In for a long read?
Why do people become Atheists?
People become atheistic for many reasons. A popular misconception among theists is that we have some terrible experience (lose a loved one, for example) and ask "How can I believe in a God that allows this to happen?", or start to hate God for allowing it to happen. It should be noted that in order to hate God, you actually have to believe in Him. People who claim to hate God (for whatever reason) are not, by definition, atheists. An atheist may hate a religion, or hate what people do in the name of a God, but an atheist cannot hate something that she does not believe in (it would be like hating dragons for eating princesses).
Another misconception is that people choose to become atheists. It's as though we say to ourselves, "Well, I really do believe in God, but I'm just going to pretend I don't believe.". Atheism is not a choice - you don't wake up one morning, flip a coin, and declare yourself to be atheist. It is not a teenage fad, nor is it a rebellious act (although some people are driven to atheism by constant preaching). It is not an arbitrary decision - "What shall I have for breakfast today? Erm... toast. What colour carpet should we choose this year? Erm... green. What god should I believe in? Erm... none." - it doesn't work like that.
The idea that atheism is some sort of rebellion is a common one, but also quite absurd. I often hear people saying that I'm rebelling because I don't like the idea of "something bigger than me", or I don't want to be accountable to a higher power, and so on. If that was the case, then I would not be an atheist, because I would still believe in the God I was trying to get away from! I do not merely say I am an atheist in order to make life easier for myself - I actually am an atheist. I do not believe in the gods of the Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Christians and all the rest. If I was just rebelling, then surely I would know that God would still be there, waiting for me when I die. The accusation of rebellion seems to come from theists who are simply unable to accept the fact that there are hundreds of millions of people in the world who just do not believe in their god, or anyone else's. The idea that "everyone believes in something" is so deeply ingrained in their psyche, and their own belief is so deeply held and important to them, that the only way they can deal with non-belief is to deny that it actually exists (or they start saying that atheism is itself a religion). It's funny, but I've never heard of a Christian saying to a Hindu "Ah, but you really do believe in Jesus Christ, you're just in denial. When are you going to stop pretending? All this worship of Vishnu is just rebelling against what you know in your heart is true!"
People do not choose atheism - they realise that they have lost their faith and have therefore become atheist (some even fight against it, and it can be traumatic to lose your faith if that faith has been a major part of your life). One of the common reasons for this is that people simply realise that (for themselves, at least) better, more complete and coherent explanations about Life, The Universe And Everything can be found outside of religion - the universe just makes a lot more sense without any sort of God involved. We see no evidence of a Creator in cosmology or biology (which covers just about everything); nothing is known to exist or happen for which the only possible explanation is Divine Intervention. Many, if not all, of the answers given by religions range from vague and ambiguous, through incoherent and contradictory (unless you just have "faith" that they are correct), down to ad-hoc explanations which cannot be tested (or are easily refuted and demonstrably false pseudo-science). Many of the rules and regulations laid down by religion tend to be arbitrary or irrational, and those that are not do not appear to be Divinely Revealed anyway. People lose their faith when their religion has nothing substantial to offer, and better answers, philosophies and ways of life can be found elsewhere.
It should be remembered that everyone, you included, is born an atheist - babies do not believe in God. Your religion often depends on your upbringing - if your parents are Southern Baptists, you will probably also be a Southern Baptist. If your parents are Muslims, then you will probably be one also. Which God do you believe in? I'm betting it's entirely dependent on geography. It's a bit of a lottery, isn't it?
Aren't you lucky to have been in a country that just happens to worship the One True God? =)
I became an athiest when the world (and indeed the universe) in which I lived was entirely consistent with one that has no God, no Creator, no Guiding Intelligence. There was no valid reason to believe that any sort of a God existed. God became just another supernatural critter that people seriously believed in despite the lack of evidence, like Bigfoot, alien-abductor and lake monsters. I don't necessarily think that all religious people are deluded, irrational nuts (although a minority certainly are - see my feedback pages). I just think they're mistaken, and may very well hold perfectly rational and coherent reasons for their beliefs.
I saw that
many people had different reasons for believing in Gods, including (somewhat over-simplified):
* They had simply been indoctrinated at an early age, and the beliefs became so much a part of their life that the idea of questioning or doubting simply never occurred to them. They believe it because they have just always known it to be true. (As mentioned above, people usually end up with whatever the religion of their family happens to be.)
* They feel that we must be here for a purpose. The universe and this beautiful Earth cannot all be a pointless accident, and God is the best explanation. We are all here for a reason, but only God knows exactly what that reason is and we'll just have to trust him.
* A sense of justice. It's not fair for evil people to commit all sorts of terrible acts and simply escape punishment by dying. The idea of heaven/hell ensures that good people are rewarded and bad people are suitable punished.
* A deep objection to being merely "animals". Many creationists, for instance, are offended at the idea that humans simply evolved along with all other animals. God made us separate and special, and we have a "soul" but the animals do not (biological snobbery?).
