I grew up extremely conservative christian (homeschooled, no tv, women don’t work outside the house) and was taught that anything other than married man and women was evil.
The thing is we were also taught critical thinking and logic albeit it was to compare “new teachings” against the bible. My parents always said since the bible is true [sic] it would stand up to any scrutiny. They thankfully never learned the lesson most christian leaders have that Christianity needs to be mandated for it to be effective. Obviously the bible did not hold up to logic and I’m now a proud atheist and in the process of healing.
Man, that’s worse than what I experienced growing up. Out of curiosity, why did you decide to go with atheism? Personally, I’m agnostic (I think that’s the right term) because I see no compelling evidence or argument for either side, and I am of the opinion that a human’s finite brain could never even come close to figuring out the answer. And no, the Bible isn’t evidence, not one that’s even close to being the slightest bit rigorous at least. To me, it’s as much evidence for Christianity as the Harry Potter books are for wizardry.
You’re confusing belief with knowledge.
If you don’t believe in a deity, guess what, you’re an atheist regardless of whether you know for sure a god doesn’t exist or not.
Most atheists are agnostic because it’s not on us to prove that a god doesn’t exist, no one should ever take the burden of proving a negative.
That’s not entirely true, most definitions of Agnosticism frame it as a different position from Atheism.
Plus, you don’t have to prove something to believe it, if you’re convinced that there is no god you can define yourself an Atheist, that’s it. Agnostics are just “on the fence” and have no horse in the race.
The journey went: disappointment with God, angry at God, apathetic, agnostic, then atheist. I considered myself agnostic for a long time but it always felt a bit like a compromise for me, like it’s more palatable to think “Oh, I just don’t know one way or another” over seeing god as a stopgap for holes in knowledge.
Rather than the approach of attributing less and less to the divine over time, I decided to attribute nothing and go from there.
Saying that one can’t disprove god’s existence feels the same to me as saying a watermelon is blue inside until it’s observed.
Thanks for your perspective!
Regarding your last point, we only know that the flesh of a watermelon is indeed red because we’ve seen it before. If, say, an alien would suddenly come to Earth and be presented with a watermelon, they would not know what colour it is without cracking it open or otherwise probing it with various tools (granted of course that they perceive colour like we do)
Attributing nothing to the divine is also the way I go about it. We have scientific explanations for most phenomenon we see on a daily basis, and for those we do not, I do think we will find scientific explanations for them one day. None of the mysteries of the universe that would later be answered have been caused by the supernatural, so I have no reason to think it will be different.
However, I do think that a lack of observable trace of a “divine being” is not necessarily an evidence of nonexistence. To me, my agnosticism is not a form of compromise, but a recognition of the limitations of humans, as well as an acknowledgement relative inconsequence the question of whether a divine being exists or not is to the universe and to my own life. If nothing in my life or in the known universe can be attributed to the divine, why does it matter whether it exists or not? If an extraterrestrial exists in some distant galaxy, surely it would not matter to them whether I exist or not. That’s the way I think of the idea of divine beings.
Anyways, it’s kind of great to be able to ramble about this on the internet, most of the people I know are religious and unfortunately would not be very tolerant of this type of viewpoint.
