I turned off Religion early in
my life & developed finally to a FANATIC Atheist & VERY Anti
Christ & the Bible.i would pick on Christians to Attack them &
try to Disprove their faith & convince them of the Non
Existance of God & that there is no life after death & that we
all came about through Evolution (i was affected by Darwinism
& Neo Darwinism). Deep inside though, i was Really Searching
for a meaning in life & thinking that Since Death is the End,
why live Longer…I mistook Pleasure for Happiness & immersed
myself in that…But All was Temporary & the more the more
depression. One day i met a Young Vibrant Christian Believer &
as usual started attacking his faith & to prove a point i was
making against Christ,i took out a Big Anti Christian Book i
had & wanted to quote from it Against Jesus…. But when i
opened this Book….SUDDENLY ALL THE PAGES TURNED
WHITE….Even my Handwritten anti christ Notes at the Books’
Margins…WERE ALL WIPED OUT…I Was SHOCKED (even NOW my
hair stands on end). It was as if the God i SOO much Hated was
telling Me:” Gasen, who do you think you are to try & Disprove
ME, i WIPE out ALL your so called Proofs”. i lay awake All
night thinking” then there IS a GOD & the BIBLE IS TRUE &
JESUS IS REAL after all…” And then i made my Decision &
told HIM: GOD i don’t know YOU & have attacked you always ,I
am NOT Good …I DO NOT DESERVE Your Grace…But Please Do
take over My life & Forgive Me for all the Bad things i did.”
Instantly i felt The Great Presence of GOD in the Room
FILLING me With JOY JOY i was Floating from Happiness…And I
felt JESUS coming & Hugged me…..I slept 2 hrs & got up
A NEW PERSON….Life,the World ALL looked Good …Everything
fell into place. I went around to my Friends, relatives
Telling them that THERE IS A GOD…they were STUNNED ,since i
was always trying to prove the opposite…Many Came to Christ
in time…Including both my parents & Also my Atheist
Brother(DR Surgeon)..That increased My Joy a lot.

The original article clearly distinguished between mere nonbelievers and those who ridicule others for their beliefs. That you choose to align yourself with the latter type says far more about you than it does about anything else.

Either you have major reading comprehension problems, or you’re admitting you fall into the big “A” Atheist category. Which is it, pam?

Also, thanks for accusing me of “slander,” but you might want to grab yourself a dictionary. Even if I had defamed you in my article, it would have been libel, not slander.

Well, “Lapsed,”…aren’t YOU just the sweetest, smartest little cupcake on the platter?

With a surplus of venom for the religious, you turn the remainder against atheists, deciding how WE feel about the rest of the world.

Your smug superiority makes it very difficult to read the remarks you’ve posted.

We’re not ALL as “superior in our own view” as you’d paint us and we’re not ALL as full of ridicule as you’d like to depict us, either.

One of the least humane and attractive things about religion is the prejudice and narrow-mindedness which YOU display. Honestly, you’re as bad as the right-wing “fundies” with your snide slander.

There should be room for all of us…please don’t attempt to represent ME, ok?

> the definition of atheism is an active disbelief

Whose definition is that exactly? I think passive inactive lack of belief works quite well for most atheists, thank you very much. Could you list all the gods you do not believe in? Some people use strong atheism and weak atheism. Jenn distinguished between capital A Atheists and lowercase a atheists. I think your definition of atheist is too narrow, and your definition of agnostic is too broad.

I am intrigued that the God you believe is not omnipotent. Still, his physical laws allow outright miracles. For example, “God is Great” being spelled out — unmistakably, none of this face-of-Jesus-in-burnt-toast nonsense — in the clouds during the Super Bowl on national television.

There are plenty of things that God could do that demonstrate his being real, all within the laws of physics, but beyond explanation due to probability.

If there is a God, He is terribly, terribly committed to providing absolutely no evidence for his existence.

Different people interpret different facts in different ways. It’s why there is so much antipathy in the first place. The problem comes when people choose to listen to someone and then believe what that person tells them rather than going to a bit of effort to think and study for themselves. I think a great many religious people and some non-religious people are guilty of that.

I try not to tell anyone what to believe, though I’m obviously more than happy to share my beliefs. I greatly resent my fellow ‘Christians’ (whose Christianity appears different than mine and kind of scary) calling me a ‘watered down Christian’ or an ‘atheist in disguise.’ I find Bill Maher’s snarky dismissal of all belief entirely somewhat offensive and insulting, but then I feel the same way about his occasional pro-PETA rants. On most other issues, I think he makes good sense.

