Why ExMos's turn atheist!

[_krose]

Asking for convincing evidence is so very arrogant.

[_RockSlider]

Asking for convincing evidence is so very arrogant.

How dare us not go on faith!

[_Res Ipsa]

My own crackpot theory is that formons who join other churches have a new community that can replace their former community. As a result, they are less likely to join online communities than are those who don’t join. That’s why atheists are so heavily represented in online communities of formons.

In my case, it was 25 years between leaving the church and identifying as an atheist. During that time, I did a ton of reading about science, mostly biology, cosmology, and physics. From that reading, I was able to see how it was possible for the universe to exist without God. Once I opened mind to that possibility, I saw less and less reason to believe in any flavor of God. Eventually, I could see no good reason for me to believe. And that’s where I’ve been for several years now.

[_Ceeboo]

We could get into the definition debates, conflating agnosticism with atheism, belief vs lack of belief vs belief in a negative, which is always how this tedious conversation goes. For me it usually just boils down to those identifying as "atheists" being arrogant pricks.

Yeah - You're not going to experience too much trouble locating arrogant pricks who self identify as atheist. Given all the parroting and copycat mockery that takes place in sections of this community, it's a great breeding ground for arrogant and pretentious pricks.

To be fair though, theists (of every stripe) have produced some exceptionally arrogant and quite dicky human beings as well. So, there is that.

Peace,
Ceeboo

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

However, if you want to claim that a God or gods exist outside of our functional reality then I just have to shrug my shoulders because how do you argue against something like that?

- Doc

There's a few ways. The two most important types of atheological argument for the nonexistence of gods are:

1) The definition of a god is incoherent and it is necessarily true that incoherent things cannot exist.

and

2) It's actually reasonable to think things do not exist when you note the lack of evidence for them and the body of evidence that indicates they are products of human imagination. Such things are improbable to exist and the statement "X does not exist" is just another way of saying, "the likelihood X does not exist is sufficiently high that one can be confident in it."

A lot goes into these type of arguments and my one or two sentence summary might sell them short in your mind. I disagree with both, but they are probably have more merit than you think.

Sure. You can try to speak common sense to an esotericist, but they're just going to brush past it like Bruce Smith honing in on a quarterback. That's kind of my point. There are a few posters here, some more refined than others, who simply refuse to deal in reality, and any point, however well reasoned or argued, is quickly brushed aside in order to refocus the argument on their assertions. It's just an endless cavalcade of bull crap, and yet somehow we the atheist are the dicks in the whole affair.

- Doc

[_Xenophon]

Sure. You can try to speak common sense to an esotericist, but they're just going to brush past it like Bruce Smith honing in on a quarterback. That's kind of my point. There are a few posters here, some more refined than others, who simply refuse to deal in reality, and any point, however well reasoned or argued, is quickly brushed aside in order to refocus the argument on their assertions. It's just an endless cavalcade of bull crap, and yet somehow we the atheist are the dicks in the whole affair.

- Doc

In my opinion, most of the declaration of atheists being jerks centers around the lack of respect that some atheists pay to believer's ideas. It is pretty common for atheists to declare beliefs as magical, woo-woo or whatever other pejorative phrase you like. I make no claim to the above practice being inaccurate, just that it reads as highly disrespectful and arrogant, not unlike evangelicals throwing around scientism. This is a debate that is often deeply personal on both sides, thus feelings get hurt quite easily. The most successful debaters I have seen on the topic typically refrain from those kinds of digs and instead just focus on fact based, evidence driven presentations.

You're right that you probably won't win many people over with the arguments, but at least you won't come across as a knob.

[_Dr Exiled]

For me, this comes back to the need for mo's and evangelicals to force their beliefs onto the population at large. Don't try and save us any more. We will take our chances in a reverse pascal wager sense. It is fine for them to have their magic world view, but as Christopher Hitchens admonished, play with your religious toys inside your own home and not outside. Nevertheless, it doesn't do any good to ridicule the religious as they retrench, usually, when confronted with their utter lack of evidence.

[_Maksutov]

It's fascinating to me that there's such a large, vibrant, noisy ex- group for Mormons. A similar sized church group, the Seventh Day Adventists, doesn't have such a large and articulate ex- community.

Does Mormonism produce an unusual number of former members? Does it produce an unusual number of schismatic groups? If so, why?

[_Water Dog]

Asking for convincing evidence is so very arrogant.

How dare us not go on faith!

^^ proving my point

[_Maksutov]

We could get into the definition debates, conflating agnosticism with atheism, belief vs lack of belief vs belief in a negative, which is always how this tedious conversation goes. For me it usually just boils down to those identifying as "atheists" being arrogant pricks.

Yeah - You're not going to experience too much trouble locating arrogant pricks who self identify as atheist. Given all the parroting and copycat mockery that takes place in sections of this community, it's a great breeding ground for arrogant and pretentious pricks.

To be fair though, theists (of every stripe) have produced some exceptionally arrogant and quite dicky human beings as well. So, there is that.

Peace,
Ceeboo

Believing and not believing are leaps to conclusions. That's why I stay agnostic. However...

Everyone I know is an atheist, including everyone on this board. Everyone reading this post knows that there are gods they *don't* believe in, therefore they're an atheist to those believers. So is it arrogant to dismiss Vishnu or Thor? Or more arrogant to believe in them?