Why are Atheists so Scary?

What's scary to me is this whole thread. It shows a broad and widespread misunderstanding of what atheists are and believe. No wonder we can't get our point across. So many theists seem to be seeing us through some weird lens.

I see a good point there. It brings to mind Nietzche's walking dead Christians... dead because they abdicate this world in favor of another.

On that: again there's a difference between an image and a living person. You can easily define the image... it's a resident of your mind. But you know from personal experience that a living person is more complicated than a single image.

Nietzche was free to define Christians any way he wanted... he wasn't binding himself to explaining people as they really are.

There aren't many Christians who think God is a temporal object. God is the name they give for the source of all existence now and forever. To transcend the self is to pass downward to the ground of being.

I'm thinking that the difference between an atheist and a believer isn't one of substance, it's a matter of focus... of where emphasis is placed.

You'll laugh, but I had a marvellous dream about myself and Richard Dawkins, which has encouraged me to give this thread, and this forum, at least one more chance.

Perhaps we could try to concentrate on this thought. There may be common ground here, and perhaps we can use it to shift the ground of the discussion somewhat, onto less disputed territory. Perhaps we can recover some of our shared humanity, and even some of our sense of fun.

We probably all have our own perspective on this territory (I would be very disappointed, indeed, were there not a welter of perspectives differing from my own), so nothing I write is meant to be given too much weight. Here, at any rate, are just a few of my thoughts. (Everything I would like to say would literally fill a book, one I am not ready to write yet.)

Is it irrational to believe that even as adults we are all still in some sense children? Can we not rationally accept our childlikeness, and in so doing, become not less adult, but more fully adult?

Might atheists be scared of theists because they correctly perceive that theists are often trying to intimidate them into abandoning their hard-won adulthood?

Might theists be scared of atheists because they correctly perceive that atheists are trying to intimidate them into abandoning their childlikeness for the sake of a form of adultlikeness that can never, for them at least, be real?

Perhaps, as has been said here, all children are atheists; but perhaps also all atheists, just like all theists, are children.

Whether atheists or not (I am far from sure about that), all children believe in adults. Tragically, that belief is often misplaced, but the answer to misplaced trust in adults is not to lose trust in all adults. In adulthood, too, is the answer to bad religion to have no religion at all?

Let us play.

Rock on Twirlip! Separation of Church and State.... its central column is tolerance. The root of tolerance is?

All of the sudden I realize this thread is a grim reminder of a now closed thread about the idea of jihad. Same thing: how do we trust?

That is my one overriding question. My favourite piece of philosophy, so far, is Plato's dialogue Protagoras, and I call this "the Protagoras problem". Of course, I might be misinterpreting Plato, and it's ages since I read the dialogue through; but it's a good question in its own right, nevertheless.

What is your point?

You have an absence of belief. How can your point be anything more than that?

That's the point Finn. I think littlek would agree. We simply don't believe something. We're skeptics.

It's not that we're angry at any gods. The meme that all Atheists are just believers who are angry or that there is no such thing as an Atheist are conclusions made through a religious lens. Instead of listening to our reasons for not believing what they do, many religious people tell us why we don't believe.

A
R
T

Several years ago I joined a "humanist" organization, thinking they might be a good peer group for me, but they were so militant about religion I decided to move on. Despite being an atheist, I found them a bit scary. At my last meeting, I suggested that perhaps we could find more peace discussing things to be for, rather than against, but they made it pretty clear that perhaps I should find another group. And I did.

Let me also add that one of the ways to look at the word atheist is to see it as meaning not theistic. As Isaac Asimov once remarked: "That label only says what I am not and ignores everything else that I am..." [or something like that]

--Bill

"Why be born again when there is so much compelling evidence that we should all just grow up?"

An actual absence of belief would would require also an absence of justification for any real claim to knowledge. The formula for knowing something is normally considered (Justified true belief). Since the argument for atheism is based on material empirical "factual" (quotes around factual because I have issues with facts, not issues with anyone using them as justification but that is another story) justification one must also believe in the justification which is by extension necessarily requires belief in the non existence of a God.

