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AudaciousLarue
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17 Feb 2012, 2:08 pm

Hello everybody, I'm new to this forum and would like to first of all start off with something that has bothered me for around two years. Here goes nothing.

My parents believe that I am going to Hell. Period, no questions asked as to why I am destined to go to Hell, beyond the fact that I have decided to choose not to believe in God and apparently that means my soul is in peril.

My journey down towards atheism began around a year or two ago(9th or 10th grade in high school). I was(and am) really big into philosophy.

I read more of course, and had at that point totally questioned the existence of a higher power. My parents tried to limit my philosophy intake, but didn't based on the assumption that free-thinking is good(and they've mostly given up on trying to control my beliefs).

We would get into bitter fights over religion, with my parents always concluding that to have purpose in life one must believe that a higher being is watching over us, every day.

I tried refuted this, arguing that one can still live life to the fullest, even more so without the fear of eternal damnation hanging over one's head. The fear of hell is not necessary to have a solid moral compass.

But, I feel guilty. My parents pray for me a lot, because they really do worry about my soul. And I seem to have chosen my path, and i don't see how I can go back. I just cannot believe in God.

They want me to become a born-again Christian "when I'm ready" but I feel right now that I just can't do it.

Is questioning everything really a "sin?" Is having free will putting you at odds with God, whom I really sometimes feel does exist, yet at the same time don't?

The biggest problem I have is this: How do my parents KNOW I will go to Hell, as if they are God?

They also think that I will overtime take up bad morals, even though right now they don't believe I have them yet. They argue that atheism=bad morals.

What do you think?

Anyways, I'd like to hear your opinions.



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17 Feb 2012, 2:18 pm

Your parents are confusing many different issues.

First off, maybe the universe was created, and maybe the universe wasn't created. That's the first issue.

If the universe was created, then maybe the creator is a person. That's the second issue.

If the creator is a person, then maybe he has interacted with the universe after its creation. That's the third issue.

If the creator has interacted with the universe after its creation, then maybe Jesus was his son. That's the fourth issue.

If Jesus was his son, then maybe Jesus was talking about a literal hell when he talking about hell. That's the fifth issue.

If Jesus was talking about a literal hell, then maybe you are going to hell. That's the sixth issue.

But it seems like your parents are fudging it and equating "God = Christianity = Hell".



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17 Feb 2012, 3:22 pm

If you do in fact go to Christian hell (a place that I'll state flat out does not exist) then you are going to love it. You will meet Bertrand Russell, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Albert Einstein, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Sartre and many many more. If you go to heaven you will meet, a ton of convicted murderers, rapists, pedophiles (and I would make a catholic joke here but I won't), you'll have to deal with people who threaten and lie to children, who are notoriously intolerant of other people and so on.

Plus, all the cool bands, drug dealers and women of ill repute.

On a serious note:

I have been in your position and while the guilt trips are hard to take, don't let emotional blackmail force you to compromise your beliefs.

Bill Maher said it well when he said that a synonym for "pray" is "wishing it was so" and Steve Buscemi has a good one in "The Island" when he says "Who's God?" Well, you know when you close your eyes and you wish really hard for something? Well, God's the guy that ignores you"

For Ateism and bad morals, I have a laundry list of quite some length, as a cardinal of the Catholic Church said at one point "given the number of sins we have committed in the lifetime of the church, reference to them must be summary". However, the quote "If left to their own devices good people will do good things and evil people will do evil things, but to make a good person do an evil thing that takes religion." suffices. I also assume that pointing out that "atheism ---> bad morals" is a slippery slope fallacy based on slippery grounds to say the least to your parents would be ineffective.



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17 Feb 2012, 3:24 pm

What is it worth to your parents that you believe as they do? Can they prove that their faith is valid?

RELIGION (n):
1. The socio-political expression of faith
2. A means of explaining the unknownable to the gullible while maintaining their ignorance
3. A means of justifying arson, murder, rape, and theft for fun and profit



circular
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17 Feb 2012, 3:38 pm

Hell is a metaphor for bad. It is a simplification of the principle of morality.

Problem is, religious people think that good morality is believing in something. Whereas it should be obvious that morality is more about what you do and if you care about other people.

Second problem, the duality good/bad makes people think that there is nothing between. But most of our deeds are not good and not bad. There are too many consequences to actions, so most actions cannot be categorized in good or bad.

So you can relax about what you do.

Now if your parents are worried, you are not responsible for it, because you are not responsible for the idea that "we should believe in religion". Your parents are the victims of this idea, but you cannot remove that idea from their heads. You can try to explain to them why this idea does not make sense, but they can do the steps to get out of it, you cannot do it for them.

