| Seems Mister Deity wants to keep his rebellious traits...which is the whole reason that freethinkers reject God even if He DID exist. They want to keep their personality flaws and all. |
Really? You really still believe that complete and utter BS lie your religion has poisoned your mind with? Despite having us here to explain it to you over and over and over and over again (as we have already done so many times).
Break it down to basics. You believe things. Why do you believe those things? What is the most basic reason for believing something? For anybody to believe something. Think about it.
The most basic reason for believing something is that you find it credible. You find it possible to believe it. Even if it is something that is completely and utterly false (eg, all of Q-Anon bat-shite crazy nonsense, Trump's claims (any of them, but currently the biggest porker is that he had actually won the election)), as long as you find it credible then you are able to believe it.
[Grammatical Note: the "you" used in this paragraph was the generic you what does not refer to you, Phat, personally but rather to some unspecified generic person. See also the English "one" (as in "What would one do in such a situation?"), the French "on" (surprisingly very heavily used; my ears prick up every time I hear it being used in French content on Netflix), the German "man" (eg, "Man ist, was man ißt", "One is what one eats."). ]
So then what happens when you (generic) cannot find something to be credible? Would one be able to believe in it? Only with difficulty, such that inordinate pressure would need to be exerted in order to convince you, ranging from peer or societal pressure (eg, old New Yorker cartoon in which one man at a cocktail party tells another, "Actually, my beliefs are the same as the Unitarians', except I'm not as brave as they are.") to the tools of the trade in the Inquisition (eg, thumbscrews, red-hot pokers).
Take that one more step: what happens when you (generic) find something completely incredible such that it is impossible for you to believe it? Would you (personal; AKA "Phat") be able to believe something that is clearly and undeniably incredible?
Why do you (personal, Phat) not believe in most of the gods that exist (eg, Wotan (AKA "Odin"), Thor, Zeus, Marduk, Bel and Anu (the Givers of the Law to Hammurabi), etc). At the most basic level, it is because you do not find them credible. Why do we atheists also not believe in them? Because we do not find them credible. Why do we also not believe in YHWH? For the same reason.
One old atheist argument to YHWH-ists (though mainly the Christian ones, since they are the more belligerent type) is to inform them that they are also atheists since they do not believe in any of those other gods; we just believe in one less god than they do.
Here is a testimonial from a local YEC activist who constantly and loudly proclaims that he used to be an atheist until he was "saved" by YEC. Let us evaluate his own testimonial from a tract that he told me he was very proud of (because of the formatting he could do because it was in an early Word format -- talk about how superficial these "true Christians" can be!):
quote:
WHY IS THIS GUY E MAILING PEOPLE AND OFFERING FREE BOOKS ON CREATION VS EVOLUTION? Good question!
First off, let me share my history with you (don't worry, it will be brief).
I was raised in Buffalo, New York, and was fortunate to have great parents They took my sister and I to church every Sunday, we attended Sunday school and church camps in the summer. I believed in God, and never gave the issue much thought.
In sixth grade, I remember seeing a big colorful book produced by Time-Life. It caught my eye, and I opened it up and was pleased to see big colorful drawings. One set of drawings really caught my eye. There was a series of animated drawings that went across two pages. On the far left was a very ape-like character walking on all fours and covered with hair. The character to his right was a little more upright, he had shorter arms, was starting to walk on two legs and had less hair. This progression continued for a few more drawings until at the far right side of the page there was this handsome fellow, a human being! This is called the ascent of man chart that nearly everyone is familiar with.
In sixth grade, I looked at that chart for a while, smirked, thought it was ridiculous, and went outside and played softball.
Eventually I made it to ninth grade. While in a Biology class, the teacher was teaching us about evolution and placed the same chart up on the wall. I still remember it. I sat there and studied that chart for a long time. It was on that very day that I recognized a major conflict existed between what this teacher was saying and what the Bible taught. Should I believe my science teacher, who is teaching man has ascended from ape-like animals, or do I believe mommy, daddy, and that book (the Bible) that says God made man instantly from the dust of the ground?" I reasoned that this teacher is a scientist after all, so this must be valid information.
I had a choice to make that millions of people world wide are faced with. Do I believe the Bible or what is taught as science (please note I did not call it science).
In ninth grade I chose to go with the science teacher, and considered myself to be an atheist for about 14 years. I took many more science classes in high school and in college (I am a Mechanical Engineer), and none of these classes changed my beliefs, if anything they reinforced my atheist beliefs.
