I have been reluctant to call myself an atheist. Mainly because I associate the label with many negative qualities and find many atheists to be perpetually 14 edgelords who claim to be pro-science but seem to think the scientific method is composed of running into a church and yelling “Fake!”
I could go on if it were my intent to chase away my audience with a stick so I’ll mostly leave it there.
How can I see such angry arrogant bullies chanting “Sky Daddy!” and go “Yes I am one of them?”
It is illogical.
But I have no choice but to wear the label, because God is not real.
If God were real, Christians would be the kindest and most giving people in the world.
I don’t need to tell you how far from the case this is.
I don’t need to tell you about the cruelty of Christian movements. About how all their good will and charitable acts begin and end at “Believe in our God and stop complaining!”
They do not stop suffering, they deny it even exists. Claiming it to be part of God’s plan and how God doesn’t make mistakes. The latter is true because the former isn’t. God doesn’t make mistakes because there is no plan, there is no God.
This is insanity
While I have known Christians who are truly kind people, some of them I call my dearest friends… these are the exception not the rule. And even he, one of my best friends, will ignore his conscience and choose cruelty if he believes it the will of his God. Even if his Pope says it isn’t.
If God were real these Christians would not be so angry that non believers and transpeople exist. They would be fearful of his wrath and joyous of his love.
The rich would not horde wealth but spend it in service to the poor, for the riches of Heaven would be far greater and far more permanent.
If God were real he would heal the sick, we would hear of the miraculous healing of amputees. We would hear of gender dysphoric teenagers who awoke in a new body. We would hear how the angels themselves condemned Israel’s genocide of Palestine.
God would have saved my Christian friend who became brain dead in a hit and run, and actually dead two weeks later.
God would have halted the actions of every man of faith who decided to prey upon children, nay they’d be too scared of his wrath to even have thoughts of doing as such.
But God will never lift a finger to help anyone. Not because he is cruel or indifferent. But because he isn’t there.
Should I hear a voice with an otherworldly glow say “It’s me, the Lord your God. I am sorry for my absence, but I need your help to make this right.”
All would be forgiven and I would bow in reverence to Christ.
But that day will not come.
I am an atheist not because I am heartless and reject him… but because my heart calls out to him and receives nothing.
I have pondered if maybe God is around and some can hear him more clearly than others.
But then I remember how Conservatives behave, either using God for a selfish agenda or being suckered by false holy men…
And there goes that hypothesis.
God, if you’re willing to talk I am willing to listen. But sadly you aren’t because you don’t exist.
You mentioed god and Christianity a bazillion tines ,so i am asuming American ? If you were born in India you woukd you even have that debate.
why not one if the hindui gods ? Or a bazillion others believed by folks.
I think the things here religion is only ostensibly about god and certainly offers no proof of god, hell in some of them you’re killed if you call this obvious behaviour out. It’s a cult to control people
As to edge lords, imagine running around inisiting your imaginery sky daddy is really like alive. It shous be a fucking cringing embarresment and yet here we.are.
Life would be so much easier if there was a god, to blame tragedies and triumphs as part of “his plan”. To know that those who wrong me will be punished accordingly. To have comfort in all the answers.
I’m endlessly envious of that mindset, but it’s just not possible.
This bag of chips get it
You’re right, there are a lot of athiests out there like that (especially I believe in America where being atheist is less common amongst so many Christians).
These are people who are alike the bad christians you describe
But there are a lot of good people out there too, who are also atheist. Those you wouldn’t be able to distinguish between your good Christian friends.
In the end people are people, no matter what they believe in, some will be bad, some will be good and most will be somewhere in the middle.
If this is something you are struggling with, I recommend looking into your local humanitarian society. They have a lot of resources for people such as yourself while also doing social outreach and charity work.
If there isn’t one local, I can reccomend watching some of Genetically Modified Skeptics videos on YouTube. He is a former christian who perhaps has walked a similar path as you.
All the best with your journey!
If God were real, Christians would be the kindest and most giving people in the world
No. Religion has 0 to do with god. Religion exists to capture loyalty to the Church through the distraction of God. That loyalty is valuable to transfer to loyalty to the king and make it more soldiers. God can exist without a Church, and can exist without interventionism.
If God can exist without interventionism, or post life rewards, then is he irrelvant? No. Humanism (God would be pro human instead of ego maniac) can lead to heaven on earth. Where God is Humanist principle, then God exists.
