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Choose to Believe

Started by SGOS, October 19, 2014, 09:59:16 AM

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SGOS

Quote from: Munch on October 20, 2014, 08:08:48 AM
The tooth fairy gave me money for a lost tooth. Father christmas gave me presents. The easter bunny gave me chocolate eggs.

I stopped believing this stuff when I grew up, as everyone else does.

But other people, who stopped believing in all the above characters, still believe in a magical sky daddy with an army of angels.

...
One day some older kids told me Santa wasn't real.  So I asked my mother, and she must have thought I was old enough to know.  She admitted that Santa wasn't real.  I was devastated.  I asked her if the Tooth Fairy was real, because I saw a similarity, and she admitted it was Dad and her.  So I asked about the Easter Bunny, because it kind of seemed like the same thing.  She said no; The Easter Bunny wasn't real either. 

At this point I was crying, because I felt betrayed.  I understood they were playing the roles for me, but I felt lied too.  One other similar thing still bothered me.  I asked Mom if God was real.  She thought for a second and replied, "Yes, God is real."  I sort of felt relieved and accepted her answer, but it was now with a great deal of caution.  From that exchange with my mother, I now understood that 1)parent's lie about things, even if they do it out of love for you 2)if things don't appear to be real, they usually are not 3)if things sound too good to be true, they are likely to be false.

I didn't become an atheist that day, but believe me when I say a powerful seed had been planted.  Clearly, I could not rely on adults for the truth.  I would have to figure the God thing out on my own.  But I was only 6.  I would need to get more information, and develop more mature reasoning skills.  Now being only 6, I didn't think of it in those terms.  I just knew I needed to think really hard about it.

And so began a life of growing and searching trying to solve the puzzle.  I enjoyed solving the puzzle.  It took many many years, and while the question of a god's existence was never solved, I did come to understand that there was nothing credible anywhere that warranted a belief in a thing that sounded too good to be true, never left a trace of evidence for his existence, and was only relayed to me on the basis of authority and hearsay.

AllPurposeAtheist

Quote from: Munch on October 20, 2014, 08:08:48 AM
The tooth fairy gave me money for a lost tooth. Father christmas gave me presents. The easter bunny gave me chocolate eggs.

I stopped believing this stuff when I grew up, as everyone else does.

But other people, who stopped believing in all the above characters, still believe in a magical sky daddy with an army of angels.

...


FEMA has a death camp with your name on it now..
All hail my new signature!

Admit it. You're secretly green with envy.

Solitary

Theists believe they are given freewill, and choose to believe in God, but never realize if they have freewill they can disbelieve in God. They are like small children, and need an authority figure like their parents were, to make decisions for them so they don't feel guilty, that is taught to them when they disobey and make the wrong decisions. God forgives them and removes the guilt reinforcing their belief in Him. The Catholic Church are experts at doing this with "Con"fessions.
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.

AllPurposeAtheist

So in essence this thread is about our obvious moral high ground we've had to climb up on to point our fingers of shame down upon the yearning masses..
Ye may be rich and own the bank or toil in a mine digging for coal, but cast thy eye always upon the donut and not upon the hole. :biggrin:
All hail my new signature!

Admit it. You're secretly green with envy.

SGOS

Somebody's got to take the high ground.  The Christians are fucking it up.

GSOgymrat

If I was going to choose a believe system I certainly would not choose Christianity. It is a pretty bleak view of human existence.

aitm

Religious belief for the majority of people was never a real choice given the age when the "fear" was installed. Fear, as we all know is a very real motivator to little children who recognize they don't have answers to what they don't know and their parents do. Now with all that fear at night we add a persona protector and things can be calmed.

Many people will never get past the fear and the reciprocal protection religion offers. For most non-believers I would suggest that it took something rather powerful to get them to start thinking about the whole thing. For most it is the death, injury or illness of a loved one. "You told me god would protect us". Stock reply, we all know.

