atheist! can you answer this?

Question

well im religious (cathlic) and well i was just wondering if you guys have faith?i know it sounds stupid but im onlu 15 so yea im just wondering (no offense)i mean when i'm in trouble i pray to god when someone is hurt i pray and hope for the best what do you guys do??? also any atheist that were once believers (influenced by their parents ) when did you become atheist? when you were 18 and all grown up? remember im 15 so this is all VERY complicated to me..

i know atheist are good people but im just asking thank you answers sincerely appreciated

Answer 1

Two saying of my old mum's were:

God helps those that help themselves
and
Praise god, but pass the ammunition.

Firstly I try not to get in to trouble, but if I have a problem, I sit down, and I work it out for myself, or I talk to somebody who may be able to help me. I think that self help is the best help, because it is ME helping ME.

There are lots of hurts. Mental hurt, I do what I can if I can, physical hurt, I am a trained first aider. For the hurts of the world, there is nothing I can do except support those who can help.

I have faith, in ME.

Answer 2

Atheism is rarely something one does in an instant. It's either something you're born into or something you study or come to awareness of and come to agreement with.

The question of if it is 'faith' is a sticky one. You must understand that there are two primary definitions of atheism, one called Strong Atheism and one called Weak Atheism.

A strong atheist would say, "I believe/know that there is in fact no deity." A weak atheist would say, "I do not believe in a deity."

The strong atheist makes an assertion, while the weak atheist asserts nothing. So the weak atheist truly cannot in any way be assumed to be operating by faith.

Most strong atheists I know are also not faith based, and here's why.

There can be no proof for or against the existence of a deity. In order to prove or disprove something, it must be falsifiable, that is, some test must be possible that would show the difference between it being true and false. For example, if I hold up a black bag and tell you, "All the marbles inside are red," how could you test it? Of course you could reach in and pull out a marble. If it comes out red, you still don't know that ALL are red. If you pull out a blue, though, you know for certain that NOT ALL are red.

So you would need a test that if you did it would have different results based on whether there was a deity or not. In short, you need a test that you could do in the presence of a deity and in the presence of no deity. If a deity exists, you can't get rid of it, and if no deity exists, you can't manufacture one to test the converse.

So, the existence or nonexistence of a deity is not provable.

This is agnosticism.

HOWEVER... the strong atheist takes agnosticism one step further, via what's called Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor is a well known scientific 'idea' that says the explanation requiring the fewest actors, prior assumptions, or causal agents is usually the correct explanation.

Since one can say, "The universe came to be through entirely natural processes," or, "The universe came to be through divine intervention and natural processes," and the divine hypothesis has that extra step, Occam's razor dismisses the divine hypothesis, PENDING FUTHER EVIDENCE.

Thus, there is still no 'faith', just the application of principle.


I hope this helps you understand. Good luck on your journey of truth, wherever it may lead you.

Answer 3

Just need to clear some things up before i answer the question, and thats the meaning of atheist. There are many words that describe someone who doesn't believe in a God, but they all mean something different.

Atheist, agnostic, infidel and skeptic refer to persons not inclined toward religious belief or a particular form of religious belief.

An atheist is one who denies the existence of a deity or of divine beings.

An agnostic is one who believes it impossible to know anything about God or about the creation of the universe and refrains from commitment to any religious doctrine.

Infidel means an unbeliever, especially a nonbeliever in Islam or Christianity.

A skeptic doubts and is critical of all accepted doctrines and creeds.

I am Agnostic, although i was brought up a to believe in a God through the religious faith of Catholicism. Both my parents believed in a god and went to church so I had no choice but to follow. Also i didn't really understand things and i just did as I was told. As a young boy the stories that i was told about Jesus and god seem amazing. Like you, your parents taught you to believe in a god, so although you have faith and belief, is it really your own or that of your parents and what they have taught you?Although I do believe in Jesus, i do not believe the stories that are told in the Bible. I believe that they have been changed in order to control people and scare people.