I won’t say all Christians are awful because it’s simply not true.
The majority of Christians, especially American style ones, do not know or follow the teachings of Christ.
I’m agnostic, but I think what Jesus taught was actually pretty cool.
I kinda wish god was/is definitely real someone’s because I want justice for all the evil people in the world.
I’m agnostic, but I think what Jesus taught was actually pretty cool.
So… just to clarify.
Did you know Jesus taught obedience to the Law of Moses (and the commands of the prophets.)? His actual teachings- as recorded in the 4 gospels- are actually pretty horrific, when you understand that he absolutely was teaching adherence to the “old law”. (in point of fact he adresses this directly in Matthew5:17-20)
The law of moses is horrific compared today’s standards. I mean, it allows men to sell their daughters to be a sex slave… rape is basically a property crime, and if a guy rapes an un-betrothed virgin… he owes the father some money and then the woman in question is forced to marry her rapist. And then there’s the explicit endorsement of slavery, the whole thing about stoning women who didn’t bleed on their wedding night (I say it this way, because it was known long before Jesus that most women didn’t actually bleed the first time they had sex… and that commandment was given directly by god, presumably.)
Like… in my limited experience, the people who talk about the teachings of jesus… only take some things, and ignore all of the horrifically objectionable shit. Like. Slavery would have been something that jesus would have encountered on a daily basis… and his father most like;y owned several. (he probably wasn’t a furniture maker- rather he was a builder… likely building houses and other buildings like bridges, etc. It’s also likely that jesus didn’t grow up poor.)
Didn’t he literally say the “old law” didn’t matter anymore?
That was Paul. Who was totally a heretic.
The verse I linked is Jesus explicitly stating he absolutely did not come to abolish the previous law. In fact, he made the law stricter (or wanted to.)
The stuff about “you’ve heard it said… don’t murder… but anger is just as bad, etc. it doesn’t help that a fair amount of the gospels were later inserts to retcon things to be more palatable to a broader audience.
Like gentiles we’re unlikely to convert if they had to give up pork and snip the tip, etc. Jesus was pretty clear about that, too.
He said he came to fulfill it, not make it stricter, fulfill as in complete so it’s no longer needed
That is a lie. Mathew 5:17-20
Yes. Jesus used the word “fulfilled”. But then in the same breath he’s saying “The law will not pass away”. and then- again literally in the next sentence, he says “whoever teaches others to not follow the law will be the least in heaven.,” And then wraps up saying “Hey, if you’re not more strict than the scribes and the pharisees… you’re not going to heaven.”
Luke says similar in 16:14-17:
if you take the scriptures as truth, Jesus is literally saying that the Law will remain.
Personally, I don’t take the scriptures as truth, and I doubt very much that what’s attributed to him were actually said. At best a historical jesus was a jewish mystic running a faith healing racket. a fraud. a sham. Paul is the one who taught that the law was now irrelevant, and most of the things attributed to jesus saying it… well… those were written after Paul. Further, none of the gospels are eye-witness accounts, were written anonymously, and some fifty years or more after the events they purport to descibe.
there are exactly zero reasons to believe they’re accurate.
It’s possible to Chery pick nice things about Jesus. Moses was a piece of shit, and Yahweh a minor Caananite god appearing late in Caananite/Egypt/Greece (who syncretized/recognized each other’s gods) between 1400 and 850bc), even if Moses truly received commandments from him, would be a Caananite coup where Yahweh is not honoring his parents, where idolatry commandment was specifically a warmongering “destroy everything Caananite” instead of coveting any metalic value inside of them. The freedom of Israelites was the freedom to enslave all others with Moses at head of Israelite hierarchy.
The disciples all brought their own perspective, and some of the gospels are written by people who never met Jesus. Matthew was a Roman tax collector, wealthy enough to host a banquet, and appreciative of the trickle up benefits of slavery.
That Jesus needed to be politicaly polite/correct to establishment beliefs as a constraint in contradicting Moses would certaily allow disciples to hear what they wanted to hear, or quote the polite parts before the “, but …”.
If you start with “ranked mandate priorities” (means all contradictions to higher prioritized mandates are invalid), which makes far more sense than every biblical statement is equally true, no matter the author, and put “do onto others as you wish done onto you.” as top mandate, then it is possible to revise the bible into something more Humanist, and even to accept Jesus while rejecting Yahweh/Moses.
