Saturday, March 22, 2008

Atheist conversion

Lord of the Geese, I felt your last post deserves it's own blog-post. You said "
However, this is not so for an atheist, so why is it that atheist's feel the need to convert people to atheism? What is the motivation?"

It is not a conversion to Atheism, but a liberation from religion. To me it's the same as showing people that the Earth is no longer flat. That in the face of evidence and scientific discoveries, humans tend to adapt their thinking and ideology. The same holds true with religion; there is no evidence of god, gods or an invisible man in the sky watching our every move. However, scientific investigation consistently finds that god does not exist or ever existed. But...that doesn't matter to the religious individual. We could take all the evidence in the world to a Mormon and demonstrate that their originator was nothing but a con-artist...and they would still believe.

So, scientific evidence may only be a small part of the liberation process. The remaining pieces must incorporate the human psyche and human experience...my own experience has shown there is no god, reading the bible has only confirmed my conviction that it is only a book written by humans...and not the word or work of god.

Hmm, if we each toss out the bible and science...does god still exist?

3 comments:

Lord of the Geese® said...

Why does it matter so much to the atheist what someone else believes? I believe in science and I believe in God. There is no disputing scientific fact as we know it. It would be stupid to do so. However, this doesn't affect my personal faith that there is a God.

You may call it liberation but to convince someone to become an atheist and deny the belief in God is in fact a conversion.

You mentioned that "scientific investigation consistently finds that god does not exist or ever existed" but this is not true. Science has never been able to prove that God doesn't exist. In the same way that the Bible doesn't prove that he does. God exists through faith in a higher power.

The Bible is indeed a book written by humans. It is not a book written by the finger of God but rather words written by normal people that were inspired by God.

If we rebuke both science and the Bible, where does that leave us? A belief in a higher power would still exist. Even though i know the answer to this already...can you claim that in your life you've never cried out to a higher power for help? Humans need hope and this hope many times comes in the form of religion.

AustinHook said...

Yes most of us skeptics have invoked a higher power from time to time but that is just a cultural habit. It doesn't prove anything. Even the idea of a higher power is no big deal -- gravity, space, lightning, the raging fusion inside the sun, they are all "higher powers" than any man, and there is still a lot we don't understand about them. But they are not God. So higher power must refer to a higher "intelligent" power. But there is no evidence of innate intelligence in nature, or at least nothing that is reasonably like human intelligence. If for example, it requires some intelligent entity to keep two plus three still equal to five tomorrow, the same as it is today, well that is a kind of inteigence entirely alien to anything we are familiar with. There is hardly anything in that to look to for comfort of the kind we might wish from a fellow human being. Hence, we may as well merely identify God with wishful thinking. Yes, wishful thinking brings momentary relief under stress, but it's importance is not very profound.

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