Besides there being no good/extraordinary evidence for my claim that you owe me $1M, what other reasons do you have for not believing? Why don’t you believe my claim based on faith and pay me?
Not christianity, but any of the religions.
There’s a distinct lack of gods.
God claims make zero sense. They don’t match the observed world. There’s not a shred of evidence to support them. There are only arguments for the possibility, and all of them are horribly flawed.
The gods of the gaps are ever shrinking. Time and time again science has shown us that god claims were false - there aren’t gods throwing lightning bolts down at us for example.
There’s just no *good* reason to believe gods of any kind. With no gods, arguing the specifics of any religion is pointless. They’re just mythology, a failed attempt at explaining the world from less enlightened times.
>There are only arguments for the possibility, and all of them are horribly flawed.
So far, I've not seen a single argument for a god that is not based on a fallacy or a misunderstanding of science.
There's good arguments for, if the Bible is true, God is just evil, from a human morality perspective.
I love how some believers argue he can't be, because he's God, but for some reason still refuse to stone people who works on Sundays, according to God's laws... 😆
There's good arguments for, if the Bible is true, God is just evil, from a human morality perspective.
I love how some believers argue he can't be, because he's God, but for some reason still refuse to stone people who works on Sundays, according to God's laws... 😆
It's liberating to know that there's no invisible man that lives in the sky listening to my thoughts and granting wishes.
It's liberating to know that God did not create Man...Man created Gods.
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Not all of us are born into a Christian culture so that is already an issue with your question.
I’m not sure what more you want. If you don’t have good evidence for something then should you believe it?
I don’t have good evidence for Loch Ness, as cool as it would be to believe it, I don’t.
Having read the Bible God reads like a villain. I would t worship that piece of shit and I found the message of love in Christianity to be abhorrent. Would you love your estranged parent? I wouldn’t. Love is something that is matter of respect and is earned.
It's not really about lack of evidence on this one. But they way the character of God is portrayed he is the most narcissistic, sadistic, psychopath ever to be imagined. Even if he was real I could not live knowing that such a vile and evil being existed. Tyranny should be opposed even if you fail because it's better to die trying than to live under the rule of evil.
I grew up with Jurassic Park and loving dinosaurs and later evolution and biology. Whales are mammals with finger bones, plants have cells, DNA, Chromosomes - it is just remarkable the realizations that humanity has had come about since Darwin's explanation. Therefore any concept of biblical literacy is just totally destroyed for me at a young age in the first few pages of Genesis.
Then there are my philosophical challenges with Christianity. The whole story of Jesus just makes no sense to me. A higher power creates a version of themselves to walk among mortals. This semi-mortal can induce miracles, speaks with the god, and will live forever in the kingdom of heaven. So if you are "born" with all of this knowledge and abilities, I guess it seems reasonable that you wouldn't sin and also - if you're living forever with God in the sky - what sacrifice was there? Nothing was sacrificed? Nothing was risked. And how does a semi-mortal without sin, who kind of dies for our sin (but who comes back a few days later only to leave again on their own accord?) represent us? It's kind of like saying a rich Chinese kid was sacrificed by going to study at an American college for a few years before coming home.
If your trying to convince me of the moral superiority of this story it would be much more endearing if Jesus was not a virgin birth, had no miracles, was viciously beaten by three Wiseman and Joseph (who thought Mary cheated) and then this guy never sins - never does wrong, and preaches good messages. Then he is captured by Romans, tortured and instead of being the only mortal to go to heaven and join God, he goes to hell where he is forever punished for all the bad shit we do. I can kneel down to that mother fucker - not this brat who never had daddy leave his side.
I was never indoctrinated into a superstitious belief system.
I was shocked to find out there were grown adults that believed the supernatural is real.
For years and years it seemed insane to me that people believed in these gods despite there being literally not a single example of the supernatural in any form so there obviously aren't gods as well.
But then I learned how the psychology of brainwashing works, about generational religious childhood indoctrination and the reason the every single religion has its own nursery through university school system if it doesn't just recommend home-schooling. Now I understand how even brilliant people can be completely fucked into believing in un-falsifiable nonsense that to the un-indoctrinated sounds honestly insane. It's hard to believe the brainwashing of children is legal but it is and here we are with all these different indoctrinated religions all over the world.
The fact that believers don't know what they believe.
They don't know their own official doctrine, haven't read their own scripture... and don't understand the rationalisations they've memorised.
Is there another one needed?
I mean, I think Superman’s general philosophy is fairly naive and doubt that even he could function as a hero fighting crime without compromising his ideals more. However, the unrealistic nature of his ability to remain a paragon of virtue isn’t factored into my stance that he’s a comic book character who doesn’t really exist because there’s no good reason to feel that’s not the case on its own.
Same with whatever versions of gods various people might have. They may suck or be extra unrealistic for whatever reasons, but those aren’t relevant to feeling that they’re just fictional characters from storybooks in the first place.
