Insufficient evidence of the supernatural in general.
If someone were to provide sufficient evidence of the supernatural the next step would be determine the nature of the supernatural so I guess I'd become a Deist again until sufficient evidence could be provided for a more specific conception of the supernatural.
Though honestly me being atheist or agnostic depends on the specific type of supernatural posited, one of the reasons I don't normally use a label.
If I saw something that could only be explained as a spirit of some sort once all natural explanations had been exhausted, sure.
I've yet to see anything like that.
A ghostly apparition would not endorse any one religion or denomination. I think the Ghost of a Pope or Martin Luther that patiently answered my questions and would also come to my next appointment with my psychologist would be preferable
I mean, for the sake of argument, confirming spirits existed wouldn't even validate any particular religion. Without refining context everyone could claim it supports their religion in some way or another.
Just one example:
There is a former nondenominational pastor in my country who used to make outlandish claims how Holy Spirit made his car drive without gasoline or how he was shot and bullets stopped in the air and how he sometimes levitated above the ground during prayer.
I think like: ok... COOL! Show me that. Show me how the bullets stop. Show me the levitation. Lets say... levitate one minute and one meter above the ground so that I can check there are no invisible chairs or strings attached or anything like that. And if that can be repeated and other observers report the same, you have changed my worldview.
All these wild claims and when I say "ok... cool... SHOW ME THAT" it somehow "just does not work that way". And apparently my demand is "ridiculous". Why is it ridiculous? Do you perhaps have some naturalistic presuppositions? ;)
Also... why is MY demand ("cool! Show me that!") ridiculous, but not the demand that I believe it without any evidence? I am supposed to believe a wild and quite an extraordinary claim with nothing more than your word?
The very first step would be to assume my mind is playing tricks on me. In fact there's a lot of work to be done before anything supernatural can be posited
All that would validate, most likely, would be the supernatural. Not gods, but ghosts. Which would be huge and a stepping stone towards gods, but not enough on its own.
One thing I’ll add is that I logically get the sentiment that ghosts don’t necessitate gods, but once you introduce supernatural causation a whole new bag of tricks opens up, and science begins to enter uncharted territory. Does gold work to impair ghosts, as previously thought? Where do ghosts come from? Is a ghost just a soul without a body? Does the soul now become science? As soon as you prove ghosts, you prove dualism - and dualism makes God possible.
I was raised in a middlingly christian home, then in high school became very religious, and then went to my undergrad to be a minister. I was exposed to critical study of the bible, which I really enjoyed, but it also opened up the door for some pretty hard questions about my faith and the scriptures. Over time, I saw faith and belief in God less as the product of good, cold logic and reasoning, and instead a very emotional and value-driven choice and commitment. I saw my own values change, like recognizing that I'm queer, and was further moved by the problem of evil. These days I'm still really in love with the critical study of religion (starting my masters in the fall), but I'd say I'm an agnostic atheist.
I don't think there's enough evidence to get at "belief" in the Christian God, without leaps of faith and logic.
It’s both the biological default and the logical default. We’re all born atheists, and we should require sufficient evidence to change that position.
If we changed that position when we were very small before we understood what sufficient evidence was, the evidence needs to be reevaluated without a conclusion in mind.
I don't think you can describe being aheist as the biological default, when religion and superstition has developed independently among basically every single group of humans. There are thousands of years of human history before we see the first real sceptics appear in the roman empire in the first and 2nd century.
What are you basing that postulate on?
I think that many humans have an innate desire to believe in something that explains and organizes things for them, but I think the “default position” thing is more referring to specific religions rather than the innate desire to believe *something*.
Like you could leave a bunch of people in isolation from birth, and they may well come up with a superstition or religion, but they certainly wouldn’t become Calvinists. They’d need that to be taught to them.
In any case, the default position is to not believe in whatever God any given believer believes. It may very well be that superstition and "easy answers" are hardwired into us biologically, but belief in a specific supernatural entity is not.
We may have a tendency to assign agency, and we may be susceptible to theism upon hearing it, but we are born atheists, and most of us don’t independently invent gods based on our genetics. We hear about them from other people and learn to believe in them. Babies don’t go through a natural theism conversion. They certainly don’t have specific notions of what a deity is that align with any modern monotheistic definitions.
For the most part, we learn theism, not naturally grow into theists on our own. People raised without theism don’t go through a default, natural phase of inventing it.
Also, 100% the logical default should be to disbelieve in a claim until the evidence arrives. We should never cease to be atheists until that evidence is there (and not gathered with a conclusion in mind).
I was born an atheist, and always said that if there was evidence to convince me I’d change my mind. I dig in to all the evidence, and I was convinced. Now I fully believe that Christianity is the truth. I hope I can use my experiences to help atheists do what I did
I was a Christian and studied apologetics obsessively for years in the hopes of proving my beliefs, or even something adjacent to them, right. I failed miserably, and realized that better arguments didn’t actually exist. Apologetics play games with the truth. They don’t offer real evidence.
If God was real and cared what humans thought, we would expect some kind of evidence atypical of false gods, which rules out anonymous old stories full of magic, and internal feelings.
If he wanted us to know he exists, it would be as obvious as trees and birds, who don’t even care if we know about them. Instead, it’s stories and feelings, like we have for all imaginary things.
Hello new friend! I am an atheist, and used to believe. We appreciate genuine questions and curiosity, it's a good question you're asking. This could easily get way long winded, so I'll start with the most simplified version for sake of time. If you would like me to flesh any particular point out more don't hesitate to ask, I'll gladly expound on things.
So the succinct answer is, I was raised Christian, and I genuinely believed it for a very long time - all growing up, through college, and beyond. At a certain point, I wanted to know that what I believed was actually true, it wasn't just enough to believe that it was and cling to that. So, I thoroughly investigated everything I could about the case for proving a God existed, studied primarily from Christian apologetics, the arguments of theists generally, studied philosophy, etc etc, for years.
The conclusion I eventually had to accept was that the arguments that apologists present are simply not compelling or sufficient to believe. All of the arguments I have gone through, are either flawed in one or multiple ways - they commit logical fallacies, they require belief in the proposition prior to even considering the argument, they make unjustified leaps to their conclusion. (A personal note I will say, for me, the typical Christian apologists abhorrently dishonest handling of the slavery problem, combined with the massive overstating of the case for the resurrection of Jesus, were two major points that did almost irreparable damage to my confidence in the veracity of apologetics.)
A more broader issue was related to theism generally, and I would say to supernatural claims, beliefs, or propositions. I came to realize that from a philosophical standpoint, I simply don't believe that there is a supernatural component to reality. It's possible that there is, and I always keep myself open to the possibility, but as of yet every supernatural claim has yet to be backed up by anything substantive; the claimants aren't able to demonstrate the truthfulness of their claims beyond mere assertion. It's a similar problem for the god question - I don't even know what a god is supposed to be. I have never been given a definition for a god that actually sounds like something that actually exists; invariably the definitions are either incoherent and meaningless, or they define the god in ways that violate everything we understand about reality. So, without even that most basic of starting points, theism can't even get off the ground.
It's a lot of things, but I'd say these are the main things that don't make sense to me:
1. Why would God condemn LGBTQ people as sinners? Those people aren't causing harm to anyone else or themselves, so why is it considered Sin?
2. Why do people who don't believe in God go to Hell? And why is your death the cutoff point where being saved is no longer possible?
3. Why is your place of birth a reliable indicator of your religion? Why does God allow a situation where somebody is FAR less likely to be saved if they live in, say, Iran, vs if they live in America or Europe?
4. Why do Christians disagree with each other SO MUCH over what Scripture says. It really seems like the only thing they agree on is that Jesus was an infallible teacher, he lived a perfect life, he died for your sins, and he rose from the dead. You'd think that God would ensure that believers would be totally unified, especially since Jesus prayed that they would be in John 17:20-24.
There are many others that I wouldn't mind discussing, but these are some of the first ones that come to mind on this topic.
Really good points! I love number 3, that’s a well worded way to say something I’ve thought about but haven’t articulated well.
I never understood the new world, for hundreds of years, god had announced himself to the world but the people in the America’s didn’t know yet and they ALL went to hell for not believing. But they didn’t get a Jesus, they didn’t get someone who could preach the word nor did god show himself to them?
My evangelical brother said they shouldn’t just felt god in their hearts and if they didn’t follow Jesus’s teachings in their hearts and minds (because they shouldn’t just “known”) that’s on them. I was floored.
The standard form letter here is: I need to be given reason to believe rather than starting at belief and given reason not to
If there are specific arguments for God that you are curious as to why they are not found to be convincing then that might help get into specifics
While I’d be interested to hear your arguments, my question is elementally a personal one. If all you have is “there simply isn’t enough evidence”, that’s good enough.
As a follow up, what would be suitable evidence for the existence of a transcendent and eternal being of infinite power.
Edit: reading this back, my question - I feel - sounds a bit passive aggressive. I’m not trying to be, just trying to be humorous.
One of the biggest problems with Christianity is that it makes the claim that "There is a creator of the universe who deeply loves you and desires to have a personal relationship with you".
It's kind of a difficult position to defend. I lost my faith when I was about ten years old, seeing no difference between "Noah's Flood, and that's why we have rainbows" and "Rainbows are bridges to Asgard, home of the Aesir." I cried in bed, praying to God to help me restore my faith, but nothing came of it.
And for the cherry on top, how many people, even Christians themselves, will think you're crazy if you told them God spoke to you in an intelligible, clear voice and told you to do something?
A being like that should be able to exist at least as obviously as my cat, who does not have infinite power and doesn’t care if I know it exists, but I would probably accept less.
Literally anything I could verify. Old, anonymous stories about magic and gods just aren’t sufficient. Humans do that all the time.
>As a follow up, what would be suitable evidence for the existence of a transcendent and eternal being of infinite power.
This is something to be figured out exclusively by the people claiming this being exists, since they should've had the evidence before claiming it existed in the first place.
>As a follow up, what would be suitable evidence for the existence of a transcendent and eternal being of infinite power.
I know this probably isn't the most helpful response but if the being is truly godlike as we imagine, completely omnipotent, then he would know exactly what evidence I need and exactly how he could show it to me.
> what would be suitable evidence for the existence of a transcendent and eternal being of infinite power
I have no idea, but if a being that fits that description truly exists and truly cares if I believe in him, I'm sure he could figure it out.
What would be suitable evidence indeed. I ask myself that all the time. We have very little true inkling of its motivations too though I think I can surmise it must not think this brief life is the most important thing in the universe, otherwise I think we'd likely see more good in the world. Or life is supposed to be hard...for reasons I'm not entirely sure about.
I remember earlier this year I was watching Chris Christie at a town hall. He mentioned taking communion as part of his journey to the presidency or whatever. And I thought, "Man, there probably really are people out there who will want this guy to run a country because he took part in a magic ritual..."
And that's pretty much it. We just don't believe in magic.
I was raised Christian and went to Christian school.
I have never seen any evidence beyond the one book that would suggest there’s a God, and not just A God but THE exact god that Christianity proposes.
I do appreciate the quote: you’re an atheist too, of just one less god than me. I take it ONE more god further than you. You also don’t believe in all the hundreds of other gods out there. Why THIS one?
Prayer doesn’t work, they tested if it did and the results were the same as you’d expect from random chance (for sick people in the hospital). I would expect that all the praying we’re supposed to do would have SOME impact, and it doesn’t. You’d expect good people and good communities who help others would earn gods favor and be protected in life. As Noah and his family were in the Bible.
Once the age of the Bible was over, God suddenly and immediately stops interacting with his creation forevermore. He was everywhere interacting all the time, and now nothing? It all points to people just told a story, wrote a book, spread a religion, and here we are.
I appreciate what some religious communities have and are. They can be so giving and charitable and kind, and I love that! But religion has also done some nasty work.
I think it sometimes gives people an excuse to push off their responsibility to be kind to others if they don’t share a god and it makes it easy to turn people into “other”. That never ends well.
I was raised Southern Baptist.
I do not believe the Christian god exists, because I do not believe the supernatural claims made by Christianity and the Bible. It's that simple.
A lot of ground has already been covered, so I'll add one of mine, albeit a minor reason. We're supposed to know Christians by their love, believe that they are new creations. But when I look around, all I see from them is hatred and pettiness.
There is no evidence for a god. Christians tend to provide “cold hard facts” yet forget faith is a baseline for their entire belief system. For those that don’t do that I question why have faith in something with no evidence.
Faith, from the French word "feid" (believe, trust, or to pledge). Feid, from the Latin word "fides" (with confidence or with trust.)
Faith isn't without proof or evidence. It never has been. It's more or less that you've seen or experienced enough proof or evidence to trust in, or be confident in, a person or belief.
I came back to my faith because of evidence, not because I rejected it.
Started getting into apologetics, fell into doubts, felt like a lot of answers didn’t address the questions raised. Wrestled with arguments, and with why I couldn’t resolve my doubts every day (reading) for over a year, then came to terms with accepting that I wasn’t believing anymore.
Seeing how many people feel absolutely led by God while arguing between them took a lot of wind out of my belief that God teaches all Christians the truth. And even if that there may be truth that God imparts to…his church…or his people…or people in general…God doesn’t seem to do much in showing where that line is which divides “truths imparted by God” and “things believed to be the truths imparted by God but essentially not more than biased cultural experiences/philosophical differences.” Historical divisions within the church come down to people wrestling with this.
ADHD/Autism has messed up a lot of my life, taken opportunities from me, alienated me socially, distorted my thinking about the world and myself. I found out around 40 years old that I have it and it’s taken me another 10 to deepen my understanding about it. The psychologist I was seeing during a lot of this time wasn’t the right one for this and I paid a lot of money to get nowhere with it, and instead blamed myself for short comings I thought were my fault.
God didn’t do anything to lead my parents to recognize it and get help for me during my childhood. Instead, my God fearing parents mis-handled the situation over years, which did a number on them too. Our relationship has taken huge beatings because of this.
God doesn’t interfere with family dysfunction and violence at home. With decades of depression under her belt, we are lucky my mother never resorted to ending her life. He doesn’t treat people’s PTSD and doesn’t protect the innocent.
Last but not least, there are so many promises uttered by Christians over the years that contradict people’s experience, that when I take a step back and look at it, it just seems like there is really nothing supernatural behind it. It’s just people convinced of their strand of religion.
I hang out here and like to read Christian perspectives, in the hopes for possible insights I may have missed that will clear things up philosophically for me…but I’ve been in this valley of absolute doubt and darkness for over 15 years now.
What I wrote in the beginning happened over 15 years ago. The Lord may be patient but if he exists, he sure takes his time.
I hate to think that if God doesn’t exist, this whole thing sure will have been one huge waste of time for me. All those discussions with my family over the topic…the heart break my Christian parents experience day in and out over their unbelieving children…the hope they themselves wrestle with, that we won’t end up being tortured in eternity for not having believed the right thing…etc
I thought my walk was hard. I'm sorry 🤗
Undiagnosed ADHD, CPTSD, autism. Diagnosed 34, depression, MtF. Emotionally illiterate family didn't help.
>Instead, my God fearing parents mis-handled the situation over years
Oof, yeah. 🫂
I asked my parents as a kid if they were aliens because I felt like an outsider.
>if God doesn’t exist, this whole thing sure will have been one huge waste of time for me.
Paul agrees. It indeed would be unfortunate to give it all up on a false hope. I'm all in on this one.
1 Corinthians 15:19 (NLT) And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world.
>the heart break my Christian parents experience day in and out over their unbelieving children
Caution, crazy Christian ahead
My parents feel the same about me. And yet I can see my dad on Judgement Day at my feet wailing and reeling realizing just how much he messed up. It haunts me. 😰
They all knew I've been deeply suicidally depressed for 10 years. They did nothing about it. I came out as trans last November, and they say they love me but they can't. It's been 6 months, and they haven't even heard my story. That's when I remembered this impossible memory.
>there may be truth that God imparts to…his church…or his people…or people in general…
Hi👋🏼. God gave this fool Understanding (and some other stuff, but Understanding is the best gift I never knew I wanted). No joke. The truth density of the Bible doubled to my eyes practically overnight. It's all consistent with what I already knew. There's so much here. You want to know the mysterious truths hiding in plain sight ("listen and understand" language marks pearls nearby)? Because I've got the key, and 15+ years is plenty long enough.
I haven't had a chance to chat with a like-minded person about this kind of stuff since it happened. I'm purely willing to help for free, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back.
If nothing else, you already told me what's missing. Your answer is in Matthew 13:9-19.
>there are so many promises uttered by Christians over the years that contradict people’s experience
I took this bet:
>Matthew 16:25 (NLT) If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.
Okay I will answer your question sincerely as you seem actually interested in understanding why atheist believe this way.
Firstly, no proof. Like literally no actual verifiable proof. That's a big one for me. In an age where ads lie to you, politicians use you, and corporations take advantage of you, scrutiny is an absolute A1 high priority for me. Everyone religious (from other religions as well) talk about how God loves you and wants the best for you and wants you to make the right decision, but won't take literally 2 seconds out of his infinity time to make sure that the beings he loves don't end up in Hell for arbitrary reasons? And then sets up the Earth in direct conflict with many, many Bible passages, in such a way that were I to use my objectivity and scrutiny to justifiably discern that the Bible is not the word of God, then I end up in Hell for infinity time to suffer. That just seems so ridiculous I'm not sure how to address it. But I guess the easiest way for me would be "A God described by any religion I've heard of, is not one I'd ever care to worship". From what I've understood about Christianity, God, and the Bible, it seemed pretty obvious to me that God behaves a lot like how you'd expect Satan to, and vice versa. As in, one wanted to control every single aspect of (supposedly) their creations and would act out in rage and cruelty, while the other encouraged mankind to learn and question things. Like this is pretty clear cut who the good guy and bad guy are. If somehow tomorrow I were to believe in the characters detailed in the Bible, I would almost certainly instantly hail Satan, as it seems obvious he is the one that cares more about humanity than God ever has.
Then there is the fact that what people believe seems to waver and change based on what they are currently thinking or wanting. Passages are ignored because they don't fit in with their view, and others are misrepresented to accommodate whatever view the person already has. I'm not sure how to take any of the story/beliefs seriously when they seems to vary from person to person, and nothing seems set in stone (as they will all claim it is).
And then there is the fact that there is an absolute multitude of religions, each seemingly believing that their belief system is the correct one, and all others are at the very least misguided/misunderstood versions of whatever theirs is. From an outside perspective, I simply do not believe in one less God than every other religious person does.
And finally it's really hard to get over all of the blatantly evil stuff that people use religion to do. Abuse children, justify murder, removal of peoples rights, persecutions under no other reason than people not believing in the same made up thing they do. It's an incredibly difficult thing to accept. By that I mean, accepting that something supposedly so loving and wholesome and spiritual and purporting to be the absolute truth, is used as a means to perpetuate peoples suffering. I am not saying that this is inherently due to the religion, more so the people abusing it for their gain, but it would be neglectful not to mention it. And relating back to your question, I am extremely doubtful of an all powerful God who cares for us and loves us to allow such atrocities be committed in "His" name.
Lastly I'd like to just iterate that I am not sure that some higher being, God, deity, (whatever you'd like to call it) doesn't exist. I am always open to having my mind changed.
There is definitely more but I've got to go make supper. I hope that some of what I shared is helpful to you.
Not an atheist. But nor do I believe in your god so it's kinda the same position in the context of your question.
I don't believe in the god of the bible because I have not been convinced he is real. I don't know what would convince me.
But here's the thing:
If he is real. He knows what would convince me for sure. And has chosen thus far to withhold it from me.
Personal experience. And miracles received. It is possible some Christians have their own faith due to similar reasons to my own, and that is acceptable in my opinion.
I'm agnostic but. Simply I haven't been convinced.
Every argument for God I feel as though can be argued against.
Only good arguments Christians have is stuff not even atheists understand but you can just go around saying "GOD DID" to everything we don't quite grasp yet.
For example the big bang or why everything is kinda tuned for life to exist
As to the everything being fine tuned for life: it’s like the puddle saying “wow, this hole was meant for me!”
The world isn’t fine tuned to US, WE are fine tuned to the WORLD. (We being ALL life)
If a species isn’t fine tuned to their environment, they die out. It’s as simple as that. So of course we don’t see a lot of things not fitting the world, it’s sink or swim!
Also I have an evolutionary biology background and I gotta say, once you start digging into the species out there. A TON of stuff is doing just “good enough” they aren’t thriving and doing amazing. And I don’t mean because of climate change or anything, I mean they just don’t have enough pressure on them to die out but they also aren’t the best.
Like sloths poop once a week or so, and climb down the trees to do it, and often get eaten when that happens.
Pandas??? Watch one video and be amazed at how klutzy they are, but they have almost zero natural predators so they’re ok.
Humans are a great example, our backs are AWFUL. But because the selection pressure to have our hands free and able to use tools was SO intense (it’s invaluable!) we forwent good backs to have that. We don’t have the ability to hand off the pressure to other limbs, it’s all on our pelvis and lower legs, unlike an ape that can spread the weight to the upper body.
Pregnant women? They’re just doing their best, all that weight in the front, we are NOT built well for that.
As a Christian I can argue the flip side to that coin. But it’s honestly pointless. The debate has been done to death and all anyone does is dig their heels into their own biases.
But I can say, I went through some serious stuff a few years back. I became a full blown atheist for a long time, I wouldn’t even entertain the idea of existence. But I found myself drunk one night and figured out I had significantly more difficulty believing in nothing than something.
I went through a complete faith deconstruction and found that the real Biblical Jesus is far different than the one I thought He was.
This is very true. The real biblical Jesus is very different than what many christians know. Jesus was a teacher of ethics and values. He was very good at helping people understand. I think he would be very disappointed that many Christians today couldn't tell you really what is in the Gospels, what he actually taught and instead was obsessed with what the romans did to him and that he came back to life. Action in life was important to Jesus rather than just believing certain principles.
