Question for Atheists/Naturalist

[For_The_Kingdom]

It has happened often, within the past 100 years, that if you ask an atheist if he believes in God, he will often say something like "No, I don't believe in God, but I also don't believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy". So, the belief in God is compared to the belief in fairy tales and such. My question is, do atheists really believe that belief in God is the same as believing in Santa Claus, or is such a statement just an over-the-top, facetious quip?

When you ride past a Church on Sunday, and you see dozens of cars in the parking lot as members are gathered inside for Sunday services as they worship their God...is that equivalent to riding past a dentist and seeing cars parked in the parking lot as the members inside share stories about a geniune belief that they have of the Tooth Fairy?

Now, if I saw cars outside the dentist and the people gathered inside for such...I would probably think they are crazy, or at least, childish in their thinking. Why? Because I don't think a rational adult with common sense can believe in such a thing.

BUT, is that the same way that someone with an atheist perspective will look at us (Church members) who are gathered inside a Church to talk about/worship a geninue belief in God?

Like, if you are an atheist who doesn't believe in God whatsoever...what do you think about those that do? Do you look at them as lost, crazy, duped, all of the above?

Some of you on here are probably former believers? Do you sometimes think, "Man, thank goodness I don't have that "God" umbrella over me anymore. I can't believe that I actually BELIEVED that nonsense".

I don't want to fuss or fight...I just want to see your thoughts.

[Divine Insight]

I don't want to fuss or fight...I just want to see your thoughts.

I will be glad to share my thoughts, experience, and critique of the Bible and the resulting religions.

Some of you on here are probably former believers? Do you sometimes think, "Man, thank goodness I don't have that "God" umbrella over me anymore. I can't believe that I actually BELIEVED that nonsense".

As a believer I didn't feel any "negative cloud" over me at all. Neither was I bothered by or harassed by my church or members of the congregation. The Church I was raised in was a very nice church, the people were all very loving, quite forgiving, and actually quite liberal as well. While they basically had no choice to believe things like homosexuality is a "sin", then didn't pass judgement on people for the "sins" that they might be committing. So the believers I grew up with were quite a friendly and accepting group.

By the way, I'm not gay myself, but I just wanted to use that as an example of how non-judgmental the people in our church were. If a gay person or couple came to our church they would be welcome. They would not be "judged" to be sinners. The reason is that the member of our church believed that everyone has to answer to God on their own, and it's not our place to judge anyone in God's name.

So for me, the church itself was not a problem. At least not "my church". However, I did have great disagreements with "Christians" from other churches and denominations. In fact, my greatest "adversaries" over Christian doctrine were other Christians, not atheists or members of non-Abrahamic religions.

In fact, it was this great division within Christianity on the larger scale that caused me to want to teach the TRUTH. Christ gave us the "Great Commission" to teach this truth anyway, so that seemed like the thing to do. I had already accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior. As far as I was concerned both Christ and the Father God were well-pleased with me. I had no reason to view either one as being hostile toward me in any way.

What had I Believed up to this Point?

I was in my late teens at this point and basically believed what my parents, pastor, and Sunday School teacher had taught me. Which basically amounts to the following:

1. God loves you.
2. Jesus loves you.
3. If you ask Jesus to come into your life he will do it.
4. The Bible is the TRUTH.
5. The Bible contains answers to all your questions, just ask and you shall receive.

I "believed" all of the above on FAITH in my parents, pastors, and Sunday School teachers. I could hardly believe in the Bible itself since I hadn't yet read it myself. But now the time had come to read the Bible for myself. I had already turned 18 and would soon be 21. Adulthood was upon me.

Ironically, I didn't even feel that I needed to read the Bible for myself. I had no seriously unanswered questions at the time. I was naive enough to just accept that God loves me, Jesus loves me, and I have already been "Saved through Christ". I'm basically done. My soul has been saved. My destiny will be heaven. Clearly the only thing left for me to do would be "The Great Commission" to teach others of the Gospel TRUTH.

By the way, one of the things that was most obvious to me was the confusion within Christendom itself, not so much the need to teach non-believers. So I felt that the first thing I would need to do is to learn the TRUTH of the Bible and potentially set the Christians straight first, then worry about speaking the truth to non-believers.

This Began My Journey into Understanding the Bible

Keep in mind that I didn't even feel that I needed to do this for my own personal salvation. My salvation had already been taken care of. Also, the church that I was raised in did not believe that it was every Christian's duty to take on the "Great Commission". They felt that this should only be done by those who felt "called" to do it. And in some sense you could say that I felt that I was being called. After all, I could clearly see there was a problem, and I did feel that Jesus was encouraging me to take on the task.

