Originally Posted by
steve
It has come to my attention recently that more and more people are swearing by atheism, especially in this age group. But what really defines atheism? Disbelief in any and all deities and organized religion? In most religions, you have to prove your commitment to it. Jews have to have a bar mitzvah, Christians and Catholics have baptisms and whatnot, Muslim's are supposed to pray five times a day, I could go on and on. To profess your committed belief in atheism, all you have to say is "I am an atheist." I find that to be incredibly irritating. I want people to prove their disbelief.
That's like saying: "I'm fed up with people not believing in unicorns for no reason! I want people to PROVE why you don't believe in unicorns or I'll think you're irritating!"
That being said, my family is Christian, and I am as well, but I am an atheist. I am a "Christian" because I was baptized, had a first communion, etc. I am an atheist because in spite of this, I do not believe in a god. I'm also pretty pissed at the lack of choice presented by my family about that.
You can become atheist or theist at any time because they are simply terms to describe. They are not religions. I don't see the big deal.
As to why, it's only reasonable. God itself is not unreasonable, but the idea of worshipping God and believing that we are his prized creations is quite vain and subjective. Why would we get special instructions from an omnipotent God? If "God" really wanted us to behave in a particular manner, and did indeed design us, and is indeed omnipotent, we could have been made to do it straight away. Theists will give some kind of argument about "But God wanted us to have free will at the same time!" Then they claim "But God is all-powerful and can do anything." Apparently he can't do that. And there are tons of other things he can't do either. See any religious text for more contradictions. Religion contains human errors because it is of human creation.
The God of nearly all religion is totally unreasonable, especially considering the hundreds(thousands?) of groups throughout history all saying the others are wrong.
I believe in a force of the universe that encompasses all, living and inanimate. Completely unbiased, because we are all the same. Magnitude of complexity is infinite on both ends of the scale. We are a simply a singularity but at same time we are infinitely complex. There is no creator, as our time and space is also of the infinite scale. We exist and do not exist at once.
There aren't really any secrets. Our own sentience has fooled us into thinking that there are.
Thanks for your time.
P.S. By definition, Agnosticism and atheism are describing different things and are not interchangeable, nor replace one another. Agnosticism is the state of claiming it impossible to know, or presently unknown by oneself, the state of existence of a deity. Theism is the belief in a deity. Believe and knowledge are not interchangeable.
For example, I believe that I am more intelligent than the collective average of people that I meet. Do I claim to know as a certainty that this is true? No.
The same goes for deities. I am an agnostic atheist. Do I believe a god exists? No, but I do not claim to know, for a fact, that one does not. Stop misusing awesome words.
But then again, they're just words. I'll stop now before I go into a very very lengthy tangent that would be off-topic.
Also, fuck apple, fuck trendy people, fuck people who use atheism as an excuse to ruin their lives.
Last edited by bananaman; Feb 18, 2010 at 11:14 PM.