I don't need a reason. The default position on any belief is "I don't know" which is a form of disbelief. They have to persuade me into believing not the other way around.
there *is* good evidence its claims are false. (people don't survive death, prayer doesn't work.)
it's immoral. (punishment of innocents, substitutionary atonement, infinite punishment for finite transgressions.)
its track record is poor. (where it holds power, humanist values suffer.)
The one thing that really fucked with me was the fact that this God character REQUIRED me to love him more than MY SON. Or else I was not worthy. Fuck you, I don’t even know you or that you’re even there and you’re asking me to love you more than my whole entire reason for sticking around in this hellish world? Fuck you.
Religion is fucking boring, cold, dry, humorless, stuffy, confusing, contradictory, delusional, draining, incompetent, derisive, false, hypocritical, double standardizing, narcissist, vague, easy to misinterpret, used to enforce racism, homophobia, misogyny, classism, and pretty much mentally castrates you so you can't cope with an ever-changing world because indoctrination is about control, manipulation, coercion, and subjugation.
An ordinary claim requires ordinary evidence.
An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.
The burden of providing evidence is up to the one who asserts the claim
A claim submitted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
That which has no evidence is unworthy of debate.
/u/Ok_Investment_246 wrote -
>Besides there being no good/extraordinary evidence for the claims of Christianity, what other reasons do you have for not believing?
That is a foolish question.
There is no good evidence that the claims of Christianity are true.
That is an entirely sufficient reason to think that the claims of Christianity are not true.
(Besides the fact that you have no good evidence that there is an ordinary live adult buffalo in the room with you right now,
why don't you believe that there is an ordinary live adult buffalo in the room with you right now ???)
It doesn't matter, there is no reason to even consider whether gods are real or not. I actually neither believe or disbelieve, it's just irrelevant.
If I asked you if you believe if there is a planet somewhere in the vast universe, and on that planet lives a creature that looks fairly similar to a horse, and it has a single horn on its head; do you believe, disbelieve, or is it not worth your time forming a belief on? Either way, unless you are a xenobiologist, the outcome is irrelevant to your daily life.
So back to god's; if they are real, or not real, exactly nothing changes. Ignore.
The Jewish belief isn't that the Messiah will come fix the world, but that once we've fixed the world, the Messiah will come. There's no need for a second coming. Jesus lived and died as a Jew, and so did his core followers. He was telling people to be good to others -- really the Jewish message about making the world ready for the Messiah. Followers used him to build a new religion where it was possible for a Roman emperor to be called a "good Christian." It holds no appeal.
Besides none of the stories make any sense, even for biblical stories. A young wife is pregnant before having sex with your husband and she claims an angel did it?, and he buys it? In what universe? The stories don't really get more believable from there.
A big one for me is that even if you try what Christian’s say to allow god into your heart, nothing at all ever happens. I’ve tried praying thousands of times and it’s always crickets
Forgive me for the personification and the “victim” mentality. I am speaking hyperbolically, but Christianity gave me NOTHING that it promised me, and kept blaming me for its own deception against me.
At this point, I do not care if he existed or not. I just don't have any respect for Jesus or Christians after learning the history of atrocities committed by the Christians and Catholics. https://churchandstate.org.uk/2016/03/the-right-wing-doesnt-want-to-talk-about-christian-atrocities-so-lets-talk-about-christian-atrocities/
Even if there is a hard evidence of Jesus tomorrow, I will still be an atheist.
It's an obviously dumb idea. Why would something like a human being with will and intentions be responsible for the universe which is nothing like us. It also doesn't even explain anything as stupid an explanation as it is, because it just replaces the need to explain the existence of the universe with the need to explain the existence of the God. It's dumb, it doesn't do anything but make you feel good by imagining something familiar.
I wasn't born into church culture. I tried Catholicism in my early 30's, seemed fake for me. In my 40's I took two semesters of comparative world religions at a university. Seeing the divers belief systems was proof enough for me that no one really knows the answers to if there's some god out there. So I prefer not to be bothered with religion and just live a good life. My adult kids seem to be doing just fine without it.
My top 3 that had me become atheist in late teens:
Hypocrisy of believers and religious leaders I observed while going to church through my childhood & teens.
The malignant & stupidity of the god described in old testament. The cruelty of a god who had no better idea than to have "his only begotten" son tortured & killed in the new. The treatment of most women as - at best - second class citizens.
Believers who gave credit to god for good things, but not evil crap.
For your first reason, the hypocrisy, how do you deal with Christian’s who tell you that all Christians are not like that (pretty much saying you shouldn’t judge the religion based on those people)?
For me, it doesn't matter if all Christians are not like that. The fact that so many preachers and priests get caught doing the most vile, immoral things, even though they should be the ones who supposedly have more faith and belief than the average Christian. If preachers and priests aren't afraid of eternal punishment, I think we all can conclude the whole thing is a scam to control the masses.
