I wouldn't say that I find atheism beneficial. Sure, I think it's beneficial to switch to it from a religion, but that's a bit like removing your hand from a hot stove burner. That's a good move no doubt, but I wouldn't describe that same area hanging at your side as an inherently beneficial position had you not just had your hand on a stove burner instead.
It's just the default position. We're all atheists until we're either told to believe in some god or decide to on our own. But atheism isn't really a belief system or even scientific system at all. Science corroborates it and often makes people revert to it, but science doesn't have to enter the picture technically. To be an atheist all you have to do is not start thinking there's a possibility that a god is out there at some point.
So since I wouldn't count all the science as a given, I'd say atheism is completely neutral. It has nothing new to offer so as to be beneficial in and of itself. What might seem as it being beneficial when reverting to it from a religion is really one simply stopping something else that was harmful.
Imagine that all religions are frequencies of visible light, different colors based on how we perceive traveling photons, but they're all certainly photons. Photons are religions. Well atheism isn't a photon. Atheism is a shadow. And a shadow is nothing. A shadow is the illusion of something created by the stark contrast between a patch of nothingness midst all those photons. If the photons weren't around in the first you wouldn't even see anything to call a shadow.
Since a shadow is nothing, it also has nothing to offer. Still, if you're being blinded or sunburned, "stepping into a shadow" might seem like a good idea, but all you really did was step _out_ of the burning sunlight.
I'd argue that agnosticism is the darkness of which you speak, and that atheism is another of the many different wavelengths. Agnosticism is the true lack of belief; not believing in the lack of a god, nor the existence of a god. After all, when there is no light, any light could come shining in, but atheism does not allow such a thing; atheism wants to stay separate from the other wavelengths, while agnosticism embraces the religions. What embraces all the wavelengths of light more readily than lack of light? Certainly not another wavelength of light. Just as atheism does not allow the presence of other religion, a single wavelength of light will not combine with another. While they may exist in the same area as each other, they will not interact. Darkness, on the other hand, is removed by the light, when the agnostic finds a religion that interests them, possibly revealing to them their truth.
Do you believe in the Aberimonu? Rather, did you before reading this comment?
I doubt it, as it's a cryptozoological creature that I just made up on the spot. Even if you weren't previously so much as conceptually aware of it, so long as you didn't either believe it existed or possibly existed, you didn't believe it existed. Even though that fact isn't something that ever crossed your mind, it's a fact that the Aberimonu is not something you believed existed.
That is the default position for all things before knowledge of them is presented. When it is, a new position may or may not be assumed.
Humans are born atheists. Even if a person never learns of what religion even is, they are still an atheist, unbeknownst to even them.
The core issue is that you are desperate to label a default lack of belief a belief when it simply isn't, just as an empty cookie jar is not a type of cookie.
If theism is light, photons, it cannot be more clear that atheism is a-light, a-photons, nothing. It's literally nothing. Your apparent inability to see this is the same as with someone incapable of seeing that a shadow is nothing, confused by the illusion of contrast rendering nothingness something useful to note in the context.
How doesn't agnosticism better fit what you describe than atheism? Agnostics are the ones who truly have no beliefs, not rejecting or embracing anything. Atheists reject all religions, except for their own belief in the impossibility of other religions. Humans are born agnostics, not immediately theistic religion, but not believing it either. Since a human is born without knowledge of religion, they will grow to be an agnostic until the concept of religion is suggested to them. They would not reject religions as atheists do, nor would they embrace religion as theists do. They are the ones who truly lack in belief. Atheism is a religion with one belief: there is no god who created the world. Agnosticism is not a religion, as agnostics have no belief.
No. People are absolutely not born agnostics. Without a conceptual understanding of gods, one can't believe one might exist.
It is widely known that people are born atheists. From the Wikipedia entry on atheism: "Atheism is commonly defined as the simple absence of belief that any deities exist. This broad definition would include newborns and other people who have not been exposed to theistic ideas. As far back as 1772, Baron d'Holbach said that 'All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.'"
If people are not born agnostic, then where did the first religions come from? The suggestion of religion must have come from nature itself first, or else there would be no religion.
If so many people are so insistent that atheism is not anti-theism, then why don't you and all the other anti-theists call yourself anti-theists, and not atheists, since, apparently, anti-theist is the far more correct title, according to your argument.
Atheism is lack of belief in the staples of theism while antitheism is opposition of them.
You can be both. An atheist doesn't have to be an antitheist and in fact they _can't_ yet be such at birth; that requires knowledge of theism and a negative opinion of the thought of it spreading. But an antitheist is almost universally also an atheist (although technically a theist could also be opposed to others believing for some bizarre reason, and therefore an antitheist).
We're born with a lack of belief in anything we've never any heard of or yet thought of ourselves. We haven't heard of or thought of theism at birth so we're atheists by default. To be agnostic we have to suspect that the existence of deities is at least possible and we can't do that until we've heard of them or thought of them.
