How open are you with your atheism?

Atheism is a controversial belief. Many atheists hide their atheism as not to cause strife. Some atheists open up to a family member or a friend or to a close circle of family and friends. Other atheists let their family and friends know where they stand on the issue of religion. Some atheists are famous for their atheism. In the U.S, atheists are most distrusted group. Some atheists may see benefits in closeting their atheism. Others believe that being more open about their atheism will build bridges between atheists and theists.

How open are you with your atheism? Also, do you lie about your atheism or downplay it?

I became an atheist in 2007, but I continued to go to church until 2008. I decided to tell a few family members, including my father, that I was an atheist at the beginning of 2009. However, that hasn't stopped my father to request me to say grace before dinner every night. What he asks is irrational, but I can't argue against him, because doing so would make him have fits as evident by how he acts in the past. I once questioned his views on sodomy (which he thinks should be illegal) and I asked for proof on how sodomy was immoral, but instead he launched into this tantrum about how I can't question him for any reason whatsoever. I badgered him why I couldn't question him and telling him that I can question him if he hasn't provided evidence for his argument, but he wouldn't answer that, probably because he had no answer to it. I should've learned then that this man can't be dealt with by reason. As Thomas Paine would say, "To argue with a man who has renounced his reason is like giving medicine to the dead." I do want to assert my freedom of conscience though, maintaining that I should be allowed to not pray if I so desire, but I'm afraid that this will arouse bitter emotions from him. I brought up before, but he just ignored me completely, which tells me that if I had persisted, he would have gotten angry. The ideal way of handling this situation is simply moving out on my own and not letting him force his beliefs on me.

My mother meanwhile is upset with me about her atheism. According to her, only people who believe in a supreme being goes to heaven. Why she believes that when she picks what she wants to believe from the Bible is so unreasonable. Since she's so ready to let go of the Bible, she could believe that all good people, or all people in general, regardless of what their beliefs of God are, go to heaven, but she chooses to believe in that. Now that I think about it, to cut away religious dogma and substitute your own is simply illogical and inconsiderate to think that I don't deserve heaven while other, less deserving looters do is irreconciable. Not that I'm not a looter myself as I am.

My brother is fine with it, but he gets drunk a lot and likes to bring it up. I simply ignore it. My sister knows I'm not religious, but I don't think she or her husband knows that I'm an atheist. None of my friends know that I'm an athiest that I'm aware of, but I've told a few that I'm not religious. A few of my family members and friends that I don't talk to anymore that are Facebook friends with me might know that I'm an atheist, if they've ever checked my Facebook page, where I've listed "Atheist" under my "Religious Views". I don't lie about my atheism, but I do downplay it.

Does it depend where you are in the States? I'd have thought religion is far less pronounced on the East and West coasts of the US than in the middle. My own atheism has not been tempered much by social complaiance - In the UK, religion is not a popular topic of converstaion anyway.

I grew up in the times of the cold war and with Irish sectarian terrorism. The world seemed doomed - catholics and protestants appeared to wish to blow everyone else up. At 15, I joined a punk band called "Iconoclast" (our logo and stage backdrop was an upside-down cruxifix, smashed in half) who played anti-religion songs. Decades later, I refused the last band I was asked to join, since the singer was a strong Christian.

I think belief systems are important issues that are bound to crop up with people you grow close to, since beliefs in atheism, like religion, give people justification for their actions. If you do want to explore your beliefs objectively, you're going to have to be prepared to discuss them. That's what I think, anyway.

Heh, I think it's a lot easier being an atheist outside of America.. or Pakistan for that matter (nudge, nudge to Gambler).domatron23

It isn't all that hard. I don't blame Christians for not trusting atheists. I blame them for being Christians. This is one of the few instances where Christians are actually doing what the Bible instructs. As I've posted before, Psalm 14:1 says, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good." Also, as you know, the Bible condemns Christians from yoking with nonbelievers, atheists being no exception. Why Americans distrust atheists than even Muslims, who should also qualify as being nonbelievers, can be chalked up to the other religious groups in the U.S. that do not trust atheists.

Also, it's important to note that in many other instances, the Bible says that no one is righteous, so you could argue that by the Bible's standards, Christians are just as depraved as atheists. The difference is that Christians are forgiven for theirs sins, where as atheists are not. Honestly, Christians shouldn't trust anyone if they don't think anyone is good.

I do trust many Christians. I just don't trust their religion.