One of the very first things I was interested in understanding was precisely why it was necessarily for God to have to sacrifice his only Son to make salvation possible for humans. Surely this would be explained in the Bible? Not that I needed to know this myself, but it would certainly be an obvious question that a preacher should easily be able to answer clearly.

What I soon discovered is that there is no rational or sane explanation for this basic question, nor does the idea even make any sense at all in the overall big picture of the religion.

The more I read, the more QUESTIONS came up, instead of ANSWERS. And many of the questions were impossible to answer. So much so that even Christian Pastors would avoid them altogether saying things like, "We must have faith that God has an answer". In other words, they too could see that there is no obvious rational answer to many of these questions.

After literally YEARS of study and bending over backwards to absurd degrees in an effort to make apologies for a clearly self-contradictory paradigm I finally owned up to the fact that the Bible is simply absurd and cannot be excused in any rational way.

So I became a "non-believer" in the Biblical God. This did not cause me to become an hardcore atheist proclaiming that there is no God at all. To the contrary, I simply acknowledge that the Bible cannot be a correct description of any actual God.

To this very day I have not been able to find any reason to make the same claims about Buddhism. As far as I'm concerned the idea of a God as described by Buddhism is quite possible. But even that paradigm could be false. We just have no way of knowing.

Like, if you are an atheist who doesn't believe in God whatsoever...what do you think about those that do? Do you look at them as lost, crazy, duped, all of the above?

I have no problem at all with people who believe that some type of higher entity might exist. In fact, I totally respect that view and hold it myself. After all, pure secular materialism doesn't really explain anything either. To actually "believe" that reality is nothing more than a purely secular accident would itself be a belief based on nothing other than a pure guess. And, as I say, it explain nothing anyway, so it's not even an "answer" to any questions really.

The best answer is "We just don't have enough information to answer the question of the true nature of reality". (i.e. Agnosticism)

And that is my answer in general. Although I still hold that the Bible clearly cannot be true because of it's extremely self-contradictory nature as well as it's immoral directives and commandments it attributes to a supposedly all-moral God.

So I don't frown on a belief in a "God" in general as an abstract concept. But I do frown on those who support that the Hebrew Bible describes God or that they "Know" the Bible is "God's Word", etc.

And similar to my experience. I don't blame young people for believing in a God because their Parents or other adults taught them to believe in a God. However, I have no respect for older theists who claim to have been studying the Bible for years. IMHO, if they have honestly done that I can't see how they can possibly defend it or stand behind it as the directives, commandments, or behavior of a supposedly all-wise all-righteous entity.

So I have no sympathy or respect for "well-seasoned" theists of the Abrahamic religions. IMHO, they should know better by now.

Spiritual people who want to support something like Buddhism as being something that seems quite plausible is far more respectable, IMHO. However, even those people need to realize that there is no actual evidence that those idea are true either. So I have no respect for any theists of any kind who claim that they hold any "Absolute Truth". That's absolute nonsense. At best they have a theology that doesn't self-contradict itself or known science, and could potentially be true, but it also could be nothing more than wishful thinking.

Theists need to acknowledge that whatever they believe in is believed entirely on pure faith and or any emotional experiences or delusions they might have had.

I have no respect for any theists or "preachers" who think they have their hands on some sort of absolute truth. They should know better.

If they believe it for themselves that's fine. But if they start "preaching" it to others (especially to others who aren't interested in bring preached to) they instantly lose my respect. And this is especially true if they start making totally bogus and false accusations against scientific knowledge. Especially when they preach things against science after having been told repeatedly that what they are claiming has been demonstrated to be false many times over.

[Cephus]

Honesty, I look upon them with pity. It's like a heroin user who just keeps jabbing that needle into his arm because not only does he not know any better, he doesn't want to. He doesn't care if it harms him or those around him, so long as he keeps getting that high.

[gordsd]

[Replying to For_The_Kingdom]

I have read a bit of atheist/agnostic literature and read statements like, “I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.� I think such statements are a low blow. I was a member of a private x-pastor atheist forum for a while, but there was so much Christian bashing it made me sick. Being a Christian for some time myself and being the grandson of devout Christian Grandparents, I cannot be too judgmental. However, the question remains, “How can people believe in such fantastic tales when there is no empirical evidence to justify such beliefs?� The answer is complex in a sense. First of all, people usually believe what they are told by people they respect. Not only do parents pass down their faith, but cultures do too. Since the beginning of civilization governments have promoted religion and gods to keep the people in line and subject to law. Also, death is a difficult thing for people to face. If a close loved one dies, people want to believe life goes on after death—for others and themselves. To make peace with God before death makes sense if you are afraid of death. Christianity offers that.

