Questions for atheists

I am not religious. I do like the teaching of Jesus Christ though. Do I need a god in order to live by the rule "do not harm anyone"? Personally I don't think so. Would it make me a better person if I worshipped a (supposed) god that kills all firstborn children in a country or destroys cities or even wipes out civilization, again I don't think so.

I try not to do wrong to others and respect them.

I would just like to quickly point out something in your 3 point :

" I believe in both. How can I do that you ask well let me explain. We now that evolution is true because things change and evolve. What we have not been able to prove is the theory of evolution as to how everything was created. So with the theory of evolution and the theory of creation both being unproven I don't see any reason why we can't look for proof of both."

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1. Why are you an atheist? I am curious why you would close your mind to the possibility of something more then just us and that there is any existence after death.
I am an atheist because there is no evidence of the existence of any god or gods. If there is no evidence for it, I don't believe in it.

2. Why do some atheists put so much energy into something they don't believe in?
This varies from person to person. For me, it's that religion is a huge factor in how the world works. It shapes a large part of our society, our laws, our customs, our politics, even our wars. It's worth talking about just because of the huge impact it has on the world.

Put it this way : 'let them do their own thing whilst I do mine' doesn't work for me in a world in which religion led to 9/11.

3. I have herd a lot of atheists say that they don't believe in a universal creator or God because they believe in evolution.
Really? I find that a bit hard to believe.

Not that I'm calling you a liar at all. But honestly, this sounds like the kind of thing some religious people like to claim that atheists say, but which in reality very few atheists say.

Plenty of religious people "believe" in evolution. In fact outside the US, most teligious people "believe" in evolution. And since there are so many religious people in the world, it's very probably true to say that most people who "believe" in evolution are religious.

Personally, evolution has nothing to do with my atheism. If evolution were disproved tomorrow it wouldn't affect my atheism in the slightest.

What we have not been able to prove is the theory of evolution as to how everything was created.
Actually evolution has nothing to do with how everything was created. "The theory of evolution" is a scientific theory which describes how and why species change over time. It's nothing to do with where life comes from, and it's certainly nothing to do where the universe came from.

I mean if there is a universal creator who's to say that they didn't create everything by evolution.
The thing is, evolution is driven by very, very simple processes. At heart, all there really is to it is the fact that kids inherit stuff from their parents, and that some people are better at stuff than other people.

Is there really room in that for god? Do we need to say that kids inherit stuff (like hair colour, being tall, being good at running, etc) from their parents because god makes it happen? Without god, your kids would just be random people that looked nothing like you? That makes no sense.

Or some people being better than others at stuff. When a lion is chasing people, the lion catches the slowest person, right? Is that because god makes that happen? Without god, the lion would catch a random person, maybe the fastest, maybe the slowest? That makes no sense.

So yeah. We can't rule god out of evolution as such, but the thing is that evolution just doesn't need god. It's like watching a boulder roll down hill and saying "I know there's gravity, but maybe god pushes stuff down hills too?" Um, well, yeah, maybe he does. But if there is gravity... what's the point of making that assumption?

4. Why don't atheists believe that a man named Jesus lived?
Many atheists do. I am open minded on the subject myself, since it's not something I've looked into much.

From what I have heard, the historical evidence for a person called Jesus is extremely thin once you get outside the bible. Atheists will generally discount the bible as being a very poor source, since it's full of obviously silly things like the talking snakes and global flood and all.

Aside from that, there are like three or four sources, IIRC, some of which are obviously faked, and not one is a contemporary first-hand account. So you get things dated from a century after jesus is said to have died talking about what people say about him. Not exactly proof.

But like I say, plenty of atheists believe there was a historical Jesus. And from what I hear, that's by far the majority opinion amongst actual historians.


Why is it that people have no problem believing that historical figures like Plato, Aristotle, Alexander the Great, King George III, lived but when it comes to Jesus, suddenly a different standard is offered.
Well, two things.

First, we have much more evidence for many historical figures. There are literally no writings about Jesus from the time in which Jesus lived, written by people who claimed to have met Jesus. None. Nor is there anything at all written by Jesus. All we have is copies of accounts written anonymously by people who weren't there to see it themselves.

Compare that to Socrates, for instance. Socrates lived before Jesus, yet we have lots of direct evidence for him. Multiple people who were alive at the time, living where he lived, wrote about him in their works - works that we have the original copies of today. And those people are other historical figures who we know well from many other writings.

Second. Socrates is not an "extraordinary" person.

What do I mean by that? Well, the more bizarre or extraordinary the claim, the more evidence there should be to support it.

Example : if I say there is a car in my garage, you're probably apt to take my word. Why not? Maybe I'm lying, but plenty of people have garages with cars in them.

If I say there is a horse in my garage, it's a bit weirder. Why would there be a horse? That's odd! Maybe you'd want an explanation befor you believed me, in case I was pulling your leg as a joke or something.