Well, not being atheist... :P

Kinda depends where I am for how open I am about my beliefs.  Everyone on GameSpot pretty much knows where I am, but I tend to be much less forward about it during one-on-one discussions, mainly out of a desire not to start any pointless conflicts.  If someone's talking about their beliefs in a way that does not really impact me in any way, I usually just let them talk and don't let on that I disagree.

[...] Kinda depends where I am for how open I am about my beliefs. [...]GabuEx

Only a handful of friends know the true extent of my disbelief.

My parents are very well aware of my skepticism but they still dont want me to completely abandon religion and I just play it along. I still participate in congregational prayers at times and all, if I completely abandoned everything then my parents will be very hurt and that to me is just not worth it. Afterall what can they do? My parents also believe that if I dont follow their religion then I am going to hell full stop. So for a father to see their son going to hell and not being able to do anything about it must be a failure of a life ultimately, that's how my father thinks. Regardless of which country I am residing in, as long as my parents are alive I dont think I'll publicly declare myself an all-out atheist.

In pakistan you can be an atheist but you better not try to prove your position. This essentially becomes a huge problem, if you declare yourself an atheist then there will inevitably be raised all sorts of questions and comments and you have to restrain yourself from answering it so basically you'll lose intellectual credibility. Living in pskistan it's not even a question if I'll ever become open about it, it's just not happening. On facebook I had put "agnostic" for a little time and that didnt go along well with a few people and arguments started, ultimately I was running out of the politically correct responses and just gave up and removed that agnostic tag under religious beliefs.

Another problem is that the women I want to marry have very religious parents and I dont want to mess it up due to my atheism, that would really suck. I could care less how religious parents or the other family is of a woman, only she matters as far as I am concerned. And I dont think I can be as happy with a western women as with a typical but educated pakistani women.

Basically the thing is that I may hate my ex-religion and the traditions of my society but I absolutely love the culture and people around and dont want to become an outcast.

[QUOTE="GabuEx"][...] Kinda depends where I am for how open I am about my beliefs. [...]foxhound_fox

Difficult to label, as michaelP4 once found. :P

I consider myself a follower of Jesus, as I consider him, from what we know with a fair degree of certainty about him, to have been a profoundly enlightened individual whose teachings (his real teachings, mind you) absolutely would improve the world were they put into practice by more people.

On the topic of his resurrection, I am open to the possibility that he was the son of God who rose after having been crucified, but I feel that there are explanations that sufficiently account for what we know which do not require such an incredible event to have occurred.  Members of cults have been observed multiple times in the past to have their beliefs strengthened, rather than destroyed, by contradicting facts which cause them to change the narrative to fit these new facts.  Both his resurrection story and the explanation in 2 Peter for his failure to promptly return both bear all the hallmarks, in my opinion, of narratives that were invented after the fact by followers who had to rationalize reality with their beliefs.  One must keep in mind both that the gospels were very likely the final product of orally transmitted sayings and stories and that 2 Peter was almost certainly not written by Peter, and as such, none of them are firsthand accounts of that of which they speak.

I further do not even believe that Jesus presented himself when he was alive to be the son of God and the savior of mankind; rather, I believe he was a radical reform-minded Jew who had nothing but contempt for the prevailing Jewish purity system and the hierarchy in the Judaism of his day.  I feel that the dialog ascribed to Jesus in the gospels in which he presents himself as the son of God was very likely an invention of either the writers or the storytellers that inspired the writers, as there are many things that quite simply do not fit (e.g., Jesus saying in one gospel that the Kingdom of God is temporally near, while saying in another that it is within you).

On a less factual note, I also find the concept quite absurd - though I say this without the intent to offend believers - that an all-powerful God decided that the best way to convey to all humanity his and their true purpose was to have some guys over the course of many centuries write down what he dictated to them or inspired them to write, codify it basically by human committee as the official Word of God, and try and convince everybody else that this was the official truth.  Not only for the logical concerns, but I would also find the idea immensely emotionally troubling, if true, that God would give those people some two thousand years ago a front-row seat to the miracles that led to their belief, but then gave us nothing at all except for the ability to struggle to separate fact from fiction in examining two-thousand-year-old documents.

On the existence of God, I do believe that, based on what we currently know, one cannot sufficiently explain existence without in some form bringing in a creator, as the only other option is "it has always existed", which to me feels like a complete non-answer to the question of why it exists.  On the other hand, however, I am mindful that one can very easily move this up a level and ask what created God, and I do not exactly subscribe to the idea that somehow the answer of "it has always existed" is any more satisfactory when applied to God than when applied to existence.  As a result, I feel that one ultimately finds oneself in an infinite regress when attempting to understand existence, as one finds oneself in the situation where one must either stop and say that something has always existed, or posit the existence of an infinite number of creators.  Because of that I feel that there must be something absolutely fundamental in existence itself that we quite simply do not understand, which renders ultimately useless any attempt to understand it.