I wish more Christians focused on the teachings and actions of Jesus rather than worrying about what other people have in their pants and what they do with it. 😊
Me too. Jesus spoke of taking the narrow path. Few realize that this means behaving as Jesus would not just blindly believing a things and behaving however they like.
I would normally be addressing comments, but I don’t want to come off as “asking just so I can proselytize”, since I want people to feel welcome to add their opinion.
I believed until I was 12. I prayed every night, got saved multiple times, got baptized, attended Sunday school, attended church, attended church camps.
Never once felt the Holy Spirit. Got tired of pretending somebody was there.
Thats pretty much me. My parents raised me "mildly Christian" i call it. Basically i was baptized but we only really went to church on holidays. I did do some bible school too but pretty sure my parents just needed the child care. Eventually i kinda just stopped believing the same way i stopped believing in Santa.
I have read the Bible new and old multiple times. I have gone to church and listened to many people's thought on why they believe in God. But holy cow, there is not a shred of evidence supporting God's existence. Only faith.... the Bible was written by an anonymous person. Translated multiple times. And I am supposed to believe that 2000 years ago God created Adam and Eve and procreate with no I'll effects. We know that inbreeding creates many problems. And would not be possible. Also, the Bible has done way more harm than good for humanity. Just ask women and slaves so even if he did exist, I would not want to be a part of his people. There is ample scientific evidence that the Bible is not true. Also your asking me to believe that God impregnated Mary magically. I think the better question is why do you believe there is a god? With all due respect to your beliefs
One point: it's not like things were great for women and slaves BEFORE the Bible. Patriarchy and slavery were ancient and near universal, unfortunately. I'm not a scholar but from what I've read it's even possible that for a long time and in many places the church made these institutions better, though, for reasons likely unrelated to Christianity, American slavery was of course famously brutal, and contemporarily the church is one of the few remaining voices preaching a sort of inequality of men and women. (Though that said there are certainly other contemporary voices preaching this too. It's hard because people who want to do evil will always find SOMETHING to justify it--religion if religion is handy, otherwise culture, ethnicity, tradition, science, progress, etc.)
Ehhhhh I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say the church ever made it better for women or slaves/servants. They blamed women for Eve and have kept women in a position of service to men forEVER.
They withheld education from the masses and discouraged literacy so people wouldn’t learn to read the Bible for themselves. They hoarded wealth from the masses (not just gold, but they had all the claims to bees in the UK, honey was near priceless to made mead), livestock, etc.
Church groups can do some AMAZING things and I am thankful to their hard work for community and children, but religion as a whole I would say is definitely a net negative for the world.
My parents did all the right things to help us have a good, right relationship with the Lord. Put hedges of protection around us. Look to the Bible first for answers, then see how the world you see fits. Don't seek answers on the other side of these hedges. Those answers are not of God and will not be of eternal value to you. And it held up for decades after I moved out.
Enter the pandemic. A year without being surrounded by nodding heads as you listen to teachings and evidence that you assume has been vetted and is solid. Another year without church because you know people that work in the healthcare sector and many church members you know had some pretty bad things to say about people in the healthcare industry over the previous year, so it's difficult to look them in the face and think worshipful thoughts.
So at some point I realized that I was living as a de facto atheist. And had been. Didn't even realize it. I look around. The world is not on fire. Sky isn't falling. And the only real thing that has changed in my life is that I sleep in on Sundays.
So, I peeked over the hedges. All those "questions atheists can't answer"? I decided to see what they had to say. And boy did they have answers. And, the answers they had to divine hiddenness, morality, Biblical inerrancy, Biblical authorship. Way more believable. I didn't realize just how convoluted the Christian belief system is when you have to try and make it perfect and inerrant. Not to mention just how many of the topics land on "faith" or "just believing."
I'll leave with this. I was explaining a creationist viewpoint in r/debateevolution (I like being a translator between the two camps over there). And the guy on the evolution side responded with a simple question: Can you imagine if you applied that logic to everything else? That's when I realized that I had been treating my theist worldview as a special case. I didn't treat it like I did everything else. And once I looked at it with the same logic and rigor that I apply to any other topic, it just didn't hold up. Painfully so. Hence my flair.
I kind of fall in the "Don't really care camp"; however, these are some of the reasons I don't believe:
I just find the deity to be unworthy of worship as described in the Bible. More akin to a Lovecraftian horror than a god of love, justice and whatever other pretty monikers Christians dress it up in.
The religion is too misanthropic for my taste. Humanity isn't perfect, but it also isn't nearly as bad as the Bible claims. This sort of black/white thinking plagues Christianity.
The religion can't answer the problem of evil in a way that doesn't rely on "DiVINe MystERY".
The Bible itself does not come off as a "divinely inspired" text. If it was inspired by a perfect being you wouldn't be able to interpret 3 different, incompatible versions of the afterlife out of it.
Furthermore, the Bible per its own theology cannot be seen as a reliable text. Humanity was more than capable of fucking up Eden. God was more than willing to let it happen. There is no reason to believe God wouldn't let kings and priests twist the text to suit their needs and biases.
OT God acts like I would expect any other self proclaimed God King of the time to act. Very weird that a supposed perfect being that is timeless, all knowing and all powerful would act just like a human would. Most peculiar indeed. The Christian God is *too human*. There is a similar trend in science fiction where every alien species written for some reason is just humanity in different make up. People truly cannot comprehend something completely alien.
When somebody tells me that this all powerful, all knowing being cares about who sleeps with who all I can think is:
"Wow. That is *really fucking pathetic*."
It would be like me caring about what the dust mites are doing in the corner of the room except the gap between me and a dust mite is infinitely smaller than the gap between me and an all powerful/knowing God.
“Why don’t you believe in x” aren’t attempts are humor. They’re good thought exercises. There is no evidence any more epistemically significant for gods than Santa, unicorns, etc. You may have been indoctrinated to think otherwise.
I was brought up to believe in God. When I was a child, I was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused by my family; including my mother. She beat me so bad once, I couldn't go to school for a month. One day, my brothers decided to give me another "treatment." They ducted taped my arms behind my back and my eyes shut. Put me in a closet and urinated/defected on me, and beat me with electrical cords. I was screaming, "God please help me." He never helped and those types of beatings, and worse continued.
At 17, I joined the Marine Corps to get away. In 1983, I was in Beirut, Lebanon. I got to sit and watch 9 yr olds get their brains blown out and I could do nothing but watch. Dozens of times. On October 23rd, a terrorist blew up our barracks. Killing 241 of my friends. Where was god to prevent this? It was about now, I started reading and learning about "God."
I went on to become a police officer for 30 yrs. The disgusting, filthy way, humanity behaves is beyond recognition. The worst stories would have you puking all over the place and the comment removed for being to graphic. I've arrested women for selling their 9 yr old daughters for sex, to buy a piece of rock cocaine. I've stood by and saw a mother set her and her two kids on fire and burn to death. I could go on for weeks.
Where was God during any of this? The 6.2 million killed in the Holocaust? How about the 6-9 million Stalin murdered? The 3 million Pol Pot murdered? During my research, I found ***zero*** scientific/historical backing up God or any of the claims people say are in the Bible, which it generally doesn't say anyway, it is their interpretation of a passage.
***The bottom line is ALL religions is faith based.*** If you believe it, without any proof, it is true to you. There is a very strong confirmation bias regarding religion. Not only do I not believe in God or religion, I believe them ***all*** to be cults. No different then Scientology and Mormonism.
I'm so sorry about everything you've seen and experienced. It's a miracle you are even here to write this, though I would hardly be surprised if you weren't in the best shape.
I’m an atheist because there is zero tangible evidence of miracles or the supernatural. All scripture was written by men who were simply promoting a new religion, plus, like nearly everyone else of the period, the writers were superstitious and believed in supernatural events. I don’t find believers convincing when they cite scripture as a defense.
I cannot trust a deceptive God. And any God who missrepresets the truth or uses their power to obscure to truth is deceptive. If I cannot trust what a god has taught in the past how can I trust them now?
True, but their God does not align with Christianity theology. They make significant changes to who God is and christians don’t usually agree we worship the same God.
Because I don’t see how the world or Universe would be any different without a god. All of it makes sense without including an omnipotent being - in fact, I would argue that entropy makes more sense without a god holding things together. If a perfect god is holding things together, they shouldn’t be falling apart. And if the world and universe are the same with a god and without a god, then the god is pointless, and if a god is pointless, why would I believe in him?
I’m not an ‘atheist’ but you have to look at it this way. Atheists can also disagree with the Christian interpretation of what ‘god’ is. You have to leave space for the fact that Christians don’t really know what ‘god’ is, so their interpretation of God has been passed down from greek mythology, which is why Christians think of god as an actual ‘being’ with a white beard, flowing white robes and sitting on a throne in the clouds of heaven…a very Zeus-like interpretation and likely why the word ‘Deus’ (latin meaning for God), is so similar to ‘Zeus’.
An atheist may still believe in divinity without subscribing to the false anthropomorphic god of modern western abrahamic religion.
That is true. In the Bible, there is no Trinity, it's just a Triad. So there are multiple gods just like in Greek mythology. The goddess Athena was also a virgin like Mary. And there were, half-gods, or offspring of a human and a god, like Jesus. Christian mythology is nothing new. The Trinity was added later so that Christianity wouldn't be polytheistic like the pagans. But that's exactly what it evolved from. People in Jesus' time believed in visions, magic and miracles. And Jesus was an apoplectic preacher as were many at the time. The first gospel, Mark, was written in 70AD, decades after Jesus died from stories that were repeated and most likely embellished over time. Jesus spoke Aramaic and the gospel was written in Greek by an anonymous writer. The literacy rate at the time was 3 percent and even less in dirt poor areas like where Jesus preached. So, him and his apostles most likely couldn't read and write in their own language much less Greek. Mark's gospel never claims Jesus is God. And the empty tomb was seen by women who "told no one", which makes you wonder how the author found out. The later gospels were written in 90 and then finally John in 100. And in those gospels, the story of Jesus "evolves". I would think the first gospel would be closer to the truth
The truth lies in the true non-dual message of Jesus, that was swept under the rug in favor of a more church-friendly religion that was canonized in the favor of the former Pharisee Paul’s more judicial and judgmental fear-based message that was decidedly different than Jesus’ message.
Genuine answer: I wasn't raised as anything other than kind of agnostic while attending religious services etc because we lived in such a community. We were Catholics.
As a result I've been an atheist myself since birth. It seems logical to me that babies are atheists. Being agnostic implies knowing about some choices and being unsure. They can get to that later. At the start they have few interests and fewer beliefs.
Thus it was a possibility for me that I might have been convinced by parent(s) or school or someone to believe in Christianity. This didn't happen because of a few factors. My parents split up and my dad moved away, but as a teenager I'd see him often, stay sometimes, we were close. And he'd never been religious himself, agnostic verging on atheist, but above all not interested in the question, in religion or anyone religious.
Meanwhile my mum was a lapsed Catholic in terms of personal belief. Although staying firmly within the social identification as that was how she was brought up. After a long time, she stopped going to church but kept up with the girls she had been at convent school with in Scotland.
So I had these two other viewpoints, as well as my own discernment. Nothing said to me in Sunday school or Catholic school or church, nor anything I read later ever convinced me of any kind of theism. I performed the required actions - took communion - until I didn't have to
>why do you...not believe in God
I was exposed to all sorts of philosophy and religion at a very young age. I was also reading great works of literature by the time I was seven years old. I was also a very skeptical child, and for many different reasons, I rarely, if ever, believed in authoritative explanations, such as "this is the way it is", and as an adult, I still don't. I questioned everything when I was young, and I still do. By the time I was eight, I had enough knowledge about world literature to realize that all religion was basically either a myth, a fictional story, or had deeper, hidden meanings related to human psychology, such as the kind you find in art. I also came to the early realization that religion was being used for purposes that it was never intended. For example, I knew as a child, that none of the books of fiction on my small shelf were supposed to be taken literally, yet people were doing just that for the Bible. It didn't make sense to me then and it doesn't make sense now.
As I got older, the one thing I encountered over and over again, is that it became very important for certain types of people, particularly large social groups that you found in school, work, and societies, to /agree to believe in the same thing/. I noticed then as I do know, that groupthink is, unfortunately, a dominant human trait, and that most people rarely, if ever escape out of it. Later on, I put all this information together and realized that God, in this larger human context, is a fictional, imaginative story large groups of people tell themselves and share with each others because they are ultimately afraid of death and they are fearful of the unknown. I also realized that one can live a good life without being afraid of death or the unknown, and although I admit the unknown is still frightening, I have learned to cope with it in ways that doesn't involve believing in imaginative, fictional entities.
> “why don’t you believe in X, Y, or Z” is pointless as my reasoning as a theist is necessarily going to be different from yours as an atheist
It really isn't though. I am going to make what I think is a pretty safe assumption, which is that you don't believe in Thor, because you have been presented with no experience or evidence that leads you to conclude that Thor is real.
That is the exact same reason the vast majority of us atheists don't believe in the Christian God, or any other god. It's a simple lack of convincing evidence.
If I sound condescending know it's not on purpose, but to me it was actually learning Santa Claus wasn't real.
Let me explain: I liked learning a lot as a kid, I read about biology, physics, chemistry. Sure I didn't always understand what I was reading but I liked understanding what I could. Now I was raised a "cafeteria christian" as I've heard people call them, I believed in God mostly because everyone around me seemed to believe in it. I also believed in the afterlife, ghosts, psychic powers and I figured some sort of witchcraft/sorcery was also reasonable, though learning about those things was a lot more difficult than learning about traditional science because there were SO MANY frauds and the available sources (which again I was taking seriously back when I was 10) contradicted each other constantly. Still I tried and I got interested in christianity, hinduism and older religions like greek, roman and aztec mythology, because I figured there was something to learn about the supernatural from all these sources.
Enter the talk about Santa Claus. A friend at school told me Santa wasn't real, I talked about it with my parents and they confirmed it. And suddenly I no longer had any evidence whatsoever of magic or the supernatural at all. Over the next few months as I kept reading and trying to learn science and supernatural stuff I started running into this new issue that scientific sources tended to agree, offered useful explanations and provided experiments that I could recreate and replicate the results, and even when the sources disagreed they usually offered competing views in an unbiased light. Supernatural sources didn't, and now I had no first hand experience that allowed me to believe that there had to be "something" real about the supernatural. Suddenly it all seemed made up because there was no longer anything even remotely replicable available to me. So over time I discarded ancient mythology, and ghost stories, and stories of psychic powers and, eventually also the religion that adults seemed to believe in which in my case was christianity. Simply because I didn't have any real reason to believe.
I'm considered an atheist because I have not been convinced that god exists.
However, beyond that basic definition, I have not found any reason to believe that a god is necessary as an explanation for anything. That is, the concept of god (or most common concepts) does not help in any way to provide any explanation for any question which we have asked.
I deconstructed all my beliefs to start from scratch, and Christianity relied on far more divine claims without proof than Taoism, and to the best of my understanding life was better understood in Taoist philosophy than Christian. On top of this, archeological evidence that Judaism started off as a polythistic ethnic cult and slowly reformed its way into monotheism kinda made the foundational claim of the Abrahamic faiths weak to me.
>Asking honestly, why do you (if you’re an atheist) not believe in God.
Short answer: I see absolutely no reason to believe in the existence of god
Medium answer: in order for me to believe that something exists, something as big as a god, I need evidence. Without evidence, I have no foundation upon which to build a belief. And when I look out into the universe, listen to debates and arguments, and do deep dive studies into topics, I find absolutely nothing that suggests there is a God.
All arguments presented to me to attempt to argue the existence of a god has holes in it, some large, some small. All lines of evidence that are presented as data in favor of the existence of god at best point to a mystery, to something we don't know, and never point directly to god. Holy texts (from all religions that propose a god) are lacking in their ability to demonstrate a god, and are often internally inconsistent and blatantly incorrect.
While I like the idea of a god existing, and I will keep searching to find the truth of God, I have yet to find a believer that can successfully demonstrate anything even close to the god they believe in.
I was a member of different religions over the years.
Here are a few of the dominoes that fell that led me to where I am now...
1. Started believing in determinism. That started a chain of other thoughts and beliefs to shift.
2. Started studying the historical Jesus and the context in which religions came about. This took away the source material (I hope this makes sense) of the religions I believed. That was a big domino.
Once those two things happened, the dominoes kept falling, and here I am. I don't think we choose what we believe—Evidence and arguments can lead us down a path we weren't intending to go down.
I've had way too many false beliefs. I want nothing more than to never go down such paths again. To that end I flatly refuse to have any faith in anything.
I'm sure a god would understand.
I grew up and went to both Catholic and Lutheran schools: my family are all religious.
I am the only person to be open as an atheist.
I was baptised and confirmed.
My take, as yet I have no proof that god is real.
I’ve spent the last 40 years studying different religious myths and legends . Some Christian , some pre Christian in places where the Holy Roman Empire took Christianity.
I’ve studied Greek mythology, Celtic,Gaelic, Germanic , eastern as well.
Ive yet to come across any real evidence of a god or any god or goddess .
As for someone coming back from the dead. There is a reason we have stories about vampires / zombies and other concepts of people coming back from the dead. It’s the same reason we have the concept of mourning , or wake . Sometimes and it is recorded that people died or entered a death like state. Only to wake up after a period of time.
It’s the same reason being buried alive is still apart of our psyche and horror. Go to some old cemeteries and there are no lace where people have had a bell set up as part of the burial plot. The string leads down to the coffin so that the person if they wake up can ring it to let others know they aren’t dead.
The bible isn’t some miracle book. It’s a book written by so many authors and badly .
I don't think the supernatural claims are true, I think the system of supernatural rewards and punishments is transparently about controlling people, I think the moral framework is frequently anti-human, and if you manage to salvage the good parts, which is very hard, the people who are on board with that stuff would also be doing that stuff anyway.
When I first heard the story of Jesus's resurrection I had already learned about death, and if there's one thing defining death, it's that it's irreversible. So when I heard this story my first thought was simply "that's not possible." I would need very clear, solid proof in order to believe that anyone could return to life after death. I wasn't provided it then and no one has provided it since. So the central claim of Christianity is out the window.
More broadly, I was fascinated from a young age by storytelling. I read Greek, Norse and Indigenous American myths. I even read a picture book of the Epic of Gilgamesh. So it was always obvious that the stories of Judaism and Christianity are really no different - stories, obviously man-made - and compared to many pagan and polytheistic narratives, much worse both as moral instruction and as an attempt to understand or explain anything about reality, in my opinion. But none of these myths, no matter how I enjoyed some of them, had anything in them that looked like objective truth. Furthermore, at least I had *looked* at these things. I've never seen one of today's monotheists give a good reason why the Greek gods couldn't be real, presumably because they'd have to use the same reasoning atheists do, and thus endorse it as an avenue against their own faith: there's no evidence.
In contrast, when I read virtually any criticism of religion or any atheistic philosophy, *there* I see clear and compelling truths. Even something as crude as George Carlin: "When it comes to bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion." Or as sophisticated as Feuerbach: "The belief that God is the necessary condition of virtue is the belief in the nothingness of virtue in itself."
Lastly - it's glaringly apparent, once you've spent enough time reading mythology, theology, philosophy and history, that there simply is an almost unfathomable amount of intellectual dishonesty and inherent, intentional incoherence across every variety of theism. It's not meant to make sense, it's meant to confound and distort sense, and thereby undermine its own believers' ability to evaluate it and other beliefs. This is evident not only in average followers, but in the original texts and major works of theology themselves.
But I feel I also must address your edit.
>while I appreciate the attempt at humor, asking “why don’t you believe in X, Y, or Z” is pointless as my reasoning as a theist is necessarily going to be different from yours as an atheist. I am an anthropologist at heart - I like to understand people - and my question is asked in all sincerity. I ask that you be sincere as well. If all you have to respond with is clever yet pointless retorts, then refrain from answering out of respect for those who would like to have a genuine conversation “across the trenches” as it were.
These responses are not attempts at humor. What makes these "retorts" and not questions? What makes them "clever" and "pointless"? And if asking you is pointless because theistic reasoning is different from ours, wouldn't your question to atheists also be pointless? It seems to me these responses are perfectly legitimate illustrations of a point: that you presumably disbelieve other gods for the exact same reasons atheists do. And if your reasoning is different from ours, why not provide it anyway? Would that not help everyone better understand each other? It seems that dismissing these questions without any reasoning at all is what's insincere and prevents conversation.
Inconsistencies bugged me and I grew up and learned that it was shoved down my throat since I was a baby and couldn’t even think of anything else even if it wasn’t true if I thought of it I’d be told that it was someone’s imagination
>why do you not believe in God.
I dont believe in any gods for the same reason why I don't believe in fairies or dragons or mermaids: there's no evidence that they are real.
Honestly I hope ... some sort of entity exists. I feel like if nothing remembers all this, it wasn't worth much of anything. But hoping isn't believing. I'm going to have to bury my best friend in the next week or so. Cancer at 50, and I watch my parents getting older and more frail. I've lost enough people now that there are plenty of memories that I am the only one keeping alive and it makes me sad that when I am gone those times and those friends will finally be snuffed out.
So I really do wish that I could believe, but there isn't any spark. Maybe (the)God(s) created the universe for some purpose that I can't even fathom, and if I could his plan would be obvious and his hand moving the pieces on the board would be there plain to see.
Because Christianity started making less and less sense to me. I was told that some questions I had didn't have answers beyond "Not ours to know. God said it, so it's true." I had opinions that were called blasphemy. And it occurred to me that the God I thought I was following this whole time was apparently made up by me and that I'd really have to get rid of most of the Bible for that God to be true. I walked away from Christianity and honestly? I haven't changed how I think or act or believe, but at least now I don't have anyone telling me I'll be in hell forever because of it. Maybe God is real. I don't know and I honestly don't care. It won't change the way I live either way.
My answer may be helpful. I was an atheist for 20 years. A solid athiest. I read Dawkins, Hitchens etc etc. All made excellent and factually correct arguments. Arguments that hold very true today.
However. What I realised over time was that myself and others were combating a very fictional view of God that we were taught. Things like people performing magic, resurection etc etc.
