Phat writes:
I will incorporate that into my database.
Hmmm. I sense you still don't get it.
Because atheism - and I'd say a agnosticism too - is an
absence of belief, it has no analogue with the way a believer thinks and behaves. The way you think about the world and go about your physical life with its churches, meetings, prayer groups, sing-songs, bible readings, evangelisms, aphorisms before dining, God bless America etc etc has no equal with 'us'.
When you try to imagine how it is for us, you get it wrong by thinking it's somehow the opposite of the way it is for you, or that we give the same amount of time and effort to being atheist/agnostic as you do to being a believer. Well we don't - it's just an absence. There's no church, no prayer, no thought process no congregation; nothing to reinforce our non-belief on a daily or hourly basis; there's just life.
Very, very few of us atheist/agnostics spend our time talking and thinking about this stuff - these boards are an aberration. In a day to day existence being atheist is as interesting as not having sugar in your tea.
I think too, that your views are tempered by being in such a strange society, a while back in the USA I got asked in a matter of fact way what church I attended. That's not a question I've ever been asked before in my life. In Northern European countries the assumption is that you're a nice liberal agnostic/atheist.
Je suis Charlie. Je suis Ahmed. Je suis Juif. Je suis Parisien. I am Mancunian. I am Brum. I am London.I am Finland. Soy Barcelona
"Life, don't talk to me about life" - Marvin the Paranoid Android
"Science adjusts it's views based on what's observed.
Faith is the denial of observation so that Belief can be preserved."
- Tim Minchin, in his beat poem, Storm.
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