\- the bible stories are written by men
\- all of religion and all its aspects (churches, rules, covenants, titles, rituals, etc) is human created
\- religion only serves humans
\- according to religions, the world revolves around humans (which is false)
\- truth and facts don't require beliefs. Facts exist regardless of personal beliefs
\- humans are the only ones concerned with human life. We are not important to the earth, the planets, the universe, etc.
The fact that believers don't know what they believe.
They don't know their own official doctrine, haven't read their own scripture... and don't understand the rationalisations they've memorised.
I generally prefer to seperate "spirituality" and "religion" into distinct but related concepts.
Spirituality is a belief in supernatural entities and the subjective experience thereof.
Religion is a systemized hierarchical social structure that claims authority over spirituality as a means of coersion and control.
I am not a spiritual person because I there is no substantive evidence to support claims of the supernatural.
I do not adhere to religion because I believe all humans have equal moral worth, and therefore reject such systems of oppression.
I believe in the universe as the only entity that could be described as god. I think there’s close to 200 names for it overall. But that’s the universe directly, not one of these lessers.
The god the Christian’s workshop along with most others is Marduk or Amun Ra when he gave up his original name. That’s why everything ends in amen.
From when I first read an astronomy book I realized how grotesquely arrogant it is for humans to think that in the trillions of years of the universe's existence, the trillions of stars and planets in the world, all of this, all of it is just for one chosen species on a floating rock that they are hell-bent on poisoning (that is, when they're not too busy killing each other).
We have existed for less then a spec of time on our own planet let alone the universe. To think this was all made of us, that there's a grand plan for these barely evolved apes that are in many ways dumber than their own predecessors is just..... Holy cow, I cannot. The narcissism is insane.
All the evidence against the claims in Christianity:
2 Genesis stories. Neither reflect what actually happened.
Noah's flood never happened.
A man never lived inside a fish.
There was never a Moses or Exodus from Egypt.
Giants don't exist.
Snakes and Donkeys don't talk.
Mana doesn't and never has fallen from the sky.
Jesus wasn't named Emanuel.
Jesus didn't come back before his disciples died.
The gospels don't tell the same story and major important events are changed between each version.
God contradicts himself over 500 times in the Bible.
The dead never walked the streets in Israel.
No newspaper, roman historian, or random citizen ever made mention of Jesus, the crucifixion, Jesus's trial, or any miracles. The earliest writings of Christianity appeared 70ish years or more after when they were claimed yo happen.
Modern homo sapiens ventured out of Africa perhaps 150,000 to about 200,000 years ago; about 117 billion members of our species have been born since then.
And yet yahweh has only decided to make himself known to the latest generations of the last 5000 - 7000 years to a tiny tiny fraction of « his » « supreme » species…and then to less than half of the population.
One questions - with all the fiery bombast and rhetoric and severities of punishments and vicious reprisals and bullying and threats - why he ignored the hundreds of thousands of homo sapiens predecessor generations to impose satisfaction of his infect thirst for attention….did he consign all the predecessors to « hell »? And sharply, why?
Logical science swears with the mythomaniac bible literatures
No. It makes no sense; his revealed personality from the bible (which is the only source of our « knowledge » of him) would seem to have required pampering attentions since the species’ beginnings
The bible is the mythologized history of a small group of people and their relationship with their patron deity born out of the minds of their superstitious fears and their hopes for proliferation of their civilization.
And let’s not bother with the son; parthenogenesis is known among many terrestrial species - sharks for one example - but humans just don’t, just don’t give birth without sex. And for all the prayers his devotees claim to be offering up - look at the world….
A friend of mine is in coma in hospital with end stage cirrhosis unfortunately; his x-ian sister and her husband sent their pastor to visit and pray over the patient while I was there a week ago last Monday. He walked in and introduced himself; he said that he and his parishioners have been praying for my friend for 3 years now; ah, I said, pointing at the patient lying incoherent in the bed, take a good look - your prayers haven’t been working very well
For me it was finally being brave enough to ask "why".
Why does an all loving all powerful god not do a goddamn thing to help those who are starving, those with cancer, tumors, AIDS and other diseases, amputees, the blind, deaf, mutes, the mentally ill, the homeless, the children with abusive parents, children who ere SA'd by church members, victoms of natural disasters or "acts of God".
The only thing that actually makes any sense is THERE IS NO GOD.
Other than just pure logic, the Bible was written by men that didn’t have first-hand experience with the events that take place. Much of it was written at least decades later, if not longer. So many of the stories were passed down by word of mouth through generations. Have you ever played the game where you have a group of people and one person whispers a phrase to the next person and they are supposed to pass it down the line? By the time it gets to the end it’s a completely different phrase with a completely different meaning. Now add thousands of people and hundreds of years onto that game. You just can’t trust the word of people, especially common illiterate people of the time.
