What motivates someone to have children?

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An absence of belief does not require faith. Believing in something without evidence does.

I will believe in a deity if I’m given sufficient evidence.

I have a similar position when it comes to fairies and invisible, pink dragons.

In my case it's more that I'm willing to be proven wrong. But I haven't found any particularly convincing evidence that there is a deity, much less any of the specific deities discussed in religion. Nor do I feel any pressing need for such a deity to exist, which I suppose biases me to some extent.

Mom got called to school once...

Apparently I told everyone in class that [Santa] wasn't real.

My 2nd grade class teacher told mom that children need to have something to believe in.

Ok, children belive in Santa, grown ups don't. Adults belive in God, who is that mentally superior being that does not belive in God or a spiritual order of some kind? Other adults who are approximately equally unable to grasp what is going on with the universe.

Minder’s take on religion is very similar to my take on religion.

I wonder where they got that theory? My preferred theory is that Santa is a convenient carrot / stick that works as a control on kids until they figure out that somebody made it up. There's a similar theory about organised religion, and curiously, in common with the Santa assertion, there's a lot of emphasis on "if you're obedient then you'll get a great reward."

I suppose the thing with believing in a deity is that every example I've heard of just creates more problems.

For instance, why create a world that's so obviously flawed? Why not make a better one? (I'll leave aside the fact that a perfect world would probably be simultaneously dull and bizarre). None of the answers are very satisfactory. This all being a test makes creation (and all the suffering within) seem like some kind of weird sociological experiment.

The Christian answer is that God created the world perfect, and it was ruined by Eve bringing sin into it by biting the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. But then I have to believe in all this stuff about Eden and Genesis. Plus, why keep punishing humans for what an ancestor did? The rationale I usually hear is that sin can't coexist with God, but why can't an all-powerful being simply rewrite that? Also, why allow the Serpent into Eden in the first place? Or even make the Tree of Knowledge accessible?

It could be that God is just some powerful entity that created the universe on a whim. Fair enough, if so, but it's hard for me to feel any loyalty or love for such an entity.

When it comes to justice, I'm not sure how that justice should be decided. I will say that a lot of us here on WP are beneficiaries of some pretty awful things. A lot of products we buy have questionable labor practices somewhere along the production line. We live on land that may have been taken from other people. So I'm not convinced that an entity of perfect justice would really be on our side. Which is a good thing (because maybe we do deserve some payback), but it's something to keep in mind when you talk about justice.

(And again, the Christian answer is that we are all sinners by nature who can only be redeemed by accepting forgiveness. Once more, fair enough, but that requires me to believe a lot of other things which I'm disinclined to believe).

I flat-out dislike the concept of an afterlife. I can't imagine any way in which a finite crime committed during a mortal life can possibly justify an infinite punishment. Punishment, to me, has four possible purposes: A) Deterrence, B) Retribution, C) Safety, and D) Rehabilitation, and Hell fails three of these. It clearly doesn't deter very many people; if it did, we'd live in a much better place. It does work as retribution, but on such a disproportionate scale as to make it worse than the original crime. Safety's kind of irrelevant after death, and there's no rehabilitation if the punishment is infinite.

The concept of a good afterlife feels more like a bribe than anything else. Do something good and you'll get something good in return. Maybe it is socially beneficial in that it gets people to do good things, but it's a little hard for me to respect this as a motive. Protestant Christianity generally rejects the works-based path to Heaven, though I find that doing good to get into Heaven still tends to influence people's behavior. And I have my own issues with sola fide (namely, that it enables some pretty bad behavior with people who take it as carte blanche to do what they want).

I'll trot out the old phrase: "There's no justice; there's just us." And we'll never have perfect justice because we aren't smart enough to figure it out. All we can do is try to make things better (and the stuff we do to improve things today could well turn into its own major problem in a decade or so).

And to be clear, I'm not even saying that these are reasons for God existing or not existing. Simply that I haven't found any explanation or justification for a deity especially satisfying.

I suppose it depends on whether or not the atheist absolutely insists there are no deities. If they do that, then there's at least a tiny sliver of something that could be called faith, because the nonexistence of deities hasn't been absolutely proved. But I don't think that little bit of faith compares with the faith of theism, which is the belief in the existence of something that's not demonstrable by the five senses or by any detection machine, experiment, or logical inference. And while the existence of a deity would be extraordinary, thus (according to some) requiring extraordinary evidence (which it hasn't presented AFAIK), atheism is relatively ordinary and plausible.