You can cherry pick anyone. I bet hitler said one or two things that weren’t totally awful. Same for Trump, Mao, Stalin, Putin… musk.
You can cherry pick, yes. But that means your understanding doesn’t comport with reality.
“Some” of the gospels? Try “all.” None of the gospels were written by the people they were named for. The rest of what you said is word salad and, it sounds like what you’re saying is that words don’t mean words.
The reality is we don’t know if these are even his words- the earliest gospel was written 50 years after his death, does not mention a virgin birth, does not mention anything before his ministry at all…. And doesn’t really mention any of the prophecies that Jesus “fulfilled”
Mathew was written next., at around the first century ce. It was written specifically to address that last bit about Mark not fulfilling prophecy. And fails miserably.
For example,
the virgin birth thing? Comes from Isaiah 7:14. Isaiah is sent by god, to tell Ahaz to chill, that god was going to deal with the kingdoms that were allying against him.
The child mentioned by Isaiah- who would be nard Emanuel- was not the Messiah. In fact the child’s sole purpose here is to indicate time. The woman is not a virgin- she’s just a “young woman”. Who was already pregnant. The kid was born and that prophecy was fulfilled in the time Isaiah said it would be.
The only reason for this mistake is that the author of Mark was likely a Hellenic Jew, heavily influenced by Greek philosophy, and was almost certainly working solely off the Septuagint. In koine Greek, the word for “virgin”- parthenos- was also used sometimes to just denote a young woman. They never read the original Hebrew, which absolutely does distinguish the two.
It doesn’t make sense to say the child was Jesus- the kid was literally born and used for timekeeping and the actual prophecy fulfilled a few chapters later.
Luke was just as bad as Mathew. None of the “prophecies” they mention were ever meant to be about Jesus, and Ike half were never actually meant to be prophecy in the first place. (Like the psalm of David they use to say him being pierced which said nothing of being pierced and was just a poem about David being surrounded and abused by enemies.)
There’s zero reason with that kind of known mistakes (or out and out lies,).
The reality is we don’t know if these are even his words
The main thing I said. Instead of reading salad, understand what was said.
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This is pretty much where I stand sort of.
I do believe that Christ if he were real could save this disgusting world and reform the plague that is humanity.
There are some Christians who legit follow Christ but they are in the minority.
The reason they are in the minority is because God is not there to reinforce the teachings. He does not appear before the wicked and warn them to change their ways, he does not appear before the downtrodden to lift their spirits.
Christians claim he does yet he is no where to be seen. “Mysterious ways” is a lot like the word “sorry”. It means less the more you have to say it
I was agnostic, I even got banned site wide from Reddit standing up for Christianity against Anti-Theistic trolls.
Even tried being Buddhist for awhile and meditated in search of God, but I couldn’t find him.
There simply must come a time where I stop saying “I must not being doing this right.” And start being honest with myself.
“I called out for God and nobody came.”
Yeah I’ve never felt it/god either. I think that’s fine.
I have Christian family members who are just solid people, so I try to defend people like them.
I don’t like anti theism because they find real community with their church and help people, and it’s genuinely a net good for them.
We’d live in a much, much more interesting world if these things were real:
God, angels, demons, ghosts, magic, fairies, UFOs, bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Atlantis/Lemuria/Mu.
Oh how I wish the fair folk could take me away from all this
Nah fuck that just be agnostic. I don’t care about god. If he exists fine, if he does not also fine. Does not amtter to me.
It’s funny, I have somewhat of an opposite problem. I am intellectually an atheist but I had a religious upbringing and it is impossible for me to emotionally unbelieve.
Atheism is very simple and obvious to me, always had been, and the horrors of organized religion are well known but still no matter how hard I want to I have an emotional conception of a higher power that I can’t get rid of 🤷♀️
I wish I could unbelieve in god but I was successfully infected by a religious mind virus as a child and I cannot undo it. I guess whatever I am now would probably be called “spiritual” but I consider myself an atheist in ordinary terms when people talk about sky god.
I wish we could trade emotions. I’d be happier believing the lie of a higher power than with the truth that we live in a cold indifferent dead emotionless materialistic universe that is trying to kill us.
The fact that I want to believe so damn badly yet God isn’t showing up is how I know he’s bogus.
