How do you feel about atheists

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Both my husband and I are atheists, but we are raising our child to be a Catholic. Why? Because the church offers many good things (community, morals, bible history, etc.) and we feel that our child will benefit from these things. And we are also hopeful that she will outgrow god in time, like Santa, Easter Bunny, etc.

I wish I could shout out to the world that I am an atheist, but I have to remain closeted.

This is wrong. Believe or don't believe, but your child deserves the best approximation of the truth about the world and her parents that you can give her. To deliberately lie to your child about something you know isn't true is really wrong.

[Anonymous]

I believe that children are the future. Teach them well, and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride to make it easier. Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be...

I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadow. If I fail, if I succeed at least I'll live as I beleive. No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I believe that children are the future. Teach them well, and let them lead the way. Show them all the beauty they possess inside. Give them a sense of pride to make it easier. Let the children's laughter remind us how we used to be...

I decided long ago, never to walk in anyone's shadow. If I fail, if I succeed at least I'll live as I beleive. No matter what they take from me, they can't take away my dignity.

Go whitney.

[Anonymous]

I am agnostic. We cannot have certainty about something entirely outside the realm of experience or scientific inquiry. And that inability to reach certainty goes both ways -- the religious and the atheists.

I am usually frustrated by both sides. Most religious people I know are smug about it and espouse their faith as certainty and kind of view nonbelievers as not having been "touched." This infuriates me.

On the flip side, though, most atheists are pretty smug as well, and they declare with certainty that there is no higher power or being and that when we die, we die. How the hell do they know what happens when we die?

So both sides are ridiculous. I don't think it's possible for humans to know what lies beyond death. We don't fully understand the human brain. Science hasn't been able to conclusively ascertain when a fetus actually starts feeling and thinking. It seems to me that this is because we don't know how that energy that animates the body works and what happens to it when the body dies.

Why can't we just leave it a mystery and admit we don't know and deal with the here and now?

So I get frustrated with atheists and religious people alike. They all seem sort of arrogant in their certainty about things that even science won't touch.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Einstein and Darwin would have belonged to the church of the flying spaghetti monster. Fact is, you can't use logic to prove or disprove God's existence. Although many have tried. The question is more a question of your faith. As a secular humanist, I have no faith in deities.

     
“I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings."

- Albert Einstein

But, have you actually read Spinoza? Spinoza, himself, is often regarded as an atheist. He's certainly no deist. We could ontologically split hairs all day .... but I have laundry to do.

My guess is that this person hasn't read or studied Spinoza and found a list of atheist quotes somewhere.

As someone who has an advanced degree in philosophy, most of the philosophers who formed the basis of modern scientific inquiry were not outright atheists but actually seemed more akin to agnostics. They wouldn't make declarative statements about something that is not observable and subject to scientific inquiry.

I would go on, but I, too, have laundry.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm not the "I don't believe in atheists" poster, but she has a point even though I'm not sure she realizes it. Like another PP said, Darwin, Einstein and Dawkins have all said they can't rule out a deity 100%, so they call themselves agnostics rather than atheists. Well in Dawkins' case he calls himself a practical atheist because he acts like God doesn't exist even though he can never be 100% sure, but I'll let you guys unpack his definitions. In any case, if these 3 undeniably smart people don't call themselves atheists, then do they exist? A theological question for the day....

This is because no person who calls himself or herself a scientist will make a declarative statement about something that is not (a) observable and (b) subject to experimentation (i.e. repeated observation).

The basis of modern science is based on theories put to repeated observation. And even then, conclusions are never absolutely certain. It's like Hume wrote, we observe the sun rise and fall every day. Over an extended period of time, we can reasonably assume the sun will rise and fall because it is something we have observed over time. But we can never know with absolute certainty that it will indeed rise and fall every day. This is the basis of modern science. We make conclusions based on the information available to us, reason, and then repeated observation under various circumstances.

We reach a point where we feel confident enough in a conclusion to act based on that conclusion. But no scientist worth his salt will ever claim certainty about something we can't even observe and subject to experimentation. He/she will barely commit to certainty about the things we can observe and subject to experimentation.

The idea is that to function in this world, we have to make conclusions about things even though we *never* have all of the information and can *never* really have absolute certainty about anything. So we make reasonable assumptions and test them and then act based on the repeated success of those assumptions put to the test.

It is foolish and arrogant to claim certainty either about the existence of a god or the lack thereof. This is why those scientists you mention identify mainly as agnostic -- the existence of a god simply cannot be known by humans. the practical atheist position is basically that we can't know for sure, but we can act based on an assumption

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Both my husband and I are atheists, but we are raising our child to be a Catholic. Why? Because the church offers many good things (community, morals, bible history, etc.) and we feel that our child will benefit from these things. And we are also hopeful that she will outgrow god in time, like Santa, Easter Bunny, etc.

I wish I could shout out to the world that I am an atheist, but I have to remain closeted.

This is wrong. Believe or don't believe, but your child deserves the best approximation of the truth about the world and her parents that you can give her. To deliberately lie to your child about something you know isn't true is really wrong.

I believe she deserves the chance to believe. I wish that I could...maybe she will be lucky.

[Anonymous]

This is an old thread.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This is an old thread.

It was, but it's an interesting topic and so someone revived it. Far different from a thread by a woman who was pregnant 3yrs ago.

[Anonymous]

Some of my best friends are atheists and I'm an agnostic/pantheistic/atheistic anti organized religion type myself, so I love atheists.