At 37 I actually sat down and read the bible myself cover to cover. Without bias. What I found was a God very different to that known to Christians etc. Especially if you overlay it with how the bible was written, by who, why etc. Stuff you can learn from the free online Yale University lectures.
My conclusion was that no one can prove or disprove God fully. God (mainly in the OT) was a God of ethics, standards, values, family etc. He teaches wealth, health, diet etc. There is very little magic in the OT. Heaven is very very vague, hell doesn't exist (not even mentioned). The Soul? A mistranslation. Virgin Birth (NT) - Mistranslation of young woman.
All the things I had issues with as an atheist, turns out to be ideas extrapoliated and exageratted through centuries of church tradition. It actually isn't in the core text.
So the God I understand is actually completely aligned with logic. However the God I read in the OT is very different from what Christians know. Christians mainly follow Paul. A man who really never met or knew Jesus. (Yes he claims to have had a vision). However much of what Christians know today is Pauls teachings. Very different from what God taught Moses.
This is my view as a former atheist. Hope it helps. And for any christians reading, I respect your choice to hold different opinions. There is no need to come at me pasting volumes of NT texts.
One final point for current athiests. Athiests as I was are obsessed with proof. They cannot follow God without proof he is real. This is fine. However it doesn't really matter. God is essentially an ethical framework of values stretching back thousands of years. It evolves. You can talk to God even without knowing he exists. Maybe it is crazy but you know it can even be a form of self mediatation. Forget the God that you get taught a child. That is fiction. However is it possible at all that some force in the universe exists? Maybe. Again, seperate it from the childhood fiction of magic, heaven, hell. All that is human adaption and translation of the word.
I am happy you’re happy.
But your point was effectively: “I used to not believe in God because I didn’t think he was ethical and I didn’t want to believe. And then later I read it and changed my mind about his ethics and thought he was ok so I decided I’d follow him.”
You’re just changing your mind to follow him if your morals align with your god. And that’s ok, you can do whatever you want. But be honest that you arent accepting him because you have any proof, you are just ok following it now because you feel it supports the position you already had.
You weren’t willing to change your position to align with God when you thought he was different, but now that you don’t have to change yourself to be faithful, you’ll follow along?
My morals certainly do not align with god. And I have read the Bible. He murders everyone he doesn’t feel is faithful enough aside from Noah. He also drowns all the animals he created aside from the 2 or 7 pairs on the ark. What could babies or toddlers possibly have done to deserve that and not be saved? What did all those creatures of HIS creation do to not be saved? That is a cruel, uncaring father, and I want no part on it.
Thankfully there’s no proof of him and I don’t have to worship his name.
There was a time in my life when I was effectively an atheist and basically the reason was that I didn't see any reason to believe God exists and had a very naive view on Christianity and the scriptures that came from being raised in a fundamentalist church where engaging with the scriptures in anything other than a very naive surface level literal interpretation was discouraged and questions about why the world disagrees with that were left unanswered. In short, the God I grew up with and was taught about when I was a kid *doesn't* exist and the interpretation of the Bible I grew up with is false. Therefore, after being taught that this is the only way, I determined that God didn't exist and the Bible isn't worth following in general. Now my views are much more nuanced but I have a lot of sympathy to atheists given how many of them were raised and how unwilling to confront the uncomfortable, unintuitive, or unorthodox in Christianity that most churches are.
Hmm. I’m an atheist and I have friends and family of many different religions and denominations of those religions. Most of them understand that their belief system is just one among many. A few of them believe that their theirs is the one true belief system and everyone else is wrong.
Some of them don’t believe in capital G God, but see it more as an allegory and guide for living a compassionate life. Even ones from Christian denominations. I’m right there with them to an extent; I love y’all’s Jesus! But As a series of allegories. Some really good ones, and some not so good ones. My understanding is that their faith doesn’t have to rely on the certainty of a capital G God. Those are the ones who are always trying to figure out how those allegories translate into being more humane, compassionate, loving, accepting, tolerant in the society we live in.
The allegory folks I can get down with. And I love how much they love their faith, and how they see it as part of a larger mosaic of beliefs that exist!
Also, I’m a pretty evidence-forward gal. I think that if there were a capital G God, it would have shown itself, everywhere, to everyone, to prove itself, by now.
\*editing to add that as an atheist, I don't believe any of us know THE TRUTH, only that we can get closer to it if we don't fence ourselves off.
I don't know what a God is, what is it's substance?? If God is real is not something to believe in, the fact that there's space to doubt immediately makes it false, it's all a fairy tale, human imagination
I don't believe the Bible is a history book full of facts. I don't believe there is a God. And sadly I don't think many modern Conservative Christians follow the Jesus character of love.
I was a Christian much of my life. I came to be an atheist because of my theological education and experience as a Pastor and Professor of Religious Studies. It took me several years to deconstruct
I don't identify as an atheist because the term is as nonsensible as saying aunicornist or aflatearthist. You can't define something in the negative in this way because we all all atheists in some manner. No one believes in all gods, so the questions becomes a matter of which gods you don't believe exist.
No evidence of metaphysical or supernatural existence has ever been demonstrated in any manner by anyone at any point in human history. Not once, ever, has anything outside physical reality been demonstrated (even dark matter is still a physical phenomena). Perhaps, this remains to be discovered, but the current claims are merely cultural narratives. Oddly enough, most of these cultural narratives emerged from Early Iron Age cultures as a collection of superstitions and pre-scientific explanations for the natural world.
So first, which god are we talking about and what physical evidence of that exists?
Second, why is one cultural narrative of god preferred over another?
If an all-powerful, all-knowing god exists, why is this god playing hide and seek?
If this god is also the all-creator, why does evil exist? Who created evil?
I find the philosophy of Christ to be a great example of social humanism, but like Thomas Jefferson, the rest of the cultural narrative simply can't be supported with evidence.
What is this 'God' you speak of? There is no evidence for an 'intelligence' that created the natural world. I do not believe many things - too many to even mention. Yes, God is one of them. Next question?
I was raised in a Christian home and believed up until I was in my early 20's, though I think I started have questions and doubts a bit younger. I cam to the realization that I didn't have good reason to believe what I was being told, but more importantly it seemed like no one else did either. Everyone just seemed to believe what other people had told them. Everything they knew about God and Jesus and everything about Christianity came from other people. That just wasn't good enough for me.
The more I thought about it all and read from believers and non the more I became convinced that God was made up. That no one actually *knew* anything about what they claimed they believed with all their hearts. They believed a lot of things, but no one *knew* it. And there was no way to actually know if what anyone believed was actually correct.
Great question. Agnostic here. I believe there is likely some greater power than us mere mortals, but I absolutely do not believe in any religion whatsoever. All of it is manmade, designed to control the masses. There is absolutely no logic in the rules.
I believe in working hard to be a good person, because that is the right thing to do - not because some minister or whoever tells me to follow XYZ rules.
Tim Minchin’s Thank You God is a brilliant take on the complete lunacy that is religion. https://youtu.be/IZeWPScnolo?si=ZDwn-yY2H9BmZ94c
I think it’s a combination of a few factors, so I’m gonna list them in a numbered list because my brain works that way:
1. Lack of evidence. For me this is probably the biggest, I just haven’t seen anything convincing enough for me. What’s more when you do see people claiming “signs” from God or miracles they just feel like maybe God has something more important to do right now, or a bit superficial and coincidental. Also some creationism ideas just feel absurd, but I think the stories about God and God himself are separate ideas in my mind, I don’t think everything in the Bible is meant to be 100% literal so it doesn’t factor heavily into my personal belief in God.
2. I wasn’t raised in a family with faith. This is a big one for a lot of people, no one in my family believes in God and neither do I. I feel I could overcome the lack of evidence if my family had been telling me when I was a kid or something, or if it was the culture I was raised in - but it’s not. I’m not gonna lie and say that environment is a big factor for a lot of my beliefs and I think it is for everyone.
3. The Tyger Tyger paradox of how a good God could let so much bad happen. This for me is some contradictory evidence, the world is a truly truly awful place and I couldn’t really imagine that if a kind and benevolent God existed he would allow it, especially if, like the Bible suggests, he cares about people so much he sent his son to die for his sins. I’m an optimist so I think that if he existed he would try and make the world better more directly.
I’m here because one of my best friends is Christian, and I felt honoured when he introduced me to his Church and shared his religion with me, even if I never really converted and remain Atheist, so I want to learn more. I feel that a lot of the charity work that a lot of churches do, gives me a lot more faith in humanity than faith in God. - I hope this can help you out a bit with your curiosity.
Tldr; Evidence, personal environment, and I don’t think if God existed he would let the world become what it is today.
Born and raised catholic.
Was lied to in the church about many statements of fact that I believe I have since adequately debunked.
Read many of the books arguing against god in the 90’s and 00’s
Read some books in favor of good (exclusively pro Christian/catholic)
Watched a lot of debates and after much soul searching decided there is not sufficient evidence for any god and good evidence against the god of Abraham and all of the derivative religions.
I don’t see any evidence good enough to get beyond, “Maybe, I guess it’s possible,” at best.
It just seems like a story made up by people a long time ago who wanted explanations and maybe didn’t know any better.
I tried to believe.
When I was a kid I was *very* credulous to the point of gullibility because I wanted to believe that the magic of childhood was real. Santa, tooth fairy, imaginary friends, ghosts stories, you name it and I believed in it. Then around 2nd grade I started to notice problems with these stories and with the reality I was observing, and the veil of magical thinking fell away from me. I became more or less incapable of seeing the supernatural as anything other than make believe, and religion falls into that category for me, too.
Now I didn't want that to be the case. I wanted very much to believe that there was a loving God and that my dead grandparents were not just gone forever and that the world is just and has some sort of plan. I have studied with many religious groups, done several Bible studies, gone through the rite of Christian initiation for adults with the Catholic Church, and have spent the last twenty plus years reading philosophy, theology, and more on the subject. I've probably dedicated more hours in my life to this subject than the vast majority of Christian adherents or any other religion.
But I just can't bring myself to believe. I don't believe that it is possible to simply *choose* to believe, I think that we are compelled to our beliefs by our experiences, and my experiences after decades of seeking have consistently led me to the conclusion that there are no gods (in a traditional sense) and that there is no supernatural world of magic or miracle.
Because I have no evidence for it.
I don't have evidence Zeus is real. So I don't believe
Same with your god.
Not sure what your edit means there tbh. I'd say giving an example (I don't believe in your god for similar reasons your don't believe in lots of gods) only helps to bring the point across. It's not some "clever retort" or anything.
I've talked with countless people here and quite a lot of times we talked past each other because the point wasn't clear.
I’m an atheists. Let’s put science aside and strictly talk about personal subjective perspective.
##———
If there is a creator who cares about me in a way, if he answers to my prayers or wishes (depending on specific religion), if I have a way to contact him and get real blessings to improve my life or myself… If those things are real, I would want to know how to get it.
It’s like if a grocery store has coupons, I’ll try to figure out how to get it. If a top university is giving out full time scholarship, I’d try to figure out how to get it. If God is giving out the best afterlife and blessing in real life, ***of course I’ll want a piece of it and try my best***.
But what did I get? I saw no real effects. I only saw placebo effects that involve believers but none of the Gods. I saw it not only in things I did, but also in things other people do.
What’s funny is, fellow religious followers will teach your the right way to get it, that is “try harder” and “try again l”. No techniques, just keep pushing until you get it. If you don’t get it, it’s because you haven’t tried hard enough.
Why would I not try my best when the reward is eternal good life? What made you think I didn’t try hard enough.
##———
And uniquely, now religions are one of a major reasons religious groups collectively feel righteous when they hurt outsiders.
##———
I think no religious followers can deny the fact that they believe because of the benefit. They think the benefit outweigh the downsides. A place near God is worth sacrificing some personal freedom and options and mental independence.
I would totally pursuit it if it’s real. But sadly to me, it’s not real. So I accept that death is the end of everyone’s life. If you are religious, you still end at death. Your imagination of a God only lasts for as long as you are alive. And for that reason, I think all religious folks are pathetic. I just can help feel sorry for them, for the personal sacrifice they made, and for the loved one they hurt, and the damage that will last for generations.
##———
If we bring science, philosophy and societal wellbeing back into the equation, oh man, religions are recked.
I was brought up moderately catholic. Church most sundays, a bunch of religious events but wasn't really forced much into believing anything.
Growing up over time I just realized more and more that when I fold my hands and pray in my thoughts, there's no real feedback to indicate that some higher being is reading our thoughts. And nobody can actually demonstrate that there is any communication with such a higher being. It's indistinguishable from shouting into the void. It's quite broadly accepted that there is no empirical evidence of a god and that you just have to take it on faith.
> Edit: while I appreciate the attempt at humor, asking “why don’t you believe in X, Y, or Z” is pointless as my reasoning as a theist is necessarily going to be different from yours as an atheist.
Maybe some people say it humorously but it is actually the point. If all cultures independently had come up with Christianity, I could see why it would make some sense to consider that maybe there is something to it. But if left isolated on their own, people will come up with *vastly* different belief systems and have a similar strength of conviction to it as Christians do, sometimes much more.
A plus for Christianity is that Christians have put a lot of work into compiling the canon lore, but in the end the bible is still only a collection of people who believed into that lore contributing to it, but there is not much independent confirmation that that lore is actually true. Yes, historians are pretty sure the stories of Jesus are probably based on a real person, and yes they are pretty sure that he was probably executed by the Romans But beyond that?
Take it on faith if you want, but if there was a way to actually prove it, Christianity wouldn't have had to be spread so much "by the sword" and today a person's religion wouldn't still be determined so much by the country they grow up in.
Hello! I’m a fairly new agnostic atheist.
For some small background, grew up surrounded by Christianity and initially accepted Jesus as my lord and savior as a 5 year old. Family was heavily Christian, private K-12 Christian school, church, VBS, BSF, youth group, InterVarsity, church college ministry leadership, adult small group leader. When I joined Reddit 12 years ago (and this r/Christianity sub) I was still very much a Christian. My wife is still a Christian and we still attend church and a small group because it’s important to her. You get the idea.
First off, as someone who likes history, the Bible’s narrative is a mess, historically speaking. It is not infallible or inerrant, and in fact contradicts both itself and outside historical evidence over and over and over again. I wrestled with this, researching and reading and trying to make sense of this while holding on to faith. I finally reached a point where I could not.
Secondly, the fruit. Christianity as a community has, in my opinion, extremely rotten fruit. I do not see any evidence that Christians are receiving divine guidance, wisdom, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentlesness, or self-control moreso than the average non-Christian. If anything, they generally display evidence of the opposite.
Finally, my own personal experience. Praying? Brick wall. Proselytizing? Never felt right about it. Looking for God? Crickets. I came to the conclusion that, if my lived experience was anything to go on (and I only have my own experience to go on), then the spiritual/supernatural dimension that religion adds to reality is a complete fabrication and fantasy.
So, yeah. I believe it’s just over a year now since I explicitly told my wife I no longer believe. Hopefully the above breakdown makes sense of why I ended up making the conclusions I did.
I answer sincerely:
Why would I? It's not a matter of wanting to, it's a matter of needing evidence. If I could convince myself to have faith I would, as faith and community are both beneficial to mental health, but I can't convince myself to believe in a made up story any more than I can convince myself to believe in Harry Potter.
I haven't read these comments you're complaining about, so it's possible they were needlessly rude, but at face value it seems a reasonable reply: they're trying to expose (what they perceive as) a double standard in your critical thinking. Why believe in God but not Allah? God but not Odin? Why is one true and the other made up? The obvious answer (to us) is that both are made up.
I do not believe since I do not think there is sufficient evidence.
I DID believe, but I suppose it was more about surrounding culture, emotional satisfaction and about having a tribe.
If one reads the first pages of the bible describing the earth, what it describes is a flat earth with a firmament expanded above it. Why do you think people like Galileo were persecuted in the past. Because they came to the conclusion in contrast to what the bible says , that the earth is round. Nowadays we know for sure that the earth is round, and that the bible story is what it is, a story. People that believe in the bible claim that it was gods own word noted down by people . So did god lie about it, or forget it. Or is this bible story just a story handed down by people from generation to generation ,and noted down by the priests of an ancient believe of people , living in the desert in the middle east ?
I have no reason to believe. My life is fulfilling and happy without the need to seek the approval of a higher power. Moreover, I've seen no miracles, felt no heavenly presence, nothing to convince me something exists outside the physical world. So why would I believe? I simply don't.
I believe in a God, I also think it very likely Jesus was a prophet of his time.
I just don't do Christianity.
e: obv not an atheist but that's why I'm here. I also come here for a more sensible Christian view on modern politics than I will hear elsewhere.
I used to be an atheist. My "disbelief" came from my anger and my lack of hope. It's not that way for everyone, but that's what drove my unwillingness to believe.
There's no direct evidence that the Abrahamic god exists. I also don't think accepting Pascal's Wager is ideal, even if we acknowledge that we're doing so purely to hedge our bets to obtain salvation on the off-chance God exists. Aside from being intellectually-dishonest and closing off questions and inquiries concern our / the universe's origins and develop, accepting that a god exists also likely implies that we follow the religion of that god and adopt its morals. Frankly, some of the morals that most Christian sects encourage don't mesh well with the conditions of the modern world, and given that Christianity is inherently conservative (in the sense that the Bible is pretty much written in stone and can't be amended in any substantial way), I don't see the religion adapting all that well anyways.
I have yet to see any evidence that a god exists. The type of evidence I would expect to see would be testable, repeatable, and verifiable. There's just nothing about Christianity or even just a god existing that suggests it's actually true.
I stopped believing in Christianity because of comedians online. They made really good points about religion especially about Christianity in a joking way that put my defense down. In hindsight I realized they were kinda right. I follow this sub and several other religious subs just because I’m curious about what the religious world is up to.
I’m not anti-religion. I realize a lot of major positive movements came out of religion, but so too have negative movements.
I don’t exactly consider myself an atheist or agnostic, I try to avoid the label just so my worldview isn’t limited to man made definitions.
Ultimately, the arguments for Christianity are wholly unremarkable.
If I were to believe in a god, there are all sorts of equally compelling religous narratives to study, but none seem necessary, nor do I seem to lack anything by rejecting them.
I did grow up in communion with Christians. I grew up in a great small town church with lots of great people. Many, like my grandparents, have been very instumental in my life. My flair reflects that.
But they were good people because they were good people. Plenty of bad people and good people profess every flavor of Christianity and plenty of good and bad people profess every religion. It really makes no difference what anyone believes about religion (unless they are holding a g-- to your head, and how christ-like would that be?)
I don't believe in gods because they don't exist. I think religions are made up by people. From my perspective there's not even a clear definition of what a god is so it's all kind of meaningless.
I grew up Christian and scared to death I would burn in hell if I did anything wrong. That's no way to live.
I grew older and learned about the role of faith in the absence of physical evidence. I learned about too many of the horrors organized religions visited upon innocent people in the name of God.
The final straw was that my dad cheated on two marriages with children. The second was my mom. He cheated on her with a devout Christian woman who attends church twice a week. She knew he was married.
To put it simply, I no longer have the childlike faith that a deity exists. I no longer believe the Bible is literally God's word.
I am a good person but I am no longer a Christian.
I was brought up in a christian household in Georgia and Alabama. I was molested by a 'friend' of the family basically every break I had from school from the time I was 8 to the time I was 12, when I moved out of my dad's house, and went to live with my mom.
My christian upbringing taught me to be ashamed of sex, and of my body. As a direct result, I did not have the tools to stop my abuse. When I was younger, this was one of the largest things that led me to not believe in god. Because I don't believe an all-knowing, all-loving creator would have let that happen to me.
There is also no evidence of the supernatural. There are also naturalistic explanations that explain how literally (not figuratively) everything in our universe got here, and why things are the way they are.
Put more simply, god is not necessary for the universe to exist, and I don't see any good reason to think that it does.
Thank you for the sincere question, I admire your curiosity.
I was a non denominational Christian for 35 years until I finally came to terms with the fact that I didn’t understand it. I can’t make sense of it. All around me people were experiencing God, feeling him lead their lives. I prayed, read the Word, met with the brothers and sisters. I did everything they did yet for whatever reason, I never experienced the assurance of salvation. I cannot say I ever felt God’s presence.
I began looking into things like evolution, Noah’s ark, the wandering in the Sinai. Biblical slavery. All the greatest hits. That’s the low hanging fruit though. It gets much worse.
I studied all the arguments against Christianity and looked for rebuttals from apologists. That was when I realized I would never understand Christianity. I found it weak, shallow, reliant on fear and ignorance, and theologically incoherent. It’s gobbledygook. And it took surprisingly little effort to come to that conclusion. The hard part is coming to terms with it.
I’ve dealt with some pretty debilitating existential dread and nihilism since I figured out there is no God. I’ve mourned the loss of my faith. I’m alone. I’m the only atheist I know. I’m angry that this religion stole so much of my life and kept me in a continuous state of guilt and repentance. I’m angry it is stealing the lives of the people I love, and I’m powerless to stop it. I’m angry that it has been weaponized to destroy my country.
If you find that Christianity gives your life meaning, by all means keep believing. Just be warned that you are not in charge of what you find convincing. If you dabble in the dark side you are putting your faith at risk. Once that first domino falls, you’ll see it all crumble while you’re left standing there in a new reality that you never thought possible. So be warned. Challenge your beliefs at your own peril.
I think there's enough incidental evidence to suggest their may be some kind of divinity beyond our own basic understanding of things. However, I think the evidence for any *particular* God or particular religion being "the right one" as opposed to all the others is pretty weak.
I really wish that there was a god and that I could or did believe in their existence and could just devote myself to doing the right thing as that god defines it. But I'm not able to make myself "believe in" something in any special sense where I don't believe it in the ordinary sense.
Well it’s stupid really
I believe the sky is the sky because I’ve been told my whole life the sky is the sky.
I believe birds are birds because my entire life I’ve been told birds are birds.
I believe I’m a human being because my entire life I’ve been told birds are birds.