That is when choice becomes a real choice. I cannot say people choose to believe in a god when fear through ignorance has them wrapped to tightly to see beyond their own limits.

Remove fear and choices become much easier to those who cannot reason when stressed out about going to hell to burn fucking forever.

Ignorance removes choice. Now stupid, being stupid, knowing what one knows and still buying it, well....that's a whole other thing, but in the end, fear overcomes everything.
A humans desire to live is exceeded only by their willingness to die for another. Even god cannot equal this magnificent sacrifice. No god has the right to judge them.-first tenant of the Panotheust

SGOS

Quote from: aitm on October 21, 2014, 02:48:20 PM
For most non-believers I would suggest that it took something rather powerful to get them to start thinking about the whole thing. For most it is the death, injury or illness of a loved one. "You told me god would protect us". Stock reply, we all know.

For me, I don't think there was anything all that powerful.  I'm not saying that isn't so for others, but just the strangeness of the whole Christian religion with an all powerful god that leaves no evidence of his presence, and the nonsense Bible stories of miracles reported only from hearsay.  I thought hard about it, because if the God of the Bible were real, it would have rather important implications for humans, so it deserved an honest shot at verification.

Verification of God's existence always seemed like the necessary first step to me.  Without verification of that specific issue, any further determination about god's will for us or descriptions of his exact nature would be a waste of time, and the more I tried to find verification (to no avail), the less I believed in God. 

aitm

Not arguing, but the vast majority of believers are "hooked" at a very young age and for many, it takes some real shaking shit to get them to think about it. And even then, the process takes years.
A humans desire to live is exceeded only by their willingness to die for another. Even god cannot equal this magnificent sacrifice. No god has the right to judge them.-first tenant of the Panotheust

Munch

Quote from: aitm on October 21, 2014, 07:00:02 PM
Not arguing, but the vast majority of believers are "hooked" at a very young age and for many, it takes some real shaking shit to get them to think about it. And even then, the process takes years.

yeah. environment and personality are important factors in all that, being raised in a theistic household, people are held down by it, but if they have the strength of will to find reason themselves it can work out in time. Infact I'm certain in many cases the reason why people become atheists is because of being raised by theistic parents, and it begins as a defiance against them.
'Political correctness is fascism pretending to be manners' - George Carlin

SGOS

#40
Quote from: Munch on October 21, 2014, 07:41:05 PM
yeah. environment and personality are important factors in all that, being raised in a theistic household, people are held down by it, but if they have the strength of will to find reason themselves it can work out in time. Infact I'm certain in many cases the reason why people become atheists is because of being raised by theistic parents, and it begins as a defiance against them.

I was raised in a theistic extended family household.  It was a mixed bag of beliefs.  My grandmother was totally delusional.  Half of her shit about religion came from the Bible, and half she just made up.  My father followed her, but he had more respect for other Christian sects and even other religions.  Indeed, he was of the attitude that what someone believed, even if it was sacred cows, was to be taken seriously, as somehow the belief was valid on the basis that it was a belief.  My mother was the more level headed one in the household.  She believed in God, but took a lot of the shit with a grain of salt.

I wonder about myself back then.  I believed in God, but even in retrospect, I don't think I was ever 100% hooked.  I always had nagging doubts, which I desperately wanted to get rid of.  This may, as you have pointed out, been a logical reaction to some of my grandmother's and father's bizarre preoccupations with religion.  I thought the only way out of doubt would be through more study of the issue and by somehow convincing myself.  The study proved to be problematic, as it always seemed to undermine what I sought.  The more I learned, the harder it was to accept.

It's like whatever innate psychological dynamic I came with, simply couldn't accept the miraculous.  I could not force that square peg into the round hole no matter how hard I tried.  For others, miracles, Bible stories, and tales of unknowable things fit quite well into their psychological make up.  I'm hard pressed to explain why.  They just don't seem to have a problem with accepting the illogical.