Why do people choose to be atheist?

[Mac Dre]

brandon, you're taking this too seriously. religious people and scientists have to know how and why the world was created. why cant people just be amazed and thankful for however it was created? both the big bang theory and god creating it in 7 days are both horrible explanations. people believing in the 7 day thing should just stop and think, wow there was no way this happened. scientists should step back and realized, wow this is way more complicated than i thought. why cant everyone just accept that we will never know how it was created and just live our lives without religion or beliefs or faith?

[YugoRocketsFan]

3. If people don’t believe in God, the historical results are horrific, so how do we deal with the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it? Countless millions lost their lives under these godless regimes, regimes more influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch (superman) than they were by transcendent morality.

 

lol hitler? HITLER!?

 

Hitler? lmao.

 

http://www.redicecreations.com/ul_img/4836hitlereugeniopacelli.jpg

 

^ Heres hitler with a very well-known atheist who thinks like him (The pope)

 

http://www.bowness.demon.co.uk/buckle.jpg

 

God with us, I thought Nazis hated religion? Hitler made all his soldiers wear these

 

 

“We were convinced that the people needs and requires this faith. We have therefore undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” -Adolf Hitler, in a speech in Berlin on 24 Oct. 1933

 

“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” –Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

 

Hitler’s involvement with the Church:

 

a) Hitler was baptized as Roman Catholic during infancy in Austria.

 

b) As Hitler approached boyhood he attended a monastery school. (On his way to school young Adolf daily observed a stone arch which was carved with the monastery’s coat of arms bearing a swastika.)

 

c) Hitler was a communicant and an altar boy in the Catholic Church.

 

d) As a young man he was confirmed as a “soldier of Christ.” His most ardent goal at the time was to become a priest. Hitler writes of his love for the church and clergy: “I had excellent opportunity to intoxicate myself with the solemn splendor of the brilliant church festivals. As was only natural, the abbot seemed to me, as the village priest had once seemed to my father, the highest and most desirable ideal.” -Adolf Hitler (Mein Kampf)

 

e) Hitler was NEVER excommunicated nor condemned by his church. Matter of fact the Church felt he was JUST and “avenging for God” in attacking the Jews for they deemed the Semites the killers of Jesus.

 

f) Hitler, Franco and Mussolini were given VETO power over whom the pope could appoint as a bishop in Germany, Spain and Italy. In turn they surtaxed the Catholics and gave the money to the Vatican. Hitler wrote a speech in which he talks about this alliance, this is an excerpt: “The fact that the Vatican is concluding a treaty with the new Germany means the acknowledgement of the National Socialist state by the Catholic Church. This treaty shows the whole world clearly and unequivocally that the assertion that National Socialism [Nazism] is hostile to religion is a lie.” Adolf Hitler, 22 July 1933, writing to the Nazi Party

 

g) Hitler worked CLOSELY with Pope Pius in converting Germanic society and supporting the church. The Church absorbed Nazi ideals and preached them as part of their sermons in turn Hitler placed Catholic teachings in public education. This photo depicts Hitler with Archbishop Cesare Orsenigo, the papal nuncio in Berlin. It was taken On April 20, 1939, when Orsenigo celebrated Hitler’s birthday. The celebrations were initiated by Pacelli (Pope Pius XII) and became a tradition.

 

 

 

Each April 20, Cardinal Bertram of Berlin was to send “warmest congratulations to the Fuhrer in the name of the bishops and the dioceses in Germany with “fervent prayers which the Catholics of Germany are sending to heaven on their altars.” (If you would like to know more about the secret dealings of Hitler and the Pope I recommend you get a book titled: Hitler’s Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, by John Cornwell)

 

h) Due to Hitler’s involvement with the Church he began enacting doctrines of the Church as law. He outlawed all abortion, raged a death war on all homosexuals, and demanded corporal punishment in schools and home. Many times Hitler addressed the church and promised that Germany would implement its teachings: “The National Socialist State professes its allegiance to positive Christianity. It will be its honest endeavor to protect both the great Christian Confessions in their rights, to secure them from interference with their doctrines (Lehren), and in their duties to constitute a harmony with the views and the exigencies of the State of today.” –Adolf Hitler, on 26 June 1934, to Catholic bishops to assure them that he would take action against the new pagan propaganda “Providence has caused me to be Catholic, and I know therefore how to handle this Church.” -Adolf Hitler, reportedly to have said in Berlin in 1936 on the enmity of the Catholic Church to National Socialism

 

 

Nice source Real Deal! A guy who falsely states Hitler as an Atheist just has proven that God is REAL!

Edited October 18, 2009 by YugoRocketsFan

[YugoRocketsFan]

Hey guys, all your pets, dogs, cats, etc. are going to hell because they dont believe in god!

