How many people here believe in God, Heaven and angels, Hell and Satan and his demons

[photon]

Well I wouldn't say I'm an atheist, at least not a full time one.

But here's my experience.. my parents more recently have changed their views on things, less fully engaged in the Word Faith movement.

So one day they were over and my sister was too, and we were having a discussion about religion and doctrine and stuff, I have to really watch what I say, I don't want to lie about what I think, but I don't want to upset my parents either.

Anyway, my sister was actually leading the conversation criticizing lots of the practices of the modern church, how lots of things that are done are not biblical, etc.. the discussion got detailed and I floated a few trial balloons, pointing out that the particular scripture they were talking about had been changed over time and that the earlier versions meant something different.

Of course this instantly lead to biblical infallibility.. so rather than biting my tongue I pushed a little further and talked about the manuscript tradition of the NT and how changes have been observed, some authorship issues, nothing radical, stuff anyone who's gone to seminary will have been taught in a historical-critical class about the Bible. Every pastor knows this stuff.

Anyway by that point my mom was visibly upset, here both her kids were being far more liberal about religion than she had ever taught them. I let off at that point. Later she was fine and even said she enjoyed when we all had conversations like that, but I haven't been controversial since.

If I flat out told her that I was at best a deist and at worst a pantheist or even agnostic atheist, I'm really not sure what would happen. My dad would be ok with it I think, disappointed but he'd be ok.. but my Mom, I really don't know.

At this stage, I would much rather have my son know his Grandma and have access to her than have her disown me. I don't know what I'll do when he gets old enough for it to become a serious topic of discussion between them.

I have spoken with a number of people in the same boat, they can't be honest about their beliefs to their family. Or ones that have and have had significant changes in the relationships.

That's very sad.

[FireFly]

Originally Posted by photon

I have spoken with a number of people in the same boat, they can't be honest about their beliefs to their family. Or ones that have and have had significant changes in the relationships.

That's very sad.

It's quite sad, and not at all Christian, actually. The number one tenant of the faith is LOVE. Regardless of who it is, from a stranger begging change to your children, you're supposed to love everyone. Perhaps you should remind them of that.

[onetwo_threefour]

A question for the atheists here: since many of us come from religious families and were raised in the faith, how did you explain your atheism to your parents? I'm sure this analogy isn't entirely accurate, but for me it felt like what I imagine a homosexual goes through when he or she "comes out" when I told my parents that I no longer believed in God and would not be attending church services with them anymore. Needless to say, it took them awhile to get over it. My father is more understanding, but it's been over a decade and my mother still hasn't fully come to terms with it.

Interestingly, my mother probably figures it's her own fault. She grew up in a strongly religious family, but her mom died after a protracted illness when my mom was sixteen. That really shook my mother's own faith. My sister was born just before my mom turned eighteen and I was born just after she turned twenty, a year and sixteen days apart. For our sakes, my mother decided to try and raise us in the Catholic church, but my dad has always been pretty non-religious. They ended up splitting up by the time I was five and my mom seemed to kind of lapse again. At the same time, I was a pretty smart kid and avid reader and my mom encouraged me strongly to question everything, and she didn't chide me for asking hard questions about religion to her, our priest, or anyone else. By the time I was about eight or nine I had pretty much decided that the church didn't have any satisfying answers. After dabbling in high school with other philosophies and even another Christian sects I came away convinced that there is no good reason to believe in any supernatural agency in our lives. With a critical eye, I have observed the back and forth arguments over the years, which have literally exploded on the internet, and no religious argument has ever satisfied, while the secular/agnostic/atheist arguments have a fundamentally coherent sense about them.

My mom has gone back and forth on her own religion, but she has never bothered me about my atheism because she knows that it comes from a place of personal reflection and understanding of myself. I think my dad is probably agnostic/atheist anyway and certainly doesn't challenge me on it but our discussions in the area tend to be abstract rather than personal.


It goes back to some of photon's much earlier posts about not wanting to derail the thread by getting into a discussion of belief versus knowledge, but in many ways he is absolutely correct that the distinction is critical to what we are talking about.