I think for some like me, prayer can be almost like self hypnosis. Call me crazy if you want, but It seems like someone is listening to my prayers and it feels like someone is with me through the day. However, because there is so much pain and tragedy in the world which happens very commonly to people better than me, I just believe the feeling of something or one listening or watching over me is just a feeling. It does not make sense that God would bless some and not bless others—when life shows that life is no better for the faithful good than the unfaithful bad. So my answer is I try to be compassionate. I can see why people believe and trust in prayer. Although, I believe that there may be something out there, I do not believe that the Bible is the word of God. Neither do I believe we should believe that God will do something in response to prayer; it is a false hope. Prayer is to make us better and that is it. But I am glad that I am liberated from the whole religious scene and the lies. We can be compassionate and loving without any outside help once we see the beauty of it, and I've seen a lot of non-believers who are compassionate and loving.

[wiploc]

It has happened often, within the past 100 years, that if you ask an atheist if he believes in God, he will often say something like "No, I don't believe in God, but I also don't believe in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, or the Tooth Fairy". So, the belief in God is compared to the belief in fairy tales and such. My question is, do atheists really believe that belief in God is the same as believing in Santa Claus, or is such a statement just an over-the-top, facetious quip?

It does sound facetious, doesn't it? And yet the point is earnest. If you don't know any better reason to believe in Jehovah than to believe in the Easter bunny, then, you know, we aren't going to believe.

When you ride past a Church on Sunday, and you see dozens of cars in the parking lot as members are gathered inside for Sunday services as they worship their God...is that equivalent to riding past a dentist and seeing cars parked in the parking lot as the members inside share stories about a geniune belief that they have of the Tooth Fairy?

Now, if I saw cars outside the dentist and the people gathered inside for such...I would probably think they are crazy, or at least, childish in their thinking. Why? Because I don't think a rational adult with common sense can believe in such a thing.

That's it exactly!

BUT, is that the same way that someone with an atheist perspective will look at us (Church members) who are gathered inside a Church to talk about/worship a geninue belief in God?

Yes, because you have an outrageously implausible story, and provide no reason to believe it.

If I told you that there is a large herd of giant (one mile high at the shoulder) buffalo roaming free in Kansas, you would assume I was either lying or deluded. So you have to expect the same reaction to your stories of a god who can't be seen but can be seen, who can do anything at all but who can't defeat iron chariots, who is an all-loving and perfectly moral genocidal sadist.

It makes sense for you to reject absurdities. It makes sense for us too.

Which makes more sense, a rabbit that hides eggs or an invisible eccentric who magically makes sexual pleasure objectively immoral? I don't see any way that, credibility-wise, you can claim a leg up on the rabbit.

Like, if you are an atheist who doesn't believe in God whatsoever...what do you think about those that do? Do you look at them as lost, crazy, duped, all of the above?

I'm not that concerned about categorizing them, but your list will do for starters.

[benchwarmer]

[Replying to post 1 by For_The_Kingdom]

As a former believer in Christianity I will sum it up as feeling duped. I don't say this thinking I was lied to on purpose. People who believe and share their beliefs genuinely believe for the most part. They think they are sharing good news and thus I don't harbor resentment for them. I just think they were also duped and don't know any better.

Much like DI explained, once I started reading the entire Bible things started to fall apart. Church scandals finally pushed me over the edge. At the end I was simply going through the motions anyways.

I still have hope there is a 'higher purpose' or some sort of god perhaps, but at this point I can confidently rule out Christianity as portrayed in the Bible. In my opinion, if Jesus really is the son of God, they really messed up putting the Bible together and have done a great disservice to the truth.

I have no respect for those who claim to 'know the truth' about any god and can't back up their assertions with verifiable evidence. I do, however, respect those who share their opinions and present them as such.

[jgh7]

I can sort of relate. When I was a former believer I would get really offended when I heard atheists comparing belief in Christianity to belief in Santa, Tooth Fairy, etc.

But what I think it boils down to is that they view them all as similar mainly because they come from stories of supernatural claims rather than hard evidence. I think that's the main point they're trying to make. Not necessarily to belittle, but just to show that they all share this similarity. So for them, believing in Christianity doesn't feel so different from believing in fairy tales.

[For_The_Kingdom]

I will be glad to share my thoughts, experience, and critique of the Bible and the resulting religions.

Word.