I do also feel that there are certain oddities in the world that seem not to fit within the framework of natural selection, such as persistent levels of love and contentedness that seem to me to be entirely unnecessary for survival and reproduction - but, on the other hand, I recognize that this is woefully subjective and based purely on my own experience, and I also recognize that there are certainly other terrible things that one could point to that would certainly seem to cancel out any sense of divine loving guidance.

On the existence of an afterlife, I do believe, based on thought experiments like as the ones I presented here a while back, that consciousness cannot be explained or accounted for in its entirety simply through one's physical body, as I do not believe that this sufficiently accounts for the singularity of one's perception of a conscious existence, especially when one has (for example) an identical twin.  I therefore cannot agree with those who state quite confidently that our physical bodies are the full and complete extent of our existence, and as a result, I remain open to the possibility of an afterlife, though due to my complete lack of understanding regarding what consciousness and existence even is, I cannot even begin to speculate on what it might be.  Although, if there is an afterlife, I certainly do not believe it would be anything resembling the popular image of "one place for bad people for all eternity, and one place for good people for all eternity", if for no other reason that I do not even believe "good people" and "bad people" exist.

...And that's about the full extent of it, in as few words as I can make it; if you have any labels to apply that encapsulate all of the above, you're welcome to suggest them. :P

if you have any labels to apply that encapsulate all of the above, you're welcome to suggest them. :PGabuEx

You're a deist who likes Jesus.

On the existence of an afterlife, I do believe, based on thought experiments like as the ones I presented here a while back, that consciousness cannot be explained or accounted for in its entirety simply through one's physical body, as I do not believe that this sufficiently accounts for the singularity of one's perception of a conscious existence, especially when one has (for example) an identical twin.GabuEx

Did you happen to read my post in that topic? I was a bit late to it admittedly but if you feel that twins should experience the same singular consciousness because they both have the same brain then it might benefit you to read it.

I've only talked about it once with my nephew (16 years old).

Probably seeing what I discussed here on GS, he asked me (suggestively) "you .....dont really care much about religion and stuff right?"

I just told him that I dont believe the Bible is the word of God (even if inspired by him) and that I dont reject the possibility of the existence of a deity at all.

My family knows I'm not religious, and my family isn't very religious anyhow. One set of grandparents would probably be dissapointed with the "atheist" status. My family on that side (parents of my father and their relatives) lives mostly in Ohio and I know a couple of them that are profoundly Christian. I don't see them very often, and most of them don't know anything about my family's religious status.

My immediate family probably knows what I think, but I don't discuss it with them.

My friends at school are probably the most numerous to know or hear of my atheism. Majority of the people I know have heard, a few I have discussed with, and three of my friends are atheist themselves. All of whom are far more outspoken about it than I usually am, often referencing their disbelief anytime religious practice is mentioned, save by certain people.

I don't care who knows, besides the older members of my family, who would probably take it badly. But I don't make a point to talk about it, and slowly other people are making less of a point to talk about it with me. There was a time people seemed to find it useful (a novelty, perhaps) to mention my atheism more than necessary, but now it's old hat. 

I have no reason to flaunt the fact that I'm an atheist because it's a small part of who I am. I'm more than happy to discuss why I am an atheist if I'm asked, but I don't behave like an evangelist.

*post*

...And that's about the full extent of it, in as few words as I can make it; if you have any labels to apply that encapsulate all of the above, you're welcome to suggest them. :P

GabuEx

[QUOTE="GabuEx"]*post*

...And that's about the full extent of it, in as few words as I can make it; if you have any labels to apply that encapsulate all of the above, you're welcome to suggest them. :P

foxhound_fox

Any suggestions on where to start?  I do enjoy reading on this topic and have read quite a few books that I considered interesting, so I'd be happy to get another one. 

In the UK being an atheist was neither a stigma nor uncommon, the same cannot be said livingin the US. If anyone asks me I usually am very open about it, but I never try to convert or preach at people who believe in something fantastical.

Any suggestions on where to start? I do enjoy reading on this topic and have read quite a few books that I considered interesting, so I'd be happy to get another one. GabuEx

Hmm, OK, cool, I'll see about picking up The Serpent's Gift. I'll let you know what I think.GabuEx