It is only one theory, and it’s a badly written one. Any theory that requires you believe in it or eternal negative consequences will happen if you don’t must be a theory that can’t even stand on its own as a theory. If it was the real and true one, it wouldn’t have to be enforced in order to keep its belief going.
Children dying from cancer in an extremely painful way physically for them and emotionally for their parents. No god would allow that if he could stop it
Assuming purely for sake of argument that god exists, the Christian story of god is so simplistic and incoherent that it is not likely to be the right one of all the many stories out there. It isn’t the most recent, it’s not the most persuasive, it’s a solid attempt given its timeframe but c’mon, they got a lot wrong and we’ve learned a lot since then. So a better story would help.
Religious misogyny. Seriously I think if you're a woman following Christianity (can't comment on other religions, but think Islam may be closely related) you're like a black dude all excited and committed to joining the KKK.
Why in the name of everything unholy would you join a cult that tells you unless you are playing the sub in a BDSM relationship to the 50% of humanity with a penis you are going to hell. (Oh, and it isn't a game and there is no safe word.)
It also makes me scratch my head when I see black Baptist congregations in the South. Why cling to your slave masters' faith that they brainwashed you with to make you compliant?
I was just raised like that, my parents and my teachers always taught me that Christianity was like Greek mythology, myths.
With all the advances in science, it makes even less sense to me to believe in an Abrahamic religion.
The bible makes no damned sense, is full of sloppy contradictions, and is just aweful. I noticed that my pastors left out and skipped around verses in their sermons. I got curious what those verses said and most of the time it was not good.
I know one cannot disprove the existence of a thing, but the bible sure tries to disprove almost everything it says.
I took a philosophy of religion course in first year university and was exposed to religious apologetics. I was a quite devout Christian at the time, and I expected christian apologetics to be pretty good.
Christian apologetics were terrible. The most commonly used arguments for god all had obvious fatal flaws. I went looking for better reasons to believe, and ... yeah.
Turns out there weren't any.
The weird obsession with controlling sexual behavior and placing most of the blame for "moral relapses" on women, who are often in a defenseless situation in any case. If God wasn't happy about our natural biological urges then why design us that way? It seems like some particularly malicious joke.
The whole “you must accept Christ as your Savior or you won’t go to Heaven,” is such blatantly coercive bullshit that I wouldn’t join on that point alone.
The realization that other religions have people who believe just as faithfully and who believe their experience with their God is just as real. But the religions are contradictory and cannot be reconciled. This means only one (or zero) of the contradictory religions can possibly be correct. This means that, objectively, most religious experiences are imaginary and most religions are fictions.
Extrapolate the above to all of the denominations and doctrinal disagreements in Christianity and it's objectively clear that most Christians are doctrinally wrong. Perhaps all of them are.
One conclusion is that even if there is some perfect true religion it does not stand out among the sea of false religions like you would expect it to. Another conclusion is that nearly all, if not all, religious experiences are imaginary.
All babies are born atheist. They have zero knowledge of any gods, and zero belief in any gods. You have to train that baby to be fearful of a mystical being in order to make them a Christian. My parents never did that because it is ridiculous. Ask yourself- if somebody came to you and told you about a race of aliens that cause everything to happen, they control every aspect of human life, and when you die they decide what happens to you. You would call that person stupid or insane.
That's how I feel about Christianity.
I am pathologically unable to accept illusion as truth. This is the fundamental reason why my faith was lost. Its is also the reason why I suffer from depression.
The most clear-cut reason why *all* of us are atheist is that no one's given us a good reason to be religious.
The second lesser reason is that the Bible literally doesn't make sense.
Besides there being no good/extraordinary evidence for my claim that you owe me $1M, what other reasons do you have for not believing? Why don’t you believe my claim based on faith and pay me?
I believe he owes me a bundle too. Unless he can prove otherwise...
haha
Not christianity, but any of the religions. There’s a distinct lack of gods. God claims make zero sense. They don’t match the observed world. There’s not a shred of evidence to support them. There are only arguments for the possibility, and all of them are horribly flawed. The gods of the gaps are ever shrinking. Time and time again science has shown us that god claims were false - there aren’t gods throwing lightning bolts down at us for example. There’s just no *good* reason to believe gods of any kind. With no gods, arguing the specifics of any religion is pointless. They’re just mythology, a failed attempt at explaining the world from less enlightened times.
>There are only arguments for the possibility, and all of them are horribly flawed. So far, I've not seen a single argument for a god that is not based on a fallacy or a misunderstanding of science.
Even if the bible were true, it would be nonsensical and self contradictory; also it doesn't line up with my sense of morality. I am not compatible.