In my own case I just go with the balance of probabilities that the evidence and reasoning that came to my attention led me to figure out, i.e. that the existence of deities looks very unlikely, and so I don't worry about any risk going to hell for not obeying some supposedly divine set of rules. I don't absolutely insist I'm 100% right, but the doubt in my mind is so small as to be negligible, even though the consequences of my being wrong might be worse than anything I've ever experienced.

The other reason I don't absolutely insist I'm right is politeness - when theists make sweeping, categorical assertions that their supposed deity is real, it sometimes annoys me, and I get the impression that when atheists do the same thing in reverse, it sometimes annoys theists, so I try not to fan the flames like that. It's kind of strange to have to be so careful, given that we live in a rather assumptive world in which it's pretty normal for people to talk and think as if 2 + 1.99999999999999 = 4, but religion can be a very thorny issue, and I think if everybody refrained from that, and politely preceded their approximations with "I think....." or "I could be wrong but......" etc., there might be less polarisation and more of a calm, level-headed conversation, reason wouldn't take wings and it wouldn't degenerate into personal attacks quite so often.

I think that's the kind of comment that does more harm than good. As you've already said you're not talking to Mikah, I don't see why you then refer to him. And what you say looks to me very much like an attempt to piss him off.

I think that most of us here are educated enough to not belive 100% what this or that holy book says. Personally I like the idea of a God in a metaphorical/philosophical way but I find myself unable to believe in a religion because of the mythological part of it. I really like Calvinism but I would be a hypocrite if I said I believe in Jesus as part of the holy trinity, or that he was born to a virgin mother and so on. Same with other religions. But to simply state that there is no God or spiritual order in the universe and that we are nothing more but biological machines is too nihilistic for me and therefore meaningless, in the sense that if one is a nihilist why continue living at all, why keep wanting the beautiful things in life, why keep being moral, why giving any significance to the emotions. I think that there is an order in the universe and also meaning and we are hardwired to it. We have evolved to become spiritual for a reason.

Why wouldn't you keep being moral in a nihilistic universe?

Because it doesn't make any difference. It's a 50/50, you can chose to be moral or you don't, it doesn't make any difference on the cosmic scale.

It could still make a difference to someone who's helped by doing good. That's a lot more important IMO.

I wouldn't really expect anything I do to make a difference in a cosmic scale.

It's really not that sort of occasion. It's more like:

Mikah: Atheism must be a faith based position because [logical argument] there's no way to actually acquire data on that outside of "divine revelation" which is not something that can apply to an atheist universe, oh and by the way in other news of similar difficulty to ingest: 1-plus-1-equals-fucking-2.

Pepe: Let us agree to disagree

Mikah: ^_- There is no hope. I hope the Chinese actually do invade Australia.



You've made a leap or a choice somewhere along the line. The default position of a human must be a very pure sort of agnosticism - lacking any thoughts on the matter at all. If you can even say that you lack a belief in a higher power - you must have conceptualised a higher power at some point and rejected its existence, no?



I wouldn't worry about, it's just banter. He only gets really annoyed with me in the Ukraine thread.

Indeed, people do seem to keep being moral. Surveys fail to demonstrate that secular societies behave any less morally than religious ones, the only exceptions being where a secular minority are somewhat excluded from their surrounding community because of their atheism, so it seems it's not the atheism as such that's the cause, it's the feeling of alienation. I think humans are hard-wired to be fairly kind towards others, as long as there's a sense of "we," of group identity, between them. And even I, a person who doesn't feel particularly accepted by society in general, and sees the very word "spiritual" as meaningless, strongly dislike harming others, and get quite a buzz out of helping them.

There appear to be evolutionary explanations for what I would call superstition in the human race. Those evolutionary relics remain to this day and make us fail to fully grasp that the dead are dead, and to get strange feelings of some animate agency behind certain phenomena. In that sense we have evolved to be "spiritual" and to be to a degree hard-wired to a sense of some kind of external cosmic agency.

There are rational reasons to believe in the non-existence of a conscious, compassionate, all-powerful "god".
Understanding archeology, evolutionary biology, and human psychology allow us to come to a more rational conclusion than faith-based BELIEFS.