Is it true that we're all born atheists?

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01 Sep 2016, 9:48 pm

Bald is a hair state--the most extreme example being a total lack of hair--totally bald.

It shouldn't be a hair/skin color--because people's heads are different colors when they are bald.

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01 Sep 2016, 10:10 pm

naturalplastic wrote:

The Catholic Church did NOT "come to believe" that the Earth was the center of the Universe. That was the normal belief of every human culture since the Stone Age from long before Christianity. The normal belief because anyone looking up in the sky can see that every celestial object (stars, the sun, moon, etc) appears to revolve around where we are standing. There were rare occassional philosophers in both east and west who would suggest that "maybe its not the stars that revolve around us, but that it's the earth that is spinning and that that gives the appearance that the stars are revolving around us". The thinkers who suggested that were always pilloried (figuratively, and often also literally).

fair enough. although "always pilloried" sounds like an exaggeration to me. maybe it's just that i don't know enough or don't remember enough, but as far as i remember there was no persecution against heliocentrism in ancient greece

i still have the impression that it was generally not a controversy in antiquity (meaning, it simply wasn't a question that any historically significant person was asking) until it became a mathematical question (which actually was a contentious thing back then, regardless if was about astronomy or anything else). and then the church, in turn, turned geocentrism into dogma. i think it's interesting because, despite the widespread idea that "god lives in the sky", it was more important for the church that the center of the universe would be what he created. not what gives life (the sun), but life itself (the earth). rather odd for a theocentric philosophy

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What the Catholic Church did was to latch onto one particular geocentric cosmology and make it a tenet of the faith. The cosmology of Aristotle. The real "irony" is that Aristotle was not in the Bible, and was not a Christian, nor even a Jew, but was a Pagan.

yes, that's more or less what i meant. "came to believe" meaning "turned it into part of the faith". more than passively having a sense that the earth was the center of everything, you were supposed to have faith that it was the center of the universe, no matter if there was evidence against it. another way how christianity evolved to suit paradoxical political interests

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01 Sep 2016, 10:30 pm

In the technical sense that a baby doesn't believe very much of anything, yes. In the sense antithiests use to argue that thiesm is learned from indoctrination, no, not at all. Actually most people are predisposed to believing in the supernatural, exact models for God are just developed later in life, and the way it's developed is largely a rational rather than empirical process.

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01 Sep 2016, 11:35 pm

anagram wrote:

you life a wicked life instead if it suits you better. it's what god intended for you, after all

You intentionally do wrong, and believe that is Christian?

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01 Sep 2016, 11:38 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:

You intentionally do wrong, and believe that is Christian?

i suppose not, but if you do believe you're predestined to damnation (because you already tend to do bad things without even trying or wanting to anyway), then why would you even try to "be christian"? either you keep doing bad things as you please or you seek another religious denomination for you to follow

to me the concept of strict predestination only seems to benefit the self-righteous, at the expense of everyone else. if the idea is to encourage everyone to behave decently, then it seems rather counterproductive

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02 Sep 2016, 12:55 am

kraftiekortie wrote:

To me, one must actively not believe in gods in order to be an atheist..

Depends what a god is. I can't actively disbelieve in every flavor of god. It's not physically possible. I can disbelieve only those I've already heard of.

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02 Sep 2016, 1:03 am

Campin_Cat wrote:

No. I think different people define / believe-in God, differently----and, IMO, defining / believing-in Him differently, doesn't make either of us wrong, it just means we're different. Also, it might not matter to God how we define / believe-in Him, just as long as we DO.

I think that at the very foundation, the Christian God, Muslim God, Judaic God, etc., are all, basically, the same----but, maybe, the DETAILS are different.

Well - notwithstanding the Bahá'í (another Abrahamic religion) concept of god, this still leaves out - at the very least - the Hindu, Buddhist, Jain and Sikh gods, several of which are either female or genderless, and thus not covered by the moniker "Him".

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02 Sep 2016, 5:58 am

kraftiekortie wrote:

It is not a redundancy--Agnostic Atheist.. An agnostic is a skeptic; an atheist is not skeptical about his/her atheism.

Babies are not born atheists....because the concept of "gods" hasn't entered into their brains yet.

To me, it's an ideology of conscious belief after a certain amount of thought.

To me, one must actively not believe in gods in order to be an atheist.

At the age of one day, all a kid believes in is sleepism and milkism.

That's what I believe. A baby is not a willful, conscious atheist, he/she doesn't subscribe to the ideology.

