Hello, fellow godless, heathen bastards!

[drhilarius]

A little about myself.

1. I am what some would call a weak atheist. For the uninitiated, this does not mean the grounds of my atheism, the logic upon which I have built it, is shaky, but rather that I simply disbelieve in God (I don't, as the strong atheist, make the absolutist statement "there is no god").

2. After 12 years of a high priced catholic school education I became and atheist and renounced the Catholic church, like most people who go to Catholic school for 12 years. I have to agree with dookus: more suffering, pain, and death has been caused, either directly or indirectly, by the idea of god and religion than has ever been caused by anything that the natural world can spew out. Okay, that statement might be treading hyperbole, but the point is god+religion= crapload of suffering.

3. Yes, the evil done by religion outweighs any good, since any good, I would argue, would be the natural consequent of a humanist ethic.

4. A note to my good christian, muslim, jewish, etc. DU'ers: I love you guys, but please don't proselytize. Us atheists have to spend time in your theist world feeling, or being made to feel, frankly, sub-human. I'll respect your right to believe as long as you respect my right not to.

and that's it. Atheists and Agnostics of DU, unite!

[Philostopher]

1. Not trying to start an argument -- I'm genuinely curious ...

and share your lack of ability to believe in the white-throned paternalistic God of my youth ...

I just wonder about something, and maybe you can shed some light on this.

I grew up in a fairly mainstream, somewhat dogmatically liberal evangelical church. I lost religion through a lengthy process involving my intellectual development, spurred by anger at changes one conservative evangelical minister made in the church I'd grown up in -- some things he said were pretty disgusting to me, personally, though many evangelicals would shrug. Had to do with those not following the 'born again' dogma burning up in hell, at a time I was studying Eastern thought in college, and starting to realize how much Eastern thought actually had in common with Christianity.

Ultimately, I think my brain would have brought me up at the same place with our without the intervention of the toad at my mother's (and my former) church -- the realization that we created all these gods, and not them us -- but I still consider myself agnostic. I don't think I'm really atheist. I guess the thing that made me not-Christian (that the similarities were legion) also makes me think I can't completely discount the possibility that somewhere along the line there was something bigger than humanity, but I just can't reconcile my intellectual state with 'faith.'

So I call myself agnostic. I don't believe the whole cloth of any religion I've ever studied, and I have at least shallowly studied many of the major religions of the world.

Anyway, just wanted to give you the 'back story' so the question didn't sound as impudent as it might if you didn't know where I was coming from. Most of the lapsed evangelicals I know who no longer believe call themselves agnostic; most of the lapsed Catholics I know call themselves atheist. It could just be a matter of terminology. I know there are differences in the terms, and I think I understand the differences -- I just wonder if it's just a matter of perception on my part, or if Catholics who fall off the 'God bandwagon' really think/feel that much different about the whole thing than protestants.

[drhilarius]

2. I don't know if I'm willing to make a sweeping generalization...

But here it goes.

In catholic school we are instructed in matters of faith, and the importance of faith (and works) is stressed throughout our schooling. When I got to high school, they began to reify our faith through philosophy and logic. It was curious: the very tools they gave us to buttress our faith (logic and reason) became the very tools by which we dismantled it. Through logic I dismantled my faith.

In protestantism, particularly the Evangelical strain, I find that there is an ideology of faith being enough in and of itself. Faith, by its very nature, is that which transcends reason, logic, proof, argumentation, so the protestant does not need the elaborate Aquinian validation of faith through logic.

What I am saying, basically, is that for the evangelical who leaves the fold, faith remains very much inscrutable, it remains as an indelible mark on the consciousness, and no amount of reasoning or argument will erase it.