We don't have to be walking around actively thinking of our atheism to lack theistic beliefs and therefore meet the definition of atheists. Atheism isn't lack of theistic beliefs after having considered them; its just lack of theistic beliefs. At any rate, I am both an atheist and antitheist, and I used to run a large page and group dedicated to antitheism.
As for where the concept of deities came from, people came up with the ideas after using their imaginations and after observing things like the moon and the sun. Humans are actually predisposed to developing religiosity for two reasons, and had a third reason to keep it after devising it.
1. The human brain isn't very well equipped to handle the concept of not being able to explain _everything_ at any given moment. It's just good enough at explaining so much that it doesn't cope very well with hitting walls that are simply going to remain at various points until scientific breakthroughs take us further. Our profound need to immediately explain everything, coupled with lacking hardly anything resembling the level of scientific method we have today, led us to start filling in the blanks and eventually orally passing on wild ideas and writing books claiming to essentially have the whole damn thing figured out. We're out there walking around, still taking shits at the edge of camps, thousands of years from indoor plumbing and electricity, and apparently we've solved the entire formation of the universe. Not having done so would have made us feel uncomfortable.
2. This is the biggest one. Biology is born from chemical processes that allow formations to both store data and replicate themselves. The entire process of natural selection is essentially based on these formations doing everything possible to preserve themselves and also to reproduce. They get better and better at it. Eventually you have lifeforms that essentially survive at all cost. Eventually creatures have complex emotions like fear and horrible anxiety regarding possible death. Every fiber of our beings is based on billions of years of natural processes saying, "There is nothing more important than living."
Most creatures don't even know they can die but they're nonetheless programmed to interact with the environment as if they do. More advanced creatures, heaps of mammals for example, know they can die. They know if they don't secure food and water while evading predators they will die. They don't know, however, that they are _going_ to die, the worst, no matter what.
Humans alone know this and it's the worst thing that could ever happen to a being that's very coding drives them to believe nothing is worse. This drives cognitive bias to borderline mental illness and, so as to escape this existential crisis, we're willing to accept unlikely or even impossible scenarios so as to believe there's a way around this, because without this loophole many of us couldn't handle it and would have full-on mental breakdowns. This is a coping mechanism. Suddenly, maybe these things like the sun and the moon are going to make sure we don't _really_ die, not permanently, if we make them happy enough.
3. As all that cements and creation, immortality, and law are intertwined, certain people can't help but noticing that the fear of losing eternal life and perhaps even being supernaturally punished is keeping people under control a lot better than laws they're told are purely human.
why are you atheist? why are you theist?
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I wouldn't say that I find atheism beneficial. Sure, I think it's beneficial to switch to it from a religion, but that's a bit like removing your hand from a hot stove burner. That's a good move no doubt, but I wouldn't describe that same area hanging at your side as an inherently beneficial position had you not just had your hand on a stove burner instead.
It's just the default position. We're all atheists until we're either told to believe in some god or decide to on our own. But atheism isn't really a belief system or even scientific system at all. Science corroborates it and often makes people revert to it, but science doesn't have to enter the picture technically. To be an atheist all you have to do is not start thinking there's a possibility that a god is out there at some point.
So since I wouldn't count all the science as a given, I'd say atheism is completely neutral. It has nothing new to offer so as to be beneficial in and of itself. What might seem as it being beneficial when reverting to it from a religion is really one simply stopping something else that was harmful.
Imagine that all religions are frequencies of visible light, different colors based on how we perceive traveling photons, but they're all certainly photons. Photons are religions. Well atheism isn't a photon. Atheism is a shadow. And a shadow is nothing. A shadow is the illusion of something created by the stark contrast between a patch of nothingness midst all those photons. If the photons weren't around in the first you wouldn't even see anything to call a shadow.
Since a shadow is nothing, it also has nothing to offer. Still, if you're being blinded or sunburned, "stepping into a shadow" might seem like a good idea, but all you really did was step _out_ of the burning sunlight.
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Clunk42
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I'd argue that agnosticism is the darkness of which you speak, and that atheism is another of the many different wavelengths. Agnosticism is the true lack of belief; not believing in the lack of a god, nor the existence of a god. After all, when there is no light, any light could come shining in, but atheism does not allow such a thing; atheism wants to stay separate from the other wavelengths, while agnosticism embraces the religions. What embraces all the wavelengths of light more readily than lack of light? Certainly not another wavelength of light. Just as atheism does not allow the presence of other religion, a single wavelength of light will not combine with another. While they may exist in the same area as each other, they will not interact. Darkness, on the other hand, is removed by the light, when the agnostic finds a religion that interests them, possibly revealing to them their truth.
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Do you believe in the Aberimonu? Rather, did you before reading this comment?
I doubt it, as it's a cryptozoological creature that I just made up on the spot. Even if you weren't previously so much as conceptually aware of it, so long as you didn't either believe it existed or possibly existed, you didn't believe it existed. Even though that fact isn't something that ever crossed your mind, it's a fact that the Aberimonu is not something you believed existed.
That is the default position for all things before knowledge of them is presented. When it is, a new position may or may not be assumed.