Finally, religious people say that we must obey to the word of God, i.e. the Bible or some other text. But they do not. Anyone pick and choose from religious texts according to their morality. So you can skip that, and create by yourself the rules you think are right. You can also do a compromise, by finding in religious texts rules that you like, and reminding them with a religious reference.

If your parents are making you feel guilty, maybe they are using guilt mongering techniques, and I invite you to watch this cool video to understand what is going on :
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P2vYIgPdKg[/youtube]



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18 Feb 2012, 7:06 am

AudaciousLarue wrote:
My parents believe that I am going to Hell. Period, no questions asked as to why I am destined to go to Hell, beyond the fact that I have decided to choose not to believe in God and apparently that means my soul is in peril.

.


This here lies the problem. I see this as verbal abuse while religious people see it as trying to help.

Religious people are wrong when they say this, it is very simple, and I will shout it from the rooftops if I have to. This is when I start to get angry so I am going to stop talking.



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18 Feb 2012, 4:46 pm

It's always difficult to have these kinds of conflicts. They are not really resolvable.

Quote:
Is questioning everything really a "sin?"


That's really two questions: Is questioning God's existence a sin within a religious context? Pretty much, yes. Maybe not a strict sin, but it's close enough to the line, and likely causes enough practical problems living the faith that it is hard to make compatible.

Is questioning God wrong? Well.... as an atheist, I don't think God exists. So, is it wrong to ask a question that will lead you to truth? My intuitions would tell me "no" without much equivocation on the matter. The issue, and this may seem odd, is that doing anything other than harshly condemning immoral ideas will make people think you are immoral. http://mindhacks.com/2011/08/11/when-ex ... mes-a-sin/

Quote:
How do my parents KNOW I will go to Hell


Here's the steps:
1) They "know" Christianity is true
2) They know Christianity entails atheists/non-Christians/etc go to hell
3) They know you are not a Christian
4) Therefore, they know you go to hell if Christianity is true (2 and 3)
5) Therefore they "know" you go to hell.

Premise 1 is probably false.

Quote:
They also think that I will overtime take up bad morals, even though right now they don't believe I have them yet.


This is a difficult issue because it is true that atheists tend to not think certain things are immoral when Christians think so. So, atheists are not as negative towards premarital sex, they are not as negative towards homosexuality, and they have no problems with some of the transgressive elements of culture.

However, when it comes to empathy, and justice, and all of those other things that really count, atheists are just fine. Some atheists have greater moral fortitude than most Christians. (Arguably even, being an atheist will entail that a person tends to have greater moral strengths in certain issues. Anybody can go with the flow, but it takes a person of character to stand against it, and atheism is NOT the flow)



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18 Feb 2012, 5:08 pm

@OP:

First of all your parents sound like pretty much every garden variety Christian and Catholic I know - my parents and family included. They almost all do the same thing, instinctively and reflexively think in nearly all of the ways out outlined, the difference I might note with my parents is that I think they believe in my being a good person so much that God couldn't possibly keep me from getting to know him eventually - like you they and I think much of my family pray for me a lot as they pray for everyone.

The conflict that I feel, you feel, I think we all feel, is that it heartbreaking to watch them go through what they do if someone they love and care about admits to being an atheist. Even though everything that you've logically seen about existence makes it pretty much a slam dunk in the evidence realm we're all surrounded by people who are jacked in incredibly deep to a theistic frame of reference that's much more profound than how they simply view a life hereafter, it runs through the whole fabric of how they see and equate everything.

That said - I used to be just like that, I used to be in that network (even as an outcast and aspie), so I know what its been like trying to have to rewire everything about how I see the world. From my own deconversion experience I do understand one thing very well - they're big fear, or probably the biggest legitimate fear to be had if the whole world deconverted, is the slipping and sliding on nihilism, whether or not we could maintain right to human life, dignity, etc. on any intellectual basis if evolution, economics, and Ayn Rand type philosophy was the only mathematically honest answer. People seem terrified that if we did that we'd be going to an Orwellian society where the value of human life would be dirt, killing an insect or human wouldn't be all that much different, and that everything they would love about life would go out the window.

