[jam277]

(Original post by SleepySheep)
Just because you're not religious doesn't mean you have to think you'll become nothing when you die.

I know, but it just doesn't seem logical. But I get what you mean, I feel like that sometimes that I can become something else. You never know tbf.

[Aleandcynicism]

(Original post by jam277)
I also said not believing in a God. Someone who denies the existence of God or doesn't believe in God(atheist) would believe there is no God. Well that's my two cents. I don't see why we have to be so pedantic on this though.

I completely agree. This paranoia about making a positive claim is something that only ever arises in discussions concerning religion. It never comes up anywhere else when discussing the existence of other things than gods.

[Pinkhead]

(Original post by jam277)
I also said not believing in a God. Someone who denies the existence of God or doesn't believe in God(atheist) would believe there is no God. Well that's my two cents. I don't see why we have to be so pedantic on this though.

Sorry I didn't mean to be pedantic for the sake of it.
It's just that theists often ask us to prove that God doesn't exist. (Of course it is impossible to prove something doesn't exist) The fact is that atheism isn't making a positive claim, so the burden of proof is not on us.

[rmpr97]

I was never properly religious but I was born into it, my mum got me baptised although she's not properly religious either.

Well lets see, I realised it was all a bag of bull**** and I denounced my religion.

Oh and 14.

[kitari]

Is it possible to have a thread about religion and not have it derail into an argument?

Also, I was never really religious and have pretty much always believed there was no God. I voluntarily attended church for a few months at 13-14, but that was mostly because I fancied a girl there. It didn't work

[jam277]

(Original post by Pinkhead)
Sorry I didn't mean to be pedantic for the sake of it.
It's just that theists often ask us to prove that God doesn't exist. (Of course it is impossible to prove something doesn't exist) The fact is that atheism isn't making a positive claim, so the burden of proof is not on us.

Oh ok, I get what you mean now. But I guess it's hard to prove anything, but we just say what's most likely, more likely evolution happened for example instead of being made of clay.

(Original post by kitari)
Is it possible to have a thread about religion and not have it derail into an argument?

Also, I was never really religious and have pretty much always believed there was no God. I voluntarily attended church for a few months at 13-14, but that was mostly because I fancied a girl there. It didn't work

We've been there before mate.

[Pinkhead]

(Original post by kitari)
Is it possible to have a thread about religion and not have it derail into an argument?

Also, I was never really religious and have pretty much always believed there was no God. I voluntarily attended church for a few months at 13-14, but that was mostly because I fancied a girl there. It didn't work

I don't think there's anything wrong with a friendly discussion. We're not insulting each other (yet).

Anyway, I don't think the girl would have liked an atheist heathen like you

[thegodofgod]

My parents are Hindus (not really religious, I mean the last time we went to a temple was over 5 years ago, but they still believe in God, hinduism etc.), and I converted from hinduism to agnosticism to atheism (and sometimes I now have antitheistic thoughts) - so there's been a massive change - from about 13 to 15.

I just realised that if there were only one and true religion (I was taught that this was hinduism), how can there be many other religions, and why does everyone not believe in hinduism...

All of that seemed flawed, so I started off looking at videos on YouTube about flaws in religion / deism, and came to the conclusion that there were too many flaws for religion / the existence of God to be credible / valid.

Ps. watching Stephen Fry knock down religious arguments is amazing!

[jam277]

(Original post by Pinkhead)
I don't think there's anything wrong with a friendly discussion. We're not insulting each other (yet).

Anyway, I don't think the girl would have liked an atheist heathen like you

Religion can be annoying with girls lol, like there's one hot girl that I know, but she's really religious, the kind that go to hillsong and stuff and do big events haha.

[G56]

(Original post by TurboCretin)
What makes you believe that?

Personally, I think that positive belief in the absence of God is as baseless as the positive belief that he exists, so I'm curious about your angle.

Because believing something 'does not exist' should be the default in situations where there is no evidence for either side.

If I said that I have a unicorn under my bed. You cant prove or 'disprove' the unicorn. But you dont believe it exists anyway.
There are an infinite number of 'un-disprovable' claims I can make. So the default is to not believe anything until you have proof for it in the first place.

[thenumber2goose]

I was a believing, god-fearing child. I remember when I was about 8 or 9, my friend said "Oh my God" which caused me to rebuke him. I was then dared by the rest of my friends to say "Oh my god" and I couldn't as i'd been told that was blasphemous.