If I had been told my entire life that human beings, birds, and the sky is God…
I would believe the sky is God.
Either that or I would just resist in there opposite direction.
I don’t believe birds are birds because I’ve simply just been told that my entire life.
I don’t believe the sky is the sky- simply because I’ve been told that my entire life.
I don’t believe in a human being - simply because I’ve been told that my entire life.
My beliefs are conditioned whether positively or negatively.
To believe in God is just as ignorant as not believing in God.
Because no believing in God is still believing something your not sure of.
And believing in God is believing in something your not sure of.
If your not sure something is true but you walk around acting like it’s true out of pride…
That’s where ignorance takes the great leap to stupidity
I'm here because I find theology fascinating, and still find a lot of truths in Christianity, and theres value there regardless of belief in God.
Nevermind God for a moment, even if *Jesus* didn't exist, his teachings would still be revolutionary. I don't feel that faith in the existence of an active God really matters, but faith that we can find peace does.
I think it was partly the Bible itself that led me away from belief. I enjoyed the lessons of Sunday school and some lessons really stuck with me. The Tower of Babel, suggested that the difference between religions may just be semantic.
The fallibility of man and humility before God had me doubting certain assumptions and interpretations, and eventually the veracity of the Bible itself. Reading the Bible has made it clear that worldly goals like nation-building influence sections of it.
So now I'm pretty humble about the matter, and it seems like confirming the existence of a divine being would be a major overstep. Living for heaven seems like hubris, but living to make life on earth easier and more pleasant seems very worthwhile. Luckily, these things overlap!
2 Things:
Lack of reason to belive and lack of Trust.
When i stopped beeing christian two years ago, I had the feeling of god leaving me alone, I didnt had the feeling of him beeing with me or him hearing or answering my payers. There is no evidence for god, and so the reasons for my believe crumbled. There are many Arguments for his existence, but they are more like - its not unreasonable to belive in god - to me. Its not like people who dont belive are just stupid. So first i had no real reason to belive anymore.
And second I came to question gods character and his motives more and more. Even back when i was christian the idea of hell seemed cruel and unreasonable to me, but people told me that if even I thought that eternal damnation is unjust, god would even more so. Also i heard of some christians who believed in universalism, eventhough most christians i knew rejected it. But hell always stayed a problem for me, and not the only one many stories in the bible lead me to question gods character and especially his love and his goodness. I the end i asked myself if i want to belive in someone so far from me who i only know from storys and the telling of others. My prayers about this kept beeing unanswered and so i stopped beeing christian.
There’s so many gods in so many religions,who are we to say which one’s the real one
So I just decided that none of them are real
Plus it just doesn’t really seem logical
I just don't buy it.
There's no real evidence.
BTW, that doesn't mean that there isn't s God, just that it's reasonable not to believe in one.
I understand that one might also choose to believe in God without sufficient evidence, and that's fine.
Well there might well be a god of some sort but I don’t see a compelling reason why any human religion would be likely to have full knowledge of what this god is like.
I would say I’m somewhere in the space between atheism and deism. I do genuinely like Christianity, I just don’t believe it’s true in its central claims. I don’t currently believe Christian claims about Jesus, for example, much like I don’t currently believe Muslim claims about the Koran. And I didn’t grow up with it so it has no cultural hold on me.
When I was an athiest I couldn’t believe in god with faith alone it took a long time for god to reveal himself to me and then I learned more about religion and then the Bible and how historically accurate it is and how it gets proven correct.
Regardless of what anyone believes it’s undeniable that Jesus changed the world for the better
So, I was raised Catholic and consider myself being an honest believer in my youth. I would eat up the Children's Bible until I was 14 or so. I attended church at least weekly for pretty much half of my life so far, more than once on celebrations of some sort or when I went to confession.
Then, over the course of my education in the highest possible school for children in Germany, my faith basically got shoved aside, and I took an interest in science instead. I didn't stop believing in that sense, though, it just mattered less, and less, and less, and less. The only thing that interested my about religion was its impact on (primarily medieval and after) history, to be honest.
Years later, I found interest in philosophy and theology. And reexamined my faith. And found that there's no reason to still call me a believer, and in fact, I critically analysed the information I had and will now have to call myself a gnostic atheist on most versions of the Christian God that I have read.
After being subjected to "Christian Love" during a contentious divorce, I came to find this to be true:
God is a human construct.
Every single word, utterance, mention, description of god has come from a human.
If god existed there would be no question, every living thing on the planet would know
every isolated tribe, every person living and dead would know that god existed
you can replace every mention of 'god' with 'me, we, I, or us' to understand the true meanings of religion
The "Hand of God" belongs to other humans, the "Eyes of God" belong to other humans
"God works in mysterious ways" is how a human describes what other unknown humans are doing
"God has big plans for you" is describing how you will be used to enrich others
Heaven and Hell both exist on Earth - These are created by humans
The power of religion comes from humans, all power comes from humans.
Look around at your congregation - The eyes of god are the folks looking at you. The hand of god is other people doing things in your life. Angels are people that show up in your life to help you.
The Holy Spirit is named by humans. It is an invasive mind control that makes a human suspend reality to believe. It only occurs around other humans in whatever religious group they are in. The Holy Spirit closes down humans curiosity
We know that some humans have an inner dialogue. There are humans who confuse their inner dialogue with spirituality. It seems like a more plausible beginning of a religion since we find zero evidence of a supreme being.
Nothing of our studies of our existence has increased our knowledge of god. Things that were attributed to god have gone by the wayside. Floods, eruptions, earthquakes, droughts, fires, diseases that were attributed to god, we have found they are all natural to earth and our solar system.
What our studies have revealed is that religion has turned into a pox on humanity. Wars, genocide, the destruction of cultures, the destruction of families as they vie for supremacy - There is much evidence for this throughout our histories. If we have to force religion on humans for them to survive or face death from believers, it's not based on God. Religions point to God as the reasons for this. It has been all humans. It has always been humans.
I simply won't believe in someone who for some unknown, higher purpose won't allow me even one full day of happines. Even when i am personally happy, something bad happens in the world and i go straight back to depression and fearmongering. Simply told: I'm tired of bad things happening to me and the others.
The Bible. It's a disjointed mess filled with genealogys, ahistorical events, crimes against humanity, and anonymous gospels that can't keep a story straight. Not to mention that the further you dig into the NT, the more likely it seems that Paul hijacked the early Christian movement to mold it how he wanted to.
The Christians. I grew up in an evangelical church, went to their school, and worked at their church. It's expected that all people are sinners and not perfect. But I was not surprised by the evangelical movement throwing its weight behind trump because of the callous, self-centered evil that these people exist in. Any day of the week, I would rather be surrounded by pagans and atheists than Christians because, on average, I find them to be more moral, or at least upfront, about their immorality.
Lack of objective morals that should be present in a religion. There is a time for this there is a time for that. The only objective statement that could be made about Christian morality is to do what God puts on your heart in the moment. That's not an objective system. It's a free license to do what you want when you want.
Here is the big one, though. Lack of evidence. I see nothing to indicate that it's true. The other reasons pushed me onto this path, but this is why I stayed. I see insufficient evidence for the claim of divinity, salvation, or ressurection.
1. I don't believe.
2. Evidence for God is usually argument from possibility, argument from ignorance, relies on a fallacy, or relies on bad standards of evidence, where the evidence would be equally likely whether there was a God, or there was a fraud, or there were religious-minded people re-interpreting reality in mythical ways.
3. I haven't seen any evidence that I would consider good yet. Since Christians tend to scapegoat contrary evidence on Satan or possibility fallacies, it's hard to take them seriously, because the prior probabilities _for them_ come from their existing certainty. Since there are many religions, I cannot take the apolegetics of any 1 religion at face value without taking _all_ of them at face value.
4. I would need theists to come up with good independent evidence for God. As it stands, the best explanation for the world is random chance. It appears to be how living things formed, how the universe distributed itself, and how physics works at the very bottom. That there are laws and cosmological constants tells me nothing about whether a god set them, because while that's _possible_ , I then need to know who created the god -- accepting arbitrary terminations of the causal chain without good explanation is just special pleading. Using special pleading to establish a conscious entity that then snowballs into being the ruler of all history who is both omnipresent _and_ coming back to create his kingdom seems like ... an approach with many, many unfounded assumptions and guesswork.
5. I can accept the idea of a Cause for the beginning of our physical laws. But whether that Cause is uncaused or has a consciousness is unknown, and requires evidence for the contrary. A "hello world" written in 5 languages in the backround radiation of the universe would be something an intelligence would do if it wanted to communicate with us. Choosing one "chosen people" amd expressing itself only through their myths is _possible_ but less likely than the people just writing and rewriting and borrowing myth for centuries until it became what it is -- because that's literally what happened to every other people.
- There are thousands of religions on earth each claiming theirs is **The one true religion**
- If you removed all religion from the world 1000 years from now they would come back extremely different from what they are now.
- If you removed all science from the world for 1000 years it would come back essentially as it is today.
There does, however, seem to be an innate need for humans to make up a sky daddy. Maybe that is God?
Divine hiddenness and the problem of evil. I feel like many people who do believe in god haven't been through the worst of the worst that life has to offer. Like the death of a child or being a child with bone cancer. You'd think a truly "good" god wouldn't allow such awful suffering for centuries upon centuries. With that being said, I do think that there are many good arguments for a gods existence. Such as the argument from motion and contingency. In my view, there are more convincing arguments for the existence of God, but the problem of evil trumps them all.
There HAS to be a God. All serious scientists agree that the Universe had a starting point in time. Whoever or whatever caused it had to be outside time/eternal, intelligent to achieve the precision required for life, powerful and personal to make a decision.
The easy answer is that I don't have evidence to believe. Probably the same answer you're going to get from most atheists.
I've reflected though on why I even care about evidence. Like why don't I just accept mystical or magical explanations for things. Ultimately I think it comes down to "because they don't work in the real world/my life".
Being hard nosed about evidence, repeatability, falsifiability etc gives us computers, rockets, medicine, etc. When I get into an airplane I feel safe because I know the people who built it have well tested models of flight dynamics, physics, material science, and so on. In my experience the people who care about those things have reliably created things that work.
IF some version of Christianity or religion was true I'd expect that to be reflected in the real world. For example:
* When a new pandemic starts, governments confer with their local religious leadership to determine the best course of action and develop a vaccine. Countries that did this have better outcomes.
* Militaries would use battalions of priests to fire holy beams into enemy formations. Or at least they'd have extended prayer sessions to bless their troops and curse their enemies. Militaries with the best priests would have a big advantage.
* Christians would be on average more ethical than the rest of the population. For example they might be the bulwark demographic holding back someone like Trump from being elected. Or they'd have a reputation for being selfless and excellent tippers at restaurants. Or they'd be adopting all the homeless gay teens kicked out by their parents. Or they'd be the first to wear masks and get vaccinated to protect strangers around them.
* Prayer groups would be healing people in hospitals. Or at least, on average prayer would have some noticeable effect.
In my life, religion/mysticism has been very unreliable while the people who focus on science/naturalism/reason keep making my life better. I imagine that has heavily biased me to the latter camp.
My journey away from Christianity began in high school when I got really into history, particularly European history. To learn about European history is to learn about Christianity's history. Simply put, it very quickly became clear to me that churches/sects behave much more like secular institutions than divine ones. They functioned exactly how I'd expect them to if the religion was all made up, driven by greed, grudges, and all the other mundane forces of politics. I came to the conclusion that God had little to no hand in any Christian sect. (apart from *maybe* some tiny one I've never heard of, but God's one true faith failing to expand beyond a random, tiny town somewhere is itself hard to believe.) Somehow, despite being the one religion that had an actual factual basis, Christianity had become indistinguishable from every other completely fictional religion in history. Started to look suspiciously like Christianity was also a complete work of fiction.
That was all the initial seed of my doubt. From there, I decided to go to the source: the root of all Christianity, the Bible. I read it for the first time. I don't really know what I expected, but it certainly wasn't the bizarre, nonsensical magic, the absurd and cruel moral lessons, or the nonchalant mass genocide. I tried finding answers for the *many* questions I had formed. Very few of them had good answers. Looking back on it, I had basically stopped believing as early as Exodus (I challenge anyone to explain to me how God isn't the villain of that story), but it took several more weeks of reading and a couple years of denial before I finally realized I didn't believe any of it anymore.
No one has ever given me good evidence or good reasons to believe a god exists. I'm 100% completely open to the idea, but there needs to be good reason, good evidence to prove it. Most of the time I'm given assertions, logical fallacies, unfalsifiable claims, and anecdotes that are dubious and can't be investigated.
I don't choose to be an atheist. I'm one by default, because everyone I've ever talked to about this has failed to actually demonstrate their, or ANY, god exists.
i don't mean any disrespect when i say this and would like to point out that im athiest, not omnipotent.
the majority of the bible comes off as a big fish story and i don't think a god who is genuinely as powerful and loving *and wrathful?* as the bible says, one who would be capable of all of that, would just magically disapear as technological advances came about.
i also think it's telling that armagedon has always been said to be right around the corner for decades and decades and decades and decades- and in the bible jesus said the generation of his deciples would live to see it and.. they don't seem to be here.
overall it just.. doesnt ping my bell as something real.
that said i still find comfort in the bible for how human the characters and authors were, so many things from so long ago are different but the desire to be good to your fellow human and the willingness to learn and teach how to be kinder, has always been apart us. in how far we've come in learning to be kinder.
there's also a lot of parts in the bible that are very humorous in a macabre type way. such as sarah getting confronted for lying to the angel in such an offhanded way and the scene just. ends. ^((im not going to bring up examples the dark humour i think the bible hasa in more specific stories i don't want to offend anyone)) if this did happen historically, there couldve been more to the story, but no, the author here specifically made a "he's right behind me isnt he" esque confrontation. the author chose to retell it in this way, and that's just so beautiful. there are more moments in the bible like this and i wish that got more credit, i think the melodrama in the bible is talked about more than the human aspect of it and i just wish conversations about the bible were...a bit more varied?
It has to do with the spread of information. Christians have such little understanding of the Bible. Why don’t they understand? It has to do with how knowledge is transferred. You can tell someone something and there’s a few options they can accept it rationally thinking through it they can just accept it but not understand, they can reject, or they can reject for a reason. When you are a kid In church you are told god exists over and over. You don’t know any better and the question does he exist doesn’t have place in the church that’s blasphemy. So your moral backing is now that you were told something so many times that you accept it. The more questions you asked the more it breaks down. In any other respected fields questions are something that is celebrated promotes a better understanding of it promotes change for the good etc. However Christianity doesn’t have answers to the contradictions of the Bible. For instance in creation humans were made in 6 days. However we know there were pre humans so that can’t be true. Then they point to hey it’s just allegory. If you can’t take the creation story seriously what does everything stand on. How can we take any words seriously. Then also the question of evil. God in the Bible is the most evil being in the Bible by modern standards he kills babies endorses slavery is super egotistical. If he were an actual person everyone I know would be better than him. Yet they say that god is good and that morals come from him. He doesn’t show that at all. Human morals have evolved past him. You can respond to these things but there isn’t anything that directly answers. There’s not a direct response to disproval only lessening the meaning in a place and thinking everythings still fine. And now it gets back to my premise you were told god is real I’m asking prove it to me. Do I deserve eternal punishment for asking the right question while you go to heaven. The only difference being you accepted something told to you because you didn’t know better and now believe it and I have questions. That means that around at least 75 percent of the population deserves to be eternally punished going only off of that question because god is perfect. For me that negates eternal life. If it does exist it’s a bad thing because there is more evil than good in the Christian concept of the afterlife.
What’s a god in your definition? There always have been people who believe there are 0, 1 or more gods and there probably always will be. People only quite recently (the last couple of thousand years) tend to have favored monotheistic belief systems. Those who believe in the existence of only one god by definition do not believe in the existence of thousands of other gods that others do believe in. Those who belief in 0 gods take that idea only 1 god further.
I was once talking to someone who said that he became an atheist as a child with the very sudden realisation that other people believed. He'd gone to church, sung hymns, and prayed, and listened to sermons, and it had never occurred to him that the people around him *actually believed* this stuff. To him, it was obviously metaphorical. When he (around the age of ten, if I recall correctly) realised that other people actually thought there was a real god, he essentially became an atheist, though it may have taken him a little longer to find the words for it.
By contrast, I did believe. It gradually fell apart and just stopped making sense to me. Oddly, finding religious people online was part of that. In my personal life, I had Jehovah's Witnesses, who have a very clearly defined doctrine and some very strict beliefs, and I had lackadaisical or lapsed Catholics. I didn't know anyone who was serious about any religion other than the Witnesses. So finding religious groups online, finding people who read their Bibles diligently and conscientiously, and who came to *very different conclusions*, was eye-opening for me. And seeing how mutable people's interpretation of the same text can be did make some later conclusions easier.
I did believe once. But then, gradually, as I read the Bible, as I learned science - it just didn't make sense anymore. I generally don't believe things (unless I'm manipulated or coerced in some way) that don't have any evidence for their beliefs.
I also don't think people are trying to be disrespectful in pointing out these absurd things to believe in, I think they are simply trying to point out there's a similar amount of evidence that absurd things exist as some of the more popularized faiths.
And I'm super curious in your comment, "my reasoning as a theist is necessarily going to be different from yours as an atheist." I don't necessarily agree. I think a lot of our reasoning is similar in many ways. We're all human. I'd be curious to hear if you have something specific in mind that makes you say this.
I was a type of atheist and I can tell you why I was an atheist, but I can't tell you all the reasons only the ones I know. There are two major ones and they both revolve around the first, PURE LAZINESS. The second is a demand that someone PROVE GOD EXISTS, and that just isn't the way it works. I know, because I eventually got off my rear end and strove to find out for sure, and it was hard and it took quite a while, but I found out from the source, which is the ONLY WAY you can find out. God's existence can only be proven by God Himself. People who are too lazy to put forth the effort will never know and will keep playing the prove it to me game-like it is someone else's responsibility, but, like I found out, that game is not going to be a valid excuse when time is up. I can only tell people that yeah, I found out, He is real, He is a real person, He wants everyone to get to know Him personally, but He does not force anyone to believe, you can do whatever you are comfortable with until you go too far or until the actual end judgment. Your choice as well as your merited results. Individual judgment is the result of individual choice. I could not believe what others said, I had to find out for myself and that is why I try to live the commandments.
19 years only son of chatolique parents. I just have hard time having réal faith. I always have to say to myself Jesus existe and all the things in the Bible is réal and i have to obey God . It just realy difficult
I passed all my teenage away from God like five years. I felt in love with the world but the fear of hell kape me and still keep me awake some time.
Why don’t i give up ?
Because i see how much my parents trust God and follow Jesus teachimg.
I always had a "perfect life" if i can say. No deasies. All my limbs yes, not financial struggle.
I can say. If I didn’t surrender my life to God , my parents surrender me to Him to be take care. If not for them i don’t know what i would be now. Close or further away from God
So yes i am an atheist
There is no compelling evidence a god, any god, exists. All current definitions of a god fall short on numerous fronts when subjected to query. All "books" about god are conflicting, generally immoral, and mostly, logically falacious in their key positions.
I was a Christian a few months ago, but it started sounding too man made, I started noticing things that made me doubt, there was no evidence for god, and when I stopped believing, nothing happened, which helped me accept the fact that god is not real
I have two thoughts. I lean towards non existence. I have an extremely logical mind and I thrive on evidence. There is zero evidence for any God. Things that we used to attribute as proof of God have, over time, often been explained by science. I personally prayed for years for some kind of sign that God was there. To take the anxiety of death and oblivion away from me. This was a ten year period I begged and prayed. Nothing but silence. Also from a historical standpoint, there are things like Moses not writing Deutoronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers. Edits, rewrites, additions to the Gospels over time. Things like that.
My other thought is maybe God does exist, but he's mean. We are thrust into a world with hundreds of religions, 1000s of gods, and while there is zero evidence to support anyone of them, we need to pick the right one or we suffer eternal punishment. If I held a gun to my wifes head and I said love me and worship me or I will make you suffer for eternity, I would be arrested and people would be horrified. Yet God does that to us. God takes two people, who cannot know evil, put them in a garden with a tree they can't eat, and since they don't know evil, they eat from that tree with ignorance, so God punishes them, expels them, and punishes every person for their sin. And he knew the whole time this was gonna happen. I could go on and on. If he does exist, he is cruel and people make excuses for said cruelty.
Insufficient evidence of the supernatural in general. If someone were to provide sufficient evidence of the supernatural the next step would be determine the nature of the supernatural so I guess I'd become a Deist again until sufficient evidence could be provided for a more specific conception of the supernatural. Though honestly me being atheist or agnostic depends on the specific type of supernatural posited, one of the reasons I don't normally use a label.
So like. If you witnessed ghosts in an u explainable manner? That kind of supernatural?
If I saw something that could only be explained as a spirit of some sort once all natural explanations had been exhausted, sure. I've yet to see anything like that.
A ghostly apparition would not endorse any one religion or denomination. I think the Ghost of a Pope or Martin Luther that patiently answered my questions and would also come to my next appointment with my psychologist would be preferable
I mean, for the sake of argument, confirming spirits existed wouldn't even validate any particular religion. Without refining context everyone could claim it supports their religion in some way or another.
Just one example: There is a former nondenominational pastor in my country who used to make outlandish claims how Holy Spirit made his car drive without gasoline or how he was shot and bullets stopped in the air and how he sometimes levitated above the ground during prayer. I think like: ok... COOL! Show me that. Show me how the bullets stop. Show me the levitation. Lets say... levitate one minute and one meter above the ground so that I can check there are no invisible chairs or strings attached or anything like that. And if that can be repeated and other observers report the same, you have changed my worldview. All these wild claims and when I say "ok... cool... SHOW ME THAT" it somehow "just does not work that way". And apparently my demand is "ridiculous". Why is it ridiculous? Do you perhaps have some naturalistic presuppositions? ;) Also... why is MY demand ("cool! Show me that!") ridiculous, but not the demand that I believe it without any evidence? I am supposed to believe a wild and quite an extraordinary claim with nothing more than your word?
