Any other atheist here?

Post Reply New Topic

Hello I am agnostic/atheist and I don't believe in supernaturals like astrology, evil eye, miracles etc. When I was in elementary school I believe in 12 olympian gods (greek mythology) I liked this religion more than christianity. Later I believe in some supernaturals because my mom used to tell me stories about weird things happened to her but now I don't believe in supernatural allthough my mom continue to tell me those weird stories. Is it common for aspies to be agnostic atheist and don't believe in supernatural?

Sorry about my english

A Christian (or Muslim, or Jew) who worships THE God is a "monotheist" (believer in a single god).

An "atheist" is someone who believes in zero gods.

If you "believe in the Olympian Gods" then you are not an "atheist" but the opposite: a "polytheist" (believer in many gods).

I don't think I really understand belief, particularly credal belief.

You are supposed to claim to believe in the truth of a set of propositions with undefined terms. That seems objectively insane.

At any rate, I find that I can't choose to believe things. Either they meet some plausibility conditions or they don't. No amount of wanting to believe things that aren't true makes them true and vice versa.

Because of this a lot of what religious people do seems completely mad to me.

On the other hand, I recognize that people are by nature irrational and subject to floods of emotion. People have epiphanies and mystical experiences and I have had them too.

I am just not able to use them to overcome the part of me that "believes in" reality.

Martial arts and atheist buddhist meditation made me more aware of these things. When I had some experience meditating, I found that religion made sense to me in a different way, not in terms of assenting to bullet point lists of doctrine to claim belief in, but in terms of practices that elicit psychological and emotional states and mystical experiences of various kinds.

As an experiment, I tried doing these things in a variety of frameworks and found that they all work, so my tentative conclusion is that there are some real, repeatable patterns of psychological and emotional experience of the kind that are usual described as religious, spiritual or mystical, but that the explanations offered by religions for such experiences are not correct.

On balance, I think there is a lot of sophisticated social, emotional and psychological practice in religion, and in that limited sense, there are 'truths' of a kind in most religion, but it's a category error to think that it explains things about history, cosmology or the deep underlying nature of things outside the realm of psychology.

I recognize that despite being raised as an atheist, many of my values are Christian because I have an Anglo-American background. I embrace that tradition and delight in it's best aspects while consciously rejecting the outrageous claims it makes about reality and the mores of the desert nomads out of whose society the faith emerged.

I don't believ in 12 olympians gods but I used to believe when I was in elementary school

You say you used to believe, then did not believe, can you explain why?

Did you believe in Mars/Ares, for example, in the same way that you believe in the mass or inertia of objects, for example?

Or was it some other kind of process where you kind of imagined what it would be like if they were real and pretended to believe in that imagined thing?

Ναι, είναι κοινή. Μάλλον, δεν είναι ασυνήθιστο.
Μάλλον πιο κοινή στις δυτικές κουλτούρες από ό, τι στην Ανατολική πολιτισμών.

Yes, it is common. Rather, it is not uncommon.
Probably more common in Western cultures than in Eastern cultures.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Oh, I voted «other» and now need to explain myself...

I don't believe in any of the religions, and I also do not believe that anything naming itself The State or The Government is a legitimate institution (such institutions are actually cult-religions or a quasi-combination of Ecclesiastical cults/religions/corporations), and I used to be so-called Christian, but I also used to be so-called Atheist, then I leaned towards Agnostic/Atheist for a time (a four-time Atheist over the course of my life-time altogether), then I learned about the subject of para-psychology and read many publications on research into the para-normal, starting with Ian Currie's book : «You Cannot Die: The Incredible Findings of a Century of Research on Death»

I was still leaning towards Agnostic/Atheist for a time, but many different transitions and paradigm-shifts had occurred throughout my life, and my current views on life/reality might be described now as being closer to Agnostic/Pantheistic but I view the universe and our existence as being something of a Technological-Phenomenon (such that it is not far-fetched for me to regard as a rather highly advanced Artificial-Intelligence having created this reality in which we find ourselves whilst others might refer to the A.I. as God or whichever word is used for Creator in any particular language). The one thing I consider to be the ultimate, never-changing reality, is that of eternal cause-and-effect. Some people refer to this as karma, and there are also other expressions, such as What Goes Around Comes Around; All Will Reap What They Sow; For Every Action There is an Equal and Opposite Reaction; etc.