Then, I went to a Catholic Secondary School and everything changed. We would have three RE lessons a week and as I was older now, I was more inquisitive. Every lesson I would ask the teacher probing questions but never received a satisfactory answer. My personal favourite was when I asked how the father, the son and the holy spirit were separate entities but are still one. He simply replied "They just are, in RE you just have to accept it"

I hated PE at school and my teacher didn't mind, so he just let me sit at the side. I then got talking to another PE hating pupil about RE. From then on, we would spend every PE lesson criticising things we'd been taught in RE. I think that's where I became comfortably and confidently an atheist.

As time progressed, this atheism became more militant in nature as I grew to hate and loathe religion. I suppose I would be classed as an anti-theist now.

[Chucklefiend]

I was raised a Roman Catholic and went to Catholic primary and secondary schools, but I'm not sure that I ever really believed the Bible to be literally true, I took the stories and teachings more as elaborate fables employed to instil morals and values into the next generation. At the age of 11-12 when I realised that Catholics did indeed hold every word of the Bible as gospel truth, I very quickly became skeptical about it. Then at the age of about 14 I read Carl Sagan's Cosmos and Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker and that, as they say, was that.

Why am I now an atheist? Well I could probably write a book explaining as to why, but it comes down to three or four key reasons:

Firstly, Occam's Razor; invoking a creator of ≥ complexity as the universe to explain the existence of the universe, makes no logical sense. If we posit, due to the complexity of the universe, that its existence requires an explanation and that that explanation can only take the form of a conscious intelligent designer, then the existence of the creator also requires an explanation and so begins an infinite regression. Conversely if, as some creationists do, we say that God is without cause and has always been, why can we not say precisely the same about the universe and negate the need to explain the universes existence?

Secondly, the Bible is full of inconsistencies, contradictions and demonstrably erroneous assertions as can be seen here ..The world is not flat, the Earth is not 6000 years old and the sun does not orbit the Earth. If the bible can be wrong about some aspects, why not all aspects?

Thirdly, evolution by natural selection has demonstrated that complexity can derive from merely a few simple fundamental laws, matter and time, without any intervention from an intelligent designer. Furthermore, the Miller-Urey experiment has shown that in the atmospheric conditions of the young earth, all would have been required for organic compounds - the stuff of life - to spontaneously assemble, is sparks of electrical energy i.e. lightning, which incidentally, was abundant on the early Earth. Once it has been established that entropy decreases in isolated pockets of a system i.e. order can arise from chaos without intelligent intervention, God becomes extraneous.

Lastly, there are hundreds of religions in the world and they cannot all be right; why, merely because of the happenstance of my place of birth and my cultural upbringing, should I place any more stock in 'my religion' than the other religions of the world? As religions are, by definition, based upon faith and not reason, there is no way that I can establish the validity of one religion over the other. I am a man of logic, and as such, blindly choosing what to believe based on nothing more than the coincidence of my birth and/or some vague notion of intuition or faith seems futile and vapid to me.

[amarih]

Around 16

Just realised it didn't make any sense and was most likely an old indoctrination system and a way of trying to explain things that humans couldn't make sense of back then (mental illness, natural phenomena, etc). The only reason I really "believed" was because the idea of hell scared me.

[concubine]

I rely upon friends and family, and my far more rational outlook upon things like death, for all the **** religious people have their religions for.

I always have, and always will.

[Costalo]

I was Christian as a child and believed there was a God until I reached late teens. I opened my eyes to all the suffering in the world and thought if there was a God, why hadn't he done anything about the mess the world is in?. Why does he allow small children in Africa to starve to death while America has an obesity problem. If there was a God why is there so much violence, hatred and evil in the world?. Why hasn't he just pulled the plug already. I also realised how violent and sexist the bible was to read. I wouldn't want to believe in a God that sends good people to burn in 'Hell' for eternity with the murderers and evil people in the world simply for not knowing or believing he existed!.

[Pi!]

I was about 10 or 11. I can't remember why. The belief just fell out of my head.

[rock_climber86]

(Original post by jam277)
Just wanted to know.

My experience, I used to be a strong christian until I was 17, I just wondered why I actually believed and realized that I could have been a hindu/muslim/insert religion just as easily as a christian if my parents were christian.

I then realized that the things that happen around me are the actions of myself and other people and not of a God. It was hard, but I think I had it coming, it was gradual, took around 3 months to convert fully from an agnostic to an atheist.

I also feel that it's such a barrier to so many things, that at times(before I offend anyone) that it's more trouble than it is worth.

I also find the theory of hell a bit sad, that a so called benevolent God who loves you always is letting you burn in hell, that is not love, regardless of free will, anyone who loves you would take you out of that fiery pit whether you wanted to or not, that is unconditional love.

Anyway TSR, what is your reason for converting?