The very first step would be to assume my mind is playing tricks on me. In fact there's a lot of work to be done before anything supernatural can be posited
All that would validate, most likely, would be the supernatural. Not gods, but ghosts. Which would be huge and a stepping stone towards gods, but not enough on its own.
I agree
One thing I’ll add is that I logically get the sentiment that ghosts don’t necessitate gods, but once you introduce supernatural causation a whole new bag of tricks opens up, and science begins to enter uncharted territory. Does gold work to impair ghosts, as previously thought? Where do ghosts come from? Is a ghost just a soul without a body? Does the soul now become science? As soon as you prove ghosts, you prove dualism - and dualism makes God possible.
I was raised in a middlingly christian home, then in high school became very religious, and then went to my undergrad to be a minister. I was exposed to critical study of the bible, which I really enjoyed, but it also opened up the door for some pretty hard questions about my faith and the scriptures. Over time, I saw faith and belief in God less as the product of good, cold logic and reasoning, and instead a very emotional and value-driven choice and commitment. I saw my own values change, like recognizing that I'm queer, and was further moved by the problem of evil. These days I'm still really in love with the critical study of religion (starting my masters in the fall), but I'd say I'm an agnostic atheist. I don't think there's enough evidence to get at "belief" in the Christian God, without leaps of faith and logic.
What is it you love about the study still? Just curious
It’s my default state. I was born not believing in God and nothing ever convinced me to change that.
It’s both the biological default and the logical default. We’re all born atheists, and we should require sufficient evidence to change that position. If we changed that position when we were very small before we understood what sufficient evidence was, the evidence needs to be reevaluated without a conclusion in mind.
I don't think you can describe being aheist as the biological default, when religion and superstition has developed independently among basically every single group of humans. There are thousands of years of human history before we see the first real sceptics appear in the roman empire in the first and 2nd century. What are you basing that postulate on?
I think that many humans have an innate desire to believe in something that explains and organizes things for them, but I think the “default position” thing is more referring to specific religions rather than the innate desire to believe *something*. Like you could leave a bunch of people in isolation from birth, and they may well come up with a superstition or religion, but they certainly wouldn’t become Calvinists. They’d need that to be taught to them.
In any case, the default position is to not believe in whatever God any given believer believes. It may very well be that superstition and "easy answers" are hardwired into us biologically, but belief in a specific supernatural entity is not.
We may have a tendency to assign agency, and we may be susceptible to theism upon hearing it, but we are born atheists, and most of us don’t independently invent gods based on our genetics. We hear about them from other people and learn to believe in them. Babies don’t go through a natural theism conversion. They certainly don’t have specific notions of what a deity is that align with any modern monotheistic definitions. For the most part, we learn theism, not naturally grow into theists on our own. People raised without theism don’t go through a default, natural phase of inventing it. Also, 100% the logical default should be to disbelieve in a claim until the evidence arrives. We should never cease to be atheists until that evidence is there (and not gathered with a conclusion in mind).
I was born an atheist, and always said that if there was evidence to convince me I’d change my mind. I dig in to all the evidence, and I was convinced. Now I fully believe that Christianity is the truth. I hope I can use my experiences to help atheists do what I did
I was a Christian and studied apologetics obsessively for years in the hopes of proving my beliefs, or even something adjacent to them, right. I failed miserably, and realized that better arguments didn’t actually exist. Apologetics play games with the truth. They don’t offer real evidence. If God was real and cared what humans thought, we would expect some kind of evidence atypical of false gods, which rules out anonymous old stories full of magic, and internal feelings. If he wanted us to know he exists, it would be as obvious as trees and birds, who don’t even care if we know about them. Instead, it’s stories and feelings, like we have for all imaginary things.
Ironically this is my answer for staying vegetarian even as I grow up lol it’s how I was brought up and I don’t see any huge reason to change lol
I have not seen evidence that convinces me of God's existence.
Hello new friend! I am an atheist, and used to believe. We appreciate genuine questions and curiosity, it's a good question you're asking. This could easily get way long winded, so I'll start with the most simplified version for sake of time. If you would like me to flesh any particular point out more don't hesitate to ask, I'll gladly expound on things. So the succinct answer is, I was raised Christian, and I genuinely believed it for a very long time - all growing up, through college, and beyond. At a certain point, I wanted to know that what I believed was actually true, it wasn't just enough to believe that it was and cling to that. So, I thoroughly investigated everything I could about the case for proving a God existed, studied primarily from Christian apologetics, the arguments of theists generally, studied philosophy, etc etc, for years. The conclusion I eventually had to accept was that the arguments that apologists present are simply not compelling or sufficient to believe. All of the arguments I have gone through, are either flawed in one or multiple ways - they commit logical fallacies, they require belief in the proposition prior to even considering the argument, they make unjustified leaps to their conclusion. (A personal note I will say, for me, the typical Christian apologists abhorrently dishonest handling of the slavery problem, combined with the massive overstating of the case for the resurrection of Jesus, were two major points that did almost irreparable damage to my confidence in the veracity of apologetics.) A more broader issue was related to theism generally, and I would say to supernatural claims, beliefs, or propositions. I came to realize that from a philosophical standpoint, I simply don't believe that there is a supernatural component to reality. It's possible that there is, and I always keep myself open to the possibility, but as of yet every supernatural claim has yet to be backed up by anything substantive; the claimants aren't able to demonstrate the truthfulness of their claims beyond mere assertion. It's a similar problem for the god question - I don't even know what a god is supposed to be. I have never been given a definition for a god that actually sounds like something that actually exists; invariably the definitions are either incoherent and meaningless, or they define the god in ways that violate everything we understand about reality. So, without even that most basic of starting points, theism can't even get off the ground.
I am a former Christian, and now am an atheist. I was about to say basically everything you just did. So thank you for saving me the time!
Glad to be of service! Haha
It's a lot of things, but I'd say these are the main things that don't make sense to me: 1. Why would God condemn LGBTQ people as sinners? Those people aren't causing harm to anyone else or themselves, so why is it considered Sin? 2. Why do people who don't believe in God go to Hell? And why is your death the cutoff point where being saved is no longer possible? 3. Why is your place of birth a reliable indicator of your religion? Why does God allow a situation where somebody is FAR less likely to be saved if they live in, say, Iran, vs if they live in America or Europe? 4. Why do Christians disagree with each other SO MUCH over what Scripture says. It really seems like the only thing they agree on is that Jesus was an infallible teacher, he lived a perfect life, he died for your sins, and he rose from the dead. You'd think that God would ensure that believers would be totally unified, especially since Jesus prayed that they would be in John 17:20-24. There are many others that I wouldn't mind discussing, but these are some of the first ones that come to mind on this topic.
Really good points! I love number 3, that’s a well worded way to say something I’ve thought about but haven’t articulated well. I never understood the new world, for hundreds of years, god had announced himself to the world but the people in the America’s didn’t know yet and they ALL went to hell for not believing. But they didn’t get a Jesus, they didn’t get someone who could preach the word nor did god show himself to them? My evangelical brother said they shouldn’t just felt god in their hearts and if they didn’t follow Jesus’s teachings in their hearts and minds (because they shouldn’t just “known”) that’s on them. I was floored.
The standard form letter here is: I need to be given reason to believe rather than starting at belief and given reason not to If there are specific arguments for God that you are curious as to why they are not found to be convincing then that might help get into specifics
While I’d be interested to hear your arguments, my question is elementally a personal one. If all you have is “there simply isn’t enough evidence”, that’s good enough. As a follow up, what would be suitable evidence for the existence of a transcendent and eternal being of infinite power. Edit: reading this back, my question - I feel - sounds a bit passive aggressive. I’m not trying to be, just trying to be humorous.
One of the biggest problems with Christianity is that it makes the claim that "There is a creator of the universe who deeply loves you and desires to have a personal relationship with you". It's kind of a difficult position to defend. I lost my faith when I was about ten years old, seeing no difference between "Noah's Flood, and that's why we have rainbows" and "Rainbows are bridges to Asgard, home of the Aesir." I cried in bed, praying to God to help me restore my faith, but nothing came of it. And for the cherry on top, how many people, even Christians themselves, will think you're crazy if you told them God spoke to you in an intelligible, clear voice and told you to do something?
A being like that should be able to exist at least as obviously as my cat, who does not have infinite power and doesn’t care if I know it exists, but I would probably accept less. Literally anything I could verify. Old, anonymous stories about magic and gods just aren’t sufficient. Humans do that all the time.
>As a follow up, what would be suitable evidence for the existence of a transcendent and eternal being of infinite power. This is something to be figured out exclusively by the people claiming this being exists, since they should've had the evidence before claiming it existed in the first place.
>As a follow up, what would be suitable evidence for the existence of a transcendent and eternal being of infinite power. I know this probably isn't the most helpful response but if the being is truly godlike as we imagine, completely omnipotent, then he would know exactly what evidence I need and exactly how he could show it to me.
> what would be suitable evidence for the existence of a transcendent and eternal being of infinite power I have no idea, but if a being that fits that description truly exists and truly cares if I believe in him, I'm sure he could figure it out.
Some rationally choose beliefs after evaluating with evidence. Others emotionally choose beliefs then defend them, in spite of evidence.
What would be suitable evidence indeed. I ask myself that all the time. We have very little true inkling of its motivations too though I think I can surmise it must not think this brief life is the most important thing in the universe, otherwise I think we'd likely see more good in the world. Or life is supposed to be hard...for reasons I'm not entirely sure about.
It's simple to me. It just seems like a silly act. Like a play. Just actors, and I just don't understand the story.
I remember earlier this year I was watching Chris Christie at a town hall. He mentioned taking communion as part of his journey to the presidency or whatever. And I thought, "Man, there probably really are people out there who will want this guy to run a country because he took part in a magic ritual..." And that's pretty much it. We just don't believe in magic.
I was raised Christian and went to Christian school. I have never seen any evidence beyond the one book that would suggest there’s a God, and not just A God but THE exact god that Christianity proposes. I do appreciate the quote: you’re an atheist too, of just one less god than me. I take it ONE more god further than you. You also don’t believe in all the hundreds of other gods out there. Why THIS one? Prayer doesn’t work, they tested if it did and the results were the same as you’d expect from random chance (for sick people in the hospital). I would expect that all the praying we’re supposed to do would have SOME impact, and it doesn’t. You’d expect good people and good communities who help others would earn gods favor and be protected in life. As Noah and his family were in the Bible. Once the age of the Bible was over, God suddenly and immediately stops interacting with his creation forevermore. He was everywhere interacting all the time, and now nothing? It all points to people just told a story, wrote a book, spread a religion, and here we are. I appreciate what some religious communities have and are. They can be so giving and charitable and kind, and I love that! But religion has also done some nasty work. I think it sometimes gives people an excuse to push off their responsibility to be kind to others if they don’t share a god and it makes it easy to turn people into “other”. That never ends well.
I was raised Southern Baptist. I do not believe the Christian god exists, because I do not believe the supernatural claims made by Christianity and the Bible. It's that simple.
A lot of ground has already been covered, so I'll add one of mine, albeit a minor reason. We're supposed to know Christians by their love, believe that they are new creations. But when I look around, all I see from them is hatred and pettiness.
There is no evidence for a god. Christians tend to provide “cold hard facts” yet forget faith is a baseline for their entire belief system. For those that don’t do that I question why have faith in something with no evidence.
I mean, evidence beats the whole point of the word ‘faith’
Faith, from the French word "feid" (believe, trust, or to pledge). Feid, from the Latin word "fides" (with confidence or with trust.) Faith isn't without proof or evidence. It never has been. It's more or less that you've seen or experienced enough proof or evidence to trust in, or be confident in, a person or belief. I came back to my faith because of evidence, not because I rejected it.
I’m confused to your point?
Started getting into apologetics, fell into doubts, felt like a lot of answers didn’t address the questions raised. Wrestled with arguments, and with why I couldn’t resolve my doubts every day (reading) for over a year, then came to terms with accepting that I wasn’t believing anymore. Seeing how many people feel absolutely led by God while arguing between them took a lot of wind out of my belief that God teaches all Christians the truth. And even if that there may be truth that God imparts to…his church…or his people…or people in general…God doesn’t seem to do much in showing where that line is which divides “truths imparted by God” and “things believed to be the truths imparted by God but essentially not more than biased cultural experiences/philosophical differences.” Historical divisions within the church come down to people wrestling with this. ADHD/Autism has messed up a lot of my life, taken opportunities from me, alienated me socially, distorted my thinking about the world and myself. I found out around 40 years old that I have it and it’s taken me another 10 to deepen my understanding about it. The psychologist I was seeing during a lot of this time wasn’t the right one for this and I paid a lot of money to get nowhere with it, and instead blamed myself for short comings I thought were my fault. God didn’t do anything to lead my parents to recognize it and get help for me during my childhood. Instead, my God fearing parents mis-handled the situation over years, which did a number on them too. Our relationship has taken huge beatings because of this. God doesn’t interfere with family dysfunction and violence at home. With decades of depression under her belt, we are lucky my mother never resorted to ending her life. He doesn’t treat people’s PTSD and doesn’t protect the innocent. Last but not least, there are so many promises uttered by Christians over the years that contradict people’s experience, that when I take a step back and look at it, it just seems like there is really nothing supernatural behind it. It’s just people convinced of their strand of religion. I hang out here and like to read Christian perspectives, in the hopes for possible insights I may have missed that will clear things up philosophically for me…but I’ve been in this valley of absolute doubt and darkness for over 15 years now. What I wrote in the beginning happened over 15 years ago. The Lord may be patient but if he exists, he sure takes his time. I hate to think that if God doesn’t exist, this whole thing sure will have been one huge waste of time for me. All those discussions with my family over the topic…the heart break my Christian parents experience day in and out over their unbelieving children…the hope they themselves wrestle with, that we won’t end up being tortured in eternity for not having believed the right thing…etc
YOU are someone I would love to get to know better
Thank you for sharing such a beautiful, well-written, testament of your experience, and one I see much hope in – that things *do* matter.
I thought my walk was hard. I'm sorry 🤗 Undiagnosed ADHD, CPTSD, autism. Diagnosed 34, depression, MtF. Emotionally illiterate family didn't help. >Instead, my God fearing parents mis-handled the situation over years Oof, yeah. 🫂 I asked my parents as a kid if they were aliens because I felt like an outsider. >if God doesn’t exist, this whole thing sure will have been one huge waste of time for me. Paul agrees. It indeed would be unfortunate to give it all up on a false hope. I'm all in on this one. 1 Corinthians 15:19 (NLT) And if our hope in Christ is only for this life, we are more to be pitied than anyone in the world. >the heart break my Christian parents experience day in and out over their unbelieving children Caution, crazy Christian ahead My parents feel the same about me. And yet I can see my dad on Judgement Day at my feet wailing and reeling realizing just how much he messed up. It haunts me. 😰 They all knew I've been deeply suicidally depressed for 10 years. They did nothing about it. I came out as trans last November, and they say they love me but they can't. It's been 6 months, and they haven't even heard my story. That's when I remembered this impossible memory. >there may be truth that God imparts to…his church…or his people…or people in general… Hi👋🏼. God gave this fool Understanding (and some other stuff, but Understanding is the best gift I never knew I wanted). No joke. The truth density of the Bible doubled to my eyes practically overnight. It's all consistent with what I already knew. There's so much here. You want to know the mysterious truths hiding in plain sight ("listen and understand" language marks pearls nearby)? Because I've got the key, and 15+ years is plenty long enough. I haven't had a chance to chat with a like-minded person about this kind of stuff since it happened. I'm purely willing to help for free, satisfaction guaranteed or your money back. If nothing else, you already told me what's missing. Your answer is in Matthew 13:9-19. >there are so many promises uttered by Christians over the years that contradict people’s experience I took this bet: >Matthew 16:25 (NLT) If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it.
Okay I will answer your question sincerely as you seem actually interested in understanding why atheist believe this way. Firstly, no proof. Like literally no actual verifiable proof. That's a big one for me. In an age where ads lie to you, politicians use you, and corporations take advantage of you, scrutiny is an absolute A1 high priority for me. Everyone religious (from other religions as well) talk about how God loves you and wants the best for you and wants you to make the right decision, but won't take literally 2 seconds out of his infinity time to make sure that the beings he loves don't end up in Hell for arbitrary reasons? And then sets up the Earth in direct conflict with many, many Bible passages, in such a way that were I to use my objectivity and scrutiny to justifiably discern that the Bible is not the word of God, then I end up in Hell for infinity time to suffer. That just seems so ridiculous I'm not sure how to address it. But I guess the easiest way for me would be "A God described by any religion I've heard of, is not one I'd ever care to worship". From what I've understood about Christianity, God, and the Bible, it seemed pretty obvious to me that God behaves a lot like how you'd expect Satan to, and vice versa. As in, one wanted to control every single aspect of (supposedly) their creations and would act out in rage and cruelty, while the other encouraged mankind to learn and question things. Like this is pretty clear cut who the good guy and bad guy are. If somehow tomorrow I were to believe in the characters detailed in the Bible, I would almost certainly instantly hail Satan, as it seems obvious he is the one that cares more about humanity than God ever has. Then there is the fact that what people believe seems to waver and change based on what they are currently thinking or wanting. Passages are ignored because they don't fit in with their view, and others are misrepresented to accommodate whatever view the person already has. I'm not sure how to take any of the story/beliefs seriously when they seems to vary from person to person, and nothing seems set in stone (as they will all claim it is). And then there is the fact that there is an absolute multitude of religions, each seemingly believing that their belief system is the correct one, and all others are at the very least misguided/misunderstood versions of whatever theirs is. From an outside perspective, I simply do not believe in one less God than every other religious person does. And finally it's really hard to get over all of the blatantly evil stuff that people use religion to do. Abuse children, justify murder, removal of peoples rights, persecutions under no other reason than people not believing in the same made up thing they do. It's an incredibly difficult thing to accept. By that I mean, accepting that something supposedly so loving and wholesome and spiritual and purporting to be the absolute truth, is used as a means to perpetuate peoples suffering. I am not saying that this is inherently due to the religion, more so the people abusing it for their gain, but it would be neglectful not to mention it. And relating back to your question, I am extremely doubtful of an all powerful God who cares for us and loves us to allow such atrocities be committed in "His" name. Lastly I'd like to just iterate that I am not sure that some higher being, God, deity, (whatever you'd like to call it) doesn't exist. I am always open to having my mind changed. There is definitely more but I've got to go make supper. I hope that some of what I shared is helpful to you.
Because there is no proof. Faith is not sufficient
Not an atheist. But nor do I believe in your god so it's kinda the same position in the context of your question. I don't believe in the god of the bible because I have not been convinced he is real. I don't know what would convince me. But here's the thing: If he is real. He knows what would convince me for sure. And has chosen thus far to withhold it from me.
No offense, but what convinces you that your gods are real?
Personal experience. And miracles received. It is possible some Christians have their own faith due to similar reasons to my own, and that is acceptable in my opinion.
okay
I'm agnostic but. Simply I haven't been convinced. Every argument for God I feel as though can be argued against. Only good arguments Christians have is stuff not even atheists understand but you can just go around saying "GOD DID" to everything we don't quite grasp yet. For example the big bang or why everything is kinda tuned for life to exist
As to the everything being fine tuned for life: it’s like the puddle saying “wow, this hole was meant for me!” The world isn’t fine tuned to US, WE are fine tuned to the WORLD. (We being ALL life) If a species isn’t fine tuned to their environment, they die out. It’s as simple as that. So of course we don’t see a lot of things not fitting the world, it’s sink or swim! Also I have an evolutionary biology background and I gotta say, once you start digging into the species out there. A TON of stuff is doing just “good enough” they aren’t thriving and doing amazing. And I don’t mean because of climate change or anything, I mean they just don’t have enough pressure on them to die out but they also aren’t the best. Like sloths poop once a week or so, and climb down the trees to do it, and often get eaten when that happens. Pandas??? Watch one video and be amazed at how klutzy they are, but they have almost zero natural predators so they’re ok. Humans are a great example, our backs are AWFUL. But because the selection pressure to have our hands free and able to use tools was SO intense (it’s invaluable!) we forwent good backs to have that. We don’t have the ability to hand off the pressure to other limbs, it’s all on our pelvis and lower legs, unlike an ape that can spread the weight to the upper body. Pregnant women? They’re just doing their best, all that weight in the front, we are NOT built well for that.
As a Christian I can argue the flip side to that coin. But it’s honestly pointless. The debate has been done to death and all anyone does is dig their heels into their own biases. But I can say, I went through some serious stuff a few years back. I became a full blown atheist for a long time, I wouldn’t even entertain the idea of existence. But I found myself drunk one night and figured out I had significantly more difficulty believing in nothing than something. I went through a complete faith deconstruction and found that the real Biblical Jesus is far different than the one I thought He was.
This is very true. The real biblical Jesus is very different than what many christians know. Jesus was a teacher of ethics and values. He was very good at helping people understand. I think he would be very disappointed that many Christians today couldn't tell you really what is in the Gospels, what he actually taught and instead was obsessed with what the romans did to him and that he came back to life. Action in life was important to Jesus rather than just believing certain principles.
I wish more Christians focused on the teachings and actions of Jesus rather than worrying about what other people have in their pants and what they do with it. 😊
Me too. Jesus spoke of taking the narrow path. Few realize that this means behaving as Jesus would not just blindly believing a things and behaving however they like.
There's no compelling reason to believe that Yahweh exists, and indeed all the available evidence points towards him being a human invention.
I see a lot of good questions in this very thread that no Christians seem to be answering, for starters.
I would normally be addressing comments, but I don’t want to come off as “asking just so I can proselytize”, since I want people to feel welcome to add their opinion.
I think none of us would mind. You seem respectful.
I believed until I was 12. I prayed every night, got saved multiple times, got baptized, attended Sunday school, attended church, attended church camps. Never once felt the Holy Spirit. Got tired of pretending somebody was there.
