Atheism may not have been normal 1000 years ago, but holding a 1st century worldview now is not reasonable.
Straw man.
And let's be honest, here: This is an example of what disappoints about atheistic advocacy.
First, if the point that we're addressing questions of religion is at all relevant, then, no, fallacy is not appropriate.
Also, it's just so gutterborne in its simplifying prejudice.
Let me, please, compare two ideas for you:
• The only time, as I see it, that "atheism" should "be a religion" is actually an inadequate expression of accounting for the belief in no deity, or participation in no religion, as a protected circumstance and staus according to the proposition of "religious freedom".
• While superstition is not in and of itself creed, it is an easy gateway to subsequent code and cult.
The mix of fallacy and projection in order to postulate a projection attends the superstition not quite bound by creed, while implying internalized standard such as those composing communal code, as well as behavioral expectations not dissimilar from communal behavioral cult. Even as an independent atheist who might claim no group affiliations, you still manage to present your evangelism in a protoreligious context.
And while nothing is an absolute guarantee in human experience, the more it looks like a factional fight between religious zealots, the more people will accept that is what it is.
To wit:
it made perfect sense to believe in a human-like loving active God when we thought the earth was at the center of a small universe and everything revolved around us and all the workings of the world were mysterious.
Actually, the "loving God" is a more recent innovation attending human insecurity. For instance, do you even know where it comes from? And do you know the story of the rainbow wig?
No, really. It sounds great, doesn't it? That God so loved the world He sent his only Son? That God so loved the world that He had His Son killed in order to tell the world how much He loved it? The trick is to pay attention to what "love" means. Okay, I take it back; it's not much of a trick.
How about 1741:
The observation from the words that I would now insist upon is this.—"There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God."—By the mere pleasure of God, I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty, any more than if nothing else but God’s mere will had in the least degree, or in any respect whatsoever, any hand in the preservation of wicked men one moment.—The truth of this observation may appear by the following considerations ....
(Edwards↱)
And what does the good preacher have to say about love?
The subject that very much enrages an arbitrary prince, is liable to suffer the most extreme torments that human art can invent, or human power can inflict. But the greatest earthly potentates in their greatest majesty and strength, and when clothed in their greatest terrors, are but feeble, despicable worms of the dust, in comparison of the great and almighty Creator and King of heaven and earth. It is but little that they can do, when most enraged, and when they have exerted the utmost of their fury. All the kings of the earth, before God, are as grasshoppers; they are nothing, and less than nothing: both their love and their hatred is to be despised. The wrath of the great King of kings, is as much more terrible than theirs, as his majesty is greater.
†
The misery you are exposed to is that which God will inflict to that end, that he might show what that wrath of Jehovah is. God hath had it on his heart to show to angels and men, both how excellent his love is, and also how terrible his wrath is. Sometimes earthly kings have a mind to show how terrible their wrath is, by the extreme punishments they would execute on those that would provoke them. Nebuchadnezzar, that mighty and haughty monarch of the Chaldean empire, was willing to show his wrath when enraged with Shadrach, Meshech, and Abednego; and accordingly gave orders that the burning fiery furnace should be heated seven times hotter than it was before; doubtless, it was raised to the utmost degree of fierceness that human art could raise it. But the great God is also willing to show his wrath, and magnify his awful majesty and mighty power in the extreme sufferings of his enemies.
†
Many are daily coming from the east, west, north and south; many that were very lately in the same miserable condition that you are in, are now in a happy state, with their hearts filled with love to him who has loved them, and washed them from their sins in his own blood, and rejoicing in hope of the glory of God. How awful is it to be left behind at such a day! To see so many others feasting, while you are pining and perishing!
If we skip 1487, or 1095, we aren't passing over mere blithe repetition. Try psychoanalyzing what happened at Nicaea in 325 CE; it's kind of hard. But one of the differences 'twixt then and, say, the first century CE,would have to be consolidation of orthodoxy including the alienation of gnosticism. If we gloss over any number of milestones, none of the historical exempla are quite like each other, which in turn is part of the point.
I have a note set aside, a
tale of two headlines↱ for the same story through two different outlets. The original, from
Raw Story↱, runs, "Americans are manipulated by fake news because religion has infected our politics: Peabody-winning journalist". Over at
AlterNet↱, the headline asks, "Can Religion Explain Why Americans Are So Easily Duped by Fake News?"
And that's actually not irrelevant to the other reason I set it aside; there was also this:
"America has always been a Christian nation," [Kurt] Andersen quoted. "That had always meant a different thing 100 years ago or even 50 years ago than it means today… Christian Protestant religion became extreme. It became more magical and supernatural in its beliefs in America than it has for hundreds of years or for any other place in the world."
This point, circa 2018, recalls to mind
Mark Noll↱, circa 2002:
Western Protestantism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was moving from establishment forms of religion, embedded in traditional, organic, premodern political economies, to individualized and affectional forms adapted to modernizing, rational, and market-oriented societies. Theological manifestations of these changes can be described in several ways. They first reoriented specific beliefs: God was perceived less often as transcendent and self-contained, more often as immanent and relational. Divine revelation was equated more simply with the Bible alone than Scripture embedded in a self-conscious ecclesiastical tradition. The physical world created by God was more likely to be regarded as understandable, progressing, and malleable, than as mysterious, inimical, and fixed. Theological method came to rely less on instinctive deference to inherited confessions and more on self-evident propositions organized by scientific method.
Theological changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries also involved a shift in meaning for key concepts that operated in both religious and political life, for example, “freedom”, “justice”, “virtue”, and “vice”. For theology, the process at work was the same as Gordon Wood once described for intellectual developments more generally: “Although words and concepts may remain outwardly the same for centuries, their particular functions and meanings do not and could not remain static—not as long as individuals attempt to use them to explain new social circumstances and make meaningful new social behavior.” In America as much was happening in theology from new meanings given to old words as from the introduction of new vocabularies.
We shouldn't overlook the point that some of the currents feeding our neighbor's well are older than the first century, though I haven't ever attempted a full survey of his range, but the larger point is that the first century is your own box. While you are not necessarily wrong that, "There is no good reason to believe an intelligent, caring being created this vast universe", the limits of what it means are entirely your own.
Try it this way:
When you see people doing something you think is odd, don't you wonder about it? Don't you think, "well that's strange, why would they do that?" I've yet to hear a reasonable argument for it
In truth, it depends on what you mean in particular. Looking to the question of, "so many obviously intelligent people believe something that seems so obviously unfounded and .....actually silly", well, how much of what sounds so silly is your own invention or insistence or belief?
You're hardly original in that.
Oh, hey, 1746. Diderot:
Whether God exists or does not exist, He has come to rank among the most sublime and useless truths.