons for choosing atheism that have little to do with evidence and more to do with satisfying our selfish egos.

That’s it. Not really a philosophical response, because I’m not interested in Spaghetti Monster theories, but just some observations about your question.

Peace!

 

[AdamStgg]

“I can’t believe in a God who would allow suffering” or “God took my daughter, I hate Him, I am an atheist” or “That Pope is wrong about contraception, therefore there is no God.” There are many reasons for choosing atheism that have little to do with evidence and more to do with satisfying our selfish egos.

People who avandon their religion for reasons other than evidence are not atheist. you can leave your church because you are angry with God for allowing children to suffer That person is not an Atheist. It woldnt make sense for an Atheist to be angry with God. That would be the equivalent of a fisherman whos fishing ship was destroyed by a wave telling his family that he won’t velieve in Seus anymore because of what Zeus did.

If the reason for avandoning your faith is emotional then you are not an Atheist.

 

[Starwynd]

Actually there are different reasons for being an atheist.

But seeking hard evidence is no guaruntee that an atheist will come to worship and adore God should they recieve the ahrd evidence they seek.

 

[tobias]

The athiest mindset is that people are thiest because of an innate ‘need’ to believe in something, thereby self defining themselves as believers of nothing.

 

[Sideline]

When you hold your newborn child in your arms or sit in the hospital room of a dying parent or experience a perfect sunset on a beach, you aren’t tempted to consider that a gnome, unicorn or leprechaun has a hand in your life.

Yes, but that’s a cultural difference. People, for the most part, no longer believe in leprechauns, but some people did. If they got lost in an area that they knew well, or if they felt they and their kin were the butt of some unkind joke, they would wonder how you ran afoul of the little people. People all over the world use the same experiences to prove different supernatural beings.

“That Pope is wrong about contraception, therefore there is no God.”

I’ve never heard anyone say this, have you really heard that?

There are many reasons for choosing atheism that have little to do with evidence and more to do with satisfying our selfish egos.

And most people are religious because their friends and family are. But those aren’t the reasons they give to themselves. When we talk about our reasons for doing things, it’s more an intellectual excuse to do what we would prefer to do or live the life we prefer to live.

The more I’ve studied people, the more I realize that we aren’t usually rational. Rationality is what we use to deal with those that oppose our ideas, not how we come to those ideas in the first place.

As to the OP, I would say it is more or less correct in my point of view.

 

[kmleo]

Yes, but that’s a cultural difference. People, for the most part, no longer believe in leprechauns, but some people did. If they got lost in an area that they knew well, or if they felt they and their kin were the butt of some unkind joke, they would wonder how you ran afoul of the little people. People all over the world use the same experiences to prove different supernatural beings.

So, in some cultures you can substitute “Little People” for “God” but you still get the same result. Atheists reject the stirrings in their souls as evidence of supernatural beings, namely, since we are discussing atheism, God.

“That Pope is wrong about contraception, therefore there is no God.”
I’ve never heard anyone say this, have you really heard that?

I have heard some really ridiculous stuff, yes. Maybe not that exact quote but just as dense.

And most people are religious because their friends and family are. But those aren’t the reasons they give to themselves.

But they don’t stay religious because their friends and family are. Being religious requires effort on the part of the individual. You can keep sitting in the pew because of family, but you won’t be religious because of them.

Peace!

 

[love4mary]

I grew up in an Atheist home, more accurate would to call it a NON-religious home where God was never mentioned. Try living in That environment in the “Bible Belt” south.

For some atheist (like me before my conversion), I could admire a beautiful sunset or the birth of a baby or any other great miracle of God and never once think it came from Him. Everything I believed could be explained by pure science, even the “Big Bang” theory made absolute sense to me (unless I tried to explain where the gases and dust came from). I didn’t understand why it even important to believe in God given the great advancements of modern science.

As an atheist, I thought that believing in God was for emotionally weak people or for people who could not explain life through science. If believing in God helped them live their lives, then so be it, just Don’t expect me to.

Atheist in some weird twisted way IS a religion, I came to realize this only after my conversion.