Anyone practicing proper critical thinking processes would accept absolute proof of a positive. I won’t deny that. However, the definition of atheism is an active disbelief while the definition of agnosticism is an unwillingness to believe or disbelieve without positive proof. One can debate how thin a line that is, but it is still a line.

The trouble with miracles is they are terribly difficult to verify. A plague of locusts can occur for quite a variety of reasons and we live in an unpredictable world. A rain of blood, scientifically explained, might not be a miracle at all. On the other hand, a believer could equally argue that there would have to be a scientific explanation because God would work through the laws of the universe he created. So I don’t believe a ‘verifiable miracle’ in the manner you describe is possible, not because of a lack of faith in miracles but because of the ability of both unbelievers and believers to explain things as they wish to see it.

I don’t think it rational for God to create any sort of natural law and then to run around superseding it willy-nilly, so it’s difficult to imagine a miracle that could not be explained scientifically somehow, even if only sketchily.

I suppose a zombie apocalypse would be pretty convincing, but I don’t believe that would be God’s thing. :)

> I believe that the preponderance of evidence favors the existence of God

Do tell! Please share your favorite authors. I am also a critical realist, and have taken my spiritual journey quite seriously. I have found no credible evidence for the existence of God whatsoever. I am bemused that we could come to such opposite conclusions, if we are both being rational and honest!

>would believe in God … refrains from belief [in God]

Implies that the person does not currently believe in God, ergo the person is an atheist by definition.

> A good agnostic has an open mind on the subject of God and would believe in God if presented positive scientific proof of God

A good atheist has an open mind on the subject of God, or is at least willing to ponder the subject, and consider what might make them reconsider their lack of belief in God. Many atheists, I even dare say most, would belief in God if presented positive proof. The proof need not be terribly scientific either, any verifiable modern day miracle of the sort found in the Old Testament would probably do the trick!

And you are confusing atheists and agnostics. A good agnostic has an open mind on the subject of God and would believe in God if presented positive scientific proof of God, but refrains from belief due to what they see as the absence of positive scientific proof.

An atheist believes that God does not exist, explicitly, and if they do not then they are not an atheist.

A deist believes God categorically exists and that natural rights are derived from God’s creation of man and the world, but that God created man to let man manage himself and does not directly manage man.

I am a critical realist, I believe that the preponderance of evidence favors the existence of God and I choose to believe based on that evidence. I am very specifically a Christian, but I am a Biblicist and a classical Protestant rather than a fundamentalist or an evangelical.

If pressed, most [atheists} will admit that they do *NOT* know that there is no god.

I am going to ignore Lord Palmerston against my better judgment.

I find comments ‘proving’ Jenn’s point about (A)atheists and the comments proving the (A)atheist point about ‘the Christian right’ equally interesting and alarming. The argument between fundamentalist Christian trolls and angry atheist trolls really illustrates why people on both sides are likely to see one another as the enemy and why those with no interest in taking a bold stance against either the evils of ‘aggressive secularism designed to destroy religion’ or ‘the fundamentalist attempt to force religion upon all Americans’ feel attacked from both sides.

The sad fact is that atheist criticism of the religious right is more accurate than not and the religious right’s criticism of Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins, at least when it comes to feelings of intellectual superiority and contempt for religious belief, is also more accurate than not. There are aggressive bigots on both sides who feel themselves entirely superior to the other side. Each side is equally convinced of the stupidity, insanity, or evil of the other. It would be difficult to tell an atheist troll and a fundamentalist troll apart if the argument wasn’t complete with its own flash cards.

I was raised in the Mennonite Church, which was one of the classical Reformation/Counter-Reformation Protestant movements. Much of my moral and ethical thinking (a belief in free will, a real but pragmatic commitment to non-violence whenever possible, a classical belief in freedom of individual conscience and the separation of Church and State, and my belief in the duty of all men and women to be good neighbors to one another) comes directly from core Mennonite doctrine even if my own personal brand of ‘critical realism’ has altered it in some forms. A reading of the Bible and a study of history has moved me more toward Unitarian Christianity and certain principles of Deism (though I am not a true Deist), but I believe in a creator with a plan for mankind and am a person of faith. So it bothers me greatly when the ideas of faith and God are attacked as childhood fables and dangerous cultural delusions by people who are essentially less ‘atheists’ than they are theological and philosophical materialists. Their religion is pure empirical science coupled with pure abstract logic and they have no room for anything that does not fit their system.

