I’m an atheist because I was born that way.
My parents were not church-goers, but I was christened in the local Church of England, because that’s what my family did. My mother, in particular, was quite happy for me to be given enough information about the church to “make up my own mind”. When I was old enough, I went to Sunday School. I don’t remember particularly liking it or disliking it, but I didn’t have to go too many times before my parents let me stop.
I remember being given a illustrated book of Bible stories when I was about 8 or 9. I liked the stories, and read them a few times. But all the time, I had this feeling that said: “But it’s not true. It’s just made up. Why would people believe in this?”
When I got to be a teenager, I had a small Pascal-style crisis of faith (not that I had heard of Pascal, of course). I wondered to myself about what would happen if I was wrong. If there was a God, and I did not worship Him, I would go to hell. Hell was pretty scary. So I considered going to church and going through all the right motions. But I couldn’t. I figured that I just plain didn’t believe, and if a God existed, he would see through any pretend worship. So I decided to just go ahead living without God – because what else could I do?
I worried less and less about it, but it took me until my early twenties until I finally got rid of the last vestiges of doubt. That happened when I was speaking with an atheist guy I worked with about life after death. He brought up the topic of religious belief in the afterlife, and I jokingly said something about “just in case they’re right”. He looked at me and said, “No – they’re wrong.”
Something clicked when he said that, and I realised that of course “they” are wrong and “we” are right.
Now, I can back up my feelings with all sorts of logic and rationality, and lots of information that I have learned at Pharyngula and through the writing of Dawkins, Hitchens and so on. But I still think that I was just plain born as a non-believer.
Robert Light
Australia
Amazingly simple: “No – they’re wrong”. Followed by rationalization of the simple decision stuffed with the logic of the New Atheists for supprt. Easy as could possibly be.
But meatless. There is no actual reasoning given here, so there is no analysis to be done.
10 comments:
I think this person's story is pretty common. Truth be told, I'd say my story is rather similar with one big difference.
I made the first step to a-theism as a youngen, but the natural next step to philosophical materialism was simply untenable. I actually exerted effort to believe such nonsense because of the prevailing scientistic slant of the "smart" set.
I kept repeating the mantra of the crutch theory to "safeguard" my rationality. Interesting.
Yes, looking back is interesting. I rejected ecclesiasticism and threw out God as a by-product, without much thought. That was the negative, repelling affect; the positive attraction was the "smart set" as you put it - the desire to think of myself as an intellectual by adopting the religion of the intellectual set.
That took a set quite quickly, and I didn't think much about it during my 40 years in engineering.
But after that, the logically bizarre things that Atheists say and do made me wonder how valid Atheism is. Long story short: it is not.
Hello!
I agree. Don't thinking too much about it is as usual, a totally emotional response, in the way it should not be good in the long term, to anyone.
Just started not by denying aforehand but, by how do I know if there's no proof, and felt the church's a scam etc etc... but anything spiritual was just not actually beliveable for me.
By doing that simple flasback, I remember, in this short life of mine, how bitter it feels to be unknowledgeable in a relatively near past, what was just about 7 years ago. I'm actually 23.
Fortunately that pace was short lived, and life made me learn just about 4 years ago, about how to find that knowledge. Although at first was something emotionally enabled (within a physical circumstance), then I realized that the specific evidence was just undeniable, but still have had some doubts, after reading, researching and trying to practice.
Eventually, about two weeks ago, all my doubts were cleared. It seems everything fits just fine (not only in an emotional stance).
Kind Regards.
Yonose,
What happened to cause your doubts to clear two weeks ago?
Hello Stan!
Well, I'll try to put the necessary details.
What was making me think twice, is something I was not be able to practice before.
mind over matter, is the key. Belief is just the "self-trust" needed to acomplish it.
That's why is always true for the better of our lives to "Think Possitive".
Acording to many mystic theosophies (at least it worked with me after these years, so I agree), the mind itself is the connection with a kind of "divine energy", and that all of us have this talent, but it is still dormant.
At first, other spiritual entities "connected" to divinity are "available" to help (that's just one stage.). They "come" as if it were a dream in the vigil, to guide you.
Remember that the process is subjective in the end, but if anecdotal experiences are similar or coinciding, the interpretations are worthless and the fact, is that the very same effect is duplicated. I undestood it actually, in the middle of the two.
Once that deep knowledge of the self is just fulfilled enough to look for a purpose, and then the beginning of the unique, selfless but individual path to look for some deeper truths is commencing, the inmediate consequence is, a sensation of relief and peace.
Kind Regards.
The "why I am a atheist" campaign only makes the atheist movement look more stupid. Their reasoning is without any substance, immature and confused.
I was just perusing the Center for Naturalism wesite and I came across an article that caught my attention entitled, "Spirituality Without Faith."
The atheist author admits that spirit does not really exist. Spirituality can be "explained" in psychological and biological terms, that is, in naturalistic terms. What's interesting is that most atheists dismiss "religion" as nonsense, but affirm "spiritual experience".
(Never mind that religion and spirituality have a symbiotic relationship: Doctrine and method)
But what ever do they mean? The atheo-materialist claims that spirituality is simply a form of emotionality. Not that this minimizes its importance; it is an experience that enriches life and provides a sense of well-being. The following borders on ridiculousness:
...its (naturalist spirituality) denial of ultimate meaning and purpose, naturalism, strangely enough, may equal traditional faiths in its capacity to inspire spiritual response. When we confront the startling fact that existence isn't subsumable under any overarching interpretation, but simply is, we are left with an irreducible mystery about why we are here, or exist at all, and mystery serves at least as well as purpose to inspire experience....The realization that existence inevitably outruns our attempts to assign meaning and purpose can have the impact of a true revelation......"