If I say there's a Giant Panda in my garage, now I'm probably lying. Giant Pandas are not easy to come by, right? It would take a picture at the very least before you believed that! Maybe even more - pictures can be faked. You'd probably want to come and see for yourself.

But what if I say there's a Loch Ness Monster in my garage? And it's invisible, intangible, completely undetectable by science, but I have faith that it's there? It would take some serious evidence to convince you of that, right? Massive, overwhelming, totally concrete unfakable evidence, right?

Socrates is in the car/horse category. All that's claimed about him is that he was a smart guy who got himself killed over politics. It's happened to millions of people.

Jesus is in the Loch Ness Monster category. He was the son of god who did miracles and gives you a get out of jail free card to avoid hell. We don't know if ANY of those things even exists or could possibly exist. So the evidence needs to be overwhelming. And it isn't.


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Christianity : A god who loves you so much that he'll set fire to you if you don't love him back

I used to believe in God but finally became an atheist after realizing how crazy it was to try to psychically communicate with an invisible being in order to get him to influence future events in my favor.

There's little difference between this and slicing open an animals belly in an attempt to read the future in their entrails.

Not going to bother reading the answers left by others but... I am agnostic. Used to an atheist. I doubt I will ever be an atheist again.

Because:

1) I don't know what's out there. If I claimed to KNOW what's out there, this would be an act of faith as surely as that of the most annoying believer.

Sure, there could be a race of beings out there somewhere that qualify as 'gods' on some scale. (NOTE: I am not ruling out polytheism. I don't believe it's either atheism or monotheism- if one god exists, the chances are more of them exist)

And actually, I do hope that there are other life forms out there somewhere and other sentient species. I hope that some of these species have managed to survive for aeons and have overcome our own problems. I hope that these species have attained a level of wisdom and knowledge that could be described as transcendent.

It gives me comfort to believe that such beings might exist.

2) I don't do this any more. I used to when I was younger. It's just anger. Whether you like to acknowledge it or not, religion ordered the world for most of history. People used to be executed in Britain, for example, for blasphemy. A young man right here in Edinburgh was hung for stating that the bible was not true.

This is where the defiance and rebellion against what is seen as an oppressive system comes from. It's pretty much as simple as that.

Look at radical Islam. They can't allow people to even deny the existence of god because their entire claim to power comes from enforcing this world view. If you can question god, their entire power platform crumbles.

This is also how it was during the peak time of Catholicism.

The Catholic Church used to burn people at the stake of blasphemy. Just research 'Giordano Bruno' if you want to know more.

Such a system deserves to be derided, debunked and de-fanged. Religion gets its fair share of victims every single day, so do not feel as if you are in the position of the oppressed. Religion is still the single biggest killer in the world. Us atheists are just a noisy minority.

3) a philosophical question. Everyone will answer it as they will. It has little to do with religion. The chicken or the egg, you know?

4) Jesus was just an angry Palestinian preacher. His story got revised in each of the gospels. He went from fire and brimstone hateful activist to 'turn the other cheek' and 'love your brother' in the revisionist gospel of John. Sure, he existed. Just not anywhere like what Christian church claims.

Paul has more to do with the creation of Christianity than Yeshua ever did.

5) I don't really subscribe to this. This is something I would have done when I was sixteen. I don't know any adults who actually carry on as such.

There are many ways I could envision a superior being in our own local universe who doesn't employ magic but simply unfathomable technology.

Many sane people have put forth the idea that we exist as part of a multiverse or indeed, even as a simulated universe. Obviously either of those possibilities leaves open the option of some sort of creator being somehow.

I don't believe in magic. But a superior creature may exist. What if beings that were a thousand times more advanced than us in science and philosophy met with us and insisted that there was a race of 'gods'. How would we argue with them?

What if we were simply too stupid to understand what they meant?

In many ways, this 'too stupid to comprehend' is sort of what people mean when they talk about god. The gods are creatures who are beyond our means of comprehension.

Do I believe such creatures exist? Sure.

Have I met them yet? No. But then I doubt we'd be very interesting to them at any rate.

1. Why would you open your mind to the reality of something so utterly ludicrous and wish-fulfilling as life after death? Something for which after countless of human suffering there is absolutely no concrete evidence. I don't believe in unicorns for the same reason.

2. Because many atheists think the world would be a lot better place if everyone didn't spend their time doing silly things like killing each other in vast numbers just because <i>their</i> long-dead bronze age delusional guru's world view disagreed with someone else's long-dead bronze age delusional guru.

3. Not applicable to me. I don't 'believe' in evolution any more than I 'believe' in gravity. It's real. Doesn't require belief.

4. I believed a man called Jesus existed. I also believe a man called Alfred Hitchcock existed. Neither was a deity.

5. I have no idea what you are puzzled about. If god has no magical powers why bother praying to him to use them? What else <i>is</i> the Bible but a series of supernatural (magic) interventions from 'god'.



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"Look! - it's the Invisible Man!"