Aetheists, exactly WHAT has caused you to be aetheists? What errors do you find in what the bible says?

Answer 1

Hi,

Goto www.skepticsannotatedbible.com to find more problems with the bible then you could possibly imagine.

More generally - I find big problems with -

The creation of the world in 6 days just 6,000 years ago.

The treatment of Adam and Eve for making a small mistake.

The condemning of the whole world because of Adam and Eve's small mistake.

The story of Exodus.

The explicit support for slavery.

The story of The Flood.

The idea that someone can die for your sins.

The idea that faith is the most important thing.

That's just a small list but it should give you the basic idea.

Answer 2

I was raised christian untill high school and started asking questions that no one could answer and i got labled everything from a trouble maker to a satanist for asking questions about the bible. I was not being a smart *** i had honest questions and got no answers so i went elsewhere and found the answers myself.

i am not intolerant i just dont understand how you can belive something that makes no sence just because its in the bible.

example: Genealogies in Genesis put the Tower of Babel about 110 to 150 years after the Flood [Gen 10:25, 11:10-19]. How did the world population regrow so fast to make its construction (and the city around it) possible? Similarly, there would have been very few people around to build Stonehenge and the Pyramids, rebuild the Sumerian and Indus Valley civilizations, populate the Americas, etc

Gathering the Animals:

Some, like sloths and penguins, can't travel overland very well at all.

Some, like koalas and many insects, require a special diet. How did they bring it along?

Some, like dodos, must have lived on islands. If they didn't, they would have been easy prey for other animals. When mainland species like rats or pigs are introduced to islands, they drive many indigenous species to extinction. Those species would not have been able to survive such competition if they lived where mainland species could get at them before the Flood.

Why is there no evidence of a flood in ice core series? Ice cores from Greenland have been dated back more than 40,000 years by counting annual layers. [Johnsen et al, 1992,; Alley et al, 1993] A worldwide flood would be expected to leave a layer of sediments, noticeable changes in salinity and oxygen isotope ratios, fractures from buoyancy and thermal stresses, a hiatus in trapped air bubbles, and probably other evidence. Why doesn't such evidence show up?

How are the polar ice caps even possible? Such a mass of water as the Flood would have provided sufficient buoyancy to float the polar caps off their beds and break them up. They wouldn't regrow quickly. In fact, the Greenland ice cap would not regrow under modern (last 10 ky) climatic conditions.

How did animals get to their present ranges? How did koalas get from Ararat to Australia, polar bears to the Arctic, etc., when the kinds of environment they require to live doesn't exist between the two points. How did so many unique species get to remote islands?

How were ecological interdependencies preserved as animals migrated from Ararat? Did the yucca an the yucca moth migrate together across the Atlantic? Were there, a few thousand years ago, unbroken giant sequoia forests between Ararat and California to allow indigenous bark and cone beetles to migrate?

Why are so many animals found only in limited ranges? Why are so many marsupials limited to Australia; why are there no wallabies in western Indonesia? Why are lemurs limited to Madagascar? The same argument applies to any number of groups of plants and animals.

Answer 3

Atheism doesn't occur because of "errors" in Christianity; or, at least, not in the way I believe you are thinking.

Atheism is mostly a belief in scientific evidence, facts, measureable and tangible equations and experiments on life, the universe, and everything.

Religion takes things on faith, sometimes flying in the face of what reliable scientific data has told us... Much like the fundamentalist claim of a 6,000-10,000 year old earth--certainly a ludicrous notion to begin with, but it also flies in the face of tons of scientific data and hard evidence!

Then there's the more ephemereal questions--like does god exist, or is there a heaven--while these questions sound nice a philosophical, they have no merit in the scientific realm--and when one places faith in science--a very different faith than what a religionite places in their sky god--and there is no evidnece to suggest, or even remotely hint at some type of supernatural being directing and guiding the cosmos... well, religion just kind of falls apart, blames a lack of faith on those who don't believe, and then damns them to hell as an after-thought meant to scare them back into the fold, as it were...

Religion is illogical--there's no two ways about it. Add to the fact that religion has yet to "save" anyone or anything, let alone get their story straight about what happened and when (as evidenced by the many branches of Christianity in the U.S. alone...), and you have to ask why we disbelieve?

One wonders what you have that makes you believe...

Aside from baseless faith, that is...

Answer 4

I'm not an atheist because of the errors in the Bible, I'm an atheist because there isn't enough evidence for God. If you really want to understand the atheist mentality, and the typical atheist's justification for rejecting God, then you need to seriously and unreservedly consider the example of your own disbelief in Santa Claus.

Why don't you believe in Santa? Presumably, because you have no reason to believe in him. It's not that you hate Santa; it's not that you think there are "errors" in "'Twas The Night Before Christmas"; it's not that you don't want to have to deal with the pressure of pleasing Santa every year; and it's not even that you think that Santa is 100% impossible (though you surely find him extremely unlikely). Rather, it's simply that there's no compelling evidence or argument that shows that Santa exists, so you make the rational conclusion.

