When did you stop believing in god?

drew_drummer said:
This is exactly why atheism needs to be talked about, debated, and spread around the world. Those people who say "why do you always have to talk about religion" to me are missing the point. Because of religion, freedom of expression and the freedom to not believe is not a worldly right, no matter how much the pot-smoking asshole liberals want to believe that everything is fine now.
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Any belief, or non belief for that matter, can be taken to an extreme and become fanaticism/extremism. I'm all for debate and conversation even if I can't convince others and I hope those I debate understand that free will really means accepting that others see the world differently - it's a two way street.

Just a quick question about your "pot smoking liberals" observation. As an atheist are you also what you would call a conservative (which I readily admit is a concept I find interesting in that sort of down to the real definition of the word sort of way - not necessarily in the modern construct terminology)?
 
carl-sagan-dude-what.png
 
and seriously you people want a fucking debate? come on o_O
let the believer's believe... and non believer's not believe...
you guys prob dont know this guy "dr.Zakir Naik" watch his vdo's in youtube and you shall get your answer
no wonder why he cant enter USA and UK region...
 
i can't particularly remember when i stopped believing. think it was when i was around 10 years old or so.

my paths with religion hadn't crossed for years, but i started thinking about it more when i met a person who was much like myself. the most glaring difference between that person and myself was that she was, what you might call, a true believer and i was not. i began respecting her views although they seemed a little extreme. we had a few discussions and debates on the subject, and we'd always end up in an impasse, because obviously we weren't talking about absolutes but only what we believe in, which in my case is believing in absolutely nothing. she was contradictory in her beliefs in many ways, like most christians i've met, but she made me think that religion can actually be good.

i found out later that this person was quite literally and severely, mentally ill. suddenly all my views seemed absolute. now i find myself wary of hearing about any sort of religion.
 
UncleBob said:
This one kind of bothers me, when people say: "well, to me God means xyz"

God is the name given to what's commonly believed to be a man-thing, with a beard, who lives up there in a place called heaven, he made everything and he will rape you if you step out of line.....but he still loves you.

When people start saying to them God means everlasting love, or God is the universe, or god is the life force in everything then it just comes across a bit bizarre, like calling your car a teacup because for you it makes it easier to buy into.
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100% agreed, exactly my thoughts, it's tiring honestly, cause as Socialnumb said, these people end up giving lame explanations and violence threats, little more.
 
Mashreef said:
and seriously you people want a fucking debate? come on o_O
let the believer's believe... and non believer's not believe...
you guys prob dont know this guy "dr.Zakir Naik" watch his vdo's in youtube and you shall get your answer
no wonder why he cant enter USA and UK region...
Click to expand...

From my personal experience this is almost ALWAYS the case, believer-guy says to atheist "I believe".... atheist shrugs shoulders ("that's nice")

Atheist-guy says "I don't believe" and all the believers in the room go apeshit.

There's no debate at all, the original question is hardly rhetorical, it's more along the lines of "when did you last take a shit?"
 
colonel kurtz said:
well when you boil it down, even the common scientific/atheistic belief that the universe was created by a super-compressed ball of matter that exploded and spread out beyond eternity, the fact still exists that the previously mentioned ball of matter came from somewhere.

everything came from something...nothing creates it self, so there has to be some form of a "god" that does/did exist somewhere at some point, but i doubt it's some sentient/omniscient/judgmental creature that created everything only to see if we'll pass his litmus test of ass kissing, and condemn us to the hell that he created, overseen by the evil overlord who he also created, if we don't follow every word in his watered-down book of bullshit.
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well, yeah, kinda... if we stick to our instinctive view of the world it would make sense that there HAS to be a reason for the big bang, it's a human trait to give meaning to everything, one that works in our scale of reality

but stuff is slowly getting the way out of something that I can grasp or imagine, if we think of all the matter around us, it's basicly nothing, we're still in nothing, every atom in our body is made out of more or less nothing. Quantum mechanics at work, it really starts to get counterintuitive. Why not take a shot at saying that the laws be which the quantum world operates were created randomly, in a way that we are (right now) not able to define.
 
I've always found that science progresses - we learn more and more each day that allows us to understand the world/universe we live in. All the while religion stays with tired old dogma that has zero capability to adapt to changing knowledge. For me, this is a key factor in my negativity towards organized religion. It's fine with me for people to have faith, but the universe is not standing still in a time capsule and our knowledge is ever increasing - you simply cannot deny this simple fact. The need to keep beliefs and practices "traditional" and dogma/doctrine "pure" serves only control.
 
