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TBH, religion to me, is geographical. You believe what you are taught based on where you are brought up, and when you were brought up.
8000 years ago, you'd have believed in whatever god, gods, spirits or whatever you were taught to by your elders.
However, there have always been atheists, even if they were secret ones who didn't fancy getting strung up by the larger of their goolies by admitting it. Every culture has people who just don't believe in the supernatural, and even before science, there were probably people who didn't believe in whatever the local priest, druid or shaman was blathering on about.
The diversity and confusion of religion throughout known history, and even what probably passed for religion in prehistory is proof enough to me that it is all bunkum.
Agnosticism is just not wanting to offend anyone, and hedging your bets. That won't work btw, if other people can see straight through your moral ambiguity, a deity is going to give you very short shrift indeed.
I don't believe God exists, for a long time I wanted it to exist, but I decided that it was just wishful thinking.
However, If you want to believe in whatever, crack on, just feel free to keep that to yourself.
Kilkrazy wrote: it is still old enough to say that atheism isn't s recent ideology.
Thus the qualification of it being 'comparatively' new. It is not new if compared to the Iphone 6+, but it is a relatively new superstructure if compared to religion in general, and especially the current form of atheism. One can find outliers for lots of things, but that doesn't make them not outliers.
It's almost a delicious irony to be able to turn an argument used to defend god against a theist, can you prove that there weren't atheists before?
However, in reality it is highly likely that since human beings evolved in their current form, there have been atheists. Simply people who do not believe in any God's. They may have performed the rites and habits of the local spirituality in order to conform, but they probably thought it was a load of Hooie too.
There are more atheists now, or in fact there maybe the same amount, it's just that now people admit it more freely, and have platforms of discussion. That, and as our understanding of the universe grows, it pushes previous supernatural theories away. Globalisation has made us aware of the diversity and incompatibility of spirituality between nations, which leads many to question how can so many different ideas be right? Such questions provoke thought more regularly than in the past, where the source of all your knowledge may have been just the priest and no one else.
Why do you think religions were, and in some parts of the world still are, so keen to provide schooling? It's not about providing knowledge to the masses, but about controlling that knowledge to the masses. They needed to make sure that nothing contradicts the current faith. Unfortunately it only works in the short term, by which I mean over a period of hundreds of years.
Doesn't bother me being called an atheist, it has no stigma in the UK.
However, in the military we're encouraged to put something on our ID discs, as many of our opponents don't like atheists, and will kill them first if captured. I go with CofE, it's practically atheism anyway.
Hatred of atheism is long standing in virtually all religions, it's the only thing they truly fear, apart from death.
I remember the argument against this from when I attended Sunday school as a child. You should not test your god.
God knows you are trying to test him, and will not participate, as faith is the most important thing.
You literally cannot argue with anyone who believes that logic.
Which is handy, as I do remember being instructed to avoid arguments with non-believers, spread the "good news" by all means, but don't engage in any arguments with non-believers.
A handy way to make sure the young and impressionable don't encounter any thought-crime.
Mario wrote: I think this is a succinct allegory regarding the idea of god and intelligent design:
It is a comment on entitlement and land ownership, I dont see any correlation with Intelligent design.
Creationism in any of its forms doesn't assume that universe is made for man. Man might be the pinnacle of life on earth, but earth was not made for man. Man has dominance over other lifeforms, but these lifeforms were made for themselves, not as gifts to man. Neither was the world, humans are just another though more important lifeform.
However saying the land fits me, and therefore I have freedom to do what I want with it is a dangerous principle, which Adams critiques. I do understand that Adams was a critic of religion, but i dont think this is what he is doing here, or if he is, he has a poor understanding of creation theology.