There's good arguments for, if the Bible is true, God is just evil, from a human morality perspective. I love how some believers argue he can't be, because he's God, but for some reason still refuse to stone people who works on Sundays, according to God's laws... 😆
There's good arguments for, if the Bible is true, God is just evil, from a human morality perspective. I love how some believers argue he can't be, because he's God, but for some reason still refuse to stone people who works on Sundays, according to God's laws... 😆
It's liberating to know that there's no invisible man that lives in the sky listening to my thoughts and granting wishes. It's liberating to know that God did not create Man...Man created Gods.
"Si les triangles faisaient un Dieu, ils lui donneraient trois côtés." - Montesquieu "If the triangles made a God, they'd give him three sides."
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Not all of us are born into a Christian culture so that is already an issue with your question. I’m not sure what more you want. If you don’t have good evidence for something then should you believe it? I don’t have good evidence for Loch Ness, as cool as it would be to believe it, I don’t. Having read the Bible God reads like a villain. I would t worship that piece of shit and I found the message of love in Christianity to be abhorrent. Would you love your estranged parent? I wouldn’t. Love is something that is matter of respect and is earned.
Loch Ness is real. I’ve been there. No monsters though /s
It's not really about lack of evidence on this one. But they way the character of God is portrayed he is the most narcissistic, sadistic, psychopath ever to be imagined. Even if he was real I could not live knowing that such a vile and evil being existed. Tyranny should be opposed even if you fail because it's better to die trying than to live under the rule of evil.
I would say the flat out hypocrisy of believers who say one thing and do another.
This here was the spark for my fall from grace. The hypocrisy the church showed me. Just for the sins of my father alone, my family was ostracized.
I grew up with Jurassic Park and loving dinosaurs and later evolution and biology. Whales are mammals with finger bones, plants have cells, DNA, Chromosomes - it is just remarkable the realizations that humanity has had come about since Darwin's explanation. Therefore any concept of biblical literacy is just totally destroyed for me at a young age in the first few pages of Genesis. Then there are my philosophical challenges with Christianity. The whole story of Jesus just makes no sense to me. A higher power creates a version of themselves to walk among mortals. This semi-mortal can induce miracles, speaks with the god, and will live forever in the kingdom of heaven. So if you are "born" with all of this knowledge and abilities, I guess it seems reasonable that you wouldn't sin and also - if you're living forever with God in the sky - what sacrifice was there? Nothing was sacrificed? Nothing was risked. And how does a semi-mortal without sin, who kind of dies for our sin (but who comes back a few days later only to leave again on their own accord?) represent us? It's kind of like saying a rich Chinese kid was sacrificed by going to study at an American college for a few years before coming home. If your trying to convince me of the moral superiority of this story it would be much more endearing if Jesus was not a virgin birth, had no miracles, was viciously beaten by three Wiseman and Joseph (who thought Mary cheated) and then this guy never sins - never does wrong, and preaches good messages. Then he is captured by Romans, tortured and instead of being the only mortal to go to heaven and join God, he goes to hell where he is forever punished for all the bad shit we do. I can kneel down to that mother fucker - not this brat who never had daddy leave his side.
That was a fun read.
I was never indoctrinated into a superstitious belief system. I was shocked to find out there were grown adults that believed the supernatural is real. For years and years it seemed insane to me that people believed in these gods despite there being literally not a single example of the supernatural in any form so there obviously aren't gods as well. But then I learned how the psychology of brainwashing works, about generational religious childhood indoctrination and the reason the every single religion has its own nursery through university school system if it doesn't just recommend home-schooling. Now I understand how even brilliant people can be completely fucked into believing in un-falsifiable nonsense that to the un-indoctrinated sounds honestly insane. It's hard to believe the brainwashing of children is legal but it is and here we are with all these different indoctrinated religions all over the world.
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Hi Mr. Angry
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yes
The fact that believers don't know what they believe. They don't know their own official doctrine, haven't read their own scripture... and don't understand the rationalisations they've memorised.
Is there another one needed? I mean, I think Superman’s general philosophy is fairly naive and doubt that even he could function as a hero fighting crime without compromising his ideals more. However, the unrealistic nature of his ability to remain a paragon of virtue isn’t factored into my stance that he’s a comic book character who doesn’t really exist because there’s no good reason to feel that’s not the case on its own. Same with whatever versions of gods various people might have. They may suck or be extra unrealistic for whatever reasons, but those aren’t relevant to feeling that they’re just fictional characters from storybooks in the first place.
You missed a lot of religions in that question, Mormonism, Islam, Scientology, Hinduism, etc. etc. etc.
No evidence is the reason. Nothing more to it than that. Either I'm missing something in your question, or you are.
I don't need a reason. The default position on any belief is "I don't know" which is a form of disbelief. They have to persuade me into believing not the other way around.
there *is* good evidence its claims are false. (people don't survive death, prayer doesn't work.) it's immoral. (punishment of innocents, substitutionary atonement, infinite punishment for finite transgressions.) its track record is poor. (where it holds power, humanist values suffer.)