The only «Reality» that I believe to be the one, unchanging reality is that, and also according to much research that has been documented in the field/subject/topic of para-psychology...: «Everything that you or your servants cause others to experience will also be experienced by you, and if not during the current life, then to happen in either a subsequent life or some type of other future existence.»

For all we know, even the very Laws of Physics can change on us for whatever reason, without our detection, similarly to how we do not consider it «unusual» when «dreaming» and being able to do things like float around, teleport ourselves, manipulate our environment solely through thought, etc.; The «Laws of Physics» changed on us, whilst we had transitioned into our «dreaming» state whilst asleep, but we are NOT thinking to ourselves : «Oh my god! Where am I? How did I get here? Last thing I remember was going to sleep in my bed-room and now I...»

P.S.: I no longer follow/adopt any particular belief-system. I simply try to make sure that my actions and activities are not aggressive against others in any way, and it would be more accurate to refer to my out-look on life as more of a knowledge-expansion-system, rather than a belief-system. The histories of what I have learned and experienced is thus now closest to being described as an Agnostic/Pantheistic/Technologicalist/Quantum-Realmist.

I am atheist I don't believe in any religion or in supernatural but when I was 8 or 9 years old I had a lesson in school about greek mythology and I liked this now I don't believe in any religion

Sometimes I say I'm a pantheist/deist, sometimes an apatheist (meaning I don't care if there is a god or not). I like Quakers though and sometimes believe in some odd things. I believe I was suppose to live here were I live now but it's a long story to explain why. And the rake in the middle of the road today belonged not to me but the guy behind me. That's why I momentarily got confused and changed lanes, because had I found it front of me I certainly would have got out and grabbed it. But he was destined to find that rake. It's some weird thinking, I know. I have some other ideas involving tornados.

So by "believe" you mean you liked the idea.
I can say without hesitation that I believe the light source in my room is the lamp in the corner. I base this belief on the evidence of a variety of senses and the memory that the room was becoming dark, then I turned on the lamp and the room became lighter in a manner consistent with light emanating from the lamp...
With God(s), I don't understand the believing process.

You read about Apollo and like something about him, and then you find that you believe that he's somehow a real being or entity and out there on Olympus somewhere?

Or is it more like the description of Apollo is a pointer to an archetype that has some kind of transpersonal meaning, but is not a being with existence in the way of people or animals in the material universe?

What is the difference between believing in one God or group of Gods and not believing in another?

It is not "THE God", these religions are very new in the grand scheme of things.

Also the opposite of atheism is theism. Polytheism and monotheism are just subgroups of theism.

In a strictly logical sense, both atheism and theism can be false. One is not the opposite of the other.

This is best expressed in the tetralemma of Hindu/Buddhist thought: for every proposition x, the truth-table is x, not-x, both x and not-x, and neither x nor not-x. Nearly every metaphysical belief is as false as its opposite, and we are trapped with "both x and not-x". Other examples include free will vs. determinism (both free will and determinism can be true or false without affecting the other); and, morality in general.

Exceptions are empirical statements, but those are never absolutely true or absolutely false.

Thanks for demonstrating that you can read at a middle school level.

But unfortunately you obviously have trouble reading between the lines, and you also obviously cant do basic arithmetic.

Due to the original poster's broken English it was hard to tell what he was saying. It was hard to tell if he understood what the term "atheist" meant. It sounded like he thought that it just meant "not Christian".

He announced in the title that he is an "atheist", but then he seemed to be saying that he believed in the gods of Mt Olympus. So to tease out where he is coming from I asked him to make up his mind - are you leaving the convention of worshipping one god to: worship zero gods, or leaving it to worship multiple gods? Addition? Or subtraction?

In arithmetic addition IS the opposite of subtraction.

Ignoring the ad hominem.

He said that he liked Greek mythology, I do not see where he said he current believes it.

He said that he believed when he was a kid. Never said he stopped believing.

If I said I believed in Santa as a kid does that mean that you should assume I do so now?

A person like you? Who expends energy to prove that all mathmaticians are wrong in believing that subtraction and addition are opposite operations? Such a person might very well believe in Santa Clause! Lol!

Listen: over the years more than one WP member as self identified as "Pagan" and has expressed belief in the Germanic gods of Valhalla. So an adult flirting with belief in the Gods of Olympus on WP wouldn't cause me to bat my eye. That's why I needed to tease what exactly he was saying in his broken English.