The experience of converting

Hello, notwise.First, let me start by saying that I'm not too comfortable with using the word "convert" to describe my...er...conversion to atheism. "Convert" seems to have connotations of a emotional and spiritual bonding, as well as an acceptance of the dogma and ritual that attends the switch in belief. My acceptance that there is no god was entirely intellectual, based on my acceptance that there was no good evidence for the existence of a deity and that postulating a deity ended up explaining nothing. And accepting that there is no god does not entail the acceptance of any particular dogma or ritual, since there is no dogmas or rituals associated with atheism. But I don't want to quibble over semantics, we can continue to use the word "convert" if that is what you prefer, as long as we remember my concerns over the use of that word.There is also some differences of opinion of the meaning of the word "atheism". When I use the word atheism, at least when describing myself, I take it to mean the belief that no god or supernatural deity exists.Anyway, to describe my initial "conversion" to atheism, I will admit that it was a very shocking and depressing event in my life. Being steeped in the fundamentalist way of viewing things, I suddenly found my life without purpose, and I had trouble justifying taking a moral stance on things. Contrary to what some fundamentalists would say, I did not decide to not believe in god in order to justify my sinful life -- I really fought against accepting these beliefs because I found the implications of a godless universe disturbing and I tried very hard to maintain my belief in Christianity.So my acceptance of atheism was really quite traumatic, and if I had my own free choice at that time I certainly would not have chosen it (although now, of course, I am glad that it happened). It took me a long time to learn how to develop my own purpose in life (or even what it means to have a purpose in life), and it took me a long time to realize that morals and ethics are not something that requires justification -- they are simply things that one feels.As far as the process of my "conversion", that is pretty hard to describe, since I think a lot of the process was subconscious, and at any rate I am no better at figuring out why I think the way I do than I am at figuring anyone else out.The first doubts came, I think, by actually reading the Gospels. I was a fundamentalist, of the religious right sort. But I could not square the Jesus' message in the Gospels with the right wing, conservative politics that the preachers were advocating from the pulpit. It didn't seem important at the time, but in hind sight I think this was the biggest source of my doubts. There were other aspects of evangelical Christianity that I found contradictory -- for example, what happens to, say, the souls of Pacific Islanders who lived after Jesus' sacrifice but before the arrival of the first missionaries -- I never found any of the answers I recieved to this question satisfactory. I recall that the differences in the accounts of the discovery of the empty tomb at the end of each gospel, not only a supposedly historical event but the most important historical event in the world, to be moderately troubling to the idea that the Bible was a literally accurate, divinely inspired work of actual history.The final straw, though, was the theory of evolution. Once I decided to look into it (with the idea of refuting it), I found that Genesis simply could not be historically accurate. With that, my entire faith crumbled, and I eventually became an atheist.I suppose one could ask why I didn't simply become a liberal, non-literal Christian along the lines of jar. I guess that is because I was so steeped in the fundamentalist faith that I couldn't disconnect any part of it from any other part -- the conservative politics, the literalness of the Bible, the existence of God -- if any of it was untrue, then none of it can be trusted. I also came to the opinion that there was no good evidence for the existence of a deity -- the only reason to believe was because the Bible said that one did. But if the Bible couldn't be trusted to be accurate in some things, then I saw no reason why its claim of the existence of god should be accurate.That, then, is a description of my switch from Christianity to atheism. Is this what you were looking for?

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Then there is one bit of dogma right there, that god definitley doesn't exist.

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From Wikipedia: Not exactly what I meant when I used the term, but close enough. The simple phrase "God does not exist" is not a dogma -- it is simply the starting point of the set of beliefs, an axiom, if you will.-

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You don't know this one way or another and if you believe that god certainly doesn't exist, then this requires faith.

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I don't know one way or the other whether there is an elephant standing in the corridor at the other end of the building, but I believe that there certainly isn't one. You might call this faith if you want, but it seems to trivialize the word "faith", at least for the purposes of this conversation.

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Are you saying that the non-existence if god(s) is self-evident?

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Yes, I am.

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A person who does believe in god(s) will tell you exactly how self-evident the existence of god really is.

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Indeed she will. That's a funny thing about axioms -- they are fairly arbitrary. The only requirement is that the logical conclusions derived from them are self-consistent and consistent with reality.Do you think that it is self-evident that given a line and a point not on that line, exactly one line passes through that point and is parallel to the first line? To someone working in Euclidean geometry it is pretty self-evident. To someone working in Lobachevian geometry, it is equally self-evident that there are infinitely many lines parallel to the first line that passes through that point.--

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To me faith means certainty without evidence.

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Then it is not by faith that I believe that there is no god. I see no evidence for any deity -- for me, in this case, the absence of evidence is good enough to be evidence of absence. You might not like this evidence, but that's too bad.A fundamentalist Christian believes in the truth of her religion, also not by faith -- her evidence is the subjective religious feelings that she experiences. I don't think it's very good evidence, but it's evidence nonetheless.In fact, I cannot think of a single belief that is based on faith, according to your definition. I'm sure there are some, but they seem to be so rare that it seems to me that your definition of faith is limited in its usefulness.Slight edit to remove overly confrontational tone.This message has been edited by Chiroptera, 05-Jul-2005 09:40 PM

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Since you are analogizing this way, then you would say that another's belief in god(s) is just as valid as your outright dismissal of the possibilty because you are operating in different geometrical spaces?

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I am just saying that the choice of axioms, statements that need to be assumed without proof to begin the argument, are arbitrary. It is just as arbitrary to assume that no god exists as it is that the Olympian gods exist.The question is how useful the model is in describing our limited experience of reality. The axioms should be self-consistent, they should be consistent with our experience with reality. Some people (like me) would add that the quality of being pasimonius, in the sense of Occam's razor, is desirable as well.-

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All you can honestly say is that, so far, you haven't come across any convincing evidence.

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Convincing evidence? Now you are changing your definition of faith. Concincing seems to be an subjective standard, does it not? I find the absense of evidence for the existence of god, but for some reason you don't. Who are you to judge that it is convincing or not? The fundamentalist Christian feels she has convincing evidence that her entire religious belief system is truth -- I don't believe that, but who am I to judge whether this evidence is convincing or not?