You don’t know that you are absolved from anything, and that you prefer to see religion as a fairy tale only tells me that you would prefer to see it as a fairy tale. Its always going to be emotionally rewarding to reject or escape something that you perceive as a fret to your desired lifestyle, but that doesn’t really tell me much.
I’m pretty sure you mean ‘threat’, not ‘fret’, but actually, yes, religion is a threat to life and liberty, as was amply demonstrated on September 11, 2001, and which is continually demonstrated by the interference of supernaturalist irrationality in human endeavour, even to the complete denial of many human inclinations and needs. As soon as you start believing that the claims of imaginary beings are worth more than the claims of flesh-and-blood humans (and other animals, at that), then you become dangerous to the flourishing of life and liberty. Assert all you like that Islam, for example, is different to Christianity, but all monotheistic faiths are cut from the same mould.
If a person takes crack and tells me that they are happy because of it, that’s fine, but that does not change the fact that their emotional reward has no real substance worth pursuing. You would prefer to believe, without evidence, that you ultimately live in a meaningless nonsensical reality, living a life that ultimately has no more moral value than human excrement, and is going to crease to exist. While believing that, you choose to indulge in fantasies about your value as a person; and you do this because you think the emotional reward is a better pay off than being a servant of God.
I have certainly found it so. And ultimately, I am in a less precarious position than you, as a believer in fundamentally undemonstrable supernatural religion. I am not basing my life on something that is very likely a fantasy, but on what I can see (and otherwise experience) is actually the case. Lack of belief in gods has no directly negative physical consequences in the way that smoking crack does; and my value as a person is precisely what I choose to make it. That goes for anyone - if I treat my fellow beings as valuable, then they have value, to me. That is all the basis required for moral behaviour, after all. I don’t need a god standing over me with promises of fire and brimstone (or the more modernity-friendly interpretation of ‘banishment from the presence of God’) in order to feel motivated to treat my fellow beings as I would like to be treated.
As for the “intellectual reward”, this is purely imaginary on your part, lacking any real objectivity.
And nor does it need ‘real’ objectivity. My feelings of satisfaction are purely subjective, but no less real for being so. I am a subjective being, after all.
There is no intellectual substance to atheism. Metaphysical naturalism has never made any positive inferences that back its claim. All I see from metaphysical naturalists is an irrational degree of scepticism toward anything that stands in the way of atheism.
Those are very big claims. Got anything to back them up? What intellectual substance does theism have that atheism lacks, after all? One needs to know about philosophical claims in order to effectively refute them. Seems to me that if you can defer to a god who ultimately explains everything, then you don’t actually have or even need an explanation for anything in particular - you can just say ‘goddidit’ and obviate the need for further investigation, right? Just because you don’t believe anything is possible without your particular version of god, doesn’t mean this is really the case, after all. Atheism at the very least opens the avenues of inquiry!
Your atheism is clearly reactionary and biased, which is the same thing you claim religion to be.
Oh, please - as if religious belief is not reactionary and biased! Humans, in past ages, found themselves at the mercy of an indifferent natural world, yet still with a certain power to influence things in that world; they reacted to their comparative insignificance by developing a bias that told them they were ‘chosen’ by beings more powerful than themselves. Show me this is not the case, if it isn’t. Yes, I freely acknowledge that much of my present belief system is the result of seeing the errors inherent in my religious upbringing, and also how limiting religious belief can be to human endeavour and understanding of the world. But reactionary bias is only a negative thing if it has negative results - thus far, atheism (and its development into pantheism) has, for me, had nothing but positive and encouraging results, and has most assuredly made my life more interesting.
It is evident to me and any honest person that a metaphysical naturalist has to ignore a large spectrum of human experience in-order to seem remotely valid as a belief system. It evades reality; it is not an intelligible response to reality. Its a hoodwink; and you have fallen for it.
Again with the big claims, with nothing to support them. Why do you insist on dividing reality into two different realms when we don’t even know enough about what really does exist, let alone what we can’t detect? Metaphysical naturalism is nothing more nor less than the belief that reality is all of one kind - that even if we don’t know certain things now, those things are ultimately susceptible to investigation and experience. Supernaturalism has far greater problems, in that it insists upon the existence of things that are, by their very definition, immune from detection or investigation, even understanding. It seems to me that if you need to resort to such things to create a sense of wonder in your life, then you truly don’t appreciate all that the natural universe has to offer.
, sorry for the embarrassing spelling mistake!!!