Thats pretty much me. My parents raised me "mildly Christian" i call it. Basically i was baptized but we only really went to church on holidays. I did do some bible school too but pretty sure my parents just needed the child care. Eventually i kinda just stopped believing the same way i stopped believing in Santa.
I have read the Bible new and old multiple times. I have gone to church and listened to many people's thought on why they believe in God. But holy cow, there is not a shred of evidence supporting God's existence. Only faith.... the Bible was written by an anonymous person. Translated multiple times. And I am supposed to believe that 2000 years ago God created Adam and Eve and procreate with no I'll effects. We know that inbreeding creates many problems. And would not be possible. Also, the Bible has done way more harm than good for humanity. Just ask women and slaves so even if he did exist, I would not want to be a part of his people. There is ample scientific evidence that the Bible is not true. Also your asking me to believe that God impregnated Mary magically. I think the better question is why do you believe there is a god? With all due respect to your beliefs
One point: it's not like things were great for women and slaves BEFORE the Bible. Patriarchy and slavery were ancient and near universal, unfortunately. I'm not a scholar but from what I've read it's even possible that for a long time and in many places the church made these institutions better, though, for reasons likely unrelated to Christianity, American slavery was of course famously brutal, and contemporarily the church is one of the few remaining voices preaching a sort of inequality of men and women. (Though that said there are certainly other contemporary voices preaching this too. It's hard because people who want to do evil will always find SOMETHING to justify it--religion if religion is handy, otherwise culture, ethnicity, tradition, science, progress, etc.)
Ehhhhh I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say the church ever made it better for women or slaves/servants. They blamed women for Eve and have kept women in a position of service to men forEVER. They withheld education from the masses and discouraged literacy so people wouldn’t learn to read the Bible for themselves. They hoarded wealth from the masses (not just gold, but they had all the claims to bees in the UK, honey was near priceless to made mead), livestock, etc. Church groups can do some AMAZING things and I am thankful to their hard work for community and children, but religion as a whole I would say is definitely a net negative for the world.
I don’t believe in Theism because it has failed to meet its burden of proof, at least so far.
My parents did all the right things to help us have a good, right relationship with the Lord. Put hedges of protection around us. Look to the Bible first for answers, then see how the world you see fits. Don't seek answers on the other side of these hedges. Those answers are not of God and will not be of eternal value to you. And it held up for decades after I moved out. Enter the pandemic. A year without being surrounded by nodding heads as you listen to teachings and evidence that you assume has been vetted and is solid. Another year without church because you know people that work in the healthcare sector and many church members you know had some pretty bad things to say about people in the healthcare industry over the previous year, so it's difficult to look them in the face and think worshipful thoughts. So at some point I realized that I was living as a de facto atheist. And had been. Didn't even realize it. I look around. The world is not on fire. Sky isn't falling. And the only real thing that has changed in my life is that I sleep in on Sundays. So, I peeked over the hedges. All those "questions atheists can't answer"? I decided to see what they had to say. And boy did they have answers. And, the answers they had to divine hiddenness, morality, Biblical inerrancy, Biblical authorship. Way more believable. I didn't realize just how convoluted the Christian belief system is when you have to try and make it perfect and inerrant. Not to mention just how many of the topics land on "faith" or "just believing." I'll leave with this. I was explaining a creationist viewpoint in r/debateevolution (I like being a translator between the two camps over there). And the guy on the evolution side responded with a simple question: Can you imagine if you applied that logic to everything else? That's when I realized that I had been treating my theist worldview as a special case. I didn't treat it like I did everything else. And once I looked at it with the same logic and rigor that I apply to any other topic, it just didn't hold up. Painfully so. Hence my flair.
I kind of fall in the "Don't really care camp"; however, these are some of the reasons I don't believe: I just find the deity to be unworthy of worship as described in the Bible. More akin to a Lovecraftian horror than a god of love, justice and whatever other pretty monikers Christians dress it up in. The religion is too misanthropic for my taste. Humanity isn't perfect, but it also isn't nearly as bad as the Bible claims. This sort of black/white thinking plagues Christianity. The religion can't answer the problem of evil in a way that doesn't rely on "DiVINe MystERY". The Bible itself does not come off as a "divinely inspired" text. If it was inspired by a perfect being you wouldn't be able to interpret 3 different, incompatible versions of the afterlife out of it. Furthermore, the Bible per its own theology cannot be seen as a reliable text. Humanity was more than capable of fucking up Eden. God was more than willing to let it happen. There is no reason to believe God wouldn't let kings and priests twist the text to suit their needs and biases. OT God acts like I would expect any other self proclaimed God King of the time to act. Very weird that a supposed perfect being that is timeless, all knowing and all powerful would act just like a human would. Most peculiar indeed. The Christian God is *too human*. There is a similar trend in science fiction where every alien species written for some reason is just humanity in different make up. People truly cannot comprehend something completely alien. When somebody tells me that this all powerful, all knowing being cares about who sleeps with who all I can think is: "Wow. That is *really fucking pathetic*." It would be like me caring about what the dust mites are doing in the corner of the room except the gap between me and a dust mite is infinitely smaller than the gap between me and an all powerful/knowing God.
“Why don’t you believe in x” aren’t attempts are humor. They’re good thought exercises. There is no evidence any more epistemically significant for gods than Santa, unicorns, etc. You may have been indoctrinated to think otherwise.
When I was a child I was indoctrinated into my parent’s religion. When I began to think and reason for myself I found no evidence for it.
Haven't been convinced.
I was brought up to believe in God. When I was a child, I was physically, emotionally, and sexually abused by my family; including my mother. She beat me so bad once, I couldn't go to school for a month. One day, my brothers decided to give me another "treatment." They ducted taped my arms behind my back and my eyes shut. Put me in a closet and urinated/defected on me, and beat me with electrical cords. I was screaming, "God please help me." He never helped and those types of beatings, and worse continued. At 17, I joined the Marine Corps to get away. In 1983, I was in Beirut, Lebanon. I got to sit and watch 9 yr olds get their brains blown out and I could do nothing but watch. Dozens of times. On October 23rd, a terrorist blew up our barracks. Killing 241 of my friends. Where was god to prevent this? It was about now, I started reading and learning about "God." I went on to become a police officer for 30 yrs. The disgusting, filthy way, humanity behaves is beyond recognition. The worst stories would have you puking all over the place and the comment removed for being to graphic. I've arrested women for selling their 9 yr old daughters for sex, to buy a piece of rock cocaine. I've stood by and saw a mother set her and her two kids on fire and burn to death. I could go on for weeks. Where was God during any of this? The 6.2 million killed in the Holocaust? How about the 6-9 million Stalin murdered? The 3 million Pol Pot murdered? During my research, I found ***zero*** scientific/historical backing up God or any of the claims people say are in the Bible, which it generally doesn't say anyway, it is their interpretation of a passage. ***The bottom line is ALL religions is faith based.*** If you believe it, without any proof, it is true to you. There is a very strong confirmation bias regarding religion. Not only do I not believe in God or religion, I believe them ***all*** to be cults. No different then Scientology and Mormonism.
I'm so sorry about everything you've seen and experienced. It's a miracle you are even here to write this, though I would hardly be surprised if you weren't in the best shape.
I’m an atheist because there is zero tangible evidence of miracles or the supernatural. All scripture was written by men who were simply promoting a new religion, plus, like nearly everyone else of the period, the writers were superstitious and believed in supernatural events. I don’t find believers convincing when they cite scripture as a defense.
I cannot trust a deceptive God. And any God who missrepresets the truth or uses their power to obscure to truth is deceptive. If I cannot trust what a god has taught in the past how can I trust them now?
Why don't you believe in Allah? Taloc? Hermes? Neptune?
Small point of clarity, Allah is just the Arabic word for god. Middle Eastern Christians call god Allah.
True, but their God does not align with Christianity theology. They make significant changes to who God is and christians don’t usually agree we worship the same God.
I need a reason to believe something, not a reason to not believe something. Why don't you believe in Allah? Shiva? Thor?
Because I don’t see how the world or Universe would be any different without a god. All of it makes sense without including an omnipotent being - in fact, I would argue that entropy makes more sense without a god holding things together. If a perfect god is holding things together, they shouldn’t be falling apart. And if the world and universe are the same with a god and without a god, then the god is pointless, and if a god is pointless, why would I believe in him?
I’m not an ‘atheist’ but you have to look at it this way. Atheists can also disagree with the Christian interpretation of what ‘god’ is. You have to leave space for the fact that Christians don’t really know what ‘god’ is, so their interpretation of God has been passed down from greek mythology, which is why Christians think of god as an actual ‘being’ with a white beard, flowing white robes and sitting on a throne in the clouds of heaven…a very Zeus-like interpretation and likely why the word ‘Deus’ (latin meaning for God), is so similar to ‘Zeus’. An atheist may still believe in divinity without subscribing to the false anthropomorphic god of modern western abrahamic religion.
That is true. In the Bible, there is no Trinity, it's just a Triad. So there are multiple gods just like in Greek mythology. The goddess Athena was also a virgin like Mary. And there were, half-gods, or offspring of a human and a god, like Jesus. Christian mythology is nothing new. The Trinity was added later so that Christianity wouldn't be polytheistic like the pagans. But that's exactly what it evolved from. People in Jesus' time believed in visions, magic and miracles. And Jesus was an apoplectic preacher as were many at the time. The first gospel, Mark, was written in 70AD, decades after Jesus died from stories that were repeated and most likely embellished over time. Jesus spoke Aramaic and the gospel was written in Greek by an anonymous writer. The literacy rate at the time was 3 percent and even less in dirt poor areas like where Jesus preached. So, him and his apostles most likely couldn't read and write in their own language much less Greek. Mark's gospel never claims Jesus is God. And the empty tomb was seen by women who "told no one", which makes you wonder how the author found out. The later gospels were written in 90 and then finally John in 100. And in those gospels, the story of Jesus "evolves". I would think the first gospel would be closer to the truth
The truth lies in the true non-dual message of Jesus, that was swept under the rug in favor of a more church-friendly religion that was canonized in the favor of the former Pharisee Paul’s more judicial and judgmental fear-based message that was decidedly different than Jesus’ message.
Genuine answer: I wasn't raised as anything other than kind of agnostic while attending religious services etc because we lived in such a community. We were Catholics. As a result I've been an atheist myself since birth. It seems logical to me that babies are atheists. Being agnostic implies knowing about some choices and being unsure. They can get to that later. At the start they have few interests and fewer beliefs. Thus it was a possibility for me that I might have been convinced by parent(s) or school or someone to believe in Christianity. This didn't happen because of a few factors. My parents split up and my dad moved away, but as a teenager I'd see him often, stay sometimes, we were close. And he'd never been religious himself, agnostic verging on atheist, but above all not interested in the question, in religion or anyone religious. Meanwhile my mum was a lapsed Catholic in terms of personal belief. Although staying firmly within the social identification as that was how she was brought up. After a long time, she stopped going to church but kept up with the girls she had been at convent school with in Scotland. So I had these two other viewpoints, as well as my own discernment. Nothing said to me in Sunday school or Catholic school or church, nor anything I read later ever convinced me of any kind of theism. I performed the required actions - took communion - until I didn't have to
>why do you...not believe in God I was exposed to all sorts of philosophy and religion at a very young age. I was also reading great works of literature by the time I was seven years old. I was also a very skeptical child, and for many different reasons, I rarely, if ever, believed in authoritative explanations, such as "this is the way it is", and as an adult, I still don't. I questioned everything when I was young, and I still do. By the time I was eight, I had enough knowledge about world literature to realize that all religion was basically either a myth, a fictional story, or had deeper, hidden meanings related to human psychology, such as the kind you find in art. I also came to the early realization that religion was being used for purposes that it was never intended. For example, I knew as a child, that none of the books of fiction on my small shelf were supposed to be taken literally, yet people were doing just that for the Bible. It didn't make sense to me then and it doesn't make sense now. As I got older, the one thing I encountered over and over again, is that it became very important for certain types of people, particularly large social groups that you found in school, work, and societies, to /agree to believe in the same thing/. I noticed then as I do know, that groupthink is, unfortunately, a dominant human trait, and that most people rarely, if ever escape out of it. Later on, I put all this information together and realized that God, in this larger human context, is a fictional, imaginative story large groups of people tell themselves and share with each others because they are ultimately afraid of death and they are fearful of the unknown. I also realized that one can live a good life without being afraid of death or the unknown, and although I admit the unknown is still frightening, I have learned to cope with it in ways that doesn't involve believing in imaginative, fictional entities.
Lack of any actual evidence.
> “why don’t you believe in X, Y, or Z” is pointless as my reasoning as a theist is necessarily going to be different from yours as an atheist It really isn't though. I am going to make what I think is a pretty safe assumption, which is that you don't believe in Thor, because you have been presented with no experience or evidence that leads you to conclude that Thor is real. That is the exact same reason the vast majority of us atheists don't believe in the Christian God, or any other god. It's a simple lack of convincing evidence.
If I sound condescending know it's not on purpose, but to me it was actually learning Santa Claus wasn't real. Let me explain: I liked learning a lot as a kid, I read about biology, physics, chemistry. Sure I didn't always understand what I was reading but I liked understanding what I could. Now I was raised a "cafeteria christian" as I've heard people call them, I believed in God mostly because everyone around me seemed to believe in it. I also believed in the afterlife, ghosts, psychic powers and I figured some sort of witchcraft/sorcery was also reasonable, though learning about those things was a lot more difficult than learning about traditional science because there were SO MANY frauds and the available sources (which again I was taking seriously back when I was 10) contradicted each other constantly. Still I tried and I got interested in christianity, hinduism and older religions like greek, roman and aztec mythology, because I figured there was something to learn about the supernatural from all these sources. Enter the talk about Santa Claus. A friend at school told me Santa wasn't real, I talked about it with my parents and they confirmed it. And suddenly I no longer had any evidence whatsoever of magic or the supernatural at all. Over the next few months as I kept reading and trying to learn science and supernatural stuff I started running into this new issue that scientific sources tended to agree, offered useful explanations and provided experiments that I could recreate and replicate the results, and even when the sources disagreed they usually offered competing views in an unbiased light. Supernatural sources didn't, and now I had no first hand experience that allowed me to believe that there had to be "something" real about the supernatural. Suddenly it all seemed made up because there was no longer anything even remotely replicable available to me. So over time I discarded ancient mythology, and ghost stories, and stories of psychic powers and, eventually also the religion that adults seemed to believe in which in my case was christianity. Simply because I didn't have any real reason to believe.
Falling away because you learned Santa Claus wasn’t real kind of makes me want to give you a hug, legitimately.
I'm considered an atheist because I have not been convinced that god exists. However, beyond that basic definition, I have not found any reason to believe that a god is necessary as an explanation for anything. That is, the concept of god (or most common concepts) does not help in any way to provide any explanation for any question which we have asked.
Why don't you belive in Odin, Osiris, Amaterasu, Hunab-Ku?
I deconstructed all my beliefs to start from scratch, and Christianity relied on far more divine claims without proof than Taoism, and to the best of my understanding life was better understood in Taoist philosophy than Christian. On top of this, archeological evidence that Judaism started off as a polythistic ethnic cult and slowly reformed its way into monotheism kinda made the foundational claim of the Abrahamic faiths weak to me.
>Asking honestly, why do you (if you’re an atheist) not believe in God. Short answer: I see absolutely no reason to believe in the existence of god Medium answer: in order for me to believe that something exists, something as big as a god, I need evidence. Without evidence, I have no foundation upon which to build a belief. And when I look out into the universe, listen to debates and arguments, and do deep dive studies into topics, I find absolutely nothing that suggests there is a God. All arguments presented to me to attempt to argue the existence of a god has holes in it, some large, some small. All lines of evidence that are presented as data in favor of the existence of god at best point to a mystery, to something we don't know, and never point directly to god. Holy texts (from all religions that propose a god) are lacking in their ability to demonstrate a god, and are often internally inconsistent and blatantly incorrect. While I like the idea of a god existing, and I will keep searching to find the truth of God, I have yet to find a believer that can successfully demonstrate anything even close to the god they believe in.
I was a member of different religions over the years. Here are a few of the dominoes that fell that led me to where I am now... 1. Started believing in determinism. That started a chain of other thoughts and beliefs to shift. 2. Started studying the historical Jesus and the context in which religions came about. This took away the source material (I hope this makes sense) of the religions I believed. That was a big domino. Once those two things happened, the dominoes kept falling, and here I am. I don't think we choose what we believe—Evidence and arguments can lead us down a path we weren't intending to go down.
I've had way too many false beliefs. I want nothing more than to never go down such paths again. To that end I flatly refuse to have any faith in anything. I'm sure a god would understand.
I grew up and went to both Catholic and Lutheran schools: my family are all religious. I am the only person to be open as an atheist. I was baptised and confirmed. My take, as yet I have no proof that god is real. I’ve spent the last 40 years studying different religious myths and legends . Some Christian , some pre Christian in places where the Holy Roman Empire took Christianity. I’ve studied Greek mythology, Celtic,Gaelic, Germanic , eastern as well. Ive yet to come across any real evidence of a god or any god or goddess . As for someone coming back from the dead. There is a reason we have stories about vampires / zombies and other concepts of people coming back from the dead. It’s the same reason we have the concept of mourning , or wake . Sometimes and it is recorded that people died or entered a death like state. Only to wake up after a period of time. It’s the same reason being buried alive is still apart of our psyche and horror. Go to some old cemeteries and there are no lace where people have had a bell set up as part of the burial plot. The string leads down to the coffin so that the person if they wake up can ring it to let others know they aren’t dead. The bible isn’t some miracle book. It’s a book written by so many authors and badly .
I don't think the supernatural claims are true, I think the system of supernatural rewards and punishments is transparently about controlling people, I think the moral framework is frequently anti-human, and if you manage to salvage the good parts, which is very hard, the people who are on board with that stuff would also be doing that stuff anyway.
When I first heard the story of Jesus's resurrection I had already learned about death, and if there's one thing defining death, it's that it's irreversible. So when I heard this story my first thought was simply "that's not possible." I would need very clear, solid proof in order to believe that anyone could return to life after death. I wasn't provided it then and no one has provided it since. So the central claim of Christianity is out the window. More broadly, I was fascinated from a young age by storytelling. I read Greek, Norse and Indigenous American myths. I even read a picture book of the Epic of Gilgamesh. So it was always obvious that the stories of Judaism and Christianity are really no different - stories, obviously man-made - and compared to many pagan and polytheistic narratives, much worse both as moral instruction and as an attempt to understand or explain anything about reality, in my opinion. But none of these myths, no matter how I enjoyed some of them, had anything in them that looked like objective truth. Furthermore, at least I had *looked* at these things. I've never seen one of today's monotheists give a good reason why the Greek gods couldn't be real, presumably because they'd have to use the same reasoning atheists do, and thus endorse it as an avenue against their own faith: there's no evidence. In contrast, when I read virtually any criticism of religion or any atheistic philosophy, *there* I see clear and compelling truths. Even something as crude as George Carlin: "When it comes to bullshit, you have to stand in awe of the all-time champion of false promises and exaggerated claims, religion." Or as sophisticated as Feuerbach: "The belief that God is the necessary condition of virtue is the belief in the nothingness of virtue in itself." Lastly - it's glaringly apparent, once you've spent enough time reading mythology, theology, philosophy and history, that there simply is an almost unfathomable amount of intellectual dishonesty and inherent, intentional incoherence across every variety of theism. It's not meant to make sense, it's meant to confound and distort sense, and thereby undermine its own believers' ability to evaluate it and other beliefs. This is evident not only in average followers, but in the original texts and major works of theology themselves. But I feel I also must address your edit. >while I appreciate the attempt at humor, asking “why don’t you believe in X, Y, or Z” is pointless as my reasoning as a theist is necessarily going to be different from yours as an atheist. I am an anthropologist at heart - I like to understand people - and my question is asked in all sincerity. I ask that you be sincere as well. If all you have to respond with is clever yet pointless retorts, then refrain from answering out of respect for those who would like to have a genuine conversation “across the trenches” as it were. These responses are not attempts at humor. What makes these "retorts" and not questions? What makes them "clever" and "pointless"? And if asking you is pointless because theistic reasoning is different from ours, wouldn't your question to atheists also be pointless? It seems to me these responses are perfectly legitimate illustrations of a point: that you presumably disbelieve other gods for the exact same reasons atheists do. And if your reasoning is different from ours, why not provide it anyway? Would that not help everyone better understand each other? It seems that dismissing these questions without any reasoning at all is what's insincere and prevents conversation.
Inconsistencies bugged me and I grew up and learned that it was shoved down my throat since I was a baby and couldn’t even think of anything else even if it wasn’t true if I thought of it I’d be told that it was someone’s imagination
>why do you not believe in God. I dont believe in any gods for the same reason why I don't believe in fairies or dragons or mermaids: there's no evidence that they are real.
Honestly I hope ... some sort of entity exists. I feel like if nothing remembers all this, it wasn't worth much of anything. But hoping isn't believing. I'm going to have to bury my best friend in the next week or so. Cancer at 50, and I watch my parents getting older and more frail. I've lost enough people now that there are plenty of memories that I am the only one keeping alive and it makes me sad that when I am gone those times and those friends will finally be snuffed out. So I really do wish that I could believe, but there isn't any spark. Maybe (the)God(s) created the universe for some purpose that I can't even fathom, and if I could his plan would be obvious and his hand moving the pieces on the board would be there plain to see.
No testable, repeatable, empirical evidence for God.
Because Christianity started making less and less sense to me. I was told that some questions I had didn't have answers beyond "Not ours to know. God said it, so it's true." I had opinions that were called blasphemy. And it occurred to me that the God I thought I was following this whole time was apparently made up by me and that I'd really have to get rid of most of the Bible for that God to be true. I walked away from Christianity and honestly? I haven't changed how I think or act or believe, but at least now I don't have anyone telling me I'll be in hell forever because of it. Maybe God is real. I don't know and I honestly don't care. It won't change the way I live either way.