As a believer I didn't feel any "negative cloud" over me at all. Neither was I bothered by or harassed by my church or members of the congregation. The Church I was raised in was a very nice church, the people were all very loving, quite forgiving, and actually quite liberal as well. While they basically had no choice to believe things like homosexuality is a "sin", then didn't pass judgement on people for the "sins" that they might be committing. So the believers I grew up with were quite a friendly and accepting group.

Cool.

By the way, I'm not gay myself, but I just wanted to use that as an example of how non-judgmental the people in our church were. If a gay person or couple came to our church they would be welcome. They would not be "judged" to be sinners. The reason is that the member of our church believed that everyone has to answer to God on their own, and it's not our place to judge anyone in God's name.

And I feel the same way. Occasionally, I "slip" every now and again, but I judge people a lot less than I used to. I realized that I have my own problems/issues that I need to work on...and on judgement day, when I stand before the Almighty, I am going to have to answer for the things that I personally did/didn't do. What someone else did in their own lives will have nothing to do with me at that point. So, how others lived their lives will have nothing to do with me at that point, then it shouldn't have anything to do with me at THIS point.

As far as the homosexuality/judging thing is concerned, that is where we have a big hypocrisy among "believers". People that condemn homosexuality are the same ones that are out there heterosexually FORNICATING.

It is like "Hey Jesus, I am a man that never slept with a man, but I had slept with a lot of different women out of wedlock".

No, I don't think that will fly.

So for me, the church itself was not a problem. At least not "my church". However, I did have great disagreements with "Christians" from other churches and denominations. In fact, my greatest "adversaries" over Christian doctrine were other Christians, not atheists or members of non-Abrahamic religions.

LOL. Kind of reminds me of the television series The Walking Dead. I was a late bloomer to the show, and the guy that was telling me about it stated "You will find out that the threat to the survivors was not the actual walkers (zombies), but rather, other humans."

In fact, it was this great division within Christianity on the larger scale that caused me to want to teach the TRUTH. Christ gave us the "Great Commission" to teach this truth anyway, so that seemed like the thing to do. I had already accepted Christ as my Lord and Savior. As far as I was concerned both Christ and the Father God were well-pleased with me. I had no reason to view either one as being hostile toward me in any way.

Word.

What had I Believed up to this Point?

I was in my late teens at this point and basically believed what my parents, pastor, and Sunday School teacher had taught me. Which basically amounts to the following:

1. God loves you.
2. Jesus loves you.
3. If you ask Jesus to come into your life he will do it.
4. The Bible is the TRUTH.
5. The Bible contains answers to all your questions, just ask and you shall receive.

I "believed" all of the above on FAITH in my parents, pastors, and Sunday School teachers. I could hardly believe in the Bible itself since I hadn't yet read it myself. But now the time had come to read the Bible for myself. I had already turned 18 and would soon be 21. Adulthood was upon me.

Right, right..

Ironically, I didn't even feel that I needed to read the Bible for myself. I had no seriously unanswered questions at the time. I was naive enough to just accept that God loves me, Jesus loves me, and I have already been "Saved through Christ". I'm basically done. My soul has been saved. My destiny will be heaven. Clearly the only thing left for me to do would be "The Great Commission" to teach others of the Gospel TRUTH.

By the way, one of the things that was most obvious to me was the confusion within Christendom itself, not so much the need to teach non-believers. So I felt that the first thing I would need to do is to learn the TRUTH of the Bible and potentially set the Christians straight first, then worry about speaking the truth to non-believers.

Right, right.

This Began My Journey into Understanding the Bible

Keep in mind that I didn't even feel that I needed to do this for my own personal salvation. My salvation had already been taken care of. Also, the church that I was raised in did not believe that it was every Christian's duty to take on the "Great Commission". They felt that this should only be done by those who felt "called" to do it. And in some sense you could say that I felt that I was being called. After all, I could clearly see there was a problem, and I did feel that Jesus was encouraging me to take on the task.

One of the very first things I was interested in understanding was precisely why it was necessarily for God to have to sacrifice his only Son to make salvation possible for humans. Surely this would be explained in the Bible? Not that I needed to know this myself, but it would certainly be an obvious question that a preacher should easily be able to answer clearly.

Right, right...

What I soon discovered is that there is no rational or sane explanation for this basic question, nor does the idea even make any sense at all in the overall big picture of the religion.

Bro, the question of why did God sacrifice his only begotten Son is a deep one. We may need an entire thread to discuss this.

The more I read, the more QUESTIONS came up, instead of ANSWERS.

Wow, that is the same thing I say about science. The more I look into things, I have more questions than the answers that are given.

And many of the questions were impossible to answer. So much so that even Christian Pastors would avoid them altogether saying things like, "We must have faith that God has an answer".

