Underseer
Contributor
That is how you view it, because you find it so straightforward to reject belief. You aren't motivated to "keep the faith". You don't put any hopes in prayers, have a community of believers that you've bonded with in support of your faith, engage in sacrificial acts, or engage in any of the activities intended to support the mindset. Unless you can get a religious person to question the foundations of belief in gods, not just the particular god that (s)he believes in, that person is likely to do what we all do in cases where some aspect of reality gets contradicted. We tinker with the edges of the belief that give us the most trouble. If you suddenly discover that your birth parents actually adopted you, you don't suddenly come to the conclusion that you had no birth parents. Your world is shaken, but you still believe that you had birth parents, even if the ones you believed in weren't the ones you thought they were. You can convince a Christian that his or her version of God is somewhat off in some respect, but that is rare. It isn't all that difficult to patch up the conceptual hole left behind, given a strong motivation to maintain faith. Usually, arguments are successful mainly with those who have already somewhat come around to the conclusion it leads to. The argument you make may help give them a little shove, but it isn't because you have shattered their world. Chances are, it already had a lot of cracks in it to begin with.
You didnt understand my point: its not the definitions of gods that makes someone atheist, its the noncomittment to the religious way of ”kno wledge”. The christian god is obviously not a rational thought and most christian wokld probably agree. They believe in jesus and god DESPITE rational arguments, not because of any.
The fools that try to rationalize their belief in deitises can we ignore. They are obviously bonkers.
Yep.
The problem is not their specific beliefs, but their method of evaluating truth claims.
Who really gives a shit if they believe in a magical sky fairy that "spoke" reality into existence?
The problem comes when they apply that same bad epistemology to other questions such as "Is it moral to give money to an effort to pass a law in Uganda that would result in the execution of all gay people in Uganda?" All of a sudden, the bad epistemology that was created to make it possible for them to believe in nonsense has real and very negative consequences in the real world.
It's good that we stopped them from causing the mass murder of all homosexuals in Uganda, but the larger issue is that it is impossible to convince people that that was a bad thing to do, and that is because of their bad epistemology.