* Comfort. Many people find it very comforting to believe that a loving God is always watching over them and caring for them, and when anything good or bad happens to them, this is all part of his Plan for their life. Also, religion is obviously very comforting when faced with the death of a loved one. It's much easier and more reassuring to believe that Grandma is free from pain now, up in Heaven with Jesus where she's waiting for us to join her for eternity, than to think that she has simply ceased to exist and the universe will have forgotten her in a couple of generations.
* Afterlife. It seems almost incomprehensible to believe that when your body dies, your existence ends. Sensation and awareness are so much a part of our existence that it is extremely difficult to imagine no longer being able to experience anything. Try to imagine that, for example, a big meteor crashes into your house and instantly kills you at the end of this paragraph. We just cannot imagine not existing or abruptly ceasing to be aware and conscious, and so it is quite natural to think that something will continue to exist after the death of our brain. It's a short step from there to accepting the idea of an immortal soul, and heaven or reincarnation or some other form of afterlife.
How do you find meaning without God?
'"Have you ever built a snowman?" After all, snowmen are ephemeral objects, soon to be melted in the sun. A snowman has no ultimate purpose or goal, and in a few weeks there will be no trace of it's ever existing. We build snowmen because all of us, theists and atheists, live here and now. In the context of our own brief mortal lives, we are able to enjoy this life and gain pleasure from ultimately pointless acts. It is fun to build a snowman, or climb a mountain, or watch the sunset, or go for a long cycle ride in the countryside. The purpose of these things is not "out there" somewhere, waiting to be achieved - the meaning is in what it means to ourselves. I am not overly concerned about some future fifty billion years from now, but I am concerned about the future of humanity here, now and for the generations that follow. That is the context of a mortal life, and that is why I "bother" to live and damn well have fun while I'm doing it.
There is no meaning to life itself. There is no purpose to the universe. You can, however, give life meaning through your actions. Make the world a better place for yourself, your contemporaries and your descendents. '
Reasons To Reject Christianity (and other Religions).
Atheists reject Christianity (and all the others) for a few very simple reasons. You don't need to examine every rivet on the Titanic to check its seaworthiness when you've already spotted the enormous iceberg-shaped gash in the hull.
* There are hundreds, if not thousands, of mutually exclusive religions all claiming to have The One Truth and divinely inspired, infallible scriptures.
* There are hundreds, if not thousands, of (often mutually exclusive) sects within Christianity, all claiming to have The One True interpretation of scripture. (They will also often claim that members of different sects are "not real Christians").
* There is overwhelming evidence suggesting that the history and nature of the universe (and life on Earth) bears no resemblance whatsoever to the myths of any religion.
* There is little or no objective evidence in favour of the existence of any deity.
* There are plenty of better, naturalistic explanations for the phenomena we observe around us. The explanations given by religions tend to only raise more problems than they solve.
* Most, if not all, descriptions of Deities are incoherent, meaningless, self-contradictory or refuted by simple observations (omni-benevolence and the problem of gratuitous evil, for instance).
What is the Universe?.. i think this little big of outsourced info should help...
On a clear, cold, moonless night drive out into the countryside. Find a quiet spot and lie on top of your car, looking up and out into the night sky. What do you see? Some might see romantic twinkly stars. Some might see the Glory of the Creator`s handiwork. Some might see the spirits of their ancestors looking down upon them, watching and waiting. Some might find inspiration for a poem, song or painting. I am an atheist, and (as my wife would surely testify) not a very romantic one at that; so what do I see?
Do I see rocks moving in curves, stars slowly using their fuel until they're snuffed out, life popping into a pointless existence only to be destroyed by a meaningless accident, tiny points of white light illuminating dead worlds that we will never see, galaxies flying away from each other for no good reason?
To a certain extent, yes. But there is more than that. Much more.
I see a myriad of coloured suns. Stars are not just twinkles of white. All the colours of the rainbow are up there for you to see, their hue determined by their age, size and chemical makeup. From the monstrous Supergiants like Antares, with a radius three hundred and twenty times that of our Sun, to Red Giants like Betelguese in the constellation of Orion, to brilliant White Dwarfs barely the size of Jupiter.
I see chunks of rock, iron and ice; pebbles that have been circling the Sun for a billion years, being drawn into the gravity well of our planet, plunging into the atmosphere and exploding in a streak of silent light. Lying on top of your car, you see one burn across the sky every few minutes, leaving a ghostly, glowing trail suspended miles above the cloudtops. Thousands burn up in the sky every day, their dusty remains drifting down to the ground. While you're sitting in your office, or watching Oprah, or choosing a new brand of toilet paper, ancient bits of the solar system are being violently annihilated a few miles above your head.
I see the Earth hurtling along its orbital path at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, creating a bow-shock as it pushes through the thin gases surrounding Sol, and leaving a trail of hydrogen in its wake. Charged particles from the Sun pour into the Earths magnetic field, grounding at the North and South Poles as dancing curtains of light. I see our Moon, pock-marked and white, its rotation halted by millions of years of gravitational braking as it tried to drag our oceans around with it, washing our shores with the daily tides. Inch by inch, every year, it falls away from us.