I think this is *exactly* why I feel so strongly about atheists, or at least enough given groups, to assert they're about 'something', some type of standards, some type of preservation of the dignity of man/woman/child, and show even lead by example that they can show every bit as much love, compassion, integrity, honesty, etc. as people can who live Sunday seven days a week. So long as mainstream atheism dubs itself an anti-culture I don't think the world faith network will ever be going away, simply because these people can clearly see a half-baked and dangerous idea when its there. I think a lot of us who've gone atheist have done so because we had no choice - it was forced on us by how our minds work, how we were treated, and yes - we're most likely right, but we wouldn't have to abandon the network or abandon even having the belief if we weren't essentially pushed out by our oddities. Some people who grew up in religious homes who turned out atheist may have a different story but I think I encapsulated the majority.

Pretty much what we're dealing with it humanity reflecting on itself and trying to weigh this decision: Do we keep believing a lie because it keeps us safe from one another or do we accept the truth knowing that we could be looking like 1930s/40's Germany or Russia as a result? That decision is just too Faustian for most people and because of that they'll gladly throw their heart and soul into what they know keeps society from cannibalizing itself over genetic worth and other 'right to exist' or 'right to liberty' type issues. Simply put people would still much rather put these things in the hands of an imaginary being who we can't negotiate with than put these value decisions in the hands of a mortal - we're far too afraid of our own for that.


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18 Feb 2012, 5:19 pm

Ask your parents this: who is the better and more moral person, the person who does good deeds of his own free will, or the person who does good deeds simply because he is threatened with eternal torture if he does not do good deeds?



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18 Feb 2012, 8:03 pm

Well I don't think your parents can claim to know who is or is not going to heaven or hell. The best advice I ever got on the subject was from reading han urs von balthasar who points out that Christians, whatever they think they know, are at their best when they work from the assumption that they do not know who will go to heaven. That they are at their best when they hope that all will go to heaven and leave the judgement where it belongs, it is called 'last' for a reason.

For myself. I never received such a hostile reaction when I was an atheist. My parents were not particularly religious and I don't ever remember really discussing it with them until I chose atheism. Some of my friends have chosen to be atheists, turning their backs on very religious histories in order to do so, there certainly is something brave in their willingness to walk that path. I certainly believe that accepting God is about accepting grace and that this decision is logical but I don't think God hated Paul, before even when he was hunting and hating Christians.

The problem with selecting atheism is that on the common understanding it is the end result of a long walk. While that certainly compliments the person on having proceeded down that path, from where I sit, it just does not seem to be true. If at arriving at atheism, you declare your walk over, then you have not really satisfied your reason for setting out in the first place. One walks away from all they know, only in the hope that they will find a truth, not because they necessarily think atheism is 100% true (I think that to embrace that view is profoundly at odds with the idea of atheism). Hence, having been an atheist, I later on, embraced Christianity. From where I sit, I see atheism as a station on my walk to discover what I believe and not the terminus of need need to search or as an aim in and of itself. Atheism and being free to be an atheist gave me the space I really needed to become a very strong believer. If someone tells me I have no right to walk that path, then they assume far too much.


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18 Feb 2012, 9:06 pm

I think the OP nailed how the vast majority - brought to it by normal means - view it though (perhaps less the assertions of hell though).

I was going to start a side post off of my second post in this thread though. It seems like this is less about belief in a deity than it is lack of faith in man, and I'm pretty convinced that much of contemporary Christiandom falls under the category of people who just go along with it all because they terrified to know what kinds of conclusions we'd come up with as a fully atheistic society where the keys to the kingdom so to speak were in our hands (like human rights or right to live) were left in our hands rather than the hands of something external to our tampering - even if imaginary.


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19 Feb 2012, 9:04 am

I noticed that everybody here is implicitely talking about atheism as a negative thing that well we have no choice but to accept because we are too rational, and about believing in god as a positive thing that poor atheist cannot have.

It is not about good or bad, it is a social thing. There is nothing good about god, and nothing bad about atheism. It is only a conditionning to associate good with god and faith, and bad with non belief. The idea that atheism is immoral is a false conclusion that comes from this conditionning.

The absolute moral of religious texts is absurd. For example, if you are in a situation when you have two options, and that one option is not steeling followed by the death of one person, and the other is steeling but preventing the death of one person, would you think that "doing nothing because you don't won't to be involved in that for absolute reasons" is a good idea ? And do you need a book to know that killing someone must be avoided ? If these religious people had not the Bible, would they kill people around, rape, etc. ? Really they do not that only because it is written ?

That is such a negative vision of human beings. Why we don't do that ? Because we know it's bad, because we feel there is a problem with it, because we've been told that it's bad, because we know what it's like to suffer, because we do not want to have problems with other people. There is no need for a religious text or a religious experience to know that.