As you get older you will understand more. Its very difficult for someone as young as you to understand and see the world as a mature adult. As you get older your views change. My views on things didn't really change until the last 10 years or so. I am 35 now. Religion is causing so much fighting and dying all around the world and this isn't a recent thing, it has been going on for hundreds of years. Who is right & who is wrong? But its not only religion thats causing trouble its politicians as well. When your young you think you know alot about life, but believe me, you will learn even more. Just keep asking questions. And question everything. Life is a mystery and will always be a mystery. To say ooh god did that, is far to easy. Life is more complicated than that. But what ever is in me, is in you, we are a part of everything. If only more people saw that. Maybe people would respect more.

I admire someone as young as you to ask such an intelligent question.

I hope this has helped and i wish you luck

Answer 4

That's a nice respectful question, thank you. Don't worry about being 15, being 15 is very cool, and we were all 15 once.

I know that I can't achieve anything by praying so my only resort when things are difficult is to try to do something practical about it. If a friend is hurt I will do what I can to help them and make their lives more comfortable. If it's a situation I juts have to endure, I steel myself to take the worst until it's over. I've never really believed, atheism was the logical option in the absence of any better set of beliefs. Peace to you.

Answer 5

Lets see I became an atheist in my 30's after being in the service and being told you life expectancy is 10 seconds if a war starts and then when I got out of the service I spent 2 years volunteering on a rescue squad.. Where a person is alive one minute and dead 10 seconds later. Plus the fact that there are inconsistancies in the bible..where are dinosaurs mentioned and we know that dinosaurs once where here on earth...and if adam and eve had two children and they both were boys were did we come from..so the way I look at it things happen for a reason and I don't think there is someone up there controlling these things...hope this helps and again these are my reasons for being how I am...

Answer 6

I was Christian from birth until age eight. At age eight I became an Atheist, which lasted until I was about your age, maybe a little older. I don't remember what changed my mind when I was eight, all I remember is that I woke up one morning (catechism morning, oddly enough) and I realized that none of it has ever made sense to me, no matter how hard I tried. For the next seven to eight years, I refused to go to catechism or church, but I did research everything I could find about every religion I heard of (including the first few editorials that spawned the Scientology movement). As I read and read and learned more, not only about Catholicism and Christianity and their ilk, but also about other religious cultures, I realized that, even though not all were centered around God, almost all of their teachings had started with a single idea that spread slowly across Europe and Asia, each culture adapting it to their own way of life, until the only thing they had in common was the underlying faith in eachother and love for one's family and friends. That last realization happened, as I said, when I was about your age, and that's when I started taking from all of those religions I had learned about (and why) everything that made sense to me and I apply it all, to this day, to my everyday life. Concisely, it's respect, inside and out, for everybody and everything, and a more natural approach to, for lack of a better term, my 'faith'. I believe in education, spirituality, respect, common sense, curiosity, nature, honor, and, what so many Muslims have lost sight of, my Internal (what USED to be the GREATER) Jihad - fighting the evil within my own self, and doing what I can to be a good person to everyone who is willing to accept me as I am. I don't need God to do that, I just need to know the difference between what's right and what's wrong. I'm may not always be nice about it, but it's never led me astray through the tangled brambles of hatred, ignorance, or cruelty.

Answer 7

When things are tough I approach it in a rational and practical sense. Writing things out, thinking of how I got to where I am, thinking of what I can do to make things better. Atheists see more power in their own ability to change their set of circumstances. I think for some, praying is similar in that it helps you sort out what's going on. We just do it without "talking" to a higher power ot looking to anyone or any being outside of ourselves.

Everything good in my life, I'm responsible for. Everything bad in my life, I'm responsible for. It's in my hands as to how I live my life and where I go.

I really can't ever recall believing in a god. It just never made a whole lot of sense to me. My family didn't go to church until I was 8 or 9 years old and when I'd be in Sunday school, I just didn't buy what they were selling. Our family was always very science and logic minded, always questioning and trying to figure out how things work. The sun rises not because God makes it, but because of rotation of the earth and it's orbit, etc.

