Is it true that we're all born atheists?

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You're conflating terms. In modern parlance, an atheist is someone who does not believe the existence of a god. The alternative definition is an archaic term used initially to describe a philosophical position, later to denounce someone as being a godless heretic.

It gets tiresome explaining this to people (including atheists).

No. If anything they are agnostics. They simply don't know if God exists or not.

Apatheist if anything. The deity (deities) vs. no deity won't have any place to occupy when a person's learning to flip their vision right-side-up, learning the basic laws of their environment, trying to acquire language, gain enough proficiency over their bodies to walk, etc. etc.. It's a bit like asking someone whose in the middle of drowning whether the toilet paper role should be over or under.

Which describes every human being on the planet. Agnostic is a redundant label.

B.S.

That is NOT at all certain.

We arent born with the exact theology of any particular extant religion (actually the Koran says that we are all "born Muslim" and the world makes us infidels until we get the right teachings,but I am not gonna touch that subject beyond just mentioning it.).

But psychologists have studied children and have found that children will say things like "the moon watches me", or that inanimate objects have personalities, and so forth. Children naturally generate beliefs that are vaguely animistic, and or theistic, on their own ( ie magical thinking).

Last edited by naturalplastic on 31 Aug 2016, 6:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

First of all, what you're describing is not theism.

Secondly, such beliefs are reliant on having an understanding that there is a thing called "moon". That's without getting into the metaphysical complexity of the perceptions of young children.

Where's the study on the beliefs of newborns?

A. Anthropomorphizing the moon is NOT theism? Thats BS.Its no different than ancient Greek adults believing that Selene drove her Moon chariot across the sky each night.

B. you're splitting hairs. The only thing that you "believe in" the moment you come out of the womb is that you wanna cry. The point is that as you develop language in childhood you tend to generate magical thinking to make sense of the world even before the big people make you go to sunday school.

The question is whether we're born atheists, not whether we remain atheists after developing sufficient cognitive skills to understand Theory of Mind - a requirement of attributing mental traits to others (e.g. the moon is watching me). The foundation of such understanding does not typically present until a child is at least 2 years old, does not fully emerge until 4-5 years old. At 24 months, your typical toddler has a vocabulary of around 50 words.

Anyone who has raised children or been around children as they were raised will tell you that there is an enormous difference between a newborn and a 2 year old, let alone a child capable of understanding the concept of other entities having autonomy.

So no, I'm not splitting hairs.



The reason that "magical thinking" is a separate concept to "theism" is that they both describe different things. The purely sensory reality of a 12 month infant who cannot perceive the difference between "I can't see it" and "it doesn't exist" is not remotely analogous to the "I can't see it and it does exist" of theism.

Is it true that people in the year 1998 didn't believe in the dwarf planet Eris? No. Because they didn't know what it was. They didn't believe one way or the other. Likewise infants are not atheists. They don't know what God is.

You do not remember the womb. You do not remember being born. You do not remember the first six months of your life. In that time you are the nagual. Everything after that is a trained thought. It is a substance of this world. It is tonal. Weather you believe, or disbelieve in god. Athiest, agnostic, religious, or a crossword puzzle, it is all the same. It is tonal. You loose (forgot) what it is to be the nagual.

Soo, before six months, you are nagual, after, you are tonal. We are all on the island of the tonal. It is all the same. Your religion, or belief system has no bearing in the life of the nagual.

If you can be nagual now, you may know something no one else you know does. Good luck with that.

Please don't ask me to explain anymore than I just did. It is pointless. Figure it out yourself.

Pagans believe in multiple gods . That is a form of theism.

Its true that you cant believe in god until you have a rudimentary idea of what god is, but you also cannot choose to disbelieve in god either until you have a rudimentary idea of what god is . So infants can not be either theists or atheists.

The definition of atheism to me is the belief that there is no god rather than just being unlearned and ignorant of it, a rejection of god. If the implication is if we didn't force children to learn religion then they'd all be atheists by default then it is wrong, I think the belief in the supernatural and deities as an explanation for the world around them is an inherent trait of humanity. A infant cannot reject god therefor an infant cannot be an atheist in my opinion. I don't see the point of using some older archaic definition of atheism, the contemporary one is the one people know and use. I feel like some atheists simply replace religious proselytizing with proselytizing their own grievances against said religion, everything is a matter of faith and the people that identify so strong either way do not make much sense to me. Very black and white.

Not true. Atheism can be simply the lack of belief. Common mistake.

There's zero reliable evidence of NDEs.

Yes but they have to be aware of the idea of the existence of a god to actively not believe in it.

is it really? it's pretty obvious that it's a silly question if taken literally. nobody can believe or disbelieve anything when they don't even have a concept of self yet. the concept of belief doesn't apply to newborns. end of story. nothing else to discuss there

it's a question of "nature versus nurture", not a question about the moment of birth