 

[kmleo]

Welcome to the family, love4mary!

 

[Starwynd]

Atheism is not a religion.

It is, however, a faith, simply because you can not confirm that “God doesn’t exist”. Anything that does not require empirical or hard evidence to support it is a faith, according to them. And even me, when I was an atheist.

But they strangeley never define what it is called when people believe in something that has empirical or hard evidence to back up the theory.

 

[crowonsnow]

Gods are simply a nonsensical concept to some people. It’s not a matter of evidence. It’s like talking about a square circle or a straight curve. It’s axiomatic, not evidential.

 

[strngrnrth]

The word “atheist” means someone who does not believe in any God or gods. That includes all of them – those who reject belief because they have the impression it’s the rebellious thing to do and will make them popular, those who reject belief because they are afraid that if there is a God, God will want something from them they can’t give, those who reject belief because they are angry at their religious parents, those who reject belief, as I did growing up, to please atheist authority figures, and those who actually just can’t see the evidence for God.
I grew up struggling to explain away things that didn’t follow the laws of nature, for I love the laws of nature and I have an analytical mind, and my home was passionately atheist. But I wasn’t alone in witnessing things that defied nature’s laws. Such events took many forms and happened in the presence of many different people. No particular person or group was present at every one of these events, and they happened in public and in private. It could fill several books to list them. There was no one who could possibly have gained anything by staging them, and to do so would have ranged from plausibly easy in a few cases, to very expensive and tricky in several, to ouright impossible under the circumstances in several more. I spent many years trying to find alternative explanations. I knew plenty about stage magic and fortunetellers’ tricks, and no, such trickery could never have done a lot of what I’d seen.
So I looked into various belief systems in world history. Over a lifetime I examined the claims of one after another for results, predictive ability, internal consistency, consistency with observable natural reality and consistency with observable supernatural reality.
After trying hard to make a stylish one like Hinduism or syncretism (it was a long time ago) fit, I finally had to admit Christianity fits the facts and is predictive, internally consistent and life-giving. God answers my prayers all the time. He has saved my life many times in shocking ways. He has healed me of physical and emotional problems that I could never have recovered from or lived with on my own. The evidence overwhelmed my culturally-based, emotionally-driven atheism long ago.

 

[crowonsnow]

An atheist will never say that God, dragons, unicorns and gnomes don’t exist because it would be an oxymoron. However is perfectly fine to assume they do not exist as long as you keep an open mind and constantly look for new evidence.

The problem with that statement is that evidence for a god would be evidence that contradicts universal law, universal law being the very foundation by which we accept any evidence as valid. We’d literally be using tried and true universal laws to conclude that there are no universal laws. That is an impossibility, logical, philosophical, whatever.

So if gods are real there simply are no universal laws. And if universal laws are real there simply are no gods. It is not possible to have it both ways, except in our imaginations, our human ability to pretend.

 

[Isambard]

If someone says “I believe God doesn’t exist” that person is not an Atheist for the simple reason that believing in something doesn’t have any effect on that thing actually existing or not.

atheism
One entry found.

atheism

Main Entry: athe·ism
Pronunciation: \ˈā-thē-ˌi-zəm\
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god
Date: 1546
1archaic : ungodliness, wickedness
2 a: **a disbelief in the existence of deity **b: the doctrine that there is no deity

Me thinks you don’t quite know what atheist means.

 

[Starwynd]

Most Christians don’t understand what an atheist is because of their constant demonization and utter hostility of them. And most of them don’t care about what the truth is either.

Personally it’s still hard for me to fathom why God is such a needy parent and won’t allow us to grow away Him.

But I’ve heard that it’s not God that makes demands on us to worship Him, but human beings. And I’ve heard this from protestants.

 

[CatsAndDogs]

Quote:
Originally Posted by AdamStgg
An atheist will never say that God, dragons, unicorns and gnomes don’t exist because it would be an oxymoron. However is perfectly fine to assume they do not exist as long as you keep an open mind and constantly look for new evidence.

