Various reasons for becoming an atheist

Here are various answers I've heard to the question: "Why do you think that people are atheists?" I'm merely paraphrasing, because I've heard many of these responses multiple times in multiple places on the Internet. 

1. "Atheists hate Christians."
2. "Atheists hate God and love Satan."
3. "Atheists eat babies."
4. "Atheists lust for power."
5. "Atheists worship the god of their world."

Some of these may be true, but I think a lot of these are overall mischaracterizations or distortions of atheism and are based on statements of a few atheists, but are intended to color the entire lot of them. How charming. I think that the theists that makes these up can't face the conclusion that there are legitmate reasons for becoming an atheist.

1 and 4 are the most common, but not entirely true with every atheist and 5 can be considered true for some atheists, in my opinion, but only in a metaphorical sense. However, I find 1, 4, and 5 true with many theists in today's society, so ultimately, they're dishonest assertions. 2 and 3 are blatant lies, although it wouldn't be surprising if there were exceptions. Your thoughts and/or contributions to this topic?

While I think it may at times be intentional dishonesty, I really think that boils down to a lack of critical thinking skills.  They are incapable or unwilling to actually entertain and try to understand ideas that they do not like, so they come up with these stupid straw dogs that give us the black hat.  They don't want to know why we don't believe.  A similar circumstance was my old youth group leader's answer when I asked why Iraqi citizens didn't like us in the gulf war.  He said "they don't like us because we are free."  Now to be fair, I have heard this stupid trite from much more secular people, but I think the cause is largely the same.  Both religion and patriotism do all the work of telling you who the good guys are and marginalize the bad.  This makes it very easy to be in a constant state of self-righteousness. People deeply who subscribe to either don't want to understand the opposition, because understanding them could lend credit to merit to those who they have already decided are without any.  For many fundamentalist, we are subhuman, and for some others we are just a danger to their paradigm of reality. Sitri_

Sitri_, you always provide the best answers. I love your analogy of the Gulf War. :) 

 

Sitri_, you always provide the best answers. I love your analogy of the Gulf War. :) 

Genetic_Code

Thank you.  I see this thread is also on OT.  I am going to repost there.

Logic and faith don't work in the same way and in fact they are entirely different from one another. But it's is still possible for people to be entirely logical and have faith at the same time. In fact everything we do requires a combination of logic and faith. The problem occurs when people are being guided externally, along a path that requires faith. Most religious people don't realize that they have faith in religion because they were guided by scriptures and prophets. Whereas when they have faith on the chair they sit on is because from experience they know that it is very very unlikely that the chair would break. So when someone sits on a chair expecting that it won't break, it's because most of the time that person sits on chairs they don't break and from this experience the person is comfortable enough to put some faith in the next chair he or she decides to sit.

Well..........we are all born free but somewhere along the line some of us fail to distinguish between logical faith and guided faith and chose a path. To be honest most of us don't even get the chance to decide especially if introduced to religion at a very young age.

So yes, there are atheists like me who at least got the chance to think before making a decision. There may also be a lot of atheists for the above reasons you mentioned and I would personally love to meet an atheist who eats babies.:P  

I think one important aspect to look at is the reasons for theists giving these ridiculous reasons for being atheists.

They are theists. As such they naturally view atheists and their beliefs to be antithetical to their own, which, to some degree, is true. From this some perceive atheists as a threat to their beliefs; however this could only occur if the theist was either already insecure in his own belief or ridiculously ignorant of it or frequently berated for it. This threatening feeling evokes a response that would portray the atheists in a bad light: they are a-moral, they believe God exists but just don't worship Him because of spite, etc. They teach this to other insecure/ignorant/berated theists and the cycle goes on. Thankfully the majority of people are able to keep enough sense to dismiss such ideas.

It's the exact same for atheist fundies, really. I think atheist fundies are louder than theist fundies because atheist fundies have a greater persecution complex: they are a minority in almost all parts of the world, especially America, and the loudest of them, I've noticed, were raised in strict religious households. Thus, they feel more excluded and their beliefs more fundamentally threatened, leading to generalisations and processes like I showed above. The ones raised in strict religious households feel this more than anyone else, and thus are the most abrasive and vocal of the fundy atheists (note that not everyone in such a circumstance becomes a fundy atheist). Then the theist fundies feel persecuted and the cycle begins all over again.

This is considerably different from (and longer than) my response in the OT thread.:P

That's just a theory of mine that I've cooked up. God, I'm gonna miss psychology cIass.:(

Theo, I owe you a long thought out response, but, I disagree.  You have valid points, but I don't think that Atheists have a "complex" any more than Theists do.  Some just speak louder than others.  Look at it this way, if there were thousands of mega-atheists "churches" spewing your all nuts for believing in a fairy tale, like the mega churches preach we're all going to hell for not believing in their God the country would revolt and go insane.  I think Atheists for the most part are intelligent people who believe what they believe and keep it mostly to themselves, a few exceptions of course.btaylor2404

Yes, but you have to wonder: Why do some speak louder than others? Why isn't everybody yelling at eachother or keeping it shut up? That's what I'm looking at at the moment.

And I would hazard a guess that some theists do have a persecution complex, mainly the ones who believe we are living in the end times and the world is plotting to exterminate us all. >_> Funnily enough, I think this belief extends from (or is reinforced by) growing secularisation. It's all one vicious cycle.

[QUOTE="btaylor2404"]Theo, I owe you a long thought out response, but, I disagree.  You have valid points, but I don't think that Atheists have a "complex" any more than Theists do.  Some just speak louder than others.  Look at it this way, if there were thousands of mega-atheists "churches" spewing your all nuts for believing in a fairy tale, like the mega churches preach we're all going to hell for not believing in their God the country would revolt and go insane.  I think Atheists for the most part are intelligent people who believe what they believe and keep it mostly to themselves, a few exceptions of course.Theokhoth

Yes, but you have to wonder: Why do some speak louder than others? Why isn't everybody yelling at eachother or keeping it shut up? That's what I'm looking at at the moment.

And I would hazard a guess that some theists do have a persecution complex, mainly the ones who believe we are living in the end times and the world is plotting to exterminate us all. >_> Funnily enough, I think this belief extends from (or is reinforced by) growing secularisation. It's all one vicious cycle.

On the one's who believe it's the end of times, I think their nuts, for countless reasons.  So lets throw that out of the window.  I cannot grasp how Christians, being the largest religious group, 2+ billion I think, think they are going to be exterminated or outcast.  My brain tells me those people, and I don't think your one of them, are ones who believe the Bible is set, unchanging, and not meant to be interpreted any-other way than if we were in 300 A.D.  And those people are slowly and sadly realizing it just can't be, science or something else is changing their truths.  Times change, and Christianity must adapt, which for the most part it has, I'd say that's Islam's number one problem.  Islam is stuck in the 600's for only a select few progressives.

Mmmmmm, baaabieeees...