Warning: If you are religious, posts in this thread may unintentionally offend you. Similarly, if you are an atheist, you may be bothered by religious ideas. Let's not flame, 'kay? :)
Old thread was locked for (my) necroposting. Woops. So here we go, back on the controversy train! Talk about religion and God. Some questions to answer if you're stuck:
- Do you believe in a God?
- Should people believe in a God?
- Do you think there is evidence of God?
- Is religion good?
- Does religion have anything of value to offer to society?
- Has religion ever had anything of value to offer to society?
I'm just gonna dump my post/rant about why I'm an atheist from the old thread here. Slightly edited, and a bit rough around the edges, but it's just my thoughts.
At a young age I was a Christian. My school believed it and told me it, and my parents taught me it just because I wasn't old enough and they wanted me to be happy believing in Heaven or whatever. I became an athiest for quite a while. Later, I started calling myself agnostic instead, and now I'm kind of edging more towards the term atheism, because I am becoming increasingly less inclined to subscribe to the whole "be open to all possibilities thing".
My current stance: If there is no empirical evidence to suggest something exists, it does not exist. You can try to find empirical evidence to prove it exists, but until you do, for all intents and purposes, it does not exist.
I treat people telling me that a God exists the same as I would treat them telling me that there is a unicorn living in the core of the Sun, our major political figures are all alien reptiles and the Earth is flat.
The only difference, and I mean the only difference, is that one has been consistently accepted for such a long time that people just believe it because everybody else told them to.
If you are religious, consider this. Why do you follow your religion, and not another? If you are not a Christian, what makes your religion more real than Christianity? If you are a Christian, what makes your religion more real than Islam, Hinduism, Judaism and so on? The point I am making is that most of these religions will have just as much evidence as you do. They have a holy book, they have teachings, they have morals. They have people who have claimed to have inner experiences, and they have large cultures dedicated to their individual faiths.
So why is yours better? As Richard Dawkins (a man I respect quite a lot) said "We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
So really, we atheists are just the same as the theists (religious people) out there. The only difference is that we deny one more God (or quite a few more, if you follow a polytheistic religion). So why do you believe in your God(s), then? I think I can identify a few reasons:
Your background - family, friends, your general society. If you grow up in the US you might be a Christian, if you grow up in India, you might follow Hinduism. But you cannot argue that you would still follow the same religion you do now no matter what circumstances you were born in - you could be an atheist, or follow a completely different religion, had you been born elsewhere, in a different family. This kind of hurts the validity of your religion. If this is your reason for following your religion, then you accept that you do not follow your religion because it is true, you follow your religion out of coincidence. But I'm sure you have more reasons, I'll try to go through as many as I can.
It has been followed for a long time. Sure, but so have all of the others. Your religion may have been accepted for so long that it must be true, but so have so many others. This argument doesn't work, but many people simply accept that their religion has been going on for too long to be false.
You have had some kind of experience of God. So here's another one. There's not really a fully factual way for me to disprove any claims of a spiritual experience. But then, the burden of proof dictates that I'm right and you're wrong anyway, since you can't prove you have. Look, I'm not calling you a liar. You may well genuinely think God has spoken to you in some way. But I highly doubt it. The human brain is not perfect, it can be fooled. You can see things that aren't real. Sometimes you think you hear your name, and you're only in a house with one other person. They have no idea what you're talking about, they didn't call you. Weird. Yeah, weird. You just can't trust your senses all the time. If you do, you're placing far too much value on your own abilities to perceive things, because you are simply not as accurate as you think you are. This isn't just me grasping at straws making up the idea that you hallucinate whenever you claim to have a spiritual experience. The fact of the matter is that this kind of thing does happen - people's minds are wrong sometimes, they muck things up and make you imagine things.
Miracles. The universe has existed for 14 billion years, our galaxy about 13.6, the solar system and Earth about 4.5. Us evolved humans have been plodding about for about 200 000 years. In that time, it would be incredibly unlikely for incredibly unlikely things not to happen. In fact, absolutely no 'miracles' happening in that time would be a miracle in itself. Wacky stuff happens sometimes, that doesn't mean somebody made it happen.
You don't believe the universe/the stuff in it/life could be created by chance. See above. They reckon time was created during the big bang, you know. Which is weird. We don't know how exactly the big bang happened - we have some ideas, but we haven't proven any of them yet. We just know that everything, to our knowledge, was created when it happened. And there was nothing before that, probably. At least, if there was something before that, it ended, and that led to the creation of something new. So whether we assume that there is only, has only ever been and will only ever be one universe, or we assume that a universe is created as the last one dies, we know that there is a hell of a lot of time for crazy things to happen. When you're literally dealing with an infinite amount of time, or the non-existence of time, saying that anything is impossible is preposterous.
You just want to believe it. Whether you're scared of nothingness or just like the thought of a creator who's looking after you and is saving you a spot in Heaven, this is one of my least favourite arguments, if not my least favourite of all, in favour of religion. It just doesn't make sense to me. I mean, I can understand it, but I'm the kind of person who doesn't want to believe something just because it sounds nice. I want to believe the truth and what is most likely to be the truth. I don't want to live in a bubble of happy thoughts that probably aren't real. And you should think that way too. At least, I think so. This argument seems around the same vein as believing unicorns exist. Because unicorns are cool, right?
Morals. Well, did you know that morals can be explained in evolution? Think of it this way. Humans need to survive. That is the goal. That is what evolution does - it lets us adapt to survive. Evolution is not conscious, that's just how it works, scientifically. I'm not explaining it here. Anyway, what's a good way to survive and keep the species going strong? Well, killing each other ruthlessly, stealing their stuff and destroying their property is not a good start. No, that's sooner to get you killed back, or just drive the whole species into extinction. With this theory, we can suppose that at some point, there lived humans with no morals. Fortunately, they all died, because giving zero tosses about what anybody else thinks or feels is not a good way to be accepted. Humans are cooperative beings. They need to help each other. The ones that didn't died off, and only the ones who were nice and helpful to others could pass on their genes. Of course, we occasionally get outliers who seem to have no morals even these days, but that can't be helped - that happens all across nature. Evolution dictates one thing, but there will always be odd ones out.
Please ask any questions if you disagree or are unsure about something I've written.
I did not expect this to be so long.
