Maybe Nothing: the Atheist/Agnostic/Skeptic thread

the way I always understood it was that agnostic meant you believed in a higher power, just not the traditional one found in religions.

 

Re: Dawkins, yep, agreed, he is a terrible feminist. He still technically is one.

Re: atheist/agnostic personal stories, I was not raised in a religious setting at all, and find it impossible to even consider actually believing that any sort of organized religions is true. Like smyxolotl, I see why other people do, and I see that it makes a great deal of sense for them to, but it doesn't compute as something that I could ever conceive of for myself.

My main contact with religion as a child was with Judaism, through the fact that nearly all of my friends were Jewish and I went to the JCC for preschool. That was fine and fun for my tiny young self, and I was not asked/assume/pressured to believe in any of it.

Warning: sexual misconduct mentioned in next paragraph
My other main contact with religion was with Evangelical Christianity through my aggressively religious, aggressively conservative extended family on one side. We rarely interacted with them, but they deeply horrified me when we did. Then I found out that both of those uncles were accused rapists, so that was lovely. Left me with an even worse taste in my mouth around them, and further contaminated my feelings about Christianity because they were my only direct exposure to outspokenly religious people.

Paired with other experiences, this lead to me feeling incredibly uncomfortable around Christianity. It extends to monotheism in general, I've realized. I don't have the same intense, crawling discomfort when it comes to polytheistic/non-theistic religions and beliefs, usually, unless they conduct worship in similar ways - for instance, despite theoretically not having any great objection to Unitarian Universalism (it's not even technically a religion, definitely no firm established belief in a specific singular god, etc), I almost threw up when I attended a UU church function I was asked to attend. That was a delightful time, trying to pretend I wasn't feeling extremely sick from seeing someone's (theoretically completely harmless) celebration. Ah well.

 

@Greywing: oof, witnessed. Aggressive creeps are bad enough without bringing religion into it.

Also I looked it up and in hindsight I could've worked this out by myself: agnosticism means you don't believe the existence or non-existence of higher beings can ever be known. Gnosis, knowledge, agnostic, without knowledge. Probably. Ancient Greek is tough.

eta: I guess to clarify, agnostic is like saying 'Prefer not to answer'

 

ahhhhh. that makes more sense.

 

ooh hello

I remember someone in one of my old freethinker groups saying that "getting a bunch of atheists in a group is like herding cats", which makes me laugh

at any rate, my dad was raised Lutheran, my mom was raised lax methodist (by way of lapsed catholicism), and I realized that faith was a program I could not run when I was like twelve.

I was friends, actually, with a girl who was latter day saints, and a boy who was raised in a agnostic family (that I always thought were pagan because they were super into d&d, and had a huge spice rack and four cats), and I remember trying to explain evolution to her at recess once. it was probably pretty adorable, since I was like, ten, and didn't have a great knowledge-base anyway.

luckily, I managed to ramp through my "hah you believe in god?" and "wait do I believe in god? why not?" stages pretty quickly, once in middle school, and again in freshman year college.

I even managed not to lose any friends over it, which I think was pretty impressive, for both me and my friends.

but basically the way I think of it is just that, whatever it is that other people have that lets them believe in magic and ghosts and gods and spirits, I do not have. I'm not going to be mean about it, because who's to say that maybe these things do exist and I lack the capability to perceive them?

*shrugs*

 

I was pretty religious until a couple of years ago, when I actually looked up the arguments for both sides and found atheism made more sense. I was one of the angry atheists who tries to convince everybody of atheism for a while.

 

It's specifically gods. I note this because of the form my atheism takes (hi, I'm a witch) which is that what humanity thinks of as "gods" are various spirits that have accumulated power+lore through various means, but aren't inherently divine in any way, didn't create the world, and don't actually need to be worshipped by us.

 

My dad's mother was a devout Catholic; my dad went to a Jesuit-run high school and came out fervent atheist. Made for some awkward conversations. Mom is largely just apathetic about religion; I think she's nominally Catholic.
I grew up vaguely believing in God mostly because He kept getting mentioned on TV and stuff. Drifted into atheism mostly out of laziness; if I don't believe in God then I don't need to bother with praying and stuff.
Some time in high school I became even lazier, realizing that being an agnostic means I don't need to bother actually denying the existence of higher powers.
As a terminology note, I distinguish between strong agnosticism, which says "there cannot be proof or evidence of the existence or nonexistence of higher powers" and weak agnosticism, which says "eh, I haven't really seen anything convincing either way." I was pretty much the latter at this point.
Then in college I took a philosophy course on whether morality can exist without higher moral authorities, and came out 1: an epistemological nihilist, and 2: believing that philosophers are generally useless.
So I suppose I might be what I call a strong agnostic, except that sounds like too strong a position to assert with any confidence, so I still tell people I'm a weak agnostic.