I, however, do not consider that belief necessarily the same as that which a theist might show, but it is a belief all the same.

A common theme within the justification of atheist thought is the inability to reconcile human suffering with a God of any sort, let alone a just and loving one.

dlowan, apparently, is faced, on a daily basis, with the evil of which mankind is capable and she has somehow connected the belief in God with a victim's belief that his or her suffering is deserved. Labelling both irrational.

Unfortunately, to a child, drawing a cause and effect relationship between their abuse and their conduct is entirely rational. They are, after all, children.

Similarly, it is the residue of this child-like perspective that directs many aetheists to their position of denial.

As adults, we can see that the child's behavior can never be the justifaction for abuse, but some of us are locked into this very human calculation when it comes to consideration of the devine.

A just and loving father would never abuse his children no matter what their behavior, and yet a just and loving God seems to. Therefore they must either excuse the abusive father or deny the abusive God.

The fallacy here, of course, is that the imagery of God the Father is entirely the creation of humans and their narrow perspective, and it is child-like to insist that God demonstrate the behaviors of the best of earthly human fathers.

These are atheists who do not deny God so much as they deny the facile Christian version of God, and, unfortunately, they seem to be unable to consider God through anything but a facile Christian perspective.

Take it a step further though and you can see how truly child-like many atheists perceptions of God are. What child ever accepts that the punishment he or she receives is an act of love? They are certainly capable of of connecting punishment to behavior, but incapable of the reasoning behind the desire to manage behavior. This isn't something you can bring a child to understand through reasoning. They will never associate punishment with love, and they will always associate punishment with displeasure or dissapointment.

I'm not a Christian, in part because the common practice is too desperate to reduce God to human terms, but I do believe that a Christian of thought understands that we can only hope to perceive God's plan, and trusts that he is not insane.

Of course this is not to say that all atheists are the disappointed adult children of a Christian God, but it's hard to understand their insistence, or the professed understanding behind that insistence, that God, in any manner, can exist.

What are your reasons for not believing?

I'm more than willing to listen.

Okay as I have only got up to page 8 so far, I have decided not to do as I usually do and go through chronologically taking each post into account.
To have any chance of catching up today, I am going to now read the whole thing.
Any any question that is asked of me I think has my TRUE concern in me and this thread I am going to answer.
If it is still not a correct interpretation of me or what I thought I have both apologised for misrepresenting and gone to lengths to try to explain what I needed from this thread, I am going to skip it.
So no offence if I don't answer you, you need to look at what I did not answer and try in some way to correct your own interpretation because I can see I am not doing a very good job at trying to do so for you.
All my best and no offence.

This is a very useful post and speaks truth to and for me.
Thank you

Thank you for this post, it is creative and with humour we can conquer all our fears. This most definitely fits my brief.
Thank you for your time and effort.

I don't hate anyone but myself on occasion and I don't dislike any one either.
But I do fear an aspect and worry about this fear.
Thank you for your words.

Thank you I do not have time to look to deeply into what you have provided, but what you have has taken and consideration of me and the thread.
Thank you for your participation.

My point is that we seem to be speaking in two different languages. More than that, even. It's almost as if we live in different, but over-lapping worlds. We simply don't have a belief in a higher power. That's it. It seems so incredibly simple to me, yet time and time again it gets twisted and distorted by people who do.

This is a great post,
You bring up the fact this for me is a Mental health issue,
And that I saw that is what one of the tags say.
I was trying to address a mental illness to my mind which is fear.
I am not say atheists are mentally ill, I am saying my fear makes me sick and was looking for a cure.
Thanks for being so open and descriptive.

I agree with what you say here.
If you think I was making the correlation read the post I was responding to .
Thanks you are always thorough and clever.
I may have said this already as well but we also fear intelligence, this may be another reason for my fear? looking stupid?

This post I like, it goes some way to actually investigating fear.

Thank you.

Yes I am afraid I may have to one day become an atheist, and why because I feel more safe presently not being one.
Thank you for your participation.