In epistemological circles, the question is often discussed as being a distinction between coherentism and foundationalism. Foundationalism requires that you find some base piece of incontrovertible knowledge and develop a logical framework from there to justify making a claim that something is knowledge rather than belief. Its major weakness is that soemone can always challenge the truth claim for the original foundational knowledge leading to an unavoidable infinite regress. On the other hand coherentism says that if we have a bunch of different pieces of evidence, all of which hangs together in a consistent framework to support a truth claim, that should suffice to designate that claim as knowledge rather than just belief. However, the challenge to coherentists is the question, 'If something about how the evidence goes together makes the truth claim stronger, then shouldn't that be a foundational claim itself because it could be applied to different types of evidence or situations." That then leads to the infinite regress of asking what characteristics of a group of coherent evidence makes it worthy of converting a truth claim from belief to knowledge.

In an argument/discussion about religion, we all draw our own lines. I tend to lean towards a coherentist view, in that evidence from various sources that are reliable in other contexts such as physics, math, biology, geology, history, psychology and others paint a coherent picture in which the supernatural element of a god is not necessary. It doesn't mean everything is explained, but to maintain consistency and coherence of my knowledge claims, God is not a useful concept.

A foundationalist might think differently in some respects and focus on one specific idea, such as complexity and decide that that one issue, for which there is no satisfactory explanation in their mind, supports the belief in a supernatural agency.

Neither is necessarily wrong nor right, nor, despite appearances, are they necessarily mutually exclusive. Like atheism, one would be a strong foundationalist and weak coherentist at the same time to some degree for example.

It's a truly fascinating area of philospohy, but definitely steers away from the topic at hand if you get into it.

[photon]

Originally Posted by FireFly

It's quite sad, and not at all Christian, actually. The number one tenant of the faith is LOVE. Regardless of who it is, from a stranger begging change to your children, you're supposed to love everyone. Perhaps you should remind them of that.

It's not right, but it is understandable I think.. I mean if my son came up to me at 25 and said he'd discovered the powers of crystals and wanted me to meet the 10,000 year old being he was channeling, my unconditional love would still be there but it would be a lot harder to have a strong relationship.

From her point of view, it's like me rejecting my sister, saying she doesn't exist or that I hate her, only worse... Jesus even commands people to love him more than their families, and to leave their families. Jesus wasn't particularly pro-family, so the "that isn't Christian" line might not work with all believers, depending on how well they know scripture and how fervent they are. It would probably influence my parents though.

Maybe I'm being too cautions (something I am prone to do), but I know my mom's ability to hold grudges, and I don't want that directed at me lol.

[Antithesis]

Originally Posted by MarchHare

A question for the atheists here: since many of us come from religious families and were raised in the faith, how did you explain your atheism to your parents?

In my specific case, I was brought up Roman Catholic where my Mom was the churchgoer and my Dad just never went. To be honest, I have no idea which side of the fence my Dad is on regarding religion and belief because we've actually never had the discussion which leads me to believe he's an apathetic agnostic

The closest my Mom and I have ever come to a discussion about belief is when, in the course of a normal conversation, we moved to a discussion of faith and religion and the hypocrisy we see in some specific so-called Christians in our lives. She explained she'd been moving away from church-based practice of faith (a bad experience with the church regarding her divorce) to a more personal practice, while I explained that I had moved in that direction too and no longer considered myself a Christian but rather 'spiritual' if that makes sense.

Very non-dramatic but I knew it would be, my parents are very accepting of things. Now I'm curious about my Dad's beliefs but of course I'm not going to ask!

[Hemi-Cuda]

both my parents were/are agnostic, they believed that there was some supernatural force in the universe that has a hand in how things play out, but they didn't believe in God as the bible put it and they wanted nothing to do with the church (despite my mom growing up catholic and my dad christian). religion simply wasn't talked about at all when my brother and i were kids, i believed in God the same way as Santa Clause or the easter bunny, a fairytale that kids were supposed to grow out of. it baffled me when i got older to see people who actually believed in God and who took the bible literally, in my mind they were the same as people who believed in UFO's and Bigfoot

probably explains why i'm not exactly good at dealing with religious people