Humans are born atheists. Even if a person never learns of what religion even is, they are still an atheist, unbeknownst to even them.
The core issue is that you are desperate to label a default lack of belief a belief when it simply isn't, just as an empty cookie jar is not a type of cookie.
If theism is light, photons, it cannot be more clear that atheism is a-light, a-photons, nothing. It's literally nothing. Your apparent inability to see this is the same as with someone incapable of seeing that a shadow is nothing, confused by the illusion of contrast rendering nothingness something useful to note in the context.
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Clunk42
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How doesn't agnosticism better fit what you describe than atheism? Agnostics are the ones who truly have no beliefs, not rejecting or embracing anything. Atheists reject all religions, except for their own belief in the impossibility of other religions. Humans are born agnostics, not immediately theistic religion, but not believing it either. Since a human is born without knowledge of religion, they will grow to be an agnostic until the concept of religion is suggested to them. They would not reject religions as atheists do, nor would they embrace religion as theists do. They are the ones who truly lack in belief. Atheism is a religion with one belief: there is no god who created the world. Agnosticism is not a religion, as agnostics have no belief.
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No. People are absolutely not born agnostics. Without a conceptual understanding of gods, one can't believe one might exist.
It is widely known that people are born atheists. From the Wikipedia entry on atheism: "Atheism is commonly defined as the simple absence of belief that any deities exist. This broad definition would include newborns and other people who have not been exposed to theistic ideas. As far back as 1772, Baron d'Holbach said that 'All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God.'"
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If people are not born agnostic, then where did the first religions come from? The suggestion of religion must have come from nature itself first, or else there would be no religion.
If so many people are so insistent that atheism is not anti-theism, then why don't you and all the other anti-theists call yourself anti-theists, and not atheists, since, apparently, anti-theist is the far more correct title, according to your argument.
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Atheism is lack of belief in the staples of theism while antitheism is opposition of them.
You can be both. An atheist doesn't have to be an antitheist and in fact they _can't_ yet be such at birth; that requires knowledge of theism and a negative opinion of the thought of it spreading. But an antitheist is almost universally also an atheist (although technically a theist could also be opposed to others believing for some bizarre reason, and therefore an antitheist).
We're born with a lack of belief in anything we've never any heard of or yet thought of ourselves. We haven't heard of or thought of theism at birth so we're atheists by default. To be agnostic we have to suspect that the existence of deities is at least possible and we can't do that until we've heard of them or thought of them.
We don't have to be walking around actively thinking of our atheism to lack theistic beliefs and therefore meet the definition of atheists. Atheism isn't lack of theistic beliefs after having considered them; its just lack of theistic beliefs. At any rate, I am both an atheist and antitheist, and I used to run a large page and group dedicated to antitheism.
As for where the concept of deities came from, people came up with the ideas after using their imaginations and after observing things like the moon and the sun. Humans are actually predisposed to developing religiosity for two reasons, and had a third reason to keep it after devising it.
1. The human brain isn't very well equipped to handle the concept of not being able to explain _everything_ at any given moment. It's just good enough at explaining so much that it doesn't cope very well with hitting walls that are simply going to remain at various points until scientific breakthroughs take us further. Our profound need to immediately explain everything, coupled with lacking hardly anything resembling the level of scientific method we have today, led us to start filling in the blanks and eventually orally passing on wild ideas and writing books claiming to essentially have the whole damn thing figured out. We're out there walking around, still taking shits at the edge of camps, thousands of years from indoor plumbing and electricity, and apparently we've solved the entire formation of the universe. Not having done so would have made us feel uncomfortable.
2. This is the biggest one. Biology is born from chemical processes that allow formations to both store data and replicate themselves. The entire process of natural selection is essentially based on these formations doing everything possible to preserve themselves and also to reproduce. They get better and better at it. Eventually you have lifeforms that essentially survive at all cost. Eventually creatures have complex emotions like fear and horrible anxiety regarding possible death. Every fiber of our beings is based on billions of years of natural processes saying, "There is nothing more important than living."
Most creatures don't even know they can die but they're nonetheless programmed to interact with the environment as if they do. More advanced creatures, heaps of mammals for example, know they can die. They know if they don't secure food and water while evading predators they will die. They don't know, however, that they are _going_ to die, the worst, no matter what.
Humans alone know this and it's the worst thing that could ever happen to a being that's very coding drives them to believe nothing is worse. This drives cognitive bias to borderline mental illness and, so as to escape this existential crisis, we're willing to accept unlikely or even impossible scenarios so as to believe there's a way around this, because without this loophole many of us couldn't handle it and would have full-on mental breakdowns. This is a coping mechanism. Suddenly, maybe these things like the sun and the moon are going to make sure we don't _really_ die, not permanently, if we make them happy enough.
3. As all that cements and creation, immortality, and law are intertwined, certain people can't help but noticing that the fear of losing eternal life and perhaps even being supernaturally punished is keeping people under control a lot better than laws they're told are purely human.
That's the origin of religion in a nutshell.