[BasX]

Fun thread is fun

[Warren2ThaG]

Will you ever get baptized?

[Real Deal]

Nice source Real Deal! A guy who falsely states Hitler as an Atheist just has proven that God is REAL!

Must have been a different god, because there's no way he believed in my God.

 

But, anyways, you didn't have many answers.

[YugoRocketsFan]

The trouble is that atheists seem to think that I choose to believe in God. That would be pretty dumb. I just realize that life would not work if:

 

 

1. Gravity worked differently

2. Electromagnetism worked differently

3. Protons, neutrons, OR electrons had different mass

4. The temperature on earth were not just right

5. Same thing for atmosphere

6. The sun were a little bigger

7. ...or smaller

8. We needed to breathe something rarer (like, say, Xenon) instead of oxygen

9. Water weren't so common

 

 

I'll bet money that the atheists won't even consider that there's no reason for any of these things to be true. They just are, like the universe just is. That's called science.

 

So god must exist because Earth can store life? There probably millions of planets out there on other galaxies that cant store life. One eventually had to work.

 

But there is NO God, not there probably isnt, there ISNT. God does not exist. There is nobody with a conscience who creates planets. If God created us whenever the Earth was created, what was he doing before then?

[Real Deal]

The trouble is that atheists seem to think that I choose to believe in God. That would be pretty dumb. I just realize that life would not work if:

 

 

1. Gravity worked differently

2. Electromagnetism worked differently

3. Protons, neutrons, OR electrons had different mass

4. The temperature on earth were not just right

5. Same thing for atmosphere

6. The sun were a little bigger

7. ...or smaller

8. We needed to breathe something rarer (like, say, Xenon) instead of oxygen

9. Water weren't so common

 

 

I'll bet money that the atheists won't even consider that there's no reason for any of these things to be true. They just are, like the universe just is. That's called science.

Yes sir. I mean, if everything created from a big bang, I guess we would've already found a few more planets exactly like ours...or, well, even the slightest bit like ours.

 

But, nah...it's just Earth, as far as we know, as far as we can see, that houses such uniqueness. No reason why...it just DOES.

[YugoRocketsFan]

Must have been a different god, because there's no way he believed in my God.

 

But, anyways, you didn't have many answers.

 

No, he believed in the same god as you, he read the bible, all that good stuff.

 

I dont have answers, because I dont wanna state things without evidence, I can write my own religious book if i wanted, I can say that reincarnation is real, there is no god but instead there is a giant cat who creates planets and all that other crap but that would be bullcrap kind of the like the many beliefs that are held as true by most people today.

[YugoRocketsFan]

"Belief in God" is what the demons have. "Belief in God" is what the Crusaders, the Inquisition, and the terrorists behind 9/11 had. "Belief in God" will drag people to the same hell that anything else will.

 

 

The Bible teaches accepting the grace offered by the death of Jesus. Let the religious people have their belief in God. Let them make and impose rules that were never Scriptural. That's not how the Bible works.

 

There is no god, there is a giant cat in the sky who coughs out balls that turn into planets, THIS IS THE ANSWER TO HOW THE EARTH WAS MADE, you cant prove me wrong!

[YugoRocketsFan]

Fine, assume that there eventually had to be an earth. Is there any particular reason for gravity, electromagnetism, or subatomic masses to be the way there are? If they were the slightest bit different, the universe wouldn't exactly work.

 

When the giant cat spit us out, those all came with the thing we know as Earth.

[GamerGuy]

There is no god, there is a giant cat in the sky who coughs out balls that turn into planets, THIS IS THE ANSWER TO HOW THE EARTH WAS MADE, you cant prove me wrong!

So you're not an atheist then?

[YugoRocketsFan]

So you're not an atheist then?

 

Nope, Im a Catheist.

[YugoRocketsFan]

Is there any reason to be so hostile? In case you're not aware: The one, single, only reason I'm doing this is that I don't want you to suffer eternally because nobody would give you legitimate reason to accept Christ. At the very worst, you should simply feel bad for the poor, stupid Christian trying to get you to do something insane.

 

There is no heaven or hell, Christians stole that from Pagan beliefs in order to convert fools. Heaven was widely believed to actually be in the clouds, Ive been above the clouds, Ive been inside the cloud, there is no god or dead people there.

[Poe]

1. If there is no God, “the big questions” remain unanswered, so how do we answer the following questions: Where did everything come from, and why is there something rather than nothing? Why is there conscious, intelligent life on this planet, and is there any meaning to this life? Does human history lead anywhere, or is it all in vain since death is merely the end? How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier? If these concepts are merely social constructions, or human opinions, where do we look to determine what is good or bad, right or wrong? If you are content within an atheistic worldview, what circumstances would serve to make you open to other answers?

