Maybe Nothing: the Atheist/Agnostic/Skeptic thread

Welcome! Let's have a little community thread of our own.

Share your stories of loss of belief! Talk about the wonders of the physical world! Admire the beautiful coincidence that is life and self-awareness!

at Richard Dawkins!

In the unlikely case you are entirely new to Kintsugi: Be nice to others, *especially* the outgroup!

 

Belief in a higher power baffles me. That is all.

 

pops in to, for the moment, do nothing but at Richard Dawkins

 

Who is Richard Dawkins and what is going on

 

Richard Dawkins is a famous and outspoken atheist, author of books that were to many atheists the first exposure to the idea that there could be no God at all. Richard Dawkins also a bitter old white dude who doesn't see the point of all this "feminism" and "civil rights" malarkey and thinks it is all just as pointless and fakey as religion.

 

That's actually false. He definitely sees himself as a feminist and views feminism as important. The problem is that his idea of feminism focuses in large part of "helping those oppressed Muslim women" (which in his mind seems to mean ALL Muslim women).

I'm very strongly in favor of criticizing people for what they actually do and say, not just picking views you assume they hold because they also hold other views you oppose.

 

My story of lack of belief is um.
I stopped. Because ow.
And because I was given words for something other than the deism I assumed was normal.

 

I'm a questioning skeptic right now, so hopefully I'm welcome here.
up until recently I believed somewhat in the idea of gods in general? but now I'm just...not sure. for reasons.
but I never accepted the idea of a sole, singular God. that was never a possibility for me.

 

Richard Dawkins also, I'm pretty sure, has expressed that a lot of modern feminism seems pointless because clearly white American and British women already have equal rights, and only the crazy Muslims have a problem. So, like, half what @Greywing is saying and half what @Meagen Image is! In the most hypocritical, sexist and islamophobic way! http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Richard_Dawkins has some sources.



... to be slightly more on topic, today a friend asked if I'm fasting for Yom Kippur, which was kind of awkward, 'cause my dad's family's Jewish tradition is secular and has been for generations. I come from a proud tradition of agnostics, so no cool stories about figuring it out for myself, but on the plus side, no awkward stories about explaining to my parents.

 

An acquaintance asked me if I was fasting today while I was holding a plate of food. It wasn't pointed, he's apparently just really unobservant.

 

Can an agnostic pagan stick her nose in here?

 

If I weren't following some American blogs I wouldn't even know it was Yom Kippur today. I don't even know what it is :P There are not a lot of Jewish people around my neck of the woods.

 

My family varies from Christian-by-tradition to straight up secular, so for my primary school years I sort of viewed scripture class as like, history lessons about this guy named Jesus. I don't think I ever even registered that I was supposed to be praying or believing in anything. Then! In grade 5 I moved to an Anglican school, and hoo boy was that a culture shock. There was a club for people who wanted to be more Christian! They would give out ice cream in lunch to try to get you to join! (I had ice cream the first week of every term and promptly ignored them for the next ten weeks, lmao). We also had chapel every Wednesday which involved awkward pop hymns. I hated chapel, and Christian Studies (a real class! every week! instead of maths or English or something!), and I also had no concept of believing in a higher being, so that combo really killed any interest I had in Christianity. I was actually very militantly atheist for a while there out of pain and hatred for their attitudes on my new-found gayness (and later trans-ness). I've chilled out now, but I still get kinda jittery about Christian doctrine.

I did actually dabble in, like, pagan beliefs for a bit. I was going to worship Athena. Except, I would do all the motions and leave the offerings and stuff, but I never actually...believed. I'm not sure it's something I'm capable of? Damned if I didn't try, though.

 

Only if you tell me about your beliefs, because I still find paganism interesting and I wanna know how agnostic paganism works :3

 

I can understand being jittery about Christian doctrine. I am too, for similar reasons. and that's part of why I couldn't ever accept Christianity and also partly in turn why I could never accept the idea of there being one sole, singular god-with-a-capital-G.

 

I kind of drifted into agnostic atheism over a long period of time. Religion kind of just rolled off of me despite the best attempts by others to make it stick. Nothing forceful, mind you, just like - church every Sunday and bible camp when I lived with my grandparents, a very good try by a nice Jehovah's Witness lady when I was in my early teens. I was somewhat interested, but it was in the alien anthropologist kind of way, and mostly I didn't get much of anything out of it. (I got more out of the virtue system in Ultima 4, as it happens.)

I drifted into haphazard paganism in my teens, because it seemed to fit a world that was scarier and weirder than the one the Baptist and Jehovah's Witness churches described. It was something to hold onto as I tried to make sense of a big, scary world and my own feelings of monstrosity.

And then that also just kind of slid away over time as I found words to describe what I was feeling, and ways to take care of my brainweird. I mostly don't seem to have a sense of the numinous like a lot of religious people do (except in very rare circumstances), and no patience for faith for the sake of faith. But it's not scary to me, like I thought it would be when I was younger. Figuring that this is all I and everyone else will ever get has been something of a comfort, and has kept me going through some rough times. If this is the only life I get, it's best to make the most of it, and try to leave things a little better along the way.

I have pretty much no patience for most internet Atheists, though - like Richard Dawkins. They tend to be smug, sanctimonious, and bigoted as all hell. In their hubris, they act like since (they think) they're the most correct about gods or the lack thereof, they must be the most correct about everything. If religious people are so stupid as to be religious, then they can't be right about anything! The attitude is tiresome and annoying, and I don't hold with it at all.

 

This is probably more accurate. I only hear of Richard Dawkins when he says something agressively ignorant *again* and the atheist bloggers I follow all collectively facepalm.

 

I call myself agnostic because nothing else fits, like, I do not get faith at all? I was raised in a sort-of-Christian household, went to a Church-run preschool and so on, so when I was really tiny I just assumed that God existed and the Bible was true in the way that tiny kids have of assuming that "I know of it"="it exists". And then one day I realized that not even the adults around me knew for sure if all of that stuff was true. So that is the exciting story of how I lost my faith.

However! I tend to interpret "agnostic" as "searching for faith" (I'm not sure that phrase has the same connotations in English at all, but what I mean is a sort of mindset where you are kind of curious about faith and have some sort of potential to have a religious awakening, and in fact you kind of hope for that awakening, and so on), and that's not me at all. I find religion really interesting and I don't actually doubt that people experience religious things in a meaningful way, but no matter how much I try to find some kind of genuine understanding of what it is to experience faith my brain just goes "ok I get that the social construction of religious experience in a particular context makes person A interpret their own experience in this particular way, cool, what does that have to do with me???".

I kind of feel the same way about atheists too. I interpret it as "p. sure there is no go", which seems like a very bold statement to me.

Um I forgot what point I was making but it seems like I'm pretty unclear about what the words agnostic/ateist actually mean *facepalm*

 

My general feeling is 'eh' and has always been 'eh.' I went to Catholic school as a youth from pre-k through 2nd grade, and yet even at that point with mandatory church on fridays and such it was just something I had no strong feelings about, I just went through the motions. My family isn't really super religious either.. my mom, kind of is, but only really when it suits her. I think she's only brought up things about not having faith in order to point out that it'd disappoint her.

As it stands I just know that I don't know, and won't know until the point where I'm dead, where I'd like to think if I was at least a halfway decent person, it won't matter if I didn't dedicate my life to whatever deity or deities.

 

@smyxolotl As I understand it, 'atheistic' means a person does not believe in any type of deity, spirit, what-have-you. 'Agnostic' is less searching for faith than it is ... not caring, I guess. Not feeling strongly one way or another. Whereas atheism suggests a strong feeling of there being no higher power.