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I don't get it, why can't I believe in heaven and hell or any of the claims made by Christianity? (I am Roman Catholic btw, but sometimes find myself questioning religion and church itself as well..) But don't tell me there are no facts supporting my reasoning and that because of facts, I shouldn't believe. As far as I'm concerned, you have no facts other than the fact you cannot prove supernatural beings.
Not all of us Roman Catholics believe entirely in creationism, but evolution, though you still gotta wonder how the hell the big bang even came from.. Not all of us believe a lot of things in the Bible, but many of us do believe in Jesus Christ (who was a real man).
-sigh, I will probably be flamed for my own beliefs. Try posting such an opinion on digg and you have a bunch of atheists dig you down just because they don't agree with you. You don't believe in God, I do... what's the problem? I can't compare that story of "Karen and Joe" to my faith; to me, it is something much deeper.
"You care for your friends, and you don’t want to push your views on them,"
Well then do not push your views on them. You do not want to push your views on them *because* you care for them.
"but at the same time you don’t want them to believe in unfounded concepts such as life after death, castles in the sky, virgin birth, chupacabras, or teapots orbiting Mars."
Well in that sense it is none of my business what they believe. If my friends believe in life after death, that the Queen is God's representative on earth, that my eating Pork is an abomination or that teapots orbit Mars, what difference does it make to me?
What are friends for? Why do people make friends at all? If it is just to reclone them in my own image then why even bother? A true friend accepts me as I am. True friends should have not ulterior motives, not matter how much you care about those issues.
I do not do Windows for ethical reasons, and if I friend asks for help with Windows then I say that I am sorry but I just do not do that. Likewise if a friend offers something for me to smoke or asks me to buy them cigarettes then I just say no thanks. I do not however reject them because they are different from me. Small children cannot tell the difference between themselves and their mothers, grown ups however do not need to throw a fit when someone else is separate and has different beliefs and objectives.
"It’s a dilemma."
No its not, just live and let live.
"How do you point out to a friend or aquaintance that this stuff is silly without being an asshole?"
I don't. The quoted example is a spurious comparison. The guy also sounds like he is "an asshole" already:
>Karen was not fully able to be my friend, because I couldn’t fully trust her judgment.
With friends like that, who needs enemies? The original poster does not seem to release that the past relationship is hard-wired into Karen's brain now, it is part of who she is, that will not change until she meets with someone new. Does that mean I would not trust Karen in other areas? Of course not, if I trusted her to look after my (hypothetical) kids before then I will still trust her now, if I trusted her with money before then I will still trust her now.
Whatever your believe system, most rational people will accept that we are all human and in some sense flawed and a work in progress.
On the one hand, I would expect friends to speak up if I started talking about taking precautions for a bigfoot encounter on my upcoming camping trip. Unfounded beliefs are unhealthy and they have to be challenged otherwise they are reinforced. This principle underlies the psychology of influence and persuasion: people have an innate need to be consistent. The more you restate your beliefs, the stronger they become and harder they become to break.
On the other hand, my grandmother leans heavily on religion to cope with her husbands death. I am not going to challenge her -- even gently -- when she says a prayer in my presence or mutters some other statements of faith. I would compromise my honesty in this situation to protect her emotionally.
I have many friends who are quite religious (they have built their families around their beliefs) and not very open minded so I am not sure how to handle those situations.
Like others said before me, I too find absolutely no reason to try to convince my deist friends and acquaintances that their belief is false or otherwise defective.
Let me also state this: I believe that the best way to make them reconsider their beliefs is to live a good, successful and moral life as an Atheist. Lay all the claims that Atheists are for some reason bad, immoral or disloyal to rest; be the anti-thesis to their stereotypes.
Beliefs are like a house of cards. Take a card away, and the house becomes unstable. Take the right one away and tumble it will. One such card in a deist's belief is that Atheists have unfavorable properties. Take this card away, and they will start questioning other components of their belief.
Lead by example, Daniel and Erich. Be the reason. It's a very gentle, subliminal and powerful persuasive tool.
-- Arik
"Beliefs are like a house of cards. Take a card away, and the house becomes unstable."
Well some beliefs are, i.e. fundamentalism, that all beliefs are equally important because it all has come from God, or dug up by Joseph Smith or fallen out of the orbiting Martian Teapot. It is unstable because in this fundamentalist case all beliefs are equally divine/inspired. When the house has fallen down, you can realise that actually there are better ways to build a house.
If I kick a football at the house of cards, even a full-sized house of cards, then it falls down, because all the cards are the same and interdependent. So the strategy would be defence, keep people away from it, do not let one thing come near it.
However, real houses are not like that. Some bits are made of glass, some of brick and there are steel girders, foundations and neighbouring houses. If I kick a football at my house, then it does not make the house fall down. Even if it takes out a window then the bricks are still there. Even if I get a sledge hammer and knock down a wall, then the girders are there, and so on.
So I am arguing that there are at least two kinds of faith. One that is based on everything being equally inspired and a complete and perfect system that dropped down from God. The other is different, it is a mix of different elements: experience, history, reason, community and so on. Yes it may seem less satisfying on the outside, and it requires a lot more work, but the end result is far more satisfying.
