Comments by "Be N S O N" (@Colddirector) on "The Real Reasons Why People Become Atheists" video.

I don't hate God because I don't think he exists. That being said, if he did exist as depicted in the Bible, I definitely wouldn't like him very much.
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@timmccarthy9917 idk if there's a term for this but I think negative creds are a big factor too. If your experience with religious people and religious institutions is more negative than positive (something I think is pretty common these days), you're less likely to become religious
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@exoplanet11 Honestly while the Christian “reject the truth with unrighteousness in their heart” canard is stupid, I suspect the reasons a lot of people become atheist are more emotional than they like to think. For me, the religion was top to bottom completely unappealing to me. Church was sickly saccharine, the concept of heaven was completely unappealing and a lot of the rules made no sense (ie being against homosexuality, lust being bad, no remarriage after divorce). Basically I had to follow rules I didn’t like in order to go somewhere I didn’t want to go to avoid being tortured forever. Combine that with having never felt any spiritual presence (and now seriously wondering if I’m neurologically incapable of it) and I was already kinda eyeing the exits by the time I started learning about atheism. To be clear I revisited the subject later wanting to believe during a low point in my life and I still found the actual religion too unappealing and frankly man made for me to seriously consider.
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@KyrieFortune I do think there's some people who are neurologically inclined against spiritual experiences and religious thinking, though. I suspect I am, because I've been in situations that are meant to induce spiritual experiences and felt pretty much nothing. Apparently they're quite similar to what a concert or a club can induce, and I never liked those either - the only thing they make me feel is "the music's too loud and I want to go home" lol. Also even when I believed in God, I never felt anything even remotely similar to "god speaking to me". Prayer was pretty much me writing a letter to a distant relative and never really hearing anything back
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@thethrowbackguy4319 If god is omnipotent, it's by definition impossible for him to be too busy. And if he wants a personal relationship with people, it's very shitty of him to just ignore child abuse like that. This would not be acceptable from a person - to just ignore that kind of abuse, why should it be acceptable from a god
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I've been bouncing similar thoughts around my head recently. There's research about how spiritual experiences are very similar to what people feel at live concerts, and I've never liked those either. I honestly suspect my head simply isn't wired to get anything out of these things.
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I mean, money food and social acceptance is what keeps you alive, and belief in a creator doesn’t exactly pay the bills. Also relationship is a compromise - if god wants to be loved, he has to meet individuals halfway like anyone else in a relationship.
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@gabor6259 I think the problem is that working absolutely can be good for your confidence, but not when it feels meaningless, dehumanizing or abusive. Which, unfortunately, is a lot of jobs these days.
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Everytime you guys blast other branches and denominations and say your particular flavour of religion is the true one, it reminds me of scammers who deride other scammers to give their grift more credibility. Especially when they tend to display most of same odious traits. Also given christians were pretty much a-okay with slavery not even 200 years ago, I would not be talking about objective morality if I were you.
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@PajeetAlaburnosa also word of advice - advertising orthodoxy while being really smug is more likely to make people avoid it rather than join. It’s not in my interest to help you convert people, but oh well, consider that a gimme.
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@ It's not so much borrowed/stolen as it is employing mythical tropes from the time. It's sort of like saying Friday the 13th "stole" from Halloween because they both involve some masked git killing people.
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@Rocky-ur9mn Reason is merely a tool we use to make sense of the world around us, and whether or not our senses are faulty, they're the only inputs we actually have at our disposal. Moreover, this applies even in a theistic universe, we know for a fact that our senses and reasoning faculties are faulty (ie biases, tribalism, magical thinking), but we still must rely on them. It isn't irrational to make the best of the limited information and tools we have, I'd argue it's the only rational thing to do.
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@WeAreTheEggmen22I mean you can make the same argument about Christianity - it inherited a lot of culture and social norms from the Pagans. I think it’s an overly simplistic argument though because it’s letting religion take credit for the thinking of people, even when fellow Christians at the time seriously fought back against those norms/concepts. But sure, call your own religion a tapeworm if you must.
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@WeAreTheEggmen22 Like the christians did with pagan philosophy, I am more than happy to take good ideas that work and discard the bad. If you wish to return to worship of Jupiter, by all means do so.
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@WeAreTheEggmen22 because typically I don’t worship things with poor evidence.
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@Stoned_GooglyEyes I was referring to Jupiter the Roman god, not the planet. Point was if we’re supposed to believe Christianity or be deferent to it because of the social and political advances made under its tutelage (the countless times christians pushed back against those advances notwithstanding), Christians should be deferent to paganism for a lot of the political, cultural and philosophical frameworks it provided to Christianity.
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@ I am well aware. It was still very patriarchal, but relatively progressive compared to broader pagan society. I have no problem adopting the good ideas while discarding the bad, and neither did the early christians for pagan philosophy, culture and politics.
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The KJV translation isn’t considered to be a very good one.
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I hate the “reading the Bible makes you an atheist” thing because it’s clearly not true. I think however it’s impossible to read the Bible critically and not deconstruct at least a little bit. Especially if you look into biblical scholarship - you can come out the other side faithful, but you are unlikely to have a fundamentalist view.
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Aphantasia's an interesting thing. I think I'm... partially aphantasic? I can visualise things in my head, but only in brief flashes. I can't "hold" images for longer than like a second at most. I think I can do it longer if I really practice or I'm emotionally invested, but outside that no luck. It's not because of my aphantasia, but I'm convinced I have neurological reasons for my lack of spirituality. I've tried engaging in those practices, like praying, meditation, fasting, reading holy books, none of them give me any sort of spiritual or non-materialistic feeling.
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@thoughtsuponatime847 A god who isn’t omniscient could doubt.
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@AmitySapiens fine tuning in particular falls pretty flat for me when pretty much everywhere known outside our tiny blue dot is uninhabitable. Also we have a universe sample size of 1, so we can’t exactly tell how likely life is to form in other universes, or if our specific form of life is the only that can form.
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IMO most “former atheists” tend to be people who just live their lives and don’t think about religion much before converting, either because of an impact event, social pressures or something else. There are exceptions to this but in my experience they often play up just how serious they were about atheism because it makes a compelling story, even if they converted when they were like 14 at the time.
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For me specifically, I think there may very well be a neurological element to my atheism. Spirituality and spiritual experiences have been pretty much alien to me as far as I can remember. I still believed as a child, but praying to God was more like writing a letter to a distant relative whom I never really heard back from. It is and has always been difficult for me to view the world as anything but material. I've tried revisiting the subject a few times over the course of my life, and never really got anywhere. Trying to pray always made me feel painfully aware I was trying to talk to someone who, at best, couldn't talk back. I'm not so sure it's a theory of mind thing, but it does feel like I was born without a cog crucial in these matters.
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The difference there is that money and government are a tool to manage materially provable resources, while religion is, on paper, meant to bring people to god/s nobody can prove exists.
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