What do you wish that the religious majority understood about you?

George Ricker www

I would like for religious people to understand that I am an atheist as the result of a considerable amount of thought and study.

For most of the first half of my life I was a Christian. I am familiar with Christian apologetics and have read the Bible cover to cover several times. I even studied it in Hebrew while I was attending seminary, studying for the Methodist ministry. (Note: finances forced me to discontinue those studies, but I remained a member of the church after returning home.)

I did not choose to be an atheist because I was young (actually, I was in my 30s), angry, disappointed, or just wanted to piss people off. I’m not an atheist because I hate anything.

For me, having considered the evidence for and against the existence of gods, atheism seems the only possible stance. I don’t claim certain knowledge that no gods exist. However, I regard the existence of any god to be highly improbable.

That’s what I would like for them to understand.

Dave Hitt www

I’d like believers to realize that my lack of belief in their god is trivial. It’s just one thing we disagree on, and not important. It is as unimportant as the argument the best baseball team, the best barbeque recipe, or the best pop song on the current top 40 list.

They wouldn’t be shocked if I believed in a different god, so why should they find it so difficult to accept that I don’t believe in any god.

I’d like them to know that morality and ethics, both theirs and mine, comes from character, not religion. Atheists don’t have a devil to blame for their shortcomings, nor a god to forgive them, and without that escape valve we tend to be more moral and ethical than someone who has given themselves that particular out.

I’d like them to know that atheists have not discarded religion on a whim, but only after considerable thought and research. We have heard all the tired old arguments like Pascal’s Wager, have answers to them, and are not going to be persuaded by hearing them for the hundredth time.

I’d like them to know they have nothing to fear from us, that we won’t interfere with their beliefs or worship, unless it impacts us. If they’d leave us alone, we’d be happy to return the favor.

SmartLX

I’d like religious people to realise that we still have brains, and we have thought this through.

Something like 99% of us come from a religious background and are therefore self-made, first-generation atheists. As our existing faith was fading we encountered all the popular arguments against atheism. Some like me actively sought them out. We’re now atheists regardless, which means we have answered these arguments well enough to satisfy ourselves.

This means that sound-bite arguments like “How did something come from nothing?” and “What if you’re wrong?” are useless against people who have become confident enough to declare themselves atheist.

If you want to re-convert people like this, you need to engage them. Realise that they already have replies to the entry-level arguments, and identify and address those replies. Tossing out platitudes is futile; only by winning relevant arguments will you convince these people in an intellectual exchange.

brian thomson www

In addition to the questions of basic human respect you refer to – atheists are people too, etcetera – there’s the question of labels.

I did not wake up one day and say “I think I’m going to be an atheist”. It was not the result of a negative reaction to anything. I use the word “atheist” because it is the best word to describe my religious beliefs: I don’t have any. That is all that that word tells you about me. It doesn’t tell you anything else about my ethics (I don’t like “morals”), the things I do or how I do them.

Everything else that you hear about atheists is no different from that of any other minority that is demonised by a majority. If that majority used its imagination, it could surely imagine being the minority, since that happens to any group at some point in its history. This also alludes to what logicel wrote: atheism is not a belief, or an act, or a game, or an attitude I chose to adopt for any reason: it is a natural result of the way I view the world. If I made a show of taking part in a religion I did not believe in, I might fool others, but I would not be fooling myself.

logicel

The one thing that I would like Christian believers to grasp is that atheists do not believe in any gods and the supernatural because there is no evidence. Atheists are often accused of faking their non-belief and therefore oddly and knowingly risking eternal damnation because they just enjoy mocking a god they really believes exists.

I think this is the aspect that just stops many Christians in their tracks, that we are serious in our lack of god belief. WE HAVE NO GOD BELIEF. To put it in a more snappier manner, we are not god botherers. We don’t fuss about what god’s intention may be, or the many nuances of belief, or anything to do with theistic god belief. It plays no role whatsoever in our daily lives. And we can still be happy, moral, and fulfilled humans because there are other ways and means that are effective in achieving a balanced and satisfied life.

I think grasping this is difficult for many very religious Christians in the South because, let’s face it, humans who are fulfilled and moral without religion are not a good publicity for having to bother with god and all the problematic aspects of god bothering like those racking doubts that just keep rising to the surface.

I once heard that religion is equated with being good in America, hence the desire to be labeled religious. In Europe, where I live, there is no such equation and therefore, no motivation to adopt a label and all its attendant difficulties just so you can be considered good.