I assume the majority of you are in college now. Do you understand my story? I am pretty certain you have had several hours of your education dedicated to the teaching of the Theory of Evolution. I would love to hear how this affected you. Has it done anything to your faith? It obliterated mine!
Question! Why in 6th grade did I think the drawings were ridiculous, but in 9th grade I believed them?
Was it because I was more intellectual? No. Was it because the Biology teacher explained it so convincingly? Not really. The real reason for my becoming an atheist in 9th grade can be summed up in one word...hormones. In 6th grade I did not have much temptation in my life. Perhaps my biggest sins were a lie here and there, throwing snowballs at the school bus and riding my minibike where I shouldn't.
But in 9th grade a whole new world opened up to me. The temptation of drinking, drugs and premarital sex presented themselves to me at exactly the same time I was being taught evolution. I knew the Bible said that being drunk and having sex outside of marriage was wrong, but here is my science teacher, telling me the origin of man is completely contradictory to what the Bible taught as the origin of man. I felt excited.....and decided the Theory of Evolution was for me, after all the Bible was scientifically wrong on the very first page!! I considered myself to be an atheist. As an atheist I no longer had to abide by any rules but my own. If I wanted to get drunk, no problem, if I wanted to try to have premarital sex no problem, I now belonged to the evolution "religion" (religion meaning a system of beliefs built on faith) that allowed me to sin without guilt.
It was not the data that made me an atheist, it was the conclusion, a belief that made me the judge of right and wrong. Those cartoon drawings of ape men did look sharp, but I wanted to believe them emotionally, more than I really believed them intellectually.
No, that was not what had made him a fake atheist (in our email exchange, he insisted that every single night while he was an "atheist" he prayed to God and throughout the time he was an "atheist" he still believed in God, things that are completely inconsistent with actually being an actual atheist). And yet despite his having never actually being an actual atheist, but rather a self-serving fake atheist, he insists that he knows intimately what atheists think and believe and are motivated by. And he is completely and absolutely wrong. As are you. (OK, some atheists had fallen into the same legalistic trap that he had, but that does not speak for the rest of us)
Evolution never convinced him to become an "atheist". Rather, it was his own religious training that had done it. As a hormone-laden teenager, he was aching to sin, but because of his religious indoctrination that made him feel guilty. What was he to do?
But then there was that LoopHole that his indoctrination handed him on a silver platter. "If you are an atheist, then you can sin to your heart's delight. The only reason for you to be moral is because you are responsible to God. If you no longer believe in God, then you have nobody to be responsible to. You are free to sin all you want to. You could become a complete hedonist who runs down the street naked, raping all the women you could want to, while being a serial ax murderer killing everybody else with nothing to stop you." OK, rather extreme, but that is still what "true Christians" believe that atheists will "devolve" to. But if you were to ask atheists about that, they would affirm that if their Christian neighbors actually believed that if not for being a Christian then they would be a serial ax murderer, then by all means keep those Christian neighbors from ever losing their faith.
When my ex-wife (at the time non-ex) took a class in Developmental Psychology as part of her Elementary Education degree, she insisted that I also take that class, which I did. And when our older son went to the same university, we insisted that he also take that class, which he did. When my first grandson was about to be born, my present to them was the book, Experimenting with Babies, which I had heard of on Big Bang Theory.
Basically, developmental psychology involves "stages of development" in that certain kinds of cognition do not show up at first, but then do show up later as the child grows and develops. For the stages, use "Piaget" as a search word.
One chapter in the book (which I lost in the divorce) dealt with moral development, which is admittedly less rigorously developed as other traits. The earliest stages of moral development is based solidly on a single authority, the parent, to decide what is right or wrong. In that case, the authority gives you the rules and your moral responsibility is to follow those rules and your responsibility (ie, to whom you are answerable for breaking those rules) is to that authority, which is initially your own parent.
Then as you grow up, you find yourself challenged by more complex moral dilemma. Les Misérables in which a man becomes a life-long fugitive for having stolen a loaf of bread to feed his starving family. More modernly, I think it has been posed as a very dear family member needing life-saving medication that you cannot afford to buy so your only resort is to steal it. That is your moral dilemma between theft and saving a life. And that is the stuff of high drama.
But when applied to standard religious training, it becomes far more damning.
Why be good? I do not have access to the original text at the moment. A Baptist (or whatever) child has been given the religious education task of learning what the others believe (sorry, but sounds like a set-up to me). When the Baptist child asks why she should be good. The Unitarian minister responds, "Because it is the better way."
So why be good? To help others.
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