What I meant is that this whole thread has been about language and definitions, and in particular one that's not serving clear communication well these days.

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02 Sep 2016, 9:18 am

anagram wrote:

Campin_Cat wrote:

I think that at the very foundation, the Christian God, Muslim God, Judaic God, etc., are all, basically, the same----but, maybe, the DETAILS are different.

oddly (historically speaking, belief aside), that foundation probably comes from a short period of ancient egypt when a pharaoh decided to worship the sun and nothing but the sun (if i'm not mistaken), and then it spread all over the world...

Yeah, I would have to put my belief WAAAAAAY aside, to say that's "probable". I don't believe it; if, for-no-other-reason, than because if that pharaoh is the one in your Wiki link, there were MANY peoples that populated this earth WAY before he ever came-along. The Bible has ALOT of people who chose to believe / follow the God of The Bible----ONE God----and, anyone who only considers ONE source (the story of the pharaoh, for instance) when making a decision (ANY decision), is NOT smart, IMO. I mean, even if someone has never read The Bible, do they think that no peoples were alive, BEFORE him? If nothing else, SOMEBODY had to be alive to be keeping a calendar, up 'til then, to say he existed in 13-hundred-and-something, BC!

I only skimmed your article----I don't have the "brain space", right now, to consider it, further. I'm VERY glad you posted it, though, as I bookmarked it, and hope to get back to it, sometime.

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02 Sep 2016, 10:34 am

friedmacguffins wrote:

You intentionally do wrong, and believe that is Christian?

anagram wrote:

i suppose not...

Are you contrite, in other words, conscientious about it?

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02 Sep 2016, 11:01 am

GGPViper wrote:

Campin_Cat wrote:

No, I didn't leave anybody out because I use "Him" to refer to God. I call God "Him" because that's what I'm USED TO----BUT, I don't believe that EVERYBODY has to call God, "Him"; I think people should be able to call God whatever they want ("Him", "Her", or even "It")!

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02 Sep 2016, 12:15 pm

anagram wrote:

i think it's interesting because, despite the widespread idea that "god lives in the sky", it was more important for the church that the center of the universe would be what he created. not what gives life (the sun), but life itself (the earth). rather odd for a theocentric philosophy

I'm thinking it wouldn't have mattered that the sun was "in the sky" where God was----and they didn't, IMO, believe that the sun "gave life" (but that, GOD did)----they thought it best to give highest regard to what they felt was God's greatest accomplishment (the earth). That doesn't seem odd for a theocentric philosophy, because to love God, would be to love what He created. Now, one could argue that God created the sun, as well, so why didn't they choose IT to be the center of the universe----but, to them, I'm thinking, the sun was just the sun; whereas, practically EVERYTHING else that God created was on EARTH.

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02 Sep 2016, 12:22 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:

Are you contrite, in other words, conscientious about it?

i'm talking hypotheticals. i was raised catholic (no strict predestination, no talk of hell or the devil or anything, just "do good and respect everybody"), and i'm not religious in any way as an adult

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02 Sep 2016, 12:28 pm

(I beg your pardon, for the grammatical corrections. Noisy, in my background.)

Campin_Cat wrote:

the sun was "in the sky" where God was

Is that sun uncomfortable. Does it seem to be at the wrong place and wrong time. From what have you drawn your comparison.

One of the very first assumptions of Christian philosophy is that the material world was made perfect and with a purpose.

People inherently assume that it should be put to order -- an order which exists apart from the concept of nature, as we now see it.

And, the mission of many religions is to restore that to its perfect function, a sort of dreamtime, in which intent effects action. That seems instinctual to all of mankind, or, at least, the altruists.

friedmacguffins wrote:

Are you contrite, in other words, conscientious about it?

anagram wrote:

Must you be trained to do well, or do all people have a concept of sanctity.

For instance, does a savage know the meaning of murder and theft?

Is it a social construct, or part of the hardware of his physical body?

Further, should most people seem similar, in their religious leanings, even in spite of distance, time, and culture?

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02 Sep 2016, 4:23 pm

friedmacguffins wrote:

(I beg your pardon, for the grammatical corrections. Noisy, in my background.)

Campin_Cat wrote:

the sun was "in the sky" where God was

I have no idea what you're talking about----especially, since you only quoted those few words. Anagram and I were having a conversation about ancient Egyptians, for the last couple of pages----I didn't say any of what I said, was MY belief.

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