Problem is, we can get the feeling that not believing is bad because we get punished by believers, rejected, etc. So we can have the feeling that it's bad not to believe. But it is not because in itself it has negative consequences, but because it is punished by people. Not punished by god. So you see this is really a social thing. In this case, God is just the name of social pressure.



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19 Feb 2012, 9:29 am

circular: there's absolutely nothing wrong with atheism, just that 'atheists' as a group can't throw responsibility up in the air, out of their hands, and say "We're not a culture" if the desire is to have a post-religious world. To move past a fringe minority you have to take on the responsibility of telling the world what you are for, what you're not going to allow to happen in terms of erosion of rights, and you need to make it clear that you have a strongly pro-human philosophy and rock-solid arguments against aggressive eugenics, strong arguments against totalitarianism, strong arguments for individual human rights and liberty, etc. etc. and we as atheists would need to take those things as seriously and present those things as seriously as theists would edicts handed down by 'God'. Without that any structure proposed by atheists looks like its built on sand, and as long as many atheists knee-jerk "We're not a culture" we'll always be fringe.


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19 Feb 2012, 9:38 am

I quite agree with you, but to a certain extent, I don't think atheism or religion has anything to do with responsibility, rights, philosophy, etc.

I think that morality is something that is more common, and that is independent of religion or atheism. When someone say that what is right is god's will, it does not provide any information, because, what then would be god's will, well it is what's right. So really believing in god has nothing to do with morality. And sometimes, in the name of god, very immoral things are done.

I would rather say that ethics as an atheist science, can have the role you are talking about. But ethics can be understood and supported by believers too. So, I don't really think that it should be "on the side" of atheism. Morality is something else.

Where I agree with you is that while being an atheist, it is a good thing to remind that morality does mean something, even if it is not defined by any religous text.



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19 Feb 2012, 9:39 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
circular: there's absolutely nothing wrong with atheism, just that 'atheists' as a group can't throw responsibility up in the air, out of their hands, and say "We're not a culture" if the desire is to have a post-religious world. To move past a fringe minority you have to take on the responsibility of telling the world what you are for, what you're not going to allow to happen in terms of erosion of rights, and you need to make it clear that you have a strongly pro-human philosophy and rock-solid arguments against aggressive eugenics, strong arguments against totalitarianism, strong arguments for individual human rights and liberty, etc. etc. and we as atheists would need to take those things as seriously and present those things as seriously as theists would edicts handed down by 'God'. Without that any structure proposed by atheists looks like its built on sand, and as long as many atheists knee-jerk "We're not a culture" we'll always be fringe.


atheism works just fine with rational arguments for those issues, you dont need a central pr agency to have that.


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19 Feb 2012, 10:00 am

circular wrote:
I think that morality is something that is more common, and that is independent of religion or atheism. When someone say that what is right is god's will, it does not provide any information, because, what then would be god's will, well it is what's right. So really believing in god has nothing to do with morality. And sometimes, in the name of god, very immoral things are done.

I think we also know how the dumb and ignorant are with facts though. People can pretty much disobey or ignore any rules that go over their heads.

circular wrote:
I would rather say that ethics as an atheist science, can have the role you are talking about. But ethics can be understood and supported by believers too. So, I don't really think that it should be "on the side" of atheism. Morality is something else.

Well right, the argument is God/no God, especially as an atheist you or I could just as easily assert that many Christians have lead upstandingly moral lives without a God and that they simply didn't know that they were doing so. The trick is then also convincing them that there is enough of a tried and true motivational structure within atheism that people can go on showing the best of what 'humanity' is. I think that's where PR - central or otherwise - needs to be there. Also, it needs to be removed from the angry and bitter to walk the visible high road, like it would be great for instance to see something like an atheist version of the masons who'd be a bit like the intellectual paladins of society - who'd adhere to incredibly strong ethics, do great work, get their name out there, work side by side with Christians on works endeavors, and if Christians ever say anything to them about their lack of faith they'd politely brush it aside or just flatly tell them that they're glad to have the Christian there helping them (ie. kill them with kindness). Regardless it has to get into the societal neural memory that atheism can organize to do great things and show the best of humanity as much as religion; it just needs to be demonstrated and have visible examples.

circular wrote:
Where I agree with you is that while being an atheist, it is a good thing to remind that morality does mean something, even if it is not defined by any religous text.

I think where a nihilist would get confused is that there are two realities - the objective and the subjective. If the objective unravels and essentially becomes vacuous to us in terms of leading us or even suggests we'd be better off extinct, the subjective needs to kick in, define its needs, define the needs and wants essentially of the human race, and we go from there to maximize liberty, safety, and inclusion.


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