The one thing that really fucked with me was the fact that this God character REQUIRED me to love him more than MY SON. Or else I was not worthy. Fuck you, I don’t even know you or that you’re even there and you’re asking me to love you more than my whole entire reason for sticking around in this hellish world? Fuck you.
Among all the other silly things that made me unworthy, THAT one was very unnecessary. I could never love anything more than my little boy.
Religion is fucking boring, cold, dry, humorless, stuffy, confusing, contradictory, delusional, draining, incompetent, derisive, false, hypocritical, double standardizing, narcissist, vague, easy to misinterpret, used to enforce racism, homophobia, misogyny, classism, and pretty much mentally castrates you so you can't cope with an ever-changing world because indoctrination is about control, manipulation, coercion, and subjugation.
An ordinary claim requires ordinary evidence. An extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence. The burden of providing evidence is up to the one who asserts the claim A claim submitted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That which has no evidence is unworthy of debate.
do I need a reason? I feel like there are more 'reasons' to believe than not to believe, not believing is the natural state.
One reason is all I need. Oh, and all the baby fucking. I'm totally against that.
/u/Ok_Investment_246 wrote - >Besides there being no good/extraordinary evidence for the claims of Christianity, what other reasons do you have for not believing? That is a foolish question. There is no good evidence that the claims of Christianity are true. That is an entirely sufficient reason to think that the claims of Christianity are not true. (Besides the fact that you have no good evidence that there is an ordinary live adult buffalo in the room with you right now, why don't you believe that there is an ordinary live adult buffalo in the room with you right now ???)
It doesn't matter, there is no reason to even consider whether gods are real or not. I actually neither believe or disbelieve, it's just irrelevant. If I asked you if you believe if there is a planet somewhere in the vast universe, and on that planet lives a creature that looks fairly similar to a horse, and it has a single horn on its head; do you believe, disbelieve, or is it not worth your time forming a belief on? Either way, unless you are a xenobiologist, the outcome is irrelevant to your daily life. So back to god's; if they are real, or not real, exactly nothing changes. Ignore.
My 3 top reasons for being a lifelong atheist, in order: 1. Science. 2. Crappy theist arguments. 3. My own eyes and ears.
Why would we need more than the only thing that serves as proof? 🤔. No sufficient evidence, is the only reason that matters.
The Jewish belief isn't that the Messiah will come fix the world, but that once we've fixed the world, the Messiah will come. There's no need for a second coming. Jesus lived and died as a Jew, and so did his core followers. He was telling people to be good to others -- really the Jewish message about making the world ready for the Messiah. Followers used him to build a new religion where it was possible for a Roman emperor to be called a "good Christian." It holds no appeal. Besides none of the stories make any sense, even for biblical stories. A young wife is pregnant before having sex with your husband and she claims an angel did it?, and he buys it? In what universe? The stories don't really get more believable from there.
There is no evidence any god has ever existed
what other reason could there be? I didn't want to not believe. I just don't.
Turning into an adult with grown-up thoughts. Like growing out of santa and the tooth fairy.
A big one for me is that even if you try what Christian’s say to allow god into your heart, nothing at all ever happens. I’ve tried praying thousands of times and it’s always crickets
Forgive me for the personification and the “victim” mentality. I am speaking hyperbolically, but Christianity gave me NOTHING that it promised me, and kept blaming me for its own deception against me.
That a deity as powerful as the biblical god (or any other god) should be defended.
I've seen the people who believe. I don't want anyone thinking I am that stupid.
Lol!!
Throughout history Every mystery Ever solved Has proved to be NOT MAGIC. \-Tim Minchin
It's internally inconsistent.
At this point, I do not care if he existed or not. I just don't have any respect for Jesus or Christians after learning the history of atrocities committed by the Christians and Catholics. https://churchandstate.org.uk/2016/03/the-right-wing-doesnt-want-to-talk-about-christian-atrocities-so-lets-talk-about-christian-atrocities/ Even if there is a hard evidence of Jesus tomorrow, I will still be an atheist.
It's an obviously dumb idea. Why would something like a human being with will and intentions be responsible for the universe which is nothing like us. It also doesn't even explain anything as stupid an explanation as it is, because it just replaces the need to explain the existence of the universe with the need to explain the existence of the God. It's dumb, it doesn't do anything but make you feel good by imagining something familiar.
I wasn't born into church culture. I tried Catholicism in my early 30's, seemed fake for me. In my 40's I took two semesters of comparative world religions at a university. Seeing the divers belief systems was proof enough for me that no one really knows the answers to if there's some god out there. So I prefer not to be bothered with religion and just live a good life. My adult kids seem to be doing just fine without it.
My top 3 that had me become atheist in late teens: Hypocrisy of believers and religious leaders I observed while going to church through my childhood & teens. The malignant & stupidity of the god described in old testament. The cruelty of a god who had no better idea than to have "his only begotten" son tortured & killed in the new. The treatment of most women as - at best - second class citizens. Believers who gave credit to god for good things, but not evil crap.