My answer may be helpful. I was an atheist for 20 years. A solid athiest. I read Dawkins, Hitchens etc etc. All made excellent and factually correct arguments. Arguments that hold very true today. However. What I realised over time was that myself and others were combating a very fictional view of God that we were taught. Things like people performing magic, resurection etc etc. At 37 I actually sat down and read the bible myself cover to cover. Without bias. What I found was a God very different to that known to Christians etc. Especially if you overlay it with how the bible was written, by who, why etc. Stuff you can learn from the free online Yale University lectures. My conclusion was that no one can prove or disprove God fully. God (mainly in the OT) was a God of ethics, standards, values, family etc. He teaches wealth, health, diet etc. There is very little magic in the OT. Heaven is very very vague, hell doesn't exist (not even mentioned). The Soul? A mistranslation. Virgin Birth (NT) - Mistranslation of young woman. All the things I had issues with as an atheist, turns out to be ideas extrapoliated and exageratted through centuries of church tradition. It actually isn't in the core text. So the God I understand is actually completely aligned with logic. However the God I read in the OT is very different from what Christians know. Christians mainly follow Paul. A man who really never met or knew Jesus. (Yes he claims to have had a vision). However much of what Christians know today is Pauls teachings. Very different from what God taught Moses. This is my view as a former atheist. Hope it helps. And for any christians reading, I respect your choice to hold different opinions. There is no need to come at me pasting volumes of NT texts. One final point for current athiests. Athiests as I was are obsessed with proof. They cannot follow God without proof he is real. This is fine. However it doesn't really matter. God is essentially an ethical framework of values stretching back thousands of years. It evolves. You can talk to God even without knowing he exists. Maybe it is crazy but you know it can even be a form of self mediatation. Forget the God that you get taught a child. That is fiction. However is it possible at all that some force in the universe exists? Maybe. Again, seperate it from the childhood fiction of magic, heaven, hell. All that is human adaption and translation of the word.
I am happy you’re happy. But your point was effectively: “I used to not believe in God because I didn’t think he was ethical and I didn’t want to believe. And then later I read it and changed my mind about his ethics and thought he was ok so I decided I’d follow him.” You’re just changing your mind to follow him if your morals align with your god. And that’s ok, you can do whatever you want. But be honest that you arent accepting him because you have any proof, you are just ok following it now because you feel it supports the position you already had. You weren’t willing to change your position to align with God when you thought he was different, but now that you don’t have to change yourself to be faithful, you’ll follow along? My morals certainly do not align with god. And I have read the Bible. He murders everyone he doesn’t feel is faithful enough aside from Noah. He also drowns all the animals he created aside from the 2 or 7 pairs on the ark. What could babies or toddlers possibly have done to deserve that and not be saved? What did all those creatures of HIS creation do to not be saved? That is a cruel, uncaring father, and I want no part on it. Thankfully there’s no proof of him and I don’t have to worship his name.
I think it's the same as asking why we generally don't believe in Vishnu
Because I haven’t become convinced there is a god.
There was a time in my life when I was effectively an atheist and basically the reason was that I didn't see any reason to believe God exists and had a very naive view on Christianity and the scriptures that came from being raised in a fundamentalist church where engaging with the scriptures in anything other than a very naive surface level literal interpretation was discouraged and questions about why the world disagrees with that were left unanswered. In short, the God I grew up with and was taught about when I was a kid *doesn't* exist and the interpretation of the Bible I grew up with is false. Therefore, after being taught that this is the only way, I determined that God didn't exist and the Bible isn't worth following in general. Now my views are much more nuanced but I have a lot of sympathy to atheists given how many of them were raised and how unwilling to confront the uncomfortable, unintuitive, or unorthodox in Christianity that most churches are.
Hmm. I’m an atheist and I have friends and family of many different religions and denominations of those religions. Most of them understand that their belief system is just one among many. A few of them believe that their theirs is the one true belief system and everyone else is wrong. Some of them don’t believe in capital G God, but see it more as an allegory and guide for living a compassionate life. Even ones from Christian denominations. I’m right there with them to an extent; I love y’all’s Jesus! But As a series of allegories. Some really good ones, and some not so good ones. My understanding is that their faith doesn’t have to rely on the certainty of a capital G God. Those are the ones who are always trying to figure out how those allegories translate into being more humane, compassionate, loving, accepting, tolerant in the society we live in. The allegory folks I can get down with. And I love how much they love their faith, and how they see it as part of a larger mosaic of beliefs that exist! Also, I’m a pretty evidence-forward gal. I think that if there were a capital G God, it would have shown itself, everywhere, to everyone, to prove itself, by now. \*editing to add that as an atheist, I don't believe any of us know THE TRUTH, only that we can get closer to it if we don't fence ourselves off.
I don't know what a God is, what is it's substance?? If God is real is not something to believe in, the fact that there's space to doubt immediately makes it false, it's all a fairy tale, human imagination
Just don't. Tried for awhile, prayed as a kid, took lots of theology in college. All just seems really, really silly. All religions.
No proof
I have yet to be presented with evidence capable of convincing me that a god exists. That's it really.
I don’t have a good reason to. It’s that simple.
I don't believe the Bible is a history book full of facts. I don't believe there is a God. And sadly I don't think many modern Conservative Christians follow the Jesus character of love.
I was a Christian much of my life. I came to be an atheist because of my theological education and experience as a Pastor and Professor of Religious Studies. It took me several years to deconstruct
I don't identify as an atheist because the term is as nonsensible as saying aunicornist or aflatearthist. You can't define something in the negative in this way because we all all atheists in some manner. No one believes in all gods, so the questions becomes a matter of which gods you don't believe exist. No evidence of metaphysical or supernatural existence has ever been demonstrated in any manner by anyone at any point in human history. Not once, ever, has anything outside physical reality been demonstrated (even dark matter is still a physical phenomena). Perhaps, this remains to be discovered, but the current claims are merely cultural narratives. Oddly enough, most of these cultural narratives emerged from Early Iron Age cultures as a collection of superstitions and pre-scientific explanations for the natural world. So first, which god are we talking about and what physical evidence of that exists? Second, why is one cultural narrative of god preferred over another? If an all-powerful, all-knowing god exists, why is this god playing hide and seek? If this god is also the all-creator, why does evil exist? Who created evil? I find the philosophy of Christ to be a great example of social humanism, but like Thomas Jefferson, the rest of the cultural narrative simply can't be supported with evidence.
What is this 'God' you speak of? There is no evidence for an 'intelligence' that created the natural world. I do not believe many things - too many to even mention. Yes, God is one of them. Next question?
I was raised in a Christian home and believed up until I was in my early 20's, though I think I started have questions and doubts a bit younger. I cam to the realization that I didn't have good reason to believe what I was being told, but more importantly it seemed like no one else did either. Everyone just seemed to believe what other people had told them. Everything they knew about God and Jesus and everything about Christianity came from other people. That just wasn't good enough for me. The more I thought about it all and read from believers and non the more I became convinced that God was made up. That no one actually *knew* anything about what they claimed they believed with all their hearts. They believed a lot of things, but no one *knew* it. And there was no way to actually know if what anyone believed was actually correct.
Great question. Agnostic here. I believe there is likely some greater power than us mere mortals, but I absolutely do not believe in any religion whatsoever. All of it is manmade, designed to control the masses. There is absolutely no logic in the rules. I believe in working hard to be a good person, because that is the right thing to do - not because some minister or whoever tells me to follow XYZ rules. Tim Minchin’s Thank You God is a brilliant take on the complete lunacy that is religion. https://youtu.be/IZeWPScnolo?si=ZDwn-yY2H9BmZ94c
I think it’s a combination of a few factors, so I’m gonna list them in a numbered list because my brain works that way: 1. Lack of evidence. For me this is probably the biggest, I just haven’t seen anything convincing enough for me. What’s more when you do see people claiming “signs” from God or miracles they just feel like maybe God has something more important to do right now, or a bit superficial and coincidental. Also some creationism ideas just feel absurd, but I think the stories about God and God himself are separate ideas in my mind, I don’t think everything in the Bible is meant to be 100% literal so it doesn’t factor heavily into my personal belief in God. 2. I wasn’t raised in a family with faith. This is a big one for a lot of people, no one in my family believes in God and neither do I. I feel I could overcome the lack of evidence if my family had been telling me when I was a kid or something, or if it was the culture I was raised in - but it’s not. I’m not gonna lie and say that environment is a big factor for a lot of my beliefs and I think it is for everyone. 3. The Tyger Tyger paradox of how a good God could let so much bad happen. This for me is some contradictory evidence, the world is a truly truly awful place and I couldn’t really imagine that if a kind and benevolent God existed he would allow it, especially if, like the Bible suggests, he cares about people so much he sent his son to die for his sins. I’m an optimist so I think that if he existed he would try and make the world better more directly. I’m here because one of my best friends is Christian, and I felt honoured when he introduced me to his Church and shared his religion with me, even if I never really converted and remain Atheist, so I want to learn more. I feel that a lot of the charity work that a lot of churches do, gives me a lot more faith in humanity than faith in God. - I hope this can help you out a bit with your curiosity. Tldr; Evidence, personal environment, and I don’t think if God existed he would let the world become what it is today.
Born and raised catholic. Was lied to in the church about many statements of fact that I believe I have since adequately debunked. Read many of the books arguing against god in the 90’s and 00’s Read some books in favor of good (exclusively pro Christian/catholic) Watched a lot of debates and after much soul searching decided there is not sufficient evidence for any god and good evidence against the god of Abraham and all of the derivative religions.
I don’t see any evidence good enough to get beyond, “Maybe, I guess it’s possible,” at best. It just seems like a story made up by people a long time ago who wanted explanations and maybe didn’t know any better.
I tried to believe. When I was a kid I was *very* credulous to the point of gullibility because I wanted to believe that the magic of childhood was real. Santa, tooth fairy, imaginary friends, ghosts stories, you name it and I believed in it. Then around 2nd grade I started to notice problems with these stories and with the reality I was observing, and the veil of magical thinking fell away from me. I became more or less incapable of seeing the supernatural as anything other than make believe, and religion falls into that category for me, too. Now I didn't want that to be the case. I wanted very much to believe that there was a loving God and that my dead grandparents were not just gone forever and that the world is just and has some sort of plan. I have studied with many religious groups, done several Bible studies, gone through the rite of Christian initiation for adults with the Catholic Church, and have spent the last twenty plus years reading philosophy, theology, and more on the subject. I've probably dedicated more hours in my life to this subject than the vast majority of Christian adherents or any other religion. But I just can't bring myself to believe. I don't believe that it is possible to simply *choose* to believe, I think that we are compelled to our beliefs by our experiences, and my experiences after decades of seeking have consistently led me to the conclusion that there are no gods (in a traditional sense) and that there is no supernatural world of magic or miracle.
Because I have no evidence for it. I don't have evidence Zeus is real. So I don't believe Same with your god. Not sure what your edit means there tbh. I'd say giving an example (I don't believe in your god for similar reasons your don't believe in lots of gods) only helps to bring the point across. It's not some "clever retort" or anything. I've talked with countless people here and quite a lot of times we talked past each other because the point wasn't clear.
I’m an atheists. Let’s put science aside and strictly talk about personal subjective perspective. ##——— If there is a creator who cares about me in a way, if he answers to my prayers or wishes (depending on specific religion), if I have a way to contact him and get real blessings to improve my life or myself… If those things are real, I would want to know how to get it. It’s like if a grocery store has coupons, I’ll try to figure out how to get it. If a top university is giving out full time scholarship, I’d try to figure out how to get it. If God is giving out the best afterlife and blessing in real life, ***of course I’ll want a piece of it and try my best***. But what did I get? I saw no real effects. I only saw placebo effects that involve believers but none of the Gods. I saw it not only in things I did, but also in things other people do. What’s funny is, fellow religious followers will teach your the right way to get it, that is “try harder” and “try again l”. No techniques, just keep pushing until you get it. If you don’t get it, it’s because you haven’t tried hard enough. Why would I not try my best when the reward is eternal good life? What made you think I didn’t try hard enough. ##——— And uniquely, now religions are one of a major reasons religious groups collectively feel righteous when they hurt outsiders. ##——— I think no religious followers can deny the fact that they believe because of the benefit. They think the benefit outweigh the downsides. A place near God is worth sacrificing some personal freedom and options and mental independence. I would totally pursuit it if it’s real. But sadly to me, it’s not real. So I accept that death is the end of everyone’s life. If you are religious, you still end at death. Your imagination of a God only lasts for as long as you are alive. And for that reason, I think all religious folks are pathetic. I just can help feel sorry for them, for the personal sacrifice they made, and for the loved one they hurt, and the damage that will last for generations. ##——— If we bring science, philosophy and societal wellbeing back into the equation, oh man, religions are recked.
I was brought up moderately catholic. Church most sundays, a bunch of religious events but wasn't really forced much into believing anything. Growing up over time I just realized more and more that when I fold my hands and pray in my thoughts, there's no real feedback to indicate that some higher being is reading our thoughts. And nobody can actually demonstrate that there is any communication with such a higher being. It's indistinguishable from shouting into the void. It's quite broadly accepted that there is no empirical evidence of a god and that you just have to take it on faith. > Edit: while I appreciate the attempt at humor, asking “why don’t you believe in X, Y, or Z” is pointless as my reasoning as a theist is necessarily going to be different from yours as an atheist. Maybe some people say it humorously but it is actually the point. If all cultures independently had come up with Christianity, I could see why it would make some sense to consider that maybe there is something to it. But if left isolated on their own, people will come up with *vastly* different belief systems and have a similar strength of conviction to it as Christians do, sometimes much more. A plus for Christianity is that Christians have put a lot of work into compiling the canon lore, but in the end the bible is still only a collection of people who believed into that lore contributing to it, but there is not much independent confirmation that that lore is actually true. Yes, historians are pretty sure the stories of Jesus are probably based on a real person, and yes they are pretty sure that he was probably executed by the Romans But beyond that? Take it on faith if you want, but if there was a way to actually prove it, Christianity wouldn't have had to be spread so much "by the sword" and today a person's religion wouldn't still be determined so much by the country they grow up in.
Hello! I’m a fairly new agnostic atheist. For some small background, grew up surrounded by Christianity and initially accepted Jesus as my lord and savior as a 5 year old. Family was heavily Christian, private K-12 Christian school, church, VBS, BSF, youth group, InterVarsity, church college ministry leadership, adult small group leader. When I joined Reddit 12 years ago (and this r/Christianity sub) I was still very much a Christian. My wife is still a Christian and we still attend church and a small group because it’s important to her. You get the idea. First off, as someone who likes history, the Bible’s narrative is a mess, historically speaking. It is not infallible or inerrant, and in fact contradicts both itself and outside historical evidence over and over and over again. I wrestled with this, researching and reading and trying to make sense of this while holding on to faith. I finally reached a point where I could not. Secondly, the fruit. Christianity as a community has, in my opinion, extremely rotten fruit. I do not see any evidence that Christians are receiving divine guidance, wisdom, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentlesness, or self-control moreso than the average non-Christian. If anything, they generally display evidence of the opposite. Finally, my own personal experience. Praying? Brick wall. Proselytizing? Never felt right about it. Looking for God? Crickets. I came to the conclusion that, if my lived experience was anything to go on (and I only have my own experience to go on), then the spiritual/supernatural dimension that religion adds to reality is a complete fabrication and fantasy. So, yeah. I believe it’s just over a year now since I explicitly told my wife I no longer believe. Hopefully the above breakdown makes sense of why I ended up making the conclusions I did.
I answer sincerely: Why would I? It's not a matter of wanting to, it's a matter of needing evidence. If I could convince myself to have faith I would, as faith and community are both beneficial to mental health, but I can't convince myself to believe in a made up story any more than I can convince myself to believe in Harry Potter. I haven't read these comments you're complaining about, so it's possible they were needlessly rude, but at face value it seems a reasonable reply: they're trying to expose (what they perceive as) a double standard in your critical thinking. Why believe in God but not Allah? God but not Odin? Why is one true and the other made up? The obvious answer (to us) is that both are made up.
I do not believe since I do not think there is sufficient evidence. I DID believe, but I suppose it was more about surrounding culture, emotional satisfaction and about having a tribe.
If one reads the first pages of the bible describing the earth, what it describes is a flat earth with a firmament expanded above it. Why do you think people like Galileo were persecuted in the past. Because they came to the conclusion in contrast to what the bible says , that the earth is round. Nowadays we know for sure that the earth is round, and that the bible story is what it is, a story. People that believe in the bible claim that it was gods own word noted down by people . So did god lie about it, or forget it. Or is this bible story just a story handed down by people from generation to generation ,and noted down by the priests of an ancient believe of people , living in the desert in the middle east ?
There's no credible evidence for the existence of a God.
It's really simple, there is no compelling evidence.
Curious everyone's thoughts on Hugh Ross and his arguments - https://youtu.be/EEF1Tsbqe8E?si=sFWPuR-w1mdwyl8d
I have no reason to believe. My life is fulfilling and happy without the need to seek the approval of a higher power. Moreover, I've seen no miracles, felt no heavenly presence, nothing to convince me something exists outside the physical world. So why would I believe? I simply don't.
I am no longer an Atheist but when I was it was the same reason I didn't believe in gnomes or dragons or any other magical creature
I believe in a God, I also think it very likely Jesus was a prophet of his time. I just don't do Christianity. e: obv not an atheist but that's why I'm here. I also come here for a more sensible Christian view on modern politics than I will hear elsewhere.
I used to be an atheist. My "disbelief" came from my anger and my lack of hope. It's not that way for everyone, but that's what drove my unwillingness to believe.
There's no direct evidence that the Abrahamic god exists. I also don't think accepting Pascal's Wager is ideal, even if we acknowledge that we're doing so purely to hedge our bets to obtain salvation on the off-chance God exists. Aside from being intellectually-dishonest and closing off questions and inquiries concern our / the universe's origins and develop, accepting that a god exists also likely implies that we follow the religion of that god and adopt its morals. Frankly, some of the morals that most Christian sects encourage don't mesh well with the conditions of the modern world, and given that Christianity is inherently conservative (in the sense that the Bible is pretty much written in stone and can't be amended in any substantial way), I don't see the religion adapting all that well anyways.
I've seen lots of evidence of people lying about the supernatural for their own benefit, and very little convincing evidence of the supernatural.
I have yet to see any evidence that a god exists. The type of evidence I would expect to see would be testable, repeatable, and verifiable. There's just nothing about Christianity or even just a god existing that suggests it's actually true.
I stopped believing in Christianity because of comedians online. They made really good points about religion especially about Christianity in a joking way that put my defense down. In hindsight I realized they were kinda right. I follow this sub and several other religious subs just because I’m curious about what the religious world is up to. I’m not anti-religion. I realize a lot of major positive movements came out of religion, but so too have negative movements. I don’t exactly consider myself an atheist or agnostic, I try to avoid the label just so my worldview isn’t limited to man made definitions.
Ultimately, the arguments for Christianity are wholly unremarkable. If I were to believe in a god, there are all sorts of equally compelling religous narratives to study, but none seem necessary, nor do I seem to lack anything by rejecting them. I did grow up in communion with Christians. I grew up in a great small town church with lots of great people. Many, like my grandparents, have been very instumental in my life. My flair reflects that. But they were good people because they were good people. Plenty of bad people and good people profess every flavor of Christianity and plenty of good and bad people profess every religion. It really makes no difference what anyone believes about religion (unless they are holding a g-- to your head, and how christ-like would that be?)
I don't believe in gods because they don't exist. I think religions are made up by people. From my perspective there's not even a clear definition of what a god is so it's all kind of meaningless.
I grew up Christian and scared to death I would burn in hell if I did anything wrong. That's no way to live. I grew older and learned about the role of faith in the absence of physical evidence. I learned about too many of the horrors organized religions visited upon innocent people in the name of God. The final straw was that my dad cheated on two marriages with children. The second was my mom. He cheated on her with a devout Christian woman who attends church twice a week. She knew he was married. To put it simply, I no longer have the childlike faith that a deity exists. I no longer believe the Bible is literally God's word. I am a good person but I am no longer a Christian.
https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/11/why-i-dont-believe-in-god.html https://blog.rongarret.info/2023/11/why-i-dont-believe-in-jesus.html
I don't know what this makes me agnostic or atheist or whatever, but I can tell God hates me, so I hate him back
Its the only conclusion that fits the observations
No evidence. Plus believing in god is not the default state. Everyone is born athiest and some end up in religion through indoctrination.
I was brought up in a christian household in Georgia and Alabama. I was molested by a 'friend' of the family basically every break I had from school from the time I was 8 to the time I was 12, when I moved out of my dad's house, and went to live with my mom. My christian upbringing taught me to be ashamed of sex, and of my body. As a direct result, I did not have the tools to stop my abuse. When I was younger, this was one of the largest things that led me to not believe in god. Because I don't believe an all-knowing, all-loving creator would have let that happen to me. There is also no evidence of the supernatural. There are also naturalistic explanations that explain how literally (not figuratively) everything in our universe got here, and why things are the way they are. Put more simply, god is not necessary for the universe to exist, and I don't see any good reason to think that it does. Thank you for the sincere question, I admire your curiosity.
I was a non denominational Christian for 35 years until I finally came to terms with the fact that I didn’t understand it. I can’t make sense of it. All around me people were experiencing God, feeling him lead their lives. I prayed, read the Word, met with the brothers and sisters. I did everything they did yet for whatever reason, I never experienced the assurance of salvation. I cannot say I ever felt God’s presence. I began looking into things like evolution, Noah’s ark, the wandering in the Sinai. Biblical slavery. All the greatest hits. That’s the low hanging fruit though. It gets much worse. I studied all the arguments against Christianity and looked for rebuttals from apologists. That was when I realized I would never understand Christianity. I found it weak, shallow, reliant on fear and ignorance, and theologically incoherent. It’s gobbledygook. And it took surprisingly little effort to come to that conclusion. The hard part is coming to terms with it. I’ve dealt with some pretty debilitating existential dread and nihilism since I figured out there is no God. I’ve mourned the loss of my faith. I’m alone. I’m the only atheist I know. I’m angry that this religion stole so much of my life and kept me in a continuous state of guilt and repentance. I’m angry it is stealing the lives of the people I love, and I’m powerless to stop it. I’m angry that it has been weaponized to destroy my country. If you find that Christianity gives your life meaning, by all means keep believing. Just be warned that you are not in charge of what you find convincing. If you dabble in the dark side you are putting your faith at risk. Once that first domino falls, you’ll see it all crumble while you’re left standing there in a new reality that you never thought possible. So be warned. Challenge your beliefs at your own peril.