Answer 8

First, I'm glad that you know that atheists can be good people! I'm also glad that you ask this question; there are a lot of people out there who are not mature enough to realize that having faith in god does not automatically make one good or bad.

I was raised in a generally protestant family, but went to Catholic school from K through 6th grade. So, for a good portion of my childhood I went to Catholic religion class 4 days a week at school, attended Mass on Fridays (but was excluded from communion since my family was not Catholic), and then attended Lutheran services on Sunday with my mother and Sunday School at the same Lutheran church. Although there was definitely some tension between these two religious environments, I considered myself a believer for a great deal of my childhood. I also believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and - to a lesser degree - the Tooth Fairy, just to provide some context.

Anyway, I was raised in a generally religious environment -- it just also happened to be a conflicted one; I often found myself asking whether the Lutherans were right or the Catholics were right and who was telling me the truth and who was lying. The Lutheran pastor would tell me one thing, and then the Catholic pastor would say something else and - to be honest - for a long time I didn't know what to make of it. Plus, my father was not religious (although I didn't know he considered himself an atheist until I was much older - I just thought he found church boring!) so I didn't feel social pressure to be religious from my family.

Realizing that not everyone believed the same things and that there was no way for me to figure out who was "right" and "wrong", I eventually came to realize that perhaps none of the religions had a monopoly on the truth. I also realized that when I prayed I didn't feel like I actually had a personal relationship with a god who was listening, but was just following a script provided to me by religion class at school and sunday school on the weekends. After deciding that religion was a matter of choice and that people just seemed to follow the religion that they were born into (or thrown into), I decided to blaze my own religious path. As about a thirteen year old, I decided that I was a pagan (or, more specifically, a Wiccan) and that I should honor the God and Goddess of nature instead of the all-powerful judgemental old man with a beard that I imagined in Sunday School. That lasted for about a year before I realized that I didn't believe in the God and Goddess or anything else about Wiccanism, I just liked the idea of it. At that point (around your age, I think) I realized that I simply didn't have faith in god or goddess or gods and goddesses. It just wasn't there, and I found that I didn't miss it.

Science is good enough for me when it comes to explaining (approximately) most natural phenomena. The love and support of friends and family is enough to get me through the hard times, and I don't see why one can't be an ethical and moral person without having the threat of punishment (or the inducement of a reward) hanging over my head. I believe in a lot of the same things that religious people believe in (charity, love, brother/sisterhood, forgiveness, etc), but I don't think that a god is necessary for those things to be important values. Personally, I think that humans invented the concept of god so that they would have a system around which to orient their moral and ethical beliefs. And that's fine, it just isn't for me!

Thanks for the good question and good luck!

Answer 9

I was raised Mormon. I started questioning it when I was about 12, and was largely convinced it was wrong by the time I was 16, but it took another 10 years or so before I really had a clear set of beliefs that made sense and felt right.

You're still growing up. There is plenty of evidence that your brain still hasn't reached its mature state. This is good and bad -- good because you can still absorb more and learn faster than you will later, but bad because it means you still have some years to go before can reach your full mental potential. Note that you don't suddenly become mature at 18. You'll probably still be maturing into your mid 20s, maybe later.

One of the things that will hopefully happen for you as you mature is that you'll learn that you have to rely on yourself first, and that your family and friends are your next level of support. I don't believe in God, but if you continue to believe in God, I think you should contemplate the proverb: "God helps them who help themselves".

Answer 10

I'm agnostic, not atheist -- but grew up Catholic. I stopped believing in Christianity when I was in college.

I did it partly because I did not believe that a good God would send good men to Hell just because they were not believers. A good god would accept good men. At that point, I realized that it didn't matter if I believed in God -- it mattered if I was a good man.

When I am in trouble or when someone is hurt, I don't pray to God -- I ask myself what I can do to make the situation better. Action on my part usually brings about better results than silent prayer and no action.