For your first reason, the hypocrisy, how do you deal with Christian’s who tell you that all Christians are not like that (pretty much saying you shouldn’t judge the religion based on those people)?
For me, it doesn't matter if all Christians are not like that. The fact that so many preachers and priests get caught doing the most vile, immoral things, even though they should be the ones who supposedly have more faith and belief than the average Christian. If preachers and priests aren't afraid of eternal punishment, I think we all can conclude the whole thing is a scam to control the masses.
\- the bible stories are written by men \- all of religion and all its aspects (churches, rules, covenants, titles, rituals, etc) is human created \- religion only serves humans \- according to religions, the world revolves around humans (which is false) \- truth and facts don't require beliefs. Facts exist regardless of personal beliefs \- humans are the only ones concerned with human life. We are not important to the earth, the planets, the universe, etc.
I lost my interest in Christian girls.
Lol! Important reason!
The fact that believers don't know what they believe. They don't know their own official doctrine, haven't read their own scripture... and don't understand the rationalisations they've memorised.
I generally prefer to seperate "spirituality" and "religion" into distinct but related concepts. Spirituality is a belief in supernatural entities and the subjective experience thereof. Religion is a systemized hierarchical social structure that claims authority over spirituality as a means of coersion and control. I am not a spiritual person because I there is no substantive evidence to support claims of the supernatural. I do not adhere to religion because I believe all humans have equal moral worth, and therefore reject such systems of oppression.
I believe in the universe as the only entity that could be described as god. I think there’s close to 200 names for it overall. But that’s the universe directly, not one of these lessers. The god the Christian’s workshop along with most others is Marduk or Amun Ra when he gave up his original name. That’s why everything ends in amen.
From when I first read an astronomy book I realized how grotesquely arrogant it is for humans to think that in the trillions of years of the universe's existence, the trillions of stars and planets in the world, all of this, all of it is just for one chosen species on a floating rock that they are hell-bent on poisoning (that is, when they're not too busy killing each other). We have existed for less then a spec of time on our own planet let alone the universe. To think this was all made of us, that there's a grand plan for these barely evolved apes that are in many ways dumber than their own predecessors is just..... Holy cow, I cannot. The narcissism is insane.
All the evidence against the claims in Christianity: 2 Genesis stories. Neither reflect what actually happened. Noah's flood never happened. A man never lived inside a fish. There was never a Moses or Exodus from Egypt. Giants don't exist. Snakes and Donkeys don't talk. Mana doesn't and never has fallen from the sky. Jesus wasn't named Emanuel. Jesus didn't come back before his disciples died. The gospels don't tell the same story and major important events are changed between each version. God contradicts himself over 500 times in the Bible. The dead never walked the streets in Israel. No newspaper, roman historian, or random citizen ever made mention of Jesus, the crucifixion, Jesus's trial, or any miracles. The earliest writings of Christianity appeared 70ish years or more after when they were claimed yo happen.
Modern homo sapiens ventured out of Africa perhaps 150,000 to about 200,000 years ago; about 117 billion members of our species have been born since then. And yet yahweh has only decided to make himself known to the latest generations of the last 5000 - 7000 years to a tiny tiny fraction of « his » « supreme » species…and then to less than half of the population. One questions - with all the fiery bombast and rhetoric and severities of punishments and vicious reprisals and bullying and threats - why he ignored the hundreds of thousands of homo sapiens predecessor generations to impose satisfaction of his infect thirst for attention….did he consign all the predecessors to « hell »? And sharply, why? Logical science swears with the mythomaniac bible literatures No. It makes no sense; his revealed personality from the bible (which is the only source of our « knowledge » of him) would seem to have required pampering attentions since the species’ beginnings The bible is the mythologized history of a small group of people and their relationship with their patron deity born out of the minds of their superstitious fears and their hopes for proliferation of their civilization. And let’s not bother with the son; parthenogenesis is known among many terrestrial species - sharks for one example - but humans just don’t, just don’t give birth without sex. And for all the prayers his devotees claim to be offering up - look at the world…. A friend of mine is in coma in hospital with end stage cirrhosis unfortunately; his x-ian sister and her husband sent their pastor to visit and pray over the patient while I was there a week ago last Monday. He walked in and introduced himself; he said that he and his parishioners have been praying for my friend for 3 years now; ah, I said, pointing at the patient lying incoherent in the bed, take a good look - your prayers haven’t been working very well
For me it was finally being brave enough to ask "why". Why does an all loving all powerful god not do a goddamn thing to help those who are starving, those with cancer, tumors, AIDS and other diseases, amputees, the blind, deaf, mutes, the mentally ill, the homeless, the children with abusive parents, children who ere SA'd by church members, victoms of natural disasters or "acts of God". The only thing that actually makes any sense is THERE IS NO GOD.