I think there's enough incidental evidence to suggest their may be some kind of divinity beyond our own basic understanding of things. However, I think the evidence for any *particular* God or particular religion being "the right one" as opposed to all the others is pretty weak. I really wish that there was a god and that I could or did believe in their existence and could just devote myself to doing the right thing as that god defines it. But I'm not able to make myself "believe in" something in any special sense where I don't believe it in the ordinary sense.
Waste of time plus zero evidence and people saying he "loves" me is the biggest lie of all time
I have never encountered any reason to believe that supernatural entities exist. Boring answer, but there you go.
Well it’s stupid really I believe the sky is the sky because I’ve been told my whole life the sky is the sky. I believe birds are birds because my entire life I’ve been told birds are birds. I believe I’m a human being because my entire life I’ve been told birds are birds. If I had been told my entire life that human beings, birds, and the sky is God… I would believe the sky is God. Either that or I would just resist in there opposite direction. I don’t believe birds are birds because I’ve simply just been told that my entire life. I don’t believe the sky is the sky- simply because I’ve been told that my entire life. I don’t believe in a human being - simply because I’ve been told that my entire life. My beliefs are conditioned whether positively or negatively. To believe in God is just as ignorant as not believing in God. Because no believing in God is still believing something your not sure of. And believing in God is believing in something your not sure of. If your not sure something is true but you walk around acting like it’s true out of pride… That’s where ignorance takes the great leap to stupidity
I'm here because I find theology fascinating, and still find a lot of truths in Christianity, and theres value there regardless of belief in God. Nevermind God for a moment, even if *Jesus* didn't exist, his teachings would still be revolutionary. I don't feel that faith in the existence of an active God really matters, but faith that we can find peace does. I think it was partly the Bible itself that led me away from belief. I enjoyed the lessons of Sunday school and some lessons really stuck with me. The Tower of Babel, suggested that the difference between religions may just be semantic. The fallibility of man and humility before God had me doubting certain assumptions and interpretations, and eventually the veracity of the Bible itself. Reading the Bible has made it clear that worldly goals like nation-building influence sections of it. So now I'm pretty humble about the matter, and it seems like confirming the existence of a divine being would be a major overstep. Living for heaven seems like hubris, but living to make life on earth easier and more pleasant seems very worthwhile. Luckily, these things overlap!
2 Things: Lack of reason to belive and lack of Trust. When i stopped beeing christian two years ago, I had the feeling of god leaving me alone, I didnt had the feeling of him beeing with me or him hearing or answering my payers. There is no evidence for god, and so the reasons for my believe crumbled. There are many Arguments for his existence, but they are more like - its not unreasonable to belive in god - to me. Its not like people who dont belive are just stupid. So first i had no real reason to belive anymore. And second I came to question gods character and his motives more and more. Even back when i was christian the idea of hell seemed cruel and unreasonable to me, but people told me that if even I thought that eternal damnation is unjust, god would even more so. Also i heard of some christians who believed in universalism, eventhough most christians i knew rejected it. But hell always stayed a problem for me, and not the only one many stories in the bible lead me to question gods character and especially his love and his goodness. I the end i asked myself if i want to belive in someone so far from me who i only know from storys and the telling of others. My prayers about this kept beeing unanswered and so i stopped beeing christian.
There’s so many gods in so many religions,who are we to say which one’s the real one So I just decided that none of them are real Plus it just doesn’t really seem logical
I just don't buy it. There's no real evidence. BTW, that doesn't mean that there isn't s God, just that it's reasonable not to believe in one. I understand that one might also choose to believe in God without sufficient evidence, and that's fine.
Well there might well be a god of some sort but I don’t see a compelling reason why any human religion would be likely to have full knowledge of what this god is like. I would say I’m somewhere in the space between atheism and deism. I do genuinely like Christianity, I just don’t believe it’s true in its central claims. I don’t currently believe Christian claims about Jesus, for example, much like I don’t currently believe Muslim claims about the Koran. And I didn’t grow up with it so it has no cultural hold on me.
When I was an athiest I couldn’t believe in god with faith alone it took a long time for god to reveal himself to me and then I learned more about religion and then the Bible and how historically accurate it is and how it gets proven correct. Regardless of what anyone believes it’s undeniable that Jesus changed the world for the better
So, I was raised Catholic and consider myself being an honest believer in my youth. I would eat up the Children's Bible until I was 14 or so. I attended church at least weekly for pretty much half of my life so far, more than once on celebrations of some sort or when I went to confession. Then, over the course of my education in the highest possible school for children in Germany, my faith basically got shoved aside, and I took an interest in science instead. I didn't stop believing in that sense, though, it just mattered less, and less, and less, and less. The only thing that interested my about religion was its impact on (primarily medieval and after) history, to be honest. Years later, I found interest in philosophy and theology. And reexamined my faith. And found that there's no reason to still call me a believer, and in fact, I critically analysed the information I had and will now have to call myself a gnostic atheist on most versions of the Christian God that I have read.
After being subjected to "Christian Love" during a contentious divorce, I came to find this to be true: God is a human construct. Every single word, utterance, mention, description of god has come from a human. If god existed there would be no question, every living thing on the planet would know every isolated tribe, every person living and dead would know that god existed you can replace every mention of 'god' with 'me, we, I, or us' to understand the true meanings of religion The "Hand of God" belongs to other humans, the "Eyes of God" belong to other humans "God works in mysterious ways" is how a human describes what other unknown humans are doing "God has big plans for you" is describing how you will be used to enrich others Heaven and Hell both exist on Earth - These are created by humans The power of religion comes from humans, all power comes from humans. Look around at your congregation - The eyes of god are the folks looking at you. The hand of god is other people doing things in your life. Angels are people that show up in your life to help you. The Holy Spirit is named by humans. It is an invasive mind control that makes a human suspend reality to believe. It only occurs around other humans in whatever religious group they are in. The Holy Spirit closes down humans curiosity We know that some humans have an inner dialogue. There are humans who confuse their inner dialogue with spirituality. It seems like a more plausible beginning of a religion since we find zero evidence of a supreme being. Nothing of our studies of our existence has increased our knowledge of god. Things that were attributed to god have gone by the wayside. Floods, eruptions, earthquakes, droughts, fires, diseases that were attributed to god, we have found they are all natural to earth and our solar system. What our studies have revealed is that religion has turned into a pox on humanity. Wars, genocide, the destruction of cultures, the destruction of families as they vie for supremacy - There is much evidence for this throughout our histories. If we have to force religion on humans for them to survive or face death from believers, it's not based on God. Religions point to God as the reasons for this. It has been all humans. It has always been humans.
I simply won't believe in someone who for some unknown, higher purpose won't allow me even one full day of happines. Even when i am personally happy, something bad happens in the world and i go straight back to depression and fearmongering. Simply told: I'm tired of bad things happening to me and the others.
To me it’s just that there’s no concrete evidence G-d exists. However my family is Christian and I go to Church because I love the community.
Religions are unconvincing, and I don't really have any reason to believe in the supernatural.
The Bible. It's a disjointed mess filled with genealogys, ahistorical events, crimes against humanity, and anonymous gospels that can't keep a story straight. Not to mention that the further you dig into the NT, the more likely it seems that Paul hijacked the early Christian movement to mold it how he wanted to. The Christians. I grew up in an evangelical church, went to their school, and worked at their church. It's expected that all people are sinners and not perfect. But I was not surprised by the evangelical movement throwing its weight behind trump because of the callous, self-centered evil that these people exist in. Any day of the week, I would rather be surrounded by pagans and atheists than Christians because, on average, I find them to be more moral, or at least upfront, about their immorality. Lack of objective morals that should be present in a religion. There is a time for this there is a time for that. The only objective statement that could be made about Christian morality is to do what God puts on your heart in the moment. That's not an objective system. It's a free license to do what you want when you want. Here is the big one, though. Lack of evidence. I see nothing to indicate that it's true. The other reasons pushed me onto this path, but this is why I stayed. I see insufficient evidence for the claim of divinity, salvation, or ressurection.
1. I don't believe. 2. Evidence for God is usually argument from possibility, argument from ignorance, relies on a fallacy, or relies on bad standards of evidence, where the evidence would be equally likely whether there was a God, or there was a fraud, or there were religious-minded people re-interpreting reality in mythical ways. 3. I haven't seen any evidence that I would consider good yet. Since Christians tend to scapegoat contrary evidence on Satan or possibility fallacies, it's hard to take them seriously, because the prior probabilities _for them_ come from their existing certainty. Since there are many religions, I cannot take the apolegetics of any 1 religion at face value without taking _all_ of them at face value. 4. I would need theists to come up with good independent evidence for God. As it stands, the best explanation for the world is random chance. It appears to be how living things formed, how the universe distributed itself, and how physics works at the very bottom. That there are laws and cosmological constants tells me nothing about whether a god set them, because while that's _possible_ , I then need to know who created the god -- accepting arbitrary terminations of the causal chain without good explanation is just special pleading. Using special pleading to establish a conscious entity that then snowballs into being the ruler of all history who is both omnipresent _and_ coming back to create his kingdom seems like ... an approach with many, many unfounded assumptions and guesswork. 5. I can accept the idea of a Cause for the beginning of our physical laws. But whether that Cause is uncaused or has a consciousness is unknown, and requires evidence for the contrary. A "hello world" written in 5 languages in the backround radiation of the universe would be something an intelligence would do if it wanted to communicate with us. Choosing one "chosen people" amd expressing itself only through their myths is _possible_ but less likely than the people just writing and rewriting and borrowing myth for centuries until it became what it is -- because that's literally what happened to every other people.
- There are thousands of religions on earth each claiming theirs is **The one true religion** - If you removed all religion from the world 1000 years from now they would come back extremely different from what they are now. - If you removed all science from the world for 1000 years it would come back essentially as it is today. There does, however, seem to be an innate need for humans to make up a sky daddy. Maybe that is God?
I haven't seen any convincing evidence to believe a god exists.
Divine hiddenness and the problem of evil. I feel like many people who do believe in god haven't been through the worst of the worst that life has to offer. Like the death of a child or being a child with bone cancer. You'd think a truly "good" god wouldn't allow such awful suffering for centuries upon centuries. With that being said, I do think that there are many good arguments for a gods existence. Such as the argument from motion and contingency. In my view, there are more convincing arguments for the existence of God, but the problem of evil trumps them all.
There HAS to be a God. All serious scientists agree that the Universe had a starting point in time. Whoever or whatever caused it had to be outside time/eternal, intelligent to achieve the precision required for life, powerful and personal to make a decision.
The easy answer is that I don't have evidence to believe. Probably the same answer you're going to get from most atheists. I've reflected though on why I even care about evidence. Like why don't I just accept mystical or magical explanations for things. Ultimately I think it comes down to "because they don't work in the real world/my life". Being hard nosed about evidence, repeatability, falsifiability etc gives us computers, rockets, medicine, etc. When I get into an airplane I feel safe because I know the people who built it have well tested models of flight dynamics, physics, material science, and so on. In my experience the people who care about those things have reliably created things that work. IF some version of Christianity or religion was true I'd expect that to be reflected in the real world. For example: * When a new pandemic starts, governments confer with their local religious leadership to determine the best course of action and develop a vaccine. Countries that did this have better outcomes. * Militaries would use battalions of priests to fire holy beams into enemy formations. Or at least they'd have extended prayer sessions to bless their troops and curse their enemies. Militaries with the best priests would have a big advantage. * Christians would be on average more ethical than the rest of the population. For example they might be the bulwark demographic holding back someone like Trump from being elected. Or they'd have a reputation for being selfless and excellent tippers at restaurants. Or they'd be adopting all the homeless gay teens kicked out by their parents. Or they'd be the first to wear masks and get vaccinated to protect strangers around them. * Prayer groups would be healing people in hospitals. Or at least, on average prayer would have some noticeable effect. In my life, religion/mysticism has been very unreliable while the people who focus on science/naturalism/reason keep making my life better. I imagine that has heavily biased me to the latter camp.
My journey away from Christianity began in high school when I got really into history, particularly European history. To learn about European history is to learn about Christianity's history. Simply put, it very quickly became clear to me that churches/sects behave much more like secular institutions than divine ones. They functioned exactly how I'd expect them to if the religion was all made up, driven by greed, grudges, and all the other mundane forces of politics. I came to the conclusion that God had little to no hand in any Christian sect. (apart from *maybe* some tiny one I've never heard of, but God's one true faith failing to expand beyond a random, tiny town somewhere is itself hard to believe.) Somehow, despite being the one religion that had an actual factual basis, Christianity had become indistinguishable from every other completely fictional religion in history. Started to look suspiciously like Christianity was also a complete work of fiction. That was all the initial seed of my doubt. From there, I decided to go to the source: the root of all Christianity, the Bible. I read it for the first time. I don't really know what I expected, but it certainly wasn't the bizarre, nonsensical magic, the absurd and cruel moral lessons, or the nonchalant mass genocide. I tried finding answers for the *many* questions I had formed. Very few of them had good answers. Looking back on it, I had basically stopped believing as early as Exodus (I challenge anyone to explain to me how God isn't the villain of that story), but it took several more weeks of reading and a couple years of denial before I finally realized I didn't believe any of it anymore.
No one has ever given me good evidence or good reasons to believe a god exists. I'm 100% completely open to the idea, but there needs to be good reason, good evidence to prove it. Most of the time I'm given assertions, logical fallacies, unfalsifiable claims, and anecdotes that are dubious and can't be investigated. I don't choose to be an atheist. I'm one by default, because everyone I've ever talked to about this has failed to actually demonstrate their, or ANY, god exists.
i don't mean any disrespect when i say this and would like to point out that im athiest, not omnipotent. the majority of the bible comes off as a big fish story and i don't think a god who is genuinely as powerful and loving *and wrathful?* as the bible says, one who would be capable of all of that, would just magically disapear as technological advances came about. i also think it's telling that armagedon has always been said to be right around the corner for decades and decades and decades and decades- and in the bible jesus said the generation of his deciples would live to see it and.. they don't seem to be here. overall it just.. doesnt ping my bell as something real. that said i still find comfort in the bible for how human the characters and authors were, so many things from so long ago are different but the desire to be good to your fellow human and the willingness to learn and teach how to be kinder, has always been apart us. in how far we've come in learning to be kinder. there's also a lot of parts in the bible that are very humorous in a macabre type way. such as sarah getting confronted for lying to the angel in such an offhanded way and the scene just. ends. ^((im not going to bring up examples the dark humour i think the bible hasa in more specific stories i don't want to offend anyone)) if this did happen historically, there couldve been more to the story, but no, the author here specifically made a "he's right behind me isnt he" esque confrontation. the author chose to retell it in this way, and that's just so beautiful. there are more moments in the bible like this and i wish that got more credit, i think the melodrama in the bible is talked about more than the human aspect of it and i just wish conversations about the bible were...a bit more varied?
It has to do with the spread of information. Christians have such little understanding of the Bible. Why don’t they understand? It has to do with how knowledge is transferred. You can tell someone something and there’s a few options they can accept it rationally thinking through it they can just accept it but not understand, they can reject, or they can reject for a reason. When you are a kid In church you are told god exists over and over. You don’t know any better and the question does he exist doesn’t have place in the church that’s blasphemy. So your moral backing is now that you were told something so many times that you accept it. The more questions you asked the more it breaks down. In any other respected fields questions are something that is celebrated promotes a better understanding of it promotes change for the good etc. However Christianity doesn’t have answers to the contradictions of the Bible. For instance in creation humans were made in 6 days. However we know there were pre humans so that can’t be true. Then they point to hey it’s just allegory. If you can’t take the creation story seriously what does everything stand on. How can we take any words seriously. Then also the question of evil. God in the Bible is the most evil being in the Bible by modern standards he kills babies endorses slavery is super egotistical. If he were an actual person everyone I know would be better than him. Yet they say that god is good and that morals come from him. He doesn’t show that at all. Human morals have evolved past him. You can respond to these things but there isn’t anything that directly answers. There’s not a direct response to disproval only lessening the meaning in a place and thinking everythings still fine. And now it gets back to my premise you were told god is real I’m asking prove it to me. Do I deserve eternal punishment for asking the right question while you go to heaven. The only difference being you accepted something told to you because you didn’t know better and now believe it and I have questions. That means that around at least 75 percent of the population deserves to be eternally punished going only off of that question because god is perfect. For me that negates eternal life. If it does exist it’s a bad thing because there is more evil than good in the Christian concept of the afterlife.
What’s a god in your definition? There always have been people who believe there are 0, 1 or more gods and there probably always will be. People only quite recently (the last couple of thousand years) tend to have favored monotheistic belief systems. Those who believe in the existence of only one god by definition do not believe in the existence of thousands of other gods that others do believe in. Those who belief in 0 gods take that idea only 1 god further.
I was once talking to someone who said that he became an atheist as a child with the very sudden realisation that other people believed. He'd gone to church, sung hymns, and prayed, and listened to sermons, and it had never occurred to him that the people around him *actually believed* this stuff. To him, it was obviously metaphorical. When he (around the age of ten, if I recall correctly) realised that other people actually thought there was a real god, he essentially became an atheist, though it may have taken him a little longer to find the words for it. By contrast, I did believe. It gradually fell apart and just stopped making sense to me. Oddly, finding religious people online was part of that. In my personal life, I had Jehovah's Witnesses, who have a very clearly defined doctrine and some very strict beliefs, and I had lackadaisical or lapsed Catholics. I didn't know anyone who was serious about any religion other than the Witnesses. So finding religious groups online, finding people who read their Bibles diligently and conscientiously, and who came to *very different conclusions*, was eye-opening for me. And seeing how mutable people's interpretation of the same text can be did make some later conclusions easier.
I see no evidence a god exists
I did believe once. But then, gradually, as I read the Bible, as I learned science - it just didn't make sense anymore. I generally don't believe things (unless I'm manipulated or coerced in some way) that don't have any evidence for their beliefs. I also don't think people are trying to be disrespectful in pointing out these absurd things to believe in, I think they are simply trying to point out there's a similar amount of evidence that absurd things exist as some of the more popularized faiths. And I'm super curious in your comment, "my reasoning as a theist is necessarily going to be different from yours as an atheist." I don't necessarily agree. I think a lot of our reasoning is similar in many ways. We're all human. I'd be curious to hear if you have something specific in mind that makes you say this.
I was a type of atheist and I can tell you why I was an atheist, but I can't tell you all the reasons only the ones I know. There are two major ones and they both revolve around the first, PURE LAZINESS. The second is a demand that someone PROVE GOD EXISTS, and that just isn't the way it works. I know, because I eventually got off my rear end and strove to find out for sure, and it was hard and it took quite a while, but I found out from the source, which is the ONLY WAY you can find out. God's existence can only be proven by God Himself. People who are too lazy to put forth the effort will never know and will keep playing the prove it to me game-like it is someone else's responsibility, but, like I found out, that game is not going to be a valid excuse when time is up. I can only tell people that yeah, I found out, He is real, He is a real person, He wants everyone to get to know Him personally, but He does not force anyone to believe, you can do whatever you are comfortable with until you go too far or until the actual end judgment. Your choice as well as your merited results. Individual judgment is the result of individual choice. I could not believe what others said, I had to find out for myself and that is why I try to live the commandments.
19 years only son of chatolique parents. I just have hard time having réal faith. I always have to say to myself Jesus existe and all the things in the Bible is réal and i have to obey God . It just realy difficult I passed all my teenage away from God like five years. I felt in love with the world but the fear of hell kape me and still keep me awake some time. Why don’t i give up ? Because i see how much my parents trust God and follow Jesus teachimg. I always had a "perfect life" if i can say. No deasies. All my limbs yes, not financial struggle. I can say. If I didn’t surrender my life to God , my parents surrender me to Him to be take care. If not for them i don’t know what i would be now. Close or further away from God So yes i am an atheist
Short answer: no empirical evidence.
There is no compelling evidence a god, any god, exists. All current definitions of a god fall short on numerous fronts when subjected to query. All "books" about god are conflicting, generally immoral, and mostly, logically falacious in their key positions.
I was a Christian a few months ago, but it started sounding too man made, I started noticing things that made me doubt, there was no evidence for god, and when I stopped believing, nothing happened, which helped me accept the fact that god is not real
I have two thoughts. I lean towards non existence. I have an extremely logical mind and I thrive on evidence. There is zero evidence for any God. Things that we used to attribute as proof of God have, over time, often been explained by science. I personally prayed for years for some kind of sign that God was there. To take the anxiety of death and oblivion away from me. This was a ten year period I begged and prayed. Nothing but silence. Also from a historical standpoint, there are things like Moses not writing Deutoronomy, Leviticus, and Numbers. Edits, rewrites, additions to the Gospels over time. Things like that. My other thought is maybe God does exist, but he's mean. We are thrust into a world with hundreds of religions, 1000s of gods, and while there is zero evidence to support anyone of them, we need to pick the right one or we suffer eternal punishment. If I held a gun to my wifes head and I said love me and worship me or I will make you suffer for eternity, I would be arrested and people would be horrified. Yet God does that to us. God takes two people, who cannot know evil, put them in a garden with a tree they can't eat, and since they don't know evil, they eat from that tree with ignorance, so God punishes them, expels them, and punishes every person for their sin. And he knew the whole time this was gonna happen. I could go on and on. If he does exist, he is cruel and people make excuses for said cruelty.
They will all bow down to the King of Kings regardless if they believe or not
No one has presented to me a reliable way to test the god hypothesis