Your friends are just douchebags, then. I have a few other Athiest friends as well as Christian friends, and we all get along just fine. Religion doesn’t even come up between us.
It’s really a matter of you having a standard of logical thinking for one thinking, and leaving an exception for a religious belief. Like it or not, religious belief is a massive jump in logic and it’s difficult to justify.
Obviously we had some pretty smart scientists and such that got us to this point in history that believed in a diety, so being an atheist is not an express requirement to join the ‘smart people club’.
If you let your faith or cultural perspective get in the way of your intellectual or moral reasoning, however, then most of high intellectual caliber will have a bone to pick with you and quickly point out your biases.
Generally the point of having friends that are as intelligent or more intelligent then yourself is to challenge your own perceptions about things and engage in debate. If you don’t want to be challenged by your friends intellectually, then I would suggest befriending someone who will accept everything you say. Sounds harsh, but reality is generally a harsh mistress.
TL;DR your friends see a flaw in your reasoning and are picking at it because they feel its thier duty to point out certain biases that may lead to flawed reasoning. If they are good friends, they will do this playfully and laugh about it. If they are bad friends, they will harass you about it and leave you feeling alienated. Subtle difference, but just know that they are not wrong for questioning your beliefs. Ni ether are you wrong for questioning theirs. If you see a flaw in thier reasoning,by all means, hammer away at it! Most that enjoy debate often enjoy seeing thier arguments ripped apart, as it makes them better able to construct better ones!
so you don’t believe in anything? nothing – not even the acceptance that there is a higher power then yourself?
I mean, it must be one thing to be naive, but to be a moron is a total different story.
Piss off, It’s what he Believes, whether you think its good or not is none off your buisness calling him a moron.
What evidence is there of a higher power? Please, explain to me where you’re getting any remote scientific evidence of a God. I mean, it’s one thing to be indoctrinated, but to be completely shut-off to rational belief is another.
The reason people are atheists is because they have a set standard of believing in things, that they would require evidence and need to be convinced of something before they can actually believe it. Some people identify as skeptics - people who look at a theory postulated and say “okay, I like this, but what are flaws I can find in it?” to try and validate it as something worth believing in. This is how we go about explaining the world around us. And after we’ve gathered knowledge, if we find a flaw in it we examine what went wrong in our explanation and try to improve it. Religions don’t do this.
Religion does not stand up to my standard of belief. There is no logical reason to believe in a God, and no proof of one either. I can’t just say that it exists outside of any form of “evidence” we can find, because if I do that I have to throw away everything I know about science and how we humans obtain new knowledge, and that’s absolutely ludicrous.
I don’t believe you.
Look around you.
What do you see?
Do you see nothing?
I thought not.
Look closer. Is what you see mundane? Perhaps to you, yes. To us, what you are looking at this very moment is simply incredible. It is astounding. It is so complex that it would take years of study and research for you to truly grasp the nature of its existence.
You are looking at the world. Reality. Everything there is.
Isn’t it wonderful?
Why?
cause I’m god:evil:
What an impressive argument.
i kno rite jesus saves
shh, you hear that? Its a ban hammer. I think failcrash’s Ghost has been posessing certain cockroaches.
Jesus isn’t gonna save your dumb ass from being trolled.
Of course they can. But they must admit to it being nothing but a faith based belief. Any suggestion that there is anything related to logic, or rational deduction to come by this belief contradicts the idea that they would be intellectual, or logical.
I don’t think any less of the person, merely worry about the basis of their beliefs. I worry for people who are Christians. Quite frankly, beliefs lead to action. There is interpretations of some Christian dogma that could lead to terrible things.
While there is no excuse for rude arrogant, or intolerant behavior, it can be rather difficult living in societies that have religious beliefs so interwoven into their day to day life, it is sometimes difficult for religious people to see how things they never consider referencing their beliefs and not ours. If I lived in the southern united states my daughter would be forced to learn the christian creationist beliefs system, in it’s strict form in public schools. This bothers me. Many Christians see nothing wrong with this, while there IS something fundamentally wrong with this, and not just on a religious beliefs standpoint.
Agnosticism and Atheism are not mutually incompatible. Agnosticism is about lack of knowledge. Atheism is about lack of belief.
I’m both agnostic and atheist. I don’t know and I don’t believe.
However.
The “God” of the Bible does not exist. How do I know this? The very characteristics given to this god is internally inconsistent. It might as well say that a circle is a square and vice versa.
Actually, you’re not. When you capitalize the letter “G” in “God”, you are referring to a specific deity who is referred to as “God”…specifically the Abrahamic (JudeoChristoIslamic) one.
You might not want to capitalize the letter “G” then. Avoids confusion, y’know? But, again, you’re needlessly limiting the options here when you reference a single “god”. What about “gods”? What about “goddesses”? And why are “gods” or “goddesses” the only entities that are able to “jump start it all”? And why do these gods and goddesses have to “jump start it all” at all? Why can’t they do things like, say, ferment grapes into wine?
Here’s the point I want to make:
There is no evidence whatosever of even a single god or goddess that does anything…much less creating all of existence!
You say that you have a vermicious knid? Let’s see it. Why must you show it before I believe you have it? Well, vermicious knids only exist in stories and it is unknown in the world of science and, until you can show that something like this actually exists at all, I have no choice but to say, “You don’t have a vermicious knid.”
Yes.
Yes.
Those are incidental atheists What you find extremely annoying is not atheism at all. It’s antitheism. The atheism is as irrelevant as, say, whether they have a beard or not, or whether they have brown hair or not, or whether they are right-handed or not, or whether they like pineapple on their pizza or not. None of these qualities make them antitheistic. And certainly not atheism.
However!
What many atheists DO have a problem with is the encroachment on and repression of civil liberties, freedoms, and privileges by the so-called “moral majority”. When an atheist blasts these people that call themselves “Christian”, that atheist is suddenly labeled “anti-Christian” and that he’s “bashing ALL Christians”. And this is extremely annoying.
EDIT: I just reread your post. The last part if it is extremely vague. Are they belittling the belief ITSELF or the arguments you make for having that belief? What, precisely, are they belittling? If they’re belittling you, personally, then what kind of friends are they? O_o
Do all atheists pirate like it’s going out of style, or just Garthbartin?
I’m pretty sure that lot of people from every religious- or otherwise- group pirates just the same.