Until intelligent life evolved, the universe itself had no idea it existed, intelligent life gives it momentary glimpses of itself. You are a vessel for giving the universe a brief glimpse of experience. Use your time to make the experiences the universe sees as interesting and joyous as possible. This means treating others and yourself with love. That’s basically my philosophy/spirituality. Personifying the universe as a whole.
Reverse Nihilism is still Nihilism and I do not wish to surrender to it
But your stated wish for believing in a benevolent deity is functionally like optimistic nihilism. Existence appears to lack inherent meaning from a creator deity, so you get to decide what is meaningful to you.
It’s not really “nihilism” because it specifically finds something worth valuing in life. And being a nihilist isn’t functionally incompatible with being a practicing Christian either, so they’re not really mutually exclusive.
God’s already here all around you 🫵😐
Or maybe god is a cold indifferent emotionless materialistic universe trying to kill us
I could also be lucky because I was raised with a universal impossible to understand god. So if it makes you feel any better the god I have to believe in doesn’t really answer prayers or anything lol
You could try doing psychedelics or something but those didn’t help for me…but perhaps those are a one way street to god
Haven’t done psychedelics in awhile. Theyre said to be a “cure” for atheism
Maybe I haven’t taken enough to be “cured”
That’s very possible. I could have done enough to defeat the atheism lol
But I think if you’re looking for a prayer answering god you’ll have to have a psychotic break entirely. I don’t think many people can genuinely believe in that kind of anthropomorphic god without intense upbringing or being crazy (sorry religious people)
Maybe you just need an intellectually acceptable alternative concept of some kind of spiritual god notion instead. We could also just be unchangeable products of our upbringing when it comes to such a thing and you’re out of luck
I completely understand where you’re coming from.
I do wish there was something omnipresent and beneficial. It would be comforting. But we are here because we do not agree with that concept.
And that’s been the ‘problem’ that most of us here face. We strive to be decent people while defining our own moralities based on other principles we find to be more reliable.
On the other hand, not all Christians would be good or kind or forgiving. That isn’t something that comes from a worldview.
Even if they are truly convinced that the Christian God is real and omnipresent, there has been no external force in their lives to command them to be better, so they don’t.
These changes come about when personal experience drives the change.
As such, it is up to us to push the world to be the utopia we wish it to be. This is all we have and are likely to have.
Live your life, homie.
If you want a different take on the concept, check this out.
The Egg. I’ve heard it before.
Well I can say is… if thst works for you
I feel kind of oposite to what you describe; I feel the Idea of god as described in the bible is terrifying. And i am glad There is no one out there. The god described in the bible not only reads as very human, He speaks and acts and feels in a way that is very congruent with a Medieval human. He sounds ruthless, brutal, not loving at all. When i was first introduced to the concept of god and his teachings as a child i immediately felt rejection towards it. Yahvé sounds like some kind of mad king that on top of that is all powerful; The concept of creation sounds like an elaborate ploy to create suffering, and he comes off as needy, manipulative, prideful, jealous, sexist and cruel; The god described in the bible is not a dude I’d like to talk to; even less be his eternal plaything.
In the same sense whenever people try to share their belief in Christianity, i cannot help but to feel deep down like thy are trying to share something very wrong and hurtful. I don’t feel like i want to end Christian beliefs or it’s institutions i just with they weren’t so keen on spreading these beliefs, and so keen in amassing political power.
I’m afraid of infinity, the thought of living infinitally in heaven is terrifying to me. No amount of goodness can be a counterweight to this infinity.
Isn’t that better than not existing for infinity?
Not existing I know ho it is like before I was born, it was good, I wasn’t conious. I’d like to spend eternity like that too.
Except you wouldn’t be spending eternity, you just wouldn’t. It’s not like being asleep where you’re cozy and resting, it’s not like anything.
It’s exactly like before I was born, I know exactly how it was, I was not asleep before I was born/conceived.
Okay, but the fact that you’d wish that upon yourself tells me you haven’t fully groked how not peaceful this would be.
It wouldn’t be peaceful because it wouldn’t be anything.
I don’t need peacefully, I’m contempt with what I had before I was born, that seems to me ideal, especially considering the alternatives the different religions are proposing.
Moreover, I know that what I had before I was born is possible, not only desirable.
If it makes you feel any better both atheists and religion is in the same shoe until they give you the origin of the universes energy and matter.