 

2. If we reject the existence of God, we are left with a crisis of meaning, so why don’t we see more atheists taking their worldview more seriously like Jean Paul Sartre, or Friedrich Nietzsche, or Michel Foucault? These three atheists recognized that in the absence of God, there was no transcendent meaning beyond one’s own self-interests, pleasures, or tastes. The experience of atheistic meaninglessness is recorded in Sartre’s book Nausea. Without God, these three thinkers, among others, show us a world of just stuff, thrown out into space and time, going nowhere, meaning nothing.

 

3. If people don’t believe in God, the historical results are horrific, so how do we deal with the regimes of Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it? Countless millions lost their lives under these godless regimes, regimes more influenced by Nietzsche’s concept of the ubermensch (superman) than they were by transcendent morality.

 

4. If there is no God, the problems of evil and suffering are in no way solved, so where is the hope of redemption, or meaning for those who suffer? Suffering is just as tragic, if not more so, without God because there is no hope of it being rendered meaningful or transcendent, redemptive or redeemable, since no interventions in this life or reparations in an afterlife are possible. It might be true that there is no God to blame now, but neither is there a God to reach out to for strength, transcendent meaning, or comfort. There is only madness and confusion in the face of suffering and evil.

 

5. If there is no God, we lose the very standard by which we critique religions and religious people, so whose opinion matters most? Whose voice will be heard? Whose tastes or preferences will be honored? In the long run, human tastes and opinions have no more weight than we give them, and who are we to give them meaning anyway? Who is to say that lying, or cheating or adultery or child molestation are wrong –really wrong? Where do those standards come from? Sure, our societies might make these things “illegal” and impose penalties or consequences for things that are not socially acceptable, but human cultures have at various times legally or socially disapproved of everything from believing in God to believing the world revolves around the sun; from slavery, to interracial marriage, from polygamy to monogamy. Human taste, opinion law and culture are hardly dependable arbiters of Truth.

 

6. If there is no God, we don’t make sense, so how do we explain human longings and desire for the transcendent? How do we even explain human questions for meaning and purpose, or inner thoughts like, why I am so unfulfilled or empty? Why do I hunger for the spiritual? How do we deal with these questions if nothing can exist beyond the material world? Atheists, particularly atheistic scientists go way beyond their scientific training when they depart from the “how” questions to prognosticating about the “why” questions. Even terms like “natural selection” seems a misuse of words, since only an intelligent being can assess options and choose. How do we get laws out of luck, or predictable processes out of brute chance? If all that makes us different from animals is learning and altruism, why do the brutish still widely outnumber the wise in our world?

 

 

1. For some reason, religious people think that just because you can't answer a question, that somehow makes religion or God a liable answer. Just because you don't know something doesn't mean you can pull up an old book and claim it as a liable source, since it doesn't support itself with any kind of proof other than claiming it's influenced by a divine being - when it's really just the ideas of people long ago trying to create an answer for questions that they didn't have the scientific means of answering at the period of time of which it was made. Look, when the Bible was written, people thought the Earth was flat and the Sun literally rose and set, among many other things we would consider to be crazy nonesense today (why? because nobody had the scientific research to show otherwise). Then big evil scientists came along in around the 1500s, and with observations using new technology (telescopes), they discovered the Earth is in fact round and it spins and revolves around the Sun, explaining the appearance from the Earth's perspective that the Sun rises and sets. It took quite some time, about couple hundred years for religious people to finally accept this claim, just like the evolution vs creationism "argument" we're having today.

 

2. If there is some sort of meaning or purpose to life and existence, we simply haven't discovered it yet. Back to my previous point about the bible, it's just a book of old ideas. There is not a single point made that I have seen there to prove to me otherwise. Age and popularity don't count.

 

3. Hitler didn't kill the Jews in the name of atheism. Just because the person who did these horrific things happened to be atheist, doesn't mean it was the sole purpose of being a nonbeliever. As far as I know, none of these people killed in the name of their disbelief in a god (if that even makes any sense in the first place). But you can't say the same thing about religious leaders, like when it comes to most wars that take place, it's almost always in the name of each others' God. George Bush said that God told him to invade Iraq. There is a difference.

 

4. You can't take away what you have done in the past. This is reality. It's sad, the truth hurts, but the idea that you can do away your previous wrongs by clasping your hands together and acknowledging what you've done to an imaginary being is just disillusional, even if it is comforting to some. I think it's far better to cope with your problems than the religious easy-fix. Praying doesn't change reality.

 

5. So religion, as in Christianity, is the basis for morality? Did you know that in the "good book" we call the Bible God instructs over 2 million deaths plus 65 cities destroyed without their inhabitants recorded? Plus there are many fishy stories in there as well. Just watch this video for a small taste:

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ODeI1u-0bg

 

You have to be absurd to believe this book is the bases for the difference between right and wrong. Other than all the crazy things in it, just like laws, the scriptures are man made.

