Same. “Believe” is a hard word to define. I think a lot of people sorta get to believing and then shut their minds off and don’t question it. People who supposedly believe in judgement and heaven and hell essentially never act like they believe it in the sense that one believes the sun is going to rise tomorrow morning.
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I believe in heaven but not in god.
Reminds me of this Biblical verse
From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.
-Kings 2:23-24
God didn’t like boys calling somebody baldy. So he summoned bears to kill 42 of them.
Gigantic asshole indeed.
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To expand on this, I will quote from Russell again
I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian God may exist; so may the Gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.
-Bertrand Russell, What I Believe
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That pretty much sums up where I stand - agnostic/atheist who believes it’s impossible for humans to have proof of the existence (or not) of god, and therefore belief in god is close to believing in the existence of fairies at the bottom of your garden.
Providing social cohesion seems a more important facet of their religion to most of the world’s religious people than a definite belief in the afterlife. If all these religious people arrived at their belief independently why do almost all of them practice the same religion as their parents?
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This. I’ve always thought about just how big a coincidence it is.
I guess as a function of social evolution, people have developed the tendency to anthropomorphize the objects of their experiences, and thus we have all these stories of “God” created to cast useful molds.
But the necessary, ultimate, universal one-ness of all things, as a conceptual a prior category, from Parmenides to Spinoza, has not come close to danger from any of the modernists from Russell to Dawkins.
There is a thing confusedly formed,
Born before heaven and earth.
Silent and void
It stands alone and does not change,
Goes round and does not weary.
It is capable of being the mother of the world.
I know not its name
So I style it “the way”
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Though, in any conceivable sense, the implications of this perspective would seem to be the same as atheism.
Is there a religion that promises a larger penis in heaven? Asking for a friend.
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It’s heaven, so they like you for your personality.
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Pretty sure we are all barbie doll smooth in heaven
Interesting podcast (which interviews poly sci profs about their research) on the growing political influence of the nonreglious (atheists, agnostics, and “nones”). The Growing Influence of the Non-Religious - The Science of Politics
One point: the podcast notes, at least on an individual level, atheists are probably the most active political group in the US in terms of donations, participation, etc, more so than evangelicals. Boards like this would probably also be an example. My personal sense is that evangelicals are much better at organizing–they literally share daily/weekly talking points with reps, fund a lot of right-wing think tanks, and political groups as 501(c)(3)s.
Is there a religion that offers you a better personality?
Asking for myself on this one.
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Mormonism? Those freaks are super nice. I remember my partner and I took a rafting trip in Utah and our guide was a young mormon girl. It was an old Jewish couple and us in the raft. She just about got her head around the Jewish people but then we said we were atheists and I think I saw her brain explode. She was still super nice though. Even though we were godless infidels.
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“Identifying as spiritual” gets you a lot of points on the insufferable index.
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All these are probabilities pulled from my arse so not sure if I’m an atheist or an agnostic. Definitely in the God is a giant dick if he does exist camp.
Chances any God like being is like any thought up and practiced by humankind
<unimaginably small
Chances any God like being is completely oblivious to us at all
unimaginably small < 33%
Other
33% < 100%
Come from a totally non religious family. Went to Sunday school once when I was very young and said I don’t want to go again to my mum when it was over. She said ‘fine’.
The way Atheism and agnosticism are colloquially used isn’t the only way to define them. In common parlance atheism is often understood as a conviction that there is no god while agnosticism is a more undecided stance. Some philosophers agree with this while others argue that they answer two different questions.
According to the latter, Atheism is about belief. If you answer the question “do you believe there is a personal god?” with yes, then you are a theist. If not, you are an atheist.
Agnosticism on the other hand is about knowledge. Depending on whether you claim knowledge of the existence or non-existence of god, you are either gnostic or agnostic.
“I believe in god” + “I know there is a god” → gnostic theist
“I believe in god” + “I don’t know if there is a god” → agnostic theist
“I don’t believe in god” + “I know there is no god” → gnostic atheist
“I don’t believe in god” + “I don’t know if there is a god” → agnostic atheist
Another way to understand agnosticism is as relating to knowledgeability. Can humans ever know if there is a god? Yes → gnostic, No → agnostic
I think this two-dimensional matrix makes more sense than having theism - agnosticism - atheism on the same spectrum. Otherwise agnosticism would span too broad a range from believer in a crisis of faith to a non-believer who thinks the probability for the existence of god is infinitesimally small but theoretically possible.
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