Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
@145
For what it's worth I don't "accept science" in that way, nor do most other actual atheists. Science doesn't have the answers yet. It probably will eventually, but until then I don't go seek religious explanations because every time religion has come into contact with science, science has won. For the really big questions--do we have a soul--there's very compelling concrete evidence otherwise. But for all the stuff we don't know, reputable scientists will just say "we don't know yet". To use your language, "believing science" is merely requiring actual proof for things rather than just taking whoever's word for it, not making up answers from nowhere to fill holes, and producing experimental results that can be reliably reproduced.
Don't lump scientists and people who understand science in with the covid-19 zealot crowd. Most of us hate Fauci for deciding to play politics with the science for the sake of getting people to comply with things like mask mandates, for one thing. He could have told the truth and still had people complying, and all the back and forth wouldn't have eroded the credibility of everyone involved. And don't even get me started on how we could have had vaccines in 2 months if people had bothered to get out of the way and stop riding the ethics high horse (I will scream challenge trials until the end of time at this point, but no one will ever listen).
But to circle back to my "you're probably born an atheist" point: you just treated science like a religion. Atheism is a lack of belief, not a belief in something else. Almost no one is able to understand how someone can just not believe in things. It's very easy to say "some people don't believe in things unless there's evidence" and know that to be true, but quite another thing to understand it when you say it.
What we miss out on is false comfort. It's false comfort that's as good as true comfort because if you make up reasons you have to have a soul and all these other capacities that are somehow unique to humans because humans are special and you have the ability to maintain that belief, then you get to have a higher purpose and stuff like that, and death isn't the end and so on. But to the atheist, to the scientists, it matters that the things we believe actually be true and not just pulled out of the air. Once you care about truth--not "we all have different truths" truth but actual "someone has to be right because it's either yes or no to these questions" truth--you can no longer maintain those constructs. It's a really strong placebo effect: like if you could believe in the fire when you're cold, and somehow that keeps you warm, but only until you notice that the fire doesn't exist, at which point you can't ever un-notice that the fire doesn't exist anymore.
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