I guess I was forced to be hindu until I was 15, and then I just decided you know what, all this science stuff I learnt at school was pretty cool and evolution is a more believable theory than something just "being there" and having all these zillion gods with magic powers etc.

So when I really got into GCSE science in year 10 - that's when I became an atheist

[RtGOAT]

I stopped believing in god when I stopped believing in Santa and the Tooth Fairy. So when I was about 5. I don't see how you can believe in any of those much beyond that tbh.

[dinrah04]

I was like 6, I always read Science books and I felt it didn't make much sense to me because of how things didn't really add up.

[SnoochToTheBooch]

I was raised in a catholic house, well, one parent was catholic anyway so she thought it was her christian duty to indoctrinate her kids with it. I went to a catholic school and got dragged to church often (which I never enjoyed). I just sort of passively accepted the stories when I was young, but in my teens I got a bit more of a scientific education under my belt, got a bit more rational and critical of stuff I was being told, and gradually just came to understand how much bull**** there was in the faith. I would always feel a bit embarrassed to be associated with it. Things are said in the bible that are clearly just silly and incorrect, it would not be so full of holes and flaws if it was genuine. Trying to explain these things with the convenient excuse that they are "symbolic" seems like a very flimsy, desperate way for a person to cling on to their beliefs. Either it's all trustworthy or none of it is, and there are a hell of a lot of "questionable" claims in there. They're wrong and they were stories made up at a time when people were stupid and did not know any better. Let's not forget how many times it's been pass down by word of mouth, translated and distorted and mutated over the ages, and people still base their whole lives on their interpretation of these words in modern english. It's ****ing made up, all of it, it's got mankind's messy fingerprints all over it.

The rules are silly and oppressive. The often absurd stories are designed to make people feel guilty about questioning / doubting the faith and fearful of "misbehaviour". It can be very damaging actually. This is what gives them their power, it's literally just one big cult that survives mostly by brainwashing children and scaring the naive. It drills people with the idea that blind faith is somehow a good, virtuous thing (lol), that if you doubt it then that's giving in to satan, that you're disappointing a god who loves you more than anything, that you might well end up burning for all eternity in a state of endless suffering. Wow.

I bet it would die out in a few generations if nobody had any exposure to it until they turned 21. On top of all this, I don't even really think that we have a free will, just that it seems like we do, which christianity depends entirely on, but that's a whole other discussion.

The organization itself is one of the weirdest things around. In one of life's delicious little ironies, the catholic church, which advocates giving selflessly to the poor and needy, is one of the richest organizations on earth, the vatican is extremely wealthy. Nobody ever seems to question this. The whole child abuse thing blows my mind too, just the scale and duration and hypocrisy of it.

I do recognise that it has done some positive things for humanity though. It does make people feel good even if it is fake, it comforts old/lonely/dying/whatever people, and the central message of love your neighbour as yourself, treat others how you would like to be treated, is perfect. That's really the one good thing I got out of it and still retain.

I don't really know what I am, maybe I'm an atheist, I'm definitely not religious. That's the thing though, christianity has been exposed (just like every other religion I assume) and can easily be dismissed, but nobody has the slightest clue of how this amazing universe came to exist. We've done a phenomenal job of accounting for everything that happened from that point onwards, but really we have 2 options. Either:

- the universe, this crazily diverse, unimaginably large and complicated matter / space-time reality that somehow results in conscious beings able to experience & understand it, just spontaneously popped into existence out of nothing.
- some sort of divine supernatural entity is somehow responsible for it all.

both options are unsatisfying but as far as I am aware this is the best that we have been able to come up with. The answer is that no one knows what the **** they are talking about, and people should all stop pretending like they do. People get so caught up and committed to beliefs that have absolutely no foundation, basing their whole lives around figments of someone else's imagination. Such strong opinions on something they can't possibly know about, it's insane.
People also often make the mistake of not separating the idea of a "god" from a religion, you can rule out one but not the other. Is there any evidence for it? No. Would it surprise me to find out that it was true, I don't know, perhaps not. This conscious reality is surprising enough to me already, so maybe a "god" isn't any more crazy, even though there is no reason to suspect that "it" is anything like what any religion claims "it" is.

I don't know how all this came to exist, that's the bottom line. It might well be beyond the human mind's ability to comprehend in the same way that you cannot explain, say, differential calculus to a dog. What I do know is that we need to do away with baseless faith, because it's holding us back now. Moving away from that sort of mentality and towards a more rational, honest one is the reason that we're communicating via computers over the internet rather that remaining toothless, filthy peasants, fearing spirits, burning witches and dying in a pool of our own **** aged 40.