Now seriously, you took it too far. What I meant is that, rather than shoving the fact that, rather than shove the fact that I'm an Atheist in people's face and argue unarguable points, I prefer to let people face to the fact that indeed there is an Atheist in their vicinity who is leading a life which is - surprise - at least as moral, full, satisfying as they do, without the need for a deity.
What you're talking about is realizing you need faith in your life and choosing your path according to the factors you've mentioned. Most people are not like that. I'd say 99% of deists are not like that. They loosely believe in some deity and its power over them, for better - or most likely - for worse. The fact that there is a life possible without it is news to them, hence my metaphor.
Now look at you - you're writing in an Atheist's blog in a civil way. It means that whatever your faith is, you recognize other people's faith as well, which means that you don't need this lesson anyway. You are at least willing to accept that other people have their own truth.
-- Arik
Yup I agree with you completely, wherever you believe truth comes from, no one has a monopoly on it, that is not a rationally sustainable argument in any worldview (except inside a Hollywood movie).
>I’d say 99% of deists are not like that.
Well the number is probably less that that but I think we basically agree on 'most'.
It is also an interesting idea about how we define deists and atheists. I sure the amount of people in the world that consciously describe themselves as 'atheists', in the deep and eloquent way you have described, would easily fit into one football ground with space to spare, (i.e. Manchester United total capacity: 76,212), but if even 1% of those who believe in religion are as I have described, then we are still talking about 40 Million people or more.
So if we think about the major problems facing the world today, climate change, HIV, poverty, wealth imbalance, war and corruption.
So given that it is just a few highly educated intellectuals in the west, it is quite unlikely that Atheism has any real hope of making a major difference/improvement to the world. Whereas if we can get 5% or 10% of religious people to care about these issues and act differently, then you have hundreds of millions of people working to make the world better.
Well what I am trying to say is that we are not all the so do not write us all off. For every Osama bin Laden or Dick Cheney, there is a Mother Theresa or Mahatma Gandhi. For those of us that want to make the world a better place, atheists included, need to be willing to accept each other as individuals and to form alliances as communities.
I personally am not an Atheist. I was brought up in a deeply religious context and it is woven into my soul (/neural pathways), I would feel empty without the rhythm of bread and wine, Christmas and Easter, weddings and funerals, scripture readings, prayer and silence.
However, as a middle-of-the-road English Christian, I would be considered as liberal heretic by most fundamentalist Christians in the US. For example, I do not believe in the death penalty (which is state murder), I do not believe in gun ownership (which is nuts), I do not believe in withholding abortion (which just leads to backstreet and dangerous abortions) or withholding contraception (which leads to teenage pregnancy), I do not believe in static gender roles (or even in static sexualities), I believe in Darwinism and Evolution and so on and so on.
My belief in God is not based on willful delusion, but on empirical (i.e. experiential) evidence. In fact, my acceptance of the religious principles I adhere to are logically built on this evidence. The issue is what you are willing to accept as valid evidence.
As a trained scientific researcher (in the field of information systems), I have strong respect for the scientific method and consider it to be the best means available have for acquiring knowledge. In using the scientific method, scientists make epistemological decisions to only accept as evidence those predictions of phenomena that are measurable, testable, objective, reproducible, and so on.
However, not all phenomena are measurable, etc. However, the fact that a certain phenomenon cannot be assessed using the scientific method does not mean that it isn't real. It simply means it is beyond the scope of what science can validate. To claim otherwise would be an obvious fallacy.
Many human experiences fall into this category. Most personal experiences are not objective or testable. In my case, my acceptance of the existence of God is based on several instances in my life in which I have experienced or "felt" a communication from God. None of these experiences are verifiable using the scientific method, yet they were as real as anything else I have experienced in my life.
Simply put, I have made a decision to accept these experiences as evidence of the existence of God. In other words, I have broadened my epistemological criteria to accept as valid these profound and highly individualistic experiences.
The willingness to accept spiritual experiences as evidence is a great divider of theists and atheists. Knowledge gained through spiritual experiences is obviously not scientific, but millions if not billions of people have accepted such knowledge as the basis for their belief. Such acceptance is not unfounded or thoughtless, but rests on experiences that these people consider very real.
I like your reasoning but I think your numbers are way off.
I think that if you look closely you'll find that a lot of the great minds of the 20th century are actually Atheists. I don't agree to your football field theory (although it does make me pretty unique - one in 3 million).
Moreover I think that there are great people out there that are totally Atheist in much the same I am but don't talk about it or reveal it. When I find someone who's an Atheist in the US, I broach the subject after probing gently for a while. And when we both affirm we're Atheists it's like we both share some sort of a secret. It's not easy to be an Atheist in a more then 90% Deist country. I think there are more closet Atheists among us and you can't really tell. Heck I invoke God every now and then, just to maintain rapport.
My friends obviously know. Not many others do, even people I'm in constant contact with.
Now as far as contribution - I would risk going out on a limb and say that I think Atheists contribute more than their relative number in the general population. Here's my half-baked and lame rationalization: If you take all the people who don't question their faith - how can they ponder questions of global magnitude when they don't know themselves? Atheists living in a Deist world must be holding their faith after pondering the possibility of being a Deist and finding it lacking. These vary people are at least capable of independent thought and hence capable of contemplating other problems. I believe then that per capita Atheists contribute more.
-- Arik