Re: to blind new agers
@Steve, as to your point about the main reason for atheism I don't think it is just Christians that push people away from their faith. The bible itself has a lot to do with pushing people away from the faith. That is, in fact, the main reason I converted to atheism and gave up on Christianity. The bible has a very inconsistent and less than flattering concept of God. In particular the Old Testament.
To explain a lot of Christian children are taught a very cherry picked view of the bible and God. They are told that God is loving, God is kind, just, merciful, and all good. However, when they get a little older and start reading the bible for themselves they discover that the God of the Old Testament is vengeful, petty, and down right evil. The books like Leviticus commands stoning people for being gay, for heresy, for adultery, and several other sins which I personally find objectionable. I do not believe in or support the death penalty so when I read that the Old Testame nt law, supposedly commanded by God, ordered the death penalty for sins and crimes my attitude of a loving and caring God disappeared.
Even worse I know in the book of Joshua it describes the reclaiming of the promise land by Israel. I understand we are talking about a war, and things happen in war that shouldn't and wouldn't ordinarily happen. All the same there is a discussion in Joshua chapter 10 where God supposedly commands Joshua to kill everything that breaths including every man, woman, child, and animal in the city.. To my mind any God who would order the death of everything that breathes is no better than a monster like Adolph Hitler. I realize that might offend some Christians, but it is instances like that within the bible that forever changed my outlook about God.
I had been raised with the notion that God was all good, all caring, all benevolent. The same basic presumption most Christians have about God. Then, I read the bible and find out i nstead of being loving and caring as I had been told he is a monster that orders the Children of Israel to murder sinners by stoning for a variety of sins. Then, if one wants to study the New Testament God casts sinners into a lake of fire to burn forever, and ever, and ever without reprieve. Please, tell me what God can be loving and all good who tortures souls for eternity?
Anyway, that is why I take issue with the concept that a God has to be good and all loving etc. After reading the bible I came to realize the common view of God is one manufactured by Christians to avoid the fact that God as he was once viewed was quite different. Many atheists, I'd say most, grew up in a Christian household and eventually broke away from the faith because they got tired of being lied to. They were raised with a rosy view of God, and when they finally sat down and read the bible they discovered the God in the bible is not the same as the one they were taught in Sunday school. It is n o wonder people like myself choose to leave Christianity, because it simply isn't possible to worship a deity who is so vengeful and cruel.
@Afrim, the term you are looking for is empirical evidence not concreteness. In any case that is the primary difference between faith and science. In faith people believe without evidence something to be true even though it could be wrong. In science it is based on a preponderance of evidence, empirical evidence, which leads one to the truth through a series of verifiable facts. Most atheists are scientists or have a scientific viewpoint precisely because science is currently the only way to know something with a degree of certainty without venturing out into faith.
While I take your point about knowing what happened in our early past there will always probably be a degree of uncertainty since it is hard to know what happened hundreds and thousands of years ago. That is why we have fields like archeology which tries to off er some sort of a historical view of our past, but even there it is open to alternative viewpoints and is not 100% certain. Archeology is only a best guess explanation of our past.
That is why there are many different viewpoints or beliefs on the creation and origins of humans. there really isn't much in the way of evidence to prove any particular hypothesis thus we are left with conjecture and logical deductions. One outlook is it was the result of some god or supernatural consciousness, another is we are the product of aliens, another a process of evolution. As there is little evidence to go on I try not to be too dogmatic about something so controversial and say it should be left up to someone's personal judgement.
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