 

Why would you want to believe in something you think is untrue? That is just incomprehensible to me.

 

Oh, yeah, I've had some of that. My favourite was a friend of mine, bless her heart, who's a pastor's daughter and was captain of the Christianity club. She once tried to corner me by saying I had to believe in something, I couldn't just not believe in a higher power. I think I ended up telling her I believed in the healing power of tea, which did not satisfy her in any way, shape or form, but she didn't press the issue.

Also, it's technically @a tiny mushroom's story to tell (although she's still religious, just not Abrahamically so), but I recall she once ran into some God-botherers who, upon learning she wasn't Christian and thought people were capable of defining their own morality, asked her if she thought Hitler was morally defensible. I mean, that's got to be the fastest 0 to Godwin time I've heard, at least IRL.

 

I can't really post in this thread because I'm religious, but yes, that was sure a thing that happened. I can't stand people who are so aggressive about their beliefs. If people ask me what I believe, I'll tell them. I am not interesting in evangelising because I know how annoying it is.
Anyway, this is what happened:

Christian dude: *running a poll about what I think about Jesus. I decline to take part, and he asks me why*
Me: Well, I'm not Christian, but in my faith we believe that all religious figures are worthy of respect. And who knows, you guys might be right! So I won't say anything bad about Jesus because I think him and your beliefs should be respected, but I can't say I follow him religiously because I'm not Christian.
Christian dude: So, do you respect Nazis? Do you think they're right?
Me: Uh... No... They murdered people...
Christian dude: Well how do you know that's bad? What tells you that? How do you know what's good or bad without the Bible?
Me: Ooooohhhhhh myyyyyyyyyyyyyy goooooooddddddddd

 

I think this a good tl;dr version of what I said about myself.

Faith and religion clearly work well for some people, and for them, is as true as my atheism is for me. (And in many cases, these are people who interrogate and test their faith.) But... yeah. That software doesn't run on my OS.

 

In third grade I just sort of stopped believing in God. It wasn't like I was a model Christian up to that point, but that was when I started to classify myself as atheistic.

 

It's funny that you used this example because people think Hitler was probably a Christian who followed the bible just as much as Christian Dude here did.

 

Software doesn't run on my OS is a very good way of defining why I am not atheist. Reality is just kind of incomprehensible to me without my crazy bullshit. Now that I have found a very apt way of describing that BACK TO LURKING AND WATCHING WHAT YOU ALL TALK ABOUT.

 

Hitler had all sorts of strange religious beliefs. He promoted Christianity, but he was associated with a racist pagan secret society. There's probably somebody here who an elaborate more.

 

Thank you for making words that perfectly describe me so I don't have to. It's like I'm not able to have spiritual or supernatural experiences. I don't consider myself an atheist though more "agnostic ???"

For me, it's because I see how spirituality benefits people and want that myself. I also read people describing their experiences and want to experience these things for myself. And partly, I want the world to be one where gods and spirits and magic are real. And maybe they're not but I still hold that little bit of hope

 

I believe things based on how much they correlate with reality so far as I can tell, not on how they feel to me. All the people talking about software seem to be doing the opposite.

 

It is how it feels to me, yes. Though I do feel that my beliefs correlate with reality so far as I can tell. To me I just don't get the idea of a world without rebirth. It doesn't at all add up, nor does a world without animism add up. But then I view science as only one method of information gathering. It's a very useful tool, but I don't feel it is the only or even the best one available. Sometimes my gut is more viable, such as with the divine. Other times meditation is the most apt tool, where it regards reality and what it truly is. Science is good for things like medicine, technology, and so on. Each have their own uses and those uses are contextual.

 

Hmm. For me it's a bit of both. I've never experienced anything that would point to there being a God, and plenty of things that indicate that there isn't one, but since everyone around me from ages 10-18 was absolutely convinced of God's existence, it did feel like I was deficient somehow for not being able to ~experience~ belief. (Case in point: one teacher of mine recounted a story where she was looking for a sign of faith, tripped on the pavement, rolled over and saw "the most vibrant rainbow", and then she went and became a chaplain. I spent ages after that wondering why, if everyone else got all these signs from God, I wasn't getting any. I eventually settled on 'there really isn't a god, people just like finding meaning in random occurrences'.)