The problem with that statement is that evidence for a god would be evidence that contradicts universal law, universal law being the very foundation by which we accept any evidence as valid. We’d literally be using tried and true universal laws to conclude that there are no universal laws. That is an impossibility, logical, philosophical, whatever.

So if gods are real there simply are no universal laws. And if universal laws are real there simply are no gods. It is not possible to have it both ways, except in our imaginations, our human ability to pretend.

What atheists call “universal law” is the real universal law minus one.

The one “law” that atheists compulsively leave out is the “uncaused cause” law.

The ability of an uncaused cause to affect it’s self-caused creation is NOT “proof” of the invalidity of the uncaused cause!

Is is simply THE answer to the otherwise necessary infinitely regressive “problem” of the “start” (and “end”) of existence.

Proof of God does not prove “universal lawlessness”, and the fact of universal law does not prove the nonexistence of God.

 

[CatsAndDogs]

Most Christians don’t understand what an atheist is because of their constant demonization and utter hostility of them. And most of them don’t care about what the truth is either.

Personally it’s still hard for me to fathom why God is such a needy parent and won’t allow us to grow away Him.

But I’ve heard that it’s not God that makes demands on us to worship Him, but human beings. And I’ve heard this from protestants.

Most atheists don’t know that they are not atheists.

There is no Catholic hostility toward atheists, but only toward their atheistic-inspired ANTI-CATHOLIC behaviors.

We love atheists, but hate atheism, which is an unhealthy “burden” to all (so-called) atheists.

Most so-called atheists “worship” that aspect of God which is “orderly (scientific)”, and yet fall for a collateral worship of the demon of “relativism” and/or “indifferentism”.

 

[Starwynd]

Oh the baloney “don’t hate the sinner hate the sin” junk.

And no, you hate them. All Christians do. I guess Christians must justify their hate in some way so they just call it love, which is twisted and irrational. But just renaming things because a person or group finds it hateful is a time honored tradtition in America. Shades of George Carlin is amongst all walks of life.

Atheists are the most hated people by Christians, even more than those who get and perform abortions.

Simply because they do not believe in God, and don’t believe that He exists. And that’s it.

 

[CatsAndDogs]

Oh the baloney “don’t hate the sinner hate the sin” junk.

And no, you hate them. All Christians do.

Atheists can’t believe that this “hate the sin not the sinner” behavior is possible because it’s NOT possible for them, because the “faith” of atheism REQUIRES that “sins” and “sinners” be an IDENTITY!

As an example, to an atheist, a “homosexual” IS his behavior! He is not a person who performs behaviors, but he literally IS his behavior!

Atheists really should get a clear picture of their “opponents” before making themselves look silly.

I guess Christians must justify their hate in some way so they just call it love, which is twisted and irrational. But just renaming things because a person or group finds it hateful is a time honored tradtition in America. Shades of George Carlin is amongst all walks of life.

Atheists are the most hated people by Christians, even more than those who get and perform abortions.

Why is it hateful and irrational to consider persons as precious and those things that pervert those precious persons to be worthy of hatred and worthy of “dissuasion”?

Simply because they do not believe in God, and don’t believe that He exists. And that’s it.

You’re wrong again!

Atheistic behavior which is anti-Catholic (anti-God) is utterly hated as exeedingly damaging to mankind.

Atheists are simply “sick” people who need the “medicine” of “dissuasion from sinning”.

Catholics are prohibited from hating persons, because persons are not to be hated. Sin is the ONLY thing to be hated.

 

[Isambard]

Most atheists don’t know that they are not atheists.

There is no Catholic hostility toward atheists, but only toward their atheistic-inspired ANTI-CATHOLIC behaviors.

I imagine thats why the Church has a history of persecuting non-believers? Nothing says “I Love You” like setting someone on fire.

We love atheists, but hate atheism, which is an unhealthy “burden” to all (so-called) atheists.

Please demonstrate how disbelief is a burden.

Most so-called atheists “worship” that aspect of God which is “orderly (scientific)”,

No they don’t.

and yet fall for a collateral worship of the demon of “relativism” and/or “indifferentism”.

Again, no. Don;t try and stretch the meaning of words. Lying is very unChristian-like