Any atheists here who were once believers?

Balerion said:
LG avoiding the tough questions, as usual.

And can we get a moderator to stop Mazulu from preaching, please?
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Yes, this ^^
ALL the preaching needs to stop. And also, please stop the personal attacks of other members here. Try to be respectful. Not to mention, it's against forum rules to carry on the way you have been.

The interesting irony of all the preaching though, is I don't see religion helping those here who are preaching it. Lots of angry, judgmental and bitter folks, pretending they know something about ''God'', as if they are better than everyone else.

Such a lack of respect for those who simply disagree with your views, is why religion is viewed in a negative way. Bashing people for their beliefs, is wrong. One would think...that religion 'should' elicit joy, not contempt for those who follow it.
 
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Mazulu said:
I thought you were the hate cult? Everything that you say is calculated to inflict hate and harm...

And that is where you will go in the afterlife.
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I do understanding that you believe you're spreading love when you childishly threaten others with your delusions of eternal hellfire, But it is indeed hate speech, notwithstanding. That is why your religion causes so much conflict in the world.
 
(Q) said:
I do understanding that you believe you're spreading love when you childishly threaten others with your delusions of eternal hellfire, But it is indeed hate speech, notwithstanding. That is why your religion causes so much conflict in the world.
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Not any more the communism intention wanted conquered the world
 
arauca said:
There are many fools who did not have spiritual experience , come to their own conclusion meaning nobody could have , Hoe does that sound camarade ?
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It sounds puerile and arrogant.

Yes, I completely understand you believe you're special and have been given power and authority, that you are superior to us in that your God has granted YOU His divine favor while ignoring the rest of us. This is why your religion causes so much conflict in the world.
 
Balerion said:
LG avoiding the tough questions, as usual.

And can we get a moderator to stop Mazulu from preaching, please?
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I think Mazulu should be able to spout his nonsense as much as he wants, it only serves to show everyone the true nature of what his religion is teaching him. Since his religion is a hate cult, we need to combat his hate speech with more speech, rather than trying to censor him, which would merely have the effect of him pulling a persecution card.
 
(Q) said:
It sounds puerile and arrogant.

Yes, I completely understand you believe you're special and have been given power and authority, that you are superior to us in that your God has granted YOU His divine favor while ignoring the rest of us. This is why your religion causes so much conflict in the world.
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Let me tell you, I am not any more then any other human , I don't have any authority, nor power , I have to be humble , and help the needy, I pray to God for my daily infraction if I have done against my fellow man. As I visit inmates condemned for many years , I maintain fellowship With believers and nonbelievers . So you can modify your view if you want.
 
arauca said:
Let me tell you, I am not any more then any other human , I don't have any authority, nor power
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Exactly, so you can stop feeding us your nonsense about having godly experiences. You are not special.
 
(Q) said:
I do understanding that you believe you're spreading love when you childishly threaten others with your delusions of eternal hellfire, But it is indeed hate speech, notwithstanding. That is why your religion causes so much conflict in the world.
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My religion has not caused any conflict. You have mis-identified the target.
 
wegs said:
Over the past couple of years, I've fallen away from organized "religion." And while the Bible offers some moral guidance, I find myself not taking it literally. When I think about my trust in scientific truths, my faith beliefs seem even more erroneous. In a nutshell, I feel like I've been on a winding road with my faith...and now, I'm at a cross roads. (I've shared more details in the Christian Music thread if u are interested to gain perspective)

I'm dating an atheist who doesn't scoff at my beliefs whatsoever. But he said something recently and it was this..."if you believe in God, you should know why you do." (And he went on to say...not for others, but for myself, I need to know why)

I've believed in God all of my life; I don't "know" anything else. :eek: But, for a while, I've been spiritually "dry." I'm hopeful that some of you might be inspired to share any story with me as to if you are an atheist, but you were once a believer. How did you come to terms with it? How did it change your worldview? Your life? Your decision making?

I've read recently Charles Darwin's "journey" from following a faith to systematically denouncing the Old and New Testaments. He seemed to only apply logic, but is there more to it?

Just looking for some thoughtful input and guidance from those who were once believers and now, are not.
TIA!
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As mentioned somewhere else, I'm probably only now "atheist" in a behavioral [not an intellectual and inner feeling of certainty] context -- just reflexively living as if that were the case. That is, not expecting an afterlife, not expecting a higher agency that is interested in me or anyone else, not deeming an invisible "listener / observer" to be hanging around, etc.

During any transition phase I went through, I suppose I did weather it with a kind of militant scientism. The latter not as any dead-on synonymous reference to positivism, but treating science / naturalism as a kind of ideological worldview rather than methodology. Which made any transition of my own fairly comfortable since I was simply replacing one set of beliefs and governance with another (i.e., "nature" simply became the new "god" in the sense of retaining laws[1] that regulated the cosmos but minus the unnecessary personhood). Immanuel Kant's philosophy later helped me find a kind of neutral or epistemic agnostic stance, realizing that I had never yet truly gotten to or validated some metapyschological reality or immutable truth with a capital "T".

