CNN: Atheists are still reluctant to ‘come out’
CNN: Atheists are still reluctant to ‘come out’
Many people are hesitant to identify as atheists because of the social stigma they may face, making it hard to pinpoint connections and differences among this group.
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The boldest claim to make when it comes to the existence of a "god" is that we don't know. No one fucking knows. One thing I do know is that the fundamentals of physics are beautiful no matter how it came to be. People hate not being able to explain things so they made shit up as they went, such that the idea of "god" was created.
It's not 50/50, though. Religions have repeatedly proven to have 0 predictive power, which skews the probabilities drastically in favour of atheism.
Also there are thousands of religions over the course of history, and they're almost always mutually exclusive. If all else is equal, the odds of any one being right is essentially zero. Being religious has an almost 0% chance of being right even if there is a right religion, so what's the point?
To paraphrase Ricky Gervais, I only believe in one less religion than you. There are 1000 religions, and any religious person only believes in one of them and disregards the remaining 999. I disregard all 1000 of them, are we really so different?
This is called agnosticism. It's great. If there is a god or God or gods it's not really "my" place to concern myself with them. There is no way to prove whether or not they exist. I was baptized as a child and i do not actually deny God (according to Christianity this is a cardinal sin) so by the tenants of Christianity if they are correct I'm eligible to go to heaven. Besides that I generally just aim to be an alright person doing outlandish things like treating others how I wish to be treated, and not stealing while sometimes volunteering at the local animal or homeless shelter.
If some pearl clutching Christian who pays lip service to God is going to get into heaven over me, I kinda don't want to go there anyway. I think I mostly stopped being a Christian because the sheer cognitive dissidence other Christians were causing for me with their actions was just too much for me to handle.
We do know. In order for the question of "does X exist in the real world" to even be relevant you'd need to coherently define X as a concept, and God fails even that test. Ask ten people what God is and you'll get fifteen different answers.
Nobody but mathematicians speak in proofs. Not X just means I have sufficient reason to Believe X is either explicitly false or insupportable such that I am confident in my position.
I could dish out an encyclopedia of fabrications that you couldn't prove or disprove mad libs style without sense or sanity and you could still confidently call me full of shit.
With every other position maybe X doesnt mean I cannot write a math proof that X is false it means there is a reasonable chance of X and yet when someone says not God 12 people discover an entire different standard.
When I say not god I don't mean maybe god nor do I regard this as an extraordinary position.