Woh, woh Betsy. Okay, this has to be, at best, a cheesy "variety" of nature mysticism co-opted from religions emphasizing divine immanence . It amounts to a kind of sanitized esoterica co-opted from Buddhism blended with a strain of neo-Paganism.
These notion just don't follow. A materialist, who denies even the reality of free-will, but then talks about mystery, wonder, and profound astonishment needs to question the coherence of his views. A "spiritual materialist" is like saying a "chaste prostitute" or a
"selfless narcissist".
Spirit refers to the non-natural order which is not subject to time and space. The non-natural order contains values of which truth, goodness, and beauty are the most eminent.
So, as always, the atheo-materialist attempts to reduce and re-define in a futile attempt to make sense of his riddled with contradictions worldview. The metaphysical naturalist undermines every argument he makes because all value, even Truth itself, becomes illusory and meaningless.
Now, don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not saying that an atheist cannot be moral or cultivate profound inner experiences- I daresay that he can and does both. But he does so in despite of his worldview.
My response to the article, "Spirituality Without Faith" was said best by Sartre - "absurd".
Chris,
You might be like me. I'm a devoted paradox hunter. My walls are covered with Atheist trophies. One wall is dedicated to four horned dilemmas. Another wall is dedicated to Materialist concepts: there is a chunk of knowledge nailed right through the middle, a rather tarnished hypothesis, and a bag full of meaning (it's too slippery to hang by itself). Another wall is hung with all the Atheist experiments proving that there is no non-physical existence. There are also two closets, one full of good (it's very shiny) and the other full of evil (mostly sharp shards), plus there is a trunk full of chunks of free will and agency ( I have to keep it locked, they're always trying to escape).
All these material "things" need to go to a warehouse - they take up way too much space. Maybe I should start a Materialist museum... If I could get some minds of famous dead people to stuff and mount, I think it would be a hit.
(Part 1 of 2)
Hello Stan, Chris!
Wow... I mean just, wow... Here we go again :P
My suspicions are once more confirmed, they definitely get it backwards:
Re-quoting:
"...its (naturalist spirituality) denial of ultimate meaning and purpose, naturalism, strangely enough, may equal traditional faiths in its capacity to inspire spiritual response. When we confront the startling fact that existence isn't subsumable under any overarching interpretation, but simply is, we are left with an irreducible mystery about why we are here, or exist at all, and mystery serves at least as well as purpose to inspire experience....The realization that existence inevitably outruns our attempts to assign meaning and purpose can have the impact of a true revelation..."
Simple interpretations should not be relevant once you do any known proved method(s), get what you need to know and keep going, not the other way around, which is:
Keep going with the same assumed conclusions (which is ok), then proclaim youself like the all-knower (still ok, not for me, but still seems to be ok), then interpretate everything as you please in a very showy, extravagant way(here begins the problem), then sneer at the actual knowlegde and make fun of it as if it were something that just has born this last morning, not about 10000 years ago.
It happens that maybe they don't even want to understand the very basis of what faith means. Faith is not a totally emotional and purposeless pursuit, or even a political pursuit.
Faith is the wholeness of the process of the free-will but not alone (our free-will that enables our "self-trust", the belief), that works with the tangible method, that makes the projection (any ritual and/or meditation or prayer) with the help of our minds, that makes possible a corresponding action (mind over matter). This process almost never brings inmediate results.
There is no such thing as blind faith, because our free will alone, does not factually respond every time it wishes, from our every action. Naturally, these kind of Atheists, tend to confuse even more what's the difference between faith, the rambling and the expectations.
(End of Part 1 of 2)
(Part 2 of 2)
Specially this part:
"[...]When we confront the startling fact that existence isn't subsumable under any overarching interpretation"
And the very last part:
"The realization that existence inevitably outruns our attempts to assign meaning and purpose can have the impact of a true revelation......"
Really makes me to want to rant, but not in an angry way, just in an exuberant (again, not an emotionally negative) way.
This is true because it's not merely an impact resembling a revelation, but it is a revelation, and they have to first understand what its meaning entails(clue: it is not an irreducible doubt of why we exist, it's the diametrically opposite meaning which we may realize ourselves, step by step, at our gradual pace and reach so still many of our "attempts" are not invalid nor worthless). As this is made on purpose in support of the "faithless spirituality" then, it is one of the most weird, bizarre and contradictory statements I've ever seen.
Science does work, by giving meanings to something so we may know more about and manipulate it, because, we do Science or apply it, in a way which resembles as one of the ways that our mind works (so the positivist paradox of not being able to "observe subjectively, or even, objectively into ourselves within our own hypotheses and previous knowledge" is just long ago disproved), for example:
The electron is something we don't see with our basic senses, we nowadays know it may be a kind of energy acting as a wave or a stable particle, depending of the way you subjectively think you observe it, because that energy is taken punctually as non-dimensional, but the objective conclusion is, that the electron has, depending of the experiment, some stochastic or deterministic way to measure it's behavior, and also that this very same kind of energy, of which many features are still compliant with our perspectives which are made as some of the Laws of Physics (Moreso, we are made of molecules, molecules are made of atoms, atoms have electrons so in addition of everthing else we are made of electrons too!).
Maybe, we should not know about the electron at all :P
That's intelectual dishonesty at its best, I mean wow it's just awesome :P
P.S.: Stan, the Materialist Museum seems to be a great idea!
Kind Regards!
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