That is true though, in a sense. We don't have all of the answers...there are things that we don't know. We simply accept by faith that God has the answer just like naturalists accept by faith that science will soon "figure things out". It is the same concept....and that is what I've been trying to explain to my good friend and adversary Bust Nak.

In other words, they too could see that there is no obvious rational answer to many of these questions.

There may not be an "obvious" rational answer. Some questions require some critical thinking, thinking that goes beyond the Bible (philosophical thinking). I reckon the average Pastor may not be up to speed on philosophical inquiry. Most of them are probably one-dimensional. That is why, you may want to talk to a Christian philosopher if you want to dive deep in those kind of discussions.

I don't know how many of them are out there, though.

After literally YEARS of study and bending over backwards to absurd degrees in an effort to make apologies for a clearly self-contradictory paradigm I finally owned up to the fact that the Bible is simply absurd and cannot be excused in any rational way.

That you can think of. What were the questions? I know that of all of the mind boggling tough questions that I ever had, there is only one question that doesn't seem to be rationally answered...and that is the harmanization/compatibility of divine omniscience and free will.

What do you have?

So I became a "non-believer" in the Biblical God. This did not cause me to become an hardcore atheist proclaiming that there is no God at all. To the contrary, I simply acknowledge that the Bible cannot be a correct description of any actual God.

How so?

To this very day I have not been able to find any reason to make the same claims about Buddhism. As far as I'm concerned the idea of a God as described by Buddhism is quite possible. But even that paradigm could be false. We just have no way of knowing.

You know I must beg to differ with that.

I have no problem at all with people who believe that some type of higher entity might exist. In fact, I totally respect that view and hold it myself. After all, pure secular materialism doesn't really explain anything either. To actually "believe" that reality is nothing more than a purely secular accident would itself be a belief based on nothing other than a pure guess. And, as I say, it explain nothing anyway, so it's not even an "answer" to any questions really.

Fair enough.

The best answer is "We just don't have enough information to answer the question of the true nature of reality". (i.e. Agnosticism)

You know I must beg to differ with this, too.

And that is my answer in general. Although I still hold that the Bible clearly cannot be true because of it's extremely self-contradictory nature as well as it's immoral directives and commandments it attributes to a supposedly all-moral God.

Specifics?

So I don't frown on a belief in a "God" in general as an abstract concept. But I do frown on those who support that the Hebrew Bible describes God or that they "Know" the Bible is "God's Word", etc.

If the Resurrection is true...

And similar to my experience. I don't blame young people for believing in a God because their Parents or other adults taught them to believe in a God. However, I have no respect for older theists who claim to have been studying the Bible for years. IMHO, if they have honestly done that I can't see how they can possibly defend it or stand behind it as the directives, commandments, or behavior of a supposedly all-wise all-righteous entity.

Gotta give me specifics, please. Thanks for your post, and I do wish we could discuss this matter further.

[For_The_Kingdom]

I can sort of relate. When I was a former believer I would get really offended when I heard atheists comparing belief in Christianity to belief in Santa, Tooth Fairy, etc.

But what I think it boils down to is that they view them all as similar mainly because they come from stories of supernatural claims rather than hard evidence.

What if they believe based on the evidence that have been presented to them?

I think that's the main point they're trying to make. Not necessarily to belittle, but just to show that they all share this similarity. So for them, believing in Christianity doesn't feel so different from believing in fairy tales.

So, of all of the people that believe in a form of theism...you (unbelievers) are saying that this would be similar if all of those people believed in an actual Santa Claus...the actual reality of a Santa Claus? It is the same, correct?

[For_The_Kingdom]

As a former believer in Christianity I will sum it up as feeling duped. I don't say this thinking I was lied to on purpose. People who believe and share their beliefs genuinely believe for the most part. They think they are sharing good news and thus I don't harbor resentment for them. I just think they were also duped and don't know any better.

Word.

Much like DI explained, once I started reading the entire Bible things started to fall apart.

Like what?

Church scandals finally pushed me over the edge.

What does Church scandals have to do with the religion of Christianity and what it is about?

I still have hope there is a 'higher purpose' or some sort of god perhaps, but at this point I can confidently rule out Christianity as portrayed in the Bible.

Why not?

In my opinion, if Jesus really is the son of God, they really messed up putting the Bible together and have done a great disservice to the truth.

How so?

I have no respect for those who claim to 'know the truth' about any god and can't back up their assertions with verifiable evidence.

Come to think of it, I don't either.

I do, however, respect those who share their opinions and present them as such.

Righteous.