re why do people become atheists in article may athos rutgers edu fil sapienza med umich edu fil sapienza writes in article may athos rutgers edu maxwell c muir muirm argon gas organpipe uug arizona edu writes of faith if you want to know i feel that faith is intellectually dishonest i d appreciate some support for this statement i m not sure it really makes sense to me i define faith as belief in the abscense sp of evidence i also include in evidence past experiences because i have no past experience in a god actually having an effect on my life and because i have never seen evidence for any god beyond what can be explained without the neccessity of a god or which is more convincing than the many fictional works i have read and other reasons i do not believe in any god s from what i have seen some people reconcile this lack of evidence by using faith it is faith in that sense the only way i currently understand the word faith that i find intellectually dishonest the ambiguity of religious beliefs an unwillingness to take pascal s wager i ve heard this frequently what exactly is pascal s wager pascal s wager goes something like this premise either there is or there isn t a god premise if god exists he wants us to believe and will damn us for not believing premise if god does not exist then belief in god doesn t matter because death is death anyway conclusion belief in god is superior to non belief because non belief damns us to eternal punishment if we are wrong while belief in god only wastes a little time in life if we are wrong sound pretty straightforward and is logically sound the problem is premise presupposes odds between belief and non belief this is flat out wrong because of the sheer number of religions out there and the fact that for the most part the religions are mutually exclusive i have heard theists referred to as atheists because they believe in their god or gods to be the one god or set of gods the consequence of this is what if i pick the wrong god suddenly the odds don t look so good because picking the wrong god or wrong doctrines of a god still leaves you with the possibility of being wrong and being damned to another god s version of hell do i sound broken to you i don t know you point out that your mother s treatment upset you and see inconsistencies in various religions i m not sure if that constitutes broken ness or not it certainly consititutes disillusionment i don t see how disillusionment enters into it you see i presented my mother s treatment of me to show the cause of my questioning my atheism a questioning which continues to this day i had already been an atheist for five years before having any contact with my mother s version of christianity if anything i had become somewhat disillusioned with atheism uh oh i thought what if there is a god yes in a way i have also become disillusioned by many religions simply because i had thought at one time that they had all the answers if i only found the right one i m still looking but each time i look in a different place i become a little stronger in my attitude belief if you will no faith though it s based on the evidence of past experience that i ll never find a religion which has all the answers sorta like looking for easter eggs the more time it takes you to find the next one the more convinced you become that you may already have found all the eggs you re going to find someone else mentioned that critisism isn t going to make me think any more highly of christians i have a contrary position constructive critisism will likely improve my attitude towards christians abusive critisism will turn me off no accusations to you mr sapienza i merely slipped that into this post because i forgot to reply to that one filipp sapienza department of technology services university of michigan hospitals surgery fil sapienza med umich edu muppets and garlic toast forever max bob muir ps i m leaving for home on thursday at so this is likely my last post here for the summer in the meantime thank you all for helping me see a few more things i might have missed in my meanderings through the world
