Why are you an atheist?
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Anonymous
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There are a lot of atheists on this forum.
Why are you an atheist? How can you be definitively sure that God doesn't exist? |
Anonymous
| IMO, there are very few atheists. At most, they're agnostic. |
Anonymous
| They have faith. |
Anonymous
| I question how you can believe in a God. I do not believe there is a God. I cannot be sure but I live a decent life to where I know its not a problem if there was one as those who do believe have done far more wrong than I have. Why spend your time worrying about something that may or may not exist? |
Anonymous
No one actually knows whether or not there's a god. We're all just guessing. |
Anonymous
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I am an atheist. If I wanted to believe in a higher being, there are plenty to choose from. That very fact makes me believe that the need for religion is just a basic human psychology thing ... a way for societies to make sense of the world around them and also to organize themselves so it isn't complete chaos. The irony is that having all these different religions has caused chaos (wars, etc.!).
How can there be so many higher beings to chose from? I don't think I know anything for sure, but I don't believe in a God. I think it's quite likely that there are other living forms beyond this planet. But I don't believe anyone is controlling what we are all doing here. I believe in randomness. And if there is a God - why doesn't he just show him/herself? Why does he/she make people suffer? It just doesn't make any sense. |
Anonymous
Exactly the same way you can be "sure" Santa Clause doesn't exist, zero evidence to support something that runs contrary to everything that we know about the universe. The onus is not on the disbeliever to prove definitively that Santa does not exist, the onus is on the believer to show that they do. |
Anonymous
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I can't be definitively sure that God doesn't exist, but I don't believe in one.
If I went through the motions of religion simply to appease a deity, despite not believing, that would be what's known as Pascal's Wager. I look at the universe and while I don't know a lot of things about how it was created, whether it is unique and, if not, how it fits into the multiverse and how [b]that[/t] was created, I don't see a need for a deity in that process (but I freely admit there may have been one). When I look at the evolution of religious belief, I see primitive peoples who attempted to explain things they didn't understand based on a variant of Clarke's Law which says that the behavior of any sufficiently complex system is indistinguishable from magic. (Clarke's Law in its original form says, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") They created "gods" to explain all the things they didn't understand - creation, weather, seasons, life, death, etc. Modern religious believers look back on those pantheists and say, "They just didn't understand about God," but modern religions don't actually provide any explanation why the modern, monotheistic god(s) are any different from the pantheons of old. To me, the mythology of the modern god(s) exists to perform the same functions of providing (literally) a deus ex machina for the things people don't understand and to serve as an enforcer of cultural norms and desired behaviors. The more science pushes back the boundaries of the known and understood, the less need there is for a deity to explain it. Also, the more we understand about the multiverse, the "bigger" a deity has to be to have created it - making such a deity even more removed from life on our little rock orbiting our "unregarded yellow sun far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy." Such an entity would have less in common with us than we do with the smallest pieces of cells in our bodies. So, even if there is a deity responsible for creating the multiverse, I simply don't believe that it would have any interest in us and our doings, and it certainly wouldn't be demanding worship from us or jealous of whether we worshipped something else. It would be nice to think there was a caring, omnipotent, omniscient entity out there, and it would certainly be nice to believe that after I die I'll be reunited with loved ones forever after, but I don't believe it. I'd rather live my life to maximize the value of the time that I have on Earth with those I love, because I don't believe there's an afterlife. When I die, my genes will live on in my children and descendants, and I hope that they are my gift to posterity (if not, no give backs!). The memories of me will live on for a while in the minds of those who care about me, and the bits of me - all of which were formed in ancient supernovae - will get recycled by the universe. And I'm ok with that, although I'd like to postpone it for as long as possible. 
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Anonymous
No, people just say they are agnostic over atheists as it is more socially acceptable. |
Anonymous
| Every book that people worship - the Bible, the Torah, the Quran - were all written by people. Not an almighty power. I think it's all crap and only causes problems (wars). |
Anonymous
I'm agnostic. I couldn't care less about "socially acceptable". I really think it's extremely unlikely that there's a god. But it is possible. All I know is that none of us really know, and will almost certainly never know. Hence, agnostic. |
Anonymous
We're all[/a] atheists - I just disbelieve in one more deity than you. I'm willing to bet you don't believe in unicorns, fairies, Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Odin, Thor, Loki or any of the other deities listed in the D&D Guide to Gods and Goddesses, but you can't [b]prove they don't exist. Those of us who call ourselves atheists simply feel the same way about the deity described in the Torah/Bible/Koran, too. We can't prove that deity doesn't exist, because that's a logical impossibility. But we don't believe in it. |
Anonymous
| Damn. I need to pay more attention to my HTML tags. |
Anonymous
This is how I feel about religion. It's hard for me to keep a straight face when otherwise intelligent people tell me that "he died for us"... |
Anonymous
I believe in Osiris. Does that count in your worldview? |