I see the Sun itself hurtling along its orbital path around the galactic core, dragging along a shoal of planets, comets, asteroids and moons, ineffectively showering them with neutrinos. Four million tons of hydrogen are burnt in this stellar furnace every second as it performs its alchemy, breaking down light elements and rebuilding them as iron. Sudden bursts of magnetic energy release huge flares and prominences of fire, extending thousands, millions of miles into space before falling back to the surface. I see our Milky Way, just one of a hundred billion others ploughing through space in a great river of galaxies, driven by forces on a scale that the human mind can barely begin to comprehend.
I see galaxies colliding, slowly and inexorably, their contents spread so thinly that it is hard to think of it as a collision at all. On a different scale, they smash into and through each other, ripping themselves apart and sending their stars swirling off to form elongated curls and spirals, eventually settling down into new galaxies and clusters of stars.
I see space distorted by the weight of a cluster of galaxies, forming a lens hundreds of thousands of light-years across. A giant magnifying glass creating multiple images of distant stars that would otherwise be obscured by the very galaxies forming the lens.
I see millisecond pulsars - exotic objects billions of light-years away, spinning hundreds of times a second and pumping out flashes of light at a regularity that our best technology would struggle to match. I see quasars - bizarre creations throwing out more energy than the stars of a hundred galaxies combined.
I see vast glowing nebulae, huge clouds of gas slowly condensing and heating - the birthplace of stars. The universe was not formed with a fixed set of stars - they are dying and being born every day, and their planets along with them. A good pair of binoculars will show you the stellar nursery in the Orion Nebula - a glowing patch of sky that is home to newborn stars.
I see black holes spinning at unimaginable speeds, dragging the stuff of space-time around with them; warping and bending space; slowing and maybe even stopping time itself. As they spin, they pull in gases, asteroids, dust and any stars unfortunate enough to be caught by this irresistible force. The matter joins a disc spinning down into the multi-dimensional whirlpool faster and faster, until it is destroyed and releases a scream of X-rays. The lucky particles that escape are ejected from the disc as twin jets of matter travelling at speeds exceeded only by light itself.
I see binary star systems. A tiny but brilliant white dwarf and a massive but dull red star spinning around each other like mismatched ice-skaters holding hands. Spiralling closer and closer, eventually they may collide, or one will suck the life out of the other, connecting the two via a bridge of plasma and burning hydrogen. Periodically, the dwarf will take more matter than it can absorb, and vast quantities of matter and energy are thrown off in a supernova explosion, leaving the skaters to continue their dance.
I look up, and for each and every star I can see on the clearest of nights, I know that there are a million galaxies that I cannot see. Too distant and too faint, moving away from us so quickly that their light is shifted out of the tiny visible spectrum. Only seen by powerful computer-guided telescopes that can focus on a tiny patch of the sky for day after day, collecting photons one at a time. Our galaxy contains an almost incomprehensible number of stars, but this is just one galaxy of hundreds of billions just like it. We can estimate and write down the total number of stars in the universe, but it's nothing more than a number on a piece of paper. There are more stars than our imaginations are capable of dealing with.
I see Andromeda, our nearest neighbour galaxy. With the unaided eye barely a faint glow on the clearest night. The pale light falling from it into my eyes is two million years old - a shame to waste it. Humans did not even exist when it began the journey, and our entire evolution to Homo sapiens, the development of language, civilisation and science has occurred during the flight of these photons across the cold intergalactic void.
I see planets orbiting a distant sun, detectable only by the tiny wobbles they create in the motion of their host. Are they tiny burnt cinders like Mercury, or toxic hellholes like Venus? Are they cold, dead worlds like Mars or massive gas-giants like Jupiter and Saturn, with a core of metallic hydrogen protected by storms that rage for a thousand years? Are they so cold they have seas of liquid methane, or mountain ranges of frozen ammonia? Do they have deep, warm seas teeming with life - odd creatures being selected by evolution for their ability to survive out of the water, crawling up an alien beach under an alien star, the first faltering steps on stubby limbs that might be fins or might be legs?
I see stars finally exhausting their fuel and collapsing as their nuclear engines can no longer overcome the pull of their own gravity. The star falls in on itself and explodes in a catastrophic supernova, expelling iron, carbon, silicon and all the stuff of life out into the universe. (In the night sky, a star suddenly brightens until it outshines the full moon, dazzling the tiny amphibian stumping up the muddy beach.) The shock waves from this destruction compress nearby gases, starting them on the long journey that will see them condensing into hot, spinning clouds. Clouds that will eventually form new solar systems and give rise to life that can look up and out into the clear night sky. And think, and wonder, and let their minds take them on a journey that their bodies can never achieve.
Carl Sagan said, "We are made of star stuff". Religion teaches that we are Children of God, and the heavens declare His Glory. The reality is, as Rev. Chuck said, "far greater than your religion could ever allow for".
This is a godless universe and it thrills me that I have the chance to ride along with it, even if only for my few decades of awareness. Many people turn to religion saying, "But there has to be more to it all than this." To them I say, "Look around you! What more could you ask for?" In terms of Truth, Beauty and Wonder, all the worlds religions cannot compete with a clear, cold, moonless night.
We are star-stuff, you and I. We are children of the supernova and our beginnings lie in the death of a star.