I wouldn’t worry about the label. Your association will be different than others, so it might be taken several different ways by many different people. Labels become shorthand but also a bag full of various and sometimes contradictory concepts, so they’re primarily useful when they’re very simple and facilitate communication and meaning rather than make it harder to understand and more confusing. This is true of every label you think might apply to you. The label isn’t what’s important. It’s important to understand what you think, feel, and believe. It’s just as easy to say, “I don’t believe a god exists,” as it is to say, “I’m an atheist.” There are a lot of people for whom labels become a sense of identity, but that often seems to involve adopting things that don’t apply to them simply based on the association. Be yourself, determine for yourself who you are and what you think. Don’t try to shoehorn yourself into someone else’s confused bag of meanings and associations.
Like I said I really don’t want to be an atheist. I have seen many atheists apologists and speakers, very few of them come off like they aren’t constantly flipflopping between screaming at the world like a child throwing a temper tantrum and getting high off their own farts.
If anything people like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher make me wish there was a God even harder.
I truly have nothing nice to say about the stereotypical Reddit Atheists. Honestly God being real would be worth it just to shut their self-righteous douche bag mouths.
Reddit Atheists are so insufferable they make me crave Christ in ways missionaries wish they could.
This is how not real God has to be for me to accept he isn’t.
What I’m saying is it seems like you’re concerned too much with outspoken atheists and you’re letting your experience with them cloud your perspective. You shouldn’t believe or want to believe anything other than because you have reason to consider it believable. There are cringy atheists and cringy theists. That’s just people. It’ll be true of any association.
Believing something just because you want it to be true, or worse, believing something out of spite just because you don’t like some people, is not an authentic approach to matters of belief.
You can block a subreddit. You can ignore people you don’t like. Don’t let them define you. They don’t represent the concept of atheism. They are just prominent voices on the topic in one particular place. There are significantly more you never hear from because regular people don’t make it their identity and they don’t look to talk about it all the time.
I don’t want to be an atheist, I want to believe in God and Magick and Souls and…
…
I’m so tired
The thing is, you can believe in a deity without having to accept a specific deity. Being an anti-theistic atheist or a Christian aren’t the only two possible scenarios. You don’t have to be an atheist in the sense that you actively don’t believe in a god. You can be agnostic and accept that you don’t know for certain and you may just not have enough information to draw a conclusion either way.
If you’re comfortable with believing something primarily based on your desire for it to be true, then you’re free to believe anything you want. You don’t have to pick a specific cosmology. Believe in ghosts and faeries and the hidden folk and kobolds and dragons or whatever. Believing in Christianity because some non-Christians are obnoxious just doesn’t make a lot of logical sense.
You’re not listening; I want to believe in something, but I cannot force myself to believe in anything.
This might not be a philosophical issue for you. You seem to be having an emotional response to your dilemma, which means the solution may not be to find belief, but to find hope or solace or even just a temporary distraction (and distractions can be productive). If the cognitive process doesn’t yield desirable results, maybe look at the issue from a different angle. If you can imagine this state of disbelief mixed with desire for belief never going away, what circumstances might make the dilemma less distressing? If it might be around for a while, you can always come back to it later when you’ve had new experiences that may change your perspective.
Something I experienced when I was younger was my certainty about what was wrong with the world and I felt righteous in raging against it as if being angry at it was a worthy excuse not to have to put effort into improving things. The older I got, the more I saw that it was “yes, and…” in that I wasn’t wrong, but there was a bigger picture I just couldn’t see at the time. I was hyper focused in pointing out what was wrong as if I was the only one who could see it, but then I realized I could be doing something about it, even if the world was never going to be a sane or just place or my efforts weren’t going to be highly impactful.
Well yes, thats what stereotypes are for. To make you hate and dispise the target.
Sadly I have seen from experience that this is one based on truth.
Every bigot claims their bigotry is based on truth.
Yeah I must have imagined the asshole who got me banned from Reddit
God, if you’re willing to talk I am willing to listen.
Thats good, but you need to learn how. God doesnt normally speak from a disembodied voice (ive heard disembodied voices, but whose voice it was, i dont know…), but rather through people. Also in many other forms… sometimes dreams, music, and impressions and feelings.
Consciousness is way more than just in our heads, we “hear” things in different ways. God speaks to everyone all the time, one has to learn how to listen. But if you dont believe in God, you will never realize when it is Him speaking to you.