Atheists, whether rightly or wrongly, view God in exactly the same way: they doubt God to order to be consistent with their normal, skeptical standards of evidence for all other extraordinary claims, e.g., claims that Santa, unicorns, or the Loch Ness Monster exist. The only real reason they call themselves "atheists", but not "asantaists", is because belief in God (theism) is so very common, and such an important social issue, whereas belief in Santa is not (at least, among adults).

When I was younger, I believed in God. The sole reason I stopped believing in God was because I couldn't find a good, sound reason to believe in him anymore; none of the claimed evidence (like seeing Jesus on pieces of toast), arguments (like "God must exist because otherwise where'd the universe come from!"), or threats (like "believe or you'll go to Hell!") convinced me, and I felt like I'd be a hypocrite if I dismissed belief in other unsupported things, but continued to believe in this one unsupported thing. So, although I still entertain at least the small possibility that God might exist (just as with Santa), and in some ways I actually wish that God (and Santa) existed, I am forced by my own intellectual standards to abandon my earlier wishful thinking and be an atheist. (Or, if you prefer, an agnostic, or a nontheist; these words are often interchangeable. For me, they just denote "someone who doesn't believe in God").

I never stopped believing in God because of the Bible, though I'm sure that did factor in to some other atheists' decisions. After becoming an atheist and re-examining the Bible with a more critical eye, I did find many passages in the Bible which I object to, either on moral or scientific grounds; but those are in no way my reason for atheism, they're just an afterthought. If you want examples of those criticisms of the Bible, you can find many at sites like http://creationtheory.org and http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/ , though I don't agree with all of the criticisms there.

Answer 5

Exactly WHAT has caused you to be a Christian? or a Jew? or a Muslim? or a Buddhist.

Don't think that athiesm is a direct opposition to Christianity. Errors in a bible doesn't always produce athiesm.

I simply don't believe there is a God.

Give me a reason why there is a God without giving ambigious answers like "You're alive everyday, the sky is blue, the grass is green, we are here, he loves you, faith, etc"

Answer 6

I've told this story a lot. People must be so sick of it. Became an atheist while in bible college. The LAST thing I was expecting. While in Hermenutics Class translating the koine greek of I John 3. The "small errors" in english became huge errors in greek. Soon I started seeing errors everyhwere.

I decided I was "too proud" and relying on my mind, so I prayed a lot. Willed myself to have faith. Be humble. Begged god for faith. It wasn't sin. I was a non drinking, non smoking, virgin who was pouring her heart out to god for faith. And still it slipped away.

To me "atheism" looked like a void. nothing. And I knew it would hurt my family. Plus, why give up faith and hope of eternal life for what looked like a spin on the Communist, Hedonist, Hopeless Merry-go-round.

Eventually, I realized I could no more "WILL" myself to believe in god than a 30-year-old can will themself to believe in Santa. And thats that.

Answer 7

I'm atheist because I see no need to create a god.


As for the Bible: I thought Genesis was simply laughable.

Reading Revelations, I realized the only way it would be true is if I were the antiChrist.

The god of Abraham (the one in your Bible) is basically a jerk in my opinion. I consider him to be morally inferior to me.

Answer 8

My inability to believe in an invisible flying man who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and somehow manages to choose the shadiest people in the world to represent him. Kinda like an invisible Barry Bonds.

Answer 9

The universe is complex and probably required a Creator. But which one? It seems that all cultures throughout human history have recognized the role of a Creator God.

The Creator defined by the North American Native Americans only asked that humans live in harmony with all nature. In exchange, the Creator provided plants and animals for humans to use as food, clothing, shelter, and medicine. Early Native Americans showed their respect and appreciation to the Creator by making small offerings of tobacco.

The Creator God defined by Hebrew scholars, 6000 years ago in the Middle East, was a jealous, and often cruel God. He demanded that humans make sacrifices of animal blood in order to appease Him, and set out Old Testament laws of behavior that often required the stoning-to-death of your neighbor for sins as minor as eating shell fish or working on the Sabbath. These laws remained in effect for over 4000 years until Emperor Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire and commissioned the first Bible from a collection of Hebrew scrolls and stories of Jesus. Religious scholars of today claim that the Old Testament God decided to change his original requirements for animal sacrifice and for stoning-your-neighbor-to-death for disobeying His written laws. This God, rather than having his human scribes re-write the laws on new scrolls, he decided to have His only Son sent to earth to be tortured and murdered.

I believe there is a Creator God. I just believe that his personality is more like the compassionate Creator God of the early Native Americans. If He turns out to be the cruel Middle Eastern God, and He throws me in Hell for thinking He is more loving than He really is, then I’m willing to accept with that fate.

Answer 10

Jasmine, I find multiple errors and contradictions. When I point them out Christians say that I'm taking it out of context.

http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/abs/long.htm