Jind said:
I've always found that science progresses - we learn more and more each day that allows us to understand the world/universe we live in. All the while religion stays with tired old dogma that has zero capability to adapt to changing knowledge. For me, this is a key factor in my negativity towards organized religion. It's fine with me for people to have faith, but the universe is not standing still in a time capsule and our knowledge is ever increasing - you simply cannot deny this simple fact. The need to keep beliefs and practices "traditional" and dogma/doctrine "pure" serves only control.
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Amen

It wasn't too long ago we believed wrongly that people used to believe the Earth was flat, a wrong belief about a belief that was never true.

In a couple hundred years or so from now people will look back at us now the way we look back at people a couple hundred years or so ago and laugh at what they thought was the De Facto.
 
I was pretty young. I remember sitting on my bed trying to pray, and thinking WTF am I doing????
 
well, yeah, kinda... if we stick to our instinctive view of the world it would make sense that there HAS to be a reason for the big bang, it's a human trait to give meaning to everything, one that works in our scale of reality

but stuff is slowly getting the way out of something that I can grasp or imagine, if we think of all the matter around us, it's basicly nothing, we're still in nothing, every atom in our body is made out of more or less nothing. Quantum mechanics at work, it really starts to get counterintuitive. Why not take a shot at saying that the laws be which the quantum world operates were created randomly, in a way that we are (right now) not able to define.
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meaning means nothing to me...i'm just stating that whether a monotheist, atheist, etc., pretty much everyone believes, in one way or another, that there's a single common source for everything that exists in the universe. what's up for debate is where all that shit came from in the 1st place...which to be honest, i don't know why anyone is all that concerned with!
 
Never have, not even as a kid, I was a science nerd, my first loves were dinosaurs, stars, and kid chemistry kits etc.

My vision is simple : until god is proven to exist, there is no god. There is no reason why if a god exists we could not prove its existence.

From a more down to earth vision (if that's even possible), there are just so many examples of old religious dogmas being proven wrong with time, so many converging things towards the non existence of a god, so many instances of religious practices being wrong, so many unclear things in holy books, that it is just so much more likely to be that there is no god because if there were, none of it would happen and it all would work very well right away.
 
... i never actually started believing in God, i learned to read so much younger than normal that when still in 1st grade i was reading both Stephen King and the NIV version of The Old Testament, and i just assumed it was bullshit

i ended up reading all the way through the Old Testament (in 1st grade) because i thought it was a really awesome fantasy novel

i didn't get around to reading The New Testament till 3rd grade
 
I was raised Mormon as well. I guess I believed in God and Jesus until I was about 10. Mormons live pretty pretentious lives, mine wasn't so outward, but church was a joke. Organized religion is bullshit because human nature and divine teachings just don't work. People talked shit about eachother and fucked eachother over and broke rules. I went with the motions, was ordained a deacon, teacher and a priest and was ordained with the Mormon priesthood. I went through life like any normal person- I masturbated, got drunk and high and swore and I just had to lie to get all of these things and congratulations just because I turned a certain age. It was bogus. I never felt anything or paid attention or got anything at all out of Sunday school other than not being able to do shit on Sundays. I remember after I did extacy for my first and only time and being forced to go to church the day after burnt the fuck out and seeing how depressing any normal person would have been if in my position- even though I couldn't feel anything at the time. I lied and did all sorts of shit with the church I clearly wasn't worthy to be doing or whatever. I just remember being little and scared that there was just some shitty ominous white dude watching me and keeping track of every fuckup tallying them up to announce to everyone what I did later and then potentially going to hell or a lesser glory of heaven.

When I stopped going to church my stepdad just got overly controlling about it and would let everyone in my family except me do anything musical- because any noise I made above a certain decibel limit "Drove the spirit out of the house"

But yeah those feelings went away around ten and I wasn't forced to go to church at like 16. My mom left my stepdad recently because he was on drugs the whole time he was cramming religious bullshit down my throat.

Religious teachings for the most part are pretty positive all around for most religions. Organized religion is stupid. I don't have any stance on a God because I'm busy living my life trying to be a good person. I'll find out when I die.

And I typed this on my phone so I apologize for poor grammar and spelling- the window on here is like half an inch big hahaha
 
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