Do you really want to understand the atheists? [View All]

Many times, it is difficult to understand a position that other people hold, especially if it is very different from your own world-view. I know that there are a lot of christians here who make an effort to understand atheism. However, there are many christians who base their opinions of atheist deconversion on caricatures and falsehoods. I am reminded of the threads in which I was told that I am an atheist because I was beat up with a bible, or was afraid of priests, or am afraid of God.

Thanks to Synnical, I became aware of a website that has some stories of how many atheists came to accept atheism as their world-view. My story is quite different (I was never religious to begin with) but some of these stories are very interesting. If you really want to learn why people are atheist, I implore you to read these stories.

The link to the stories is here:

http://infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/

A particularly neat story is given here:

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/testimonials/vuletic.html

here is an excerpt:

"The second problem doesn't have a name that I know of, but its essence is captured by a question I had wondered about long before I began to have personal experience of god: what would things seem like to me if I had been raised in Iran? Well, no doubt I would be a Muslim, and believe in Allah, my mother told me. And of course, she was right. Now, this was not much of a problem in my liberal days, because all religions worshipped the same god, and were thus equally legitimate. But when I started to have personal experience of the Christian god, this knowledge took on more of an edge. I viewed it as a given that Islam and Christianity could not both be true, and that Christianity was true, and that Islam therefore must be false. But could I imagine a Muslim who experienced the reality of Allah in exactly the same way as I experienced the reality of the Christian God? If I could, then that would mean that it was possible for a person to seem to have an absolutely convincing experience of a deity, and yet be mistaken. But if it was possible for an absolutely convincing experience of a deity to not really be a true experience of that deity, then wouldn't that imply that my experiences might not be true? Could I blithely assert that perhaps it might be possible for Middle Easterners to deceived, but that I was so much better than them that there was no chance of my being deceived? Well, this is precisely what I did for quite a while. On top of that, I reacted in the same way as I had to the problem of Hell and the problem of suffering any doubts that appeared in my mind were condemned as betrayal of god, and pushed out of my mind as quickly and fully as possible.

But unfortunately for my religious belief, no one is the sole master of their own mind. Suppressed thoughts do not go away forever. If Freud is right, sometimes they reemerge in the form of unconscious behavior like nervous tics. Other times the unconscious seems to work on suppressed problems, and then pushes them back into the conscious arena in a new and improved form. Probably everyone has had some practical or mathematical problem solved while they slept overnight, or while they put it aside to do something else. I've personally experienced the bizarre phenomenon of mastering my high school Spanish lessons during a summer in which I did not practice Spanish at all. Something like this seems to have happened with the ill-formed questions I was having about the existence of god.

There came a point in time when the question finally emerged fully into my conscious mind and presented itself before me, stark and horrible: what if there actually was no god? What made this event so different from my previous ill-formed doubts is that this time around I was able to treat atheism as a live option. For a few seconds, I was not a religious mind, viewing atheism from behind a plexiglass shield and handling it with industrial gloves, but a neutral mind, considering what the world looked like through both religious and atheistic eyes. For an ephemeral moment, I saw that the anomalies present in my religious perspective dissolved in the light of atheism. If there was no god, then there was no divine hand to intervene into suffering and terror, and hence I ought to expect the world to look the way it does. More importantly, when I considered what my experience of Christ looked like from a neutral perspective, unconstrained by the presuppositions and emotions that had demanded I affirm the experience as real and infallible, I saw the experience for what it was. I did not see a man with direct and infallible perception of a supernatural being, but rather a mere mortal, entangled in a coherent stream of imagination sustained by hope, habit, guilt, and fear."




So gave have a look. It may open your eyes a bit as to why atheists are atheist.