Nor is the attack solely from the left. On the right, self-appointed disciples of Ayn Rand such as Christopher Hitchens hold disdain for any sort of societal morality not based in self-interest and personal profit. This thinking has even infected certain religious groups, such as ‘prosperity doctrine’ charismatics and evangelicals who preach that if we believe then God will make us rich and if we are not rich then we must not be right with God.

On the other hand, when I went to work every day past a church with a big sign saying ‘Can America afford a watered down Christianity?’ I know who was being directly attacked by the question. They mean Christians like me, who believe in classical principles of post-Reformation Protestantism like free will, freedom of conscience, and the separation of Church and State and are rather repelled and frightened by the movement to pass arcane and often contradictory verses of Leviticus into federal law so that everyone’s sins stay safely ‘in the closet’ and do not offend those more moral than the sinners. I am also somewhat bothered by those who believe a nuclear attack on Iran will fulfill the requirements for the Rapture… and that belief is a real and powerful fact in many evangelical churches and to claim otherwise is simply untrue. The fact that it is also a real belief among politicians with some degree of power and influence is more disturbing yet, especially when one combines that with those people of faith who reject all science whatsoever because their attachment to literal truths in a book whose precise authorship is not open to scholarly proof and has been edited more times than the Oxford English Dictionary trumps empirical study and logical thought.

I believe in faith and a divine spark, as a writer I feel I have occasionally touched/felt the divine spark and been inspired as a result, and I believe in the value of empirical observation and logical calculation as necessary tools to understand the world even as faith, imagination, and the divine spark are necessary to understand the human condition.

In the end, sadly, I have to side more closely with the materialists than the fundamentalists in this argument. Not because the materialists are correct in their evaluation of religion and faith and God, which I believe they are not and which I find offensive, but because I believe they are ultimately right about the dangers of religious fundamentalism to individual thought and conscience and that those dangers are a much more serious threat to Americans than the petty nastiness of cynics. Faith, in the end, is too basic and true to be completely destroyed by cynicism or materialism. It is human nature to have faith in something greater than our own flawed reality.

Empirical reasoning, on the other hand, is threatened not only by dogmatic devotion to unswerving truth or the incorrect belief that religion and scientific fact are somehow incompatible but by infoglut, by natural human laziness, by the desire of most people to be told where to go and what to do and how to do it. For many people, thinking is too much effort. In an argument between pure faith and pure reason, either of which would be a great tragedy for mankind, pure faith has a serious danger of winning. Pure reason far less.

I have no ideological or moral commitment to absolute secularism. The Ten Commandments in a courthouse does not offend me and I do not believe Americans have an inalienable natural right not to be offended. Indeed, I believe the ‘right not to be offended’ is directly antithetical to principles of free expression. That said, I don’t believe that the religious right not to be offended trumps the rights of Americans to marry the people they love. To claim otherwise is no different than any liberal brand of PC. It’s all the same thing.

I deplore racism, homophobia, nativism, misogyny, and economic classism… but I do not believe you can legislate against bigoted thought or speech. What we can do is all stop giving credence to bigots, whichever side of the aisle those bigots may claim as their constituency.

My biggest concerns about this issue are two-fold. First, increasingly, the right wing fanatics (and that is what they are, I don’t care whom that offends) are increasingly gaining credence among the general population as the majority of Christians and the mainstream of Christian thought… which they are decidedly not. The second is that angry atheists are increasingly gaining credence as the mainstream of liberal thought, which they are also decidedly not. Even the majority of PC secularists are less anti-religion than they are against national displays of Christian piety in a multi-cultural nation, and while I do not agree with their core belief that everyone has a right not to be offended they are hardly evil. It is certainly secondary to the fundamentalist religious view that only THEY have a right not to be offended.

This comment is much the length of posts on my own blog, but this back and forth really got me going.

The only thing atheists have in common with each other is that they know they don’t believe in God. If pressed, most will admit that they do know that there is no god. See the difference?

As far as atheism being a religion or not, I do not understand what that is such a hot button. But, here is how my dictionary defines religion:

religion |riˈlijən|
noun
the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods : ideas about the relationship between science and religion.
• details of belief as taught or discussed : when the school first opened they taught only religion, Italian, and mathematics.
• a particular system of faith and worship : the world’s great religions.
• a pursuit or interest to which someone ascribes supreme importance : consumerism is the new religion.

Of these, only the last is applicable to religion. So atheism can be a religion like consumerism can be a religion. Why is this a such big deal?