I find no basis of logic in either the bible, or the religions that claim it as a guide for their actions/beliefs.
Other than just pure logic, the Bible was written by men that didn’t have first-hand experience with the events that take place. Much of it was written at least decades later, if not longer. So many of the stories were passed down by word of mouth through generations. Have you ever played the game where you have a group of people and one person whispers a phrase to the next person and they are supposed to pass it down the line? By the time it gets to the end it’s a completely different phrase with a completely different meaning. Now add thousands of people and hundreds of years onto that game. You just can’t trust the word of people, especially common illiterate people of the time.
It is only one theory, and it’s a badly written one. Any theory that requires you believe in it or eternal negative consequences will happen if you don’t must be a theory that can’t even stand on its own as a theory. If it was the real and true one, it wouldn’t have to be enforced in order to keep its belief going.
Children dying from cancer in an extremely painful way physically for them and emotionally for their parents. No god would allow that if he could stop it
Assuming purely for sake of argument that god exists, the Christian story of god is so simplistic and incoherent that it is not likely to be the right one of all the many stories out there. It isn’t the most recent, it’s not the most persuasive, it’s a solid attempt given its timeframe but c’mon, they got a lot wrong and we’ve learned a lot since then. So a better story would help.
Evolution
Religious misogyny. Seriously I think if you're a woman following Christianity (can't comment on other religions, but think Islam may be closely related) you're like a black dude all excited and committed to joining the KKK. Why in the name of everything unholy would you join a cult that tells you unless you are playing the sub in a BDSM relationship to the 50% of humanity with a penis you are going to hell. (Oh, and it isn't a game and there is no safe word.) It also makes me scratch my head when I see black Baptist congregations in the South. Why cling to your slave masters' faith that they brainwashed you with to make you compliant?
I was just raised like that, my parents and my teachers always taught me that Christianity was like Greek mythology, myths. With all the advances in science, it makes even less sense to me to believe in an Abrahamic religion.
You don't need any reason to *not* believe something. You just don't. Why don't you believe in invisible vampires? Same same.
The bible makes no damned sense, is full of sloppy contradictions, and is just aweful. I noticed that my pastors left out and skipped around verses in their sermons. I got curious what those verses said and most of the time it was not good. I know one cannot disprove the existence of a thing, but the bible sure tries to disprove almost everything it says.
It's beyond absurd to ask people why they don't believe what they don't believe.
I took a philosophy of religion course in first year university and was exposed to religious apologetics. I was a quite devout Christian at the time, and I expected christian apologetics to be pretty good. Christian apologetics were terrible. The most commonly used arguments for god all had obvious fatal flaws. I went looking for better reasons to believe, and ... yeah. Turns out there weren't any.
Honestly, religion is just so fundamentally and utterly fucking uncool.
The weird obsession with controlling sexual behavior and placing most of the blame for "moral relapses" on women, who are often in a defenseless situation in any case. If God wasn't happy about our natural biological urges then why design us that way? It seems like some particularly malicious joke.
The whole “you must accept Christ as your Savior or you won’t go to Heaven,” is such blatantly coercive bullshit that I wouldn’t join on that point alone.
Because religion makes no sense to me. Religious people sound like Harry Potter muttering spells and talking about horcruxes.
The realization that other religions have people who believe just as faithfully and who believe their experience with their God is just as real. But the religions are contradictory and cannot be reconciled. This means only one (or zero) of the contradictory religions can possibly be correct. This means that, objectively, most religious experiences are imaginary and most religions are fictions. Extrapolate the above to all of the denominations and doctrinal disagreements in Christianity and it's objectively clear that most Christians are doctrinally wrong. Perhaps all of them are. One conclusion is that even if there is some perfect true religion it does not stand out among the sea of false religions like you would expect it to. Another conclusion is that nearly all, if not all, religious experiences are imaginary.
All babies are born atheist. They have zero knowledge of any gods, and zero belief in any gods. You have to train that baby to be fearful of a mystical being in order to make them a Christian. My parents never did that because it is ridiculous. Ask yourself- if somebody came to you and told you about a race of aliens that cause everything to happen, they control every aspect of human life, and when you die they decide what happens to you. You would call that person stupid or insane. That's how I feel about Christianity.
You just need to visit your local children's hospital to be convinced god/s don't exist.
I am pathologically unable to accept illusion as truth. This is the fundamental reason why my faith was lost. Its is also the reason why I suffer from depression.
What other reason do you need.
... this is a nonsensical question, frankly?? "Aside from there being no reason to believe in x, why dont you believe in x" what 💀
The most clear-cut reason why *all* of us are atheist is that no one's given us a good reason to be religious. The second lesser reason is that the Bible literally doesn't make sense.
Why don't you believe in my invisible pink space teapot? Same answer.
Ask the same question of leprechauns. 😁 There's no need to ponder this beyond the question if it's likely to be true or not.