I'd surely also be classifiable as an apatheist, in addition to whatever else. From the standpoint that even online atheists seem far more interested in religion than I am. In contrast I rarely reply to religious threads or visit religious-topic forums (as evidenced by my extremely late appearance here), and have little interest in persuading anyone away from such or maintaining a driving or persistent enmity / disgust about these Abrahamic faiths. Even my earlier days on the web of futilely trying to correct creationists in regard to their misrepresentations of evolution, was abandoned for the most part when I eventually realized what a waste of time it was; spending three or four weeks working on a potential "client", just to have them snap right back to their original inflexible stance in the end.

I might even still be "Christian" in the sense of Thomas Jefferson, dispensing with the supernatural elements but retaining some kind of philosophical / moral / cultural connection with it. As the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia once put similar: "I feel that I'm enclosed within a Christian framework so huge that I don't believe it's possible to escape it, it's so much a part of the western point of view. [...] I was raised a Catholic so it's very hard for me to get out of that way of thinking. [...] I just don't like the exclusivity clause. [...Regarding God...] Whether it's personal - whether there's a point of view in there, or whether we're the point of view, I think is up for discussion. I don't believe in a supernatural being."[2]

- - - - - -

[1] Paul Davies: "...the very notion of physical law has its origins in theology. The idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws comes straight out of monotheism, which was the dominant influence in Europe at the time science as we know it was being formulated by Isaac Newton and his contemporaries. Just as classical Christianity presents God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, so physicists envisage their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships. Furthermore, Christians believe the world depends utterly on God for its existence, while the converse is not the case. Correspondingly, physicists declare that the universe is governed by eternal laws, but the laws remain impervious to events in the universe. I think this entire line of reasoning is now outdated and simplistic. We will never fully explain the world by appealing to something outside it that must simply be accepted on faith, be it an unexplained God or an unexplained set of mathematical laws. Can we do better? Yes, but only by relinquishing the traditional idea of physical laws as fixed, perfect relationships."
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2007/jun/26/spaceexploration.comment

[2] http://malfalfa1.tripod.com/​
 
(Q) said:
An intention you probably have no clue about, but will ignorantly label it as atheism, yes?
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I don't know if I am answered before . The communist system from 1920 up to Gorbachev even in Cuba were restricting freedom of religion, the system was to exclude god in their population mind , ( which expressed yourself that religion deprives society from prosperity ) Do I hate Russian, No ,now even V. Putin went to the shrine in Jerusalem at Via Dolorose.
 
(Q) said:
I think Mazulu should be able to spout his nonsense as much as he wants, it only serves to show everyone the true nature of what his religion is teaching him. Since his religion is a hate cult, we need to combat his hate speech with more speech, rather than trying to censor him, which would merely have the effect of him pulling a persecution card.
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In what way is spiritualism and Theosophy a hate cult? If you are loving in this world, you will create heaven around you in the next world. If you are hateful in this world, you will create...can you guess?
 
arauca said:
I don't know if I am answered before . The communist system from 1920 up to Gorbachev even in Cuba were restricting freedom of religion, the system was to exclude god in their population mind
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Yes, that is exactly what I expected you to say, showing me you don't have a clue what Communism is all about. Although I was a foreigner, I lived under Communist Regime for an entire year.
 
Mazulu said:
In what way is spiritualism and Theosophy a hate cult? If you are loving in this world, you will create heaven around you in the next world. If you are hateful in this world, you will create...can you guess?
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Yes, I understand you believe you're spreading love, but you're not. And, I also understand you must fabricate lies in order to defend the cult, That is due to the indoctrination you received that blocks out reality in favor of the myths and superstitions you were taught to believe.
 
(Q) said:
Yes, I understand you believe you're spreading love, but you're not. And, I also understand you must fabricate lies in order to defend the cult, That is due to the indoctrination you received that blocks out reality in favor of the myths and superstitions you were taught to believe.
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I am loving, polite and kind to other people. Why am I not that way to you?
 
(Q) said:
It sounds puerile and arrogant.

Yes, I completely understand you believe you're special and have been given power and authority, that you are superior to us in that your God has granted YOU His divine favor while ignoring the rest of us. This is why your religion causes so much conflict in the world.
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It is a win win solution. Favours are not made willy nilly. When we find out what these experiences were, I think we will see Arauca didn't get divine favors without tremendous effort on his part to begin with.
 
Argument for the existence of the soul

A soul is the non-physical embodiment of the personality of a person, or something with consciousness. The soul lives forever.

The universe has a soul. The laws of physics and physics constants are the non-physical embodiment of the personality of the universe (how it behaves). Consciousness is information transmission (which the space-time continuum does), and is the ability to experience. The universe (laws of physics and physics constants) will exist forever.

But the universe came from nothingness via the bb singularity. Was it specifically created by God? Or did it come from some mysterious unseen source? ...a source that creates things of like kind? Things that exist forever, things with non-physical qualities that manifest in the physical.
 
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