 

6. I can't answer the first part of this one. I've never wanted any kind of "spirituality", or had the feeling of being unfulfilled or empty. I doubt most atheists have, either, unless they are depressed or something.

 

But, lastly, the "how" from the "why". The Myth that somehow science and religion are separate studies that show two different parts of life (other than reality from delusion). Science is the study on life. It's all done through observations and experiments and no conclusion is accepted until proven. Religion, on the other hand, is accepted by many without question, and passed on to children before they are old enough to be skeptical about it. Even if science didn't or couldn't answer the "why" question, that still doesn't make man made scripture from the past a liable source. At all.

[YugoRocketsFan]

I understand that you don't want to change your mind out in the open like this. But take this seriously, and think about it. Those are simply inexplicable. There are exactly 0 reasons for the fundamental forces to operate as they do.

 

I have a supernatural explanation. Do you have a natural one?

 

Change my mind? Nothing in the world will ever make me believe in a god, nothing. 0, nada. There is no evidence, no proof, no basis, no stability, no anything that a god exists. These have been invented by humans, I dont know how the Earth was created and what created it, but doesnt mean that I should start saying that myths are true because its a widely believed "answer"

 

If God is real, why doesnt he/she tell me? You know why? Because God DOES NOT exist. Why did "God" talk to Jesus and Mohammed and told him to spread our beliefs? What the heck is the point of that? Why doesnt god just create 6 billion religious books in all languages and tell us that hes real and everything? If God made the world so perfect, why is there death, disease and all that other bad stuff? If God created everything he created diseases like diabetes, cancer and AIDS.

Edited October 18, 2009 by YugoRocketsFan

[TheNextBestThing]

Change my mind? Nothing in the world will ever make me believe in a god, nothing. 0, nada. There is no evidence, no proof, no basis, no stability, no anything that a god exists. These have been invented by humans, I dont know how the Earth was created and what created it, but doesnt mean that I should start saying that myths are true because its a widely believed "answer"

 

If God is real, why doesnt he/she tell me? You know why? Because God DOES NOT exist.

 

 

That's a great point. I know that if I were an all-powerful Creator, I'd certainly do whatever you asked.

[Poe]

Nothing in the world will ever make me believe in a god

Don't sink to the Christian level of "nothing you say can denounce my faith". At least be open minded enough to entertain the idea of a god, but not convinced until given proof.

[YugoRocketsFan]

Don't sink to the Christian level of "nothing you say can denounce my faith". At least be open minded enough to entertain the idea of a god, but not convinced until given proof.

 

Im not sinking to any level. I'll only believe in a god if the God himself told me that he is real.

[TheNextBestThing]

Don't sink to the Christian level of "nothing you say can denounce my faith". At least be open minded enough to entertain the idea of a god, but not convinced until given proof.

 

 

If the things I give God credit for turn out to have rational, observable explanations, then I will no longer believe in any god. What exactly is this "Christian level?"

[Poe]

Im not sinking to any level. I'll only believe in a god if the God himself told me that he is real.

Yea, but making a statement saying that nobody can change your mind no matter what closes yourself to opposing arguments, which really isn't the right way to attack a problem. Just saying.

 

It's probably true, though, that the only way to prove a religion as true is if the supreme being they always speak of shows itself. But, of course, God works in mysterious ways, right?

[YugoRocketsFan]

Yea, but making a statement saying that nobody can change your mind no matter what closes yourself to opposing arguments, which really isn't the right way to attack a problem. Just saying.

 

It's probably true, though, that the only way to prove a religion as true is if the supreme being they always speak of shows itself. But, of course, God works in mysterious ways, right?

 

It doesnt make sense, why would he be invisible and expect us to believe in him? Why does he make people pray to him? Why do people believe in different things? For people who live in places that have never even heard of the Christian religion, what if they dont know what a god is? They are going to hell for being unalarmed? God doesnt exist, its a fact until he appears, the invisible and nonexistent look very much alike.

[Poe]

If the things I give God credit for turn out to have rational, observable explanations, then I will no longer believe in any god. What exactly is this "Christian level?"

The level many Christians submit themselves to by closing off any argument that suggests their religion as false. If Christians were so confident that their religion is true, then they would openly explore all arguments against it, since they would have nothing to fear.

[Poe]

It doesnt make sense, why would he be invisible and expect us to believe in him? Why does he make people pray to him? Why do people believe in different things? For people who live in places that have never even heard of the Christian religion, what if they dont know what a god is? They are going to hell for being unalarmed? God doesnt exist, its a fact until he appears, the invisible and nonexistent look very much alike.

I agree.

[YugoRocketsFan]

A scientific mind at its best.

 

Since you are a big fan of science and all that good stuff, why do you choose to believe in a god which has no evidence?