To those who ascribe themselves to Atheists...

format_quote Originally Posted by Lynx

the 'big picture'

Just curious. Do you know of anyone who knows the 'big picture'?

format_quote Originally Posted by naidamar

Funny, this is exactly how I feel about atheists.

i know. that was my point: these little criticisms about people's thought-processes (like the story by ThisOldMan) are so pointless b/c everyone else thinks the same about you.

Just curious. Do you know of anyone who knows the 'big picture'?

Well some people can see more of the picture than others, that's for sure.

I notice from reading mythology that the belief and worship in many invisible supernatural beings seems to have been a world wide trend. Probably reaching it's apex among the Greeks, Romans and Norse. The general evolution seems to have been a period of strong worship among the people of a specific culture, the building of many statues and/or temples soon followed by a collapse and complete disbelief in those ancient Deities.

However, after many centuries I do not see that as having happened in the belief of the Abrahamic Monotheistic God(swt), it seems it has always had a pattern of continued growth. I do agree there have been and continue to be disagreement over the proper way to worship, but over all, belief in one God(swt) continues to grow and unlike polytheism it is not limited to a specific people.


Any explanations as to why that would be?


Before anybody notices, I did not mention Hinduism. Not because it appears to be a polytheistic religion that does not follow the evolutionary pattern. But because the Hindus I met seem to view Hinduism as being monotheistic with a view similar to the concept of Trinity, except for increasing the size from 3 to a large number.

format_quote Originally Posted by Lynx

Well some people can see more of the picture than others, that's for sure.

Agreed. We are, much as we wish otherwise, not created equal. The problem with some people is that just because they know a little bit more, they begin to delude themselves into thinking that they know everything. Said everything, of course, is an impossibility. I have nothing against deducing knowledge from what we perceive. This process is how we learn. What I find ridiculous is that just because a person can learn new knowledge, he thinks that he will eventually learn everything. Said everything, as I said above, is an impossibility. Not sure if this applies to present company, but I believe it is this notion that a person can eventually learn everything that makes said person deny the truth that there is One that actually knows everything.

Hope I have expressed myself more clearly. Insha Allah.

format_quote Originally Posted by Pygoscelis

It is the not knowing that makes life worthwhile.

My apologies if you feel offended by this observation but somehow that makes me think of the man who prefers to make love with the lights switched off because it's more exciting for him to do it in the dark. So if you prefer to grope your way through life in the darkness which you created yourself by shutting your eyes tight, what can I say?

format_quote Originally Posted by Pygoscelis

Woodrow,

Maybe it is because the polytheistic Gods are more concrete and personalized and less abstract? The polytheistic Gods warred amongst themselves, interacted on a regular basis with humans, and were basically a higher "class" of being but still beings we could very much relate to. Perhaps this led them to be seen as mythical figures. Some of them may have been even meant originally to be seen as figurative instead of literal beings, or as aspects of the divine (as in Hinduism) while they still may considered a top God or creative force which was more abstract and distant. The abrahamic monotheistic God is more universal and abstract. Maybe that gives the idea greater longevity.

Aso, how long did these polytheistic gods last? And has the monotheistic abrahamic God outlasted them yet? Has he done so in the way we currently envision him? Or has he morphed numerous times and become numerous different conceptions of monotheistic God? I think the latter is more the reality. We may think that we see God the same way the ancient Abrahamics did, but I doubt that.

I agree you make some very good points there. Especially in the last paragraph. Which to me only confirms my belief that the Torah and Injil did not remain as originally given. The last sentence I see as being similar to my belief that the Qur'an restored what had been lost.

format_quote Originally Posted by Pygoscelis

I don't think you understood what I was referring to.

I was referring to the words which you posted which were as follows:

It is the not knowing that makes life worthwhile.

format_quote Originally Posted by Yahya Sulaiman

Some [atheists] do [want to see a different perspective on life, as you’ve said, Qatada], but that doesn't mean getting them into that perspective is liable to be an easy task. Touchy-feely armchair psychology never convinced anyone of anything, and among the atheists I've seen and talked to more often than not their atheism isn't caused by trust issues at all but seemingly by a virtually incurable all-or-nothing mentality about claims of the paranormal, believing on some level that the entire invisible world is a single multifaceted object that cannot have any part of it removed without the whole thing being unraveled. Not so much throwing the baby out with the bathwater as assuming all babies to make the bathwater as dirty as the one they grew up with. This is why you'll so often hear them make claims, which make sense only to themselves and other atheists, that if we are to believe in God or the angels then we may as well believe in leprechauns and fauns too. It's the same fallacy involved in the silly argument that the sheer number of religions in the world somehow makes the odds of any individual one of them being right lower: they don't grasp the possibility that the odds aren't automatically even between multiple things just because they have some similarity or connection between them. God's existence is supernatural and elves are supernatural, so God's existence must be as bogus as elves. (This is made all the worse by—and perhaps also partially caused by—the common circularity of their standards for evidence, that things which are not physical demand physical proof, and the only thing that would convince them of the supernatural is evidence from the natural world.) You'll notice as a result that while there are relatively very few theists indeed who believe in everything paranormal that is not too obviously contradictory to everything else, there are practically no atheists who are not hard materialists despite atheism itself not automatically denoting that. While some, if not most, of us theists examine proposed supernatural realities on their own merits, individually, and at the very worst reject them otherwise simply because they're inconsistent with supernatural beliefs we already hold, [the atheists’ own] perceptions apparently do not contain or notice any percentages between 0 and 100. Long story short, if you want to make an alternate perspective seem appealing to them then focus your energies on setting your own viewpoint above the herd. Don't explain to them why they need something more, only what's so special about the particular something more that we offer. You'll notice how racists who change their minds seldom do so because they suddenly understand something about the very logic of their view which undermines the way they look at the world itself, but instead because they have got to know people of the race they despise who are not what they expected them to be.

I made this post to give Qatada advice. I did not point fingers at any individual, specific people either on or off the board and I am not speaking to anyone else but Qatada: as such, I will not entertain any argument from anyone else here. Neither my hands nor my emotional state is up to the tedium of repeating the same debate we always have a twelfth time. Just save it.

format_quote Originally Posted by ThePhilosopher

[In reference to the, "This is why you'll so often hear them make claims, which make sense only to themselves and other atheists, that if we are to believe in God or the angels then we may as well believe in leprechauns and fauns too," part, even though the rest is quoted.] Actually, these claims do not only make sense to Atheists in general. I find it quite amusing that you brought this topic up. These claims also make sense to every other religion that does not adhere to Islamic principles (save the other Abrahamic religions of course). For example, while an Atheist (and any rational person) will laugh at the notion of angels and demons (as interpreted by Islam)---so will a Hindu, Animist, various polytheist religions, etc.

Then there is a case of blatant special pleading that you have attempted to conveniently compare with the analogy of the baby and the bathwater. You have no empirical evidence for an angel or a demon (various creatures such as unicorns and leprechauns are ironically more probable than something that can not be comprehended even in principle), Hindu's lack empirical evidence for Krishna or Vishnu. "Faith" is the only standard in which these may be measured by and so in the end it is a "my faith is better than your faith" argument which of course has no rational grounds attributed to it. You have faith that the illogical entities in your religion are real and Hindus similarly have faith in their own yet you attempt to explain that your own entities are real on the same basis that a Hindu (just one example religion btw) does. This is special pleading and it is not that Atheists categorize all absurdities to be non-existent, it is that all absurdities ARE non-existent as they all similarly lack evidence.

"That which can be asserted without evidence and be dismissed without evidence"
-Hitchens razor

Though, maybe Allah the almighty has not opened my heart yet and I am not able to understand, so please show me the way if I am misunderstanding. But, know that I was once a Muslim and a very religious one, so I am well acquainted with your own perspective as well as the one I have developed more recently.

As you can see, I don’t even have to hurt my fingers by entertaining any argument here. Anyone can see for themselves, if I just show the quotes together, how blatantly ThePhilosopher has not only seized in, yes, an intellectually cowardly way onto one tiny little piece of my original quote while still keeping yet utterly ignoring the rest, but also made himself miss the point of the one little out-of-context snippet he did quote—and in addition to all that demonstrated the main principle of the text he deliberately glossed over, and in doing so demonstrated how true it was quite well with his declaration that any belief in angels without also a belief in supernatural creatures of contradictory systems is automatic “special pleading” because all absurdities (notice how he didn’t establish his claim that they were all absurd, he just declared it) are non-existent since they all lack evidence equally (another mere assertion). This is exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. Don’t argue, folks; just read it for yourself and you’ll see. Notice how he absolutely ignored everything but one single sentence in an extremely long paragraph, the very next part of which established why the illogic I discussed in that one sentence is false.

Probably no doubt he’ll take that as an invitation to desperately attempt a belated true refutation now, but watch for the same tricks next time. I trust you folks not to let his nonsense slip by you or to let any silent readers of this thread from on or off the board be fooled either. I myself should not make any more posts here until I get a refill of indomethacin, and my patience is wearing thin with this guy already. And anyone who says that any rational person will automatically laugh at someone else's beliefs does not deserve to be dignified with a response. Leave him alone and perhaps he'll grow up someday.

format_quote Originally Posted by Aztec-Revert19

They simply disbelieve for a lack of evidence.

Partly. It's more a balance of evidence (or lack or it) between believing in God or not. Most atheists consider that evidence suggesting there is no God is far weighter than any that suggests there is/might be a God. For example, I have said on these boards many times that if someone could come up with a solution to the 'Problem of Evil' that was even remotely plausible, let alone satisfactory to me, I might see that as grounds to revisit the question. And I don't just mean people here; I'm perfectly familiar with all the usual arguments. But nobody ever has.

The position you describe is perhaps more of an agnostic one.

Also, they are not atheists because this is what they are taught. Also on the contrary, it is the religious people that are generally religious because of what they are taught. Very few people are brought up as atheists. Most of them come from religious families.

Regarding the last, that would depend where they come from. It's certainly not true of most of Western Europe. I'd agree that very few are 'brought up as atheists' anywhere, because it just doesn't work that way (except maybe in the Dawkins household!). It's just that if the parents don't discuss religion or attend places of worship then their kids won't either, and the topic just doesn't become important to them, at least at an early age. I suppose there have been historical exceptions, such as in Soviet Russia and Mao's China.