Just curious (and maybe I’ll find out as I peruse more of your writings…but…) were you persuaded out of moderately-firmly-held religious belief? Or was it more that you were already wavering and casting around, dealing with cognitive dissonance, and found what turned out to be a life-raft with some articulate people already aboard?

My escape began because my family did not have a fireplace, and because I had a minor internal physical deformity.
For whatever reason, my parents hit upon the idea of hanging our Christmas stockings on our bedposts, which meant that they had to come into our bedroom to retrieve them, fill them in the kitchen, then return to re-hang.
As a light sleeper (see above), I was awakened to see the clandestine shennanigans when I was four.
The night of my five-year-old Christmas, I got out of bed when the parental units first retrieved the stockings, followed them to the kitchen, and asked to help.
It made me feel like a big boy to chat in whispers with Mom and Dad, and then to be the one hauling the laden stockings back for hanging. It was a giddy pleasure to help keep the secret from my younger siblings. It didn’t matter if I was caught manipulating the goodies in the dark. I’d just say “Look! He’s been here! Everybody be quiet while we spill the socks and compare what we got.” There would follow a round of giggling negotiations and shushings.
All that to say that I was pretty sure Santa Claus was a fib, at age four-and-a-bit, and absolutely certain by age five-and-a-bit.
The similarities between Santa and the religious utterings of the grandmother, the priests, and the nuns, were disturbing. It took longer to become sure it was all a big trick, because the priests and nuns never broke character and were never seen out of costume. I remember agonizing every couple of weeks as I tried to make up plausible sins to confess to the priest. I knew that I could not be forgiven if I was not truly contrite, but I couldn’t be truly contrite about anything except making up stuff to keep the priest happy (I was very much into people pleasing, or at least adult-pleasing). I kept hoping for the big reveal, where I’d find out what it was actually all about, since it really didn’t hang together in my 7, 8, 9-year-old mind. Then it seemed I’d be accepted into the club at my confirmation. Age 12 and the confirmation were a bust, and I soon tapered off observances. My mother later said she’d thought seriously about getting the priest to take me aside, but she was wrestling at the same time with her own beliefs, and apparently getting no better advice than to pray harder, so she let it slide. The rumors about one of the priests might also have come into her decision, or non-decision.

So, I did a little reading as a high-school student with access only to small-town libraries. But I did expend some effort at university to learn about other religions, in hopes of finding one that didn’t just seem silly. Granted, the search for meaning in other religions also exposed me to history, as I tried to determine how some of them had accumulated so many gods, or such strange ones (strange being a relative thing). I spent a few decades labeling myself ‘agnostic’. Really, the internet was my … ahem… salvation… when I was finally exposed to the writings of thoughtful atheists.
I finally thought: “Home, at last! These people actually make sense.”
My only lapses, since then, have been when I wish there was a god so I’d have someone to blame for crap in the world, and to punch in the [metaphorical] face. It actually occurred to me that since the Abrahamic religions made god in man’s image, specifically male, perhaps I could reach his gonads with a punch, and THAT would bring his high-and-mighty face down where …. but then, I’d sigh and dismiss the fantasy. Nope, all the bad shit is people doing misery to each other, including now some things we formerly thought of as purely ‘natural’.

You touch on another point about the religious, specifically about the Abrahamic: that you must believe in order to be saved.

I’ve harped on this in other places (so why not here 🙂 ) I have a belief. Yes, a belief. No one has yet argued me out of it. I wish they would, as it causes me to think seriously ILL of the adherents to those religions.
Here’s how it works.
Unlike atheists, believers assert that they can continue in conscious, aware existence, as agents in the universe (or some universe) after their bodies die.
Many believers further assert that truly believing protects them from spending that extended (eternal…) existence in the most horrible suffering it is possible to conceive – in fact, some of them regularly outdo themselves trying to define ever-worse punishments for not believing. “It’s bad. It’s so bad that we couldn’t possibly give you a meaningful example……. but here’s an example anyway.”
As Greta mentioned in a response to (was it?) Jimmy, she spent some time seeking the way to continue beyond death. If it existed, it would necesarily be the most desirable thing that anyone could contemplate. No matter how badly you had treated someone (including yourself) no matter how egregious your mistakes in your bodily lifetime, once you got past the gate into eternal life, you would have infinite do-overs. Infinite opportunity to improve and improve yourself, and to improve existence for others. You could go on being the rising tide that raises everybody’s boat… forever.
If it is true, as they profess, that the single most important thing that any entity can do, to ensure salvation, as you say, the only necessary thing, is to believe, then that must necessarily be the single most important thing to any entity. What could possibly be more important than survival? When you stop existing, there is no more potential. Not even potential to see how your offspring turned out…

Now, what could be worse than withholding the key to survival, and the key to avoiding infinite and eternal suffering?
So, as I read the rhetoric, the most important thing a believer can seek to do is to show un-believers and wrong-believers the key to proper belief. By doing so, they save them from extinction or damnation.

Now, belief is a tricky thing. We know – also from the rhetoric – that gawd sees all, knows all, including/especially the contents of our … er… souls… well, our minds. That is, not mere “belief” is the key. SINCERE belief. You can’t get past the gatekeeper by faking it. You must actually believe.

Believers say that they do. Therefore, by their lights, it is possible to do the thing that guarantees salvation. They’ ve got it. They do it.
This leads inexorably to two further truths. Either it is possible for everyone to believe, they must merely be shown, if they don’t already… or it is possible for some, but not possible for others. They just aren’t made that way.

You begin to see where I’m going. A believer has done something in his/her brain that flipped a switch. They have the knack of it. The rest of us don’t. But it can be taught. Therefore, it behooves the believer to teach us the trick, the technique to switch on belief… that specific, saving belief… no other is really important, just that one.
If they withhold it, I’d say that makes the believer the most nasty, cruel, foul sort of creature that could exist. They are depriving a living, conscious, aware entity – me, you, my Mom… – of the single most important and desirable thing we could attain…. existence. To withhold is infinitely worse than murder. No crime could be worse.
I don’t know about you, but I certainly want the opportunity to live and act forever. I mean, barring accident, I’ve got a maximum of about 20 years before I cease to exist, and cease to matter to the entire universe forever. I desperately want to escape that. Is there a single believer willing to teach me the trick? Not one.
What do they say?
“You must believe, to be saved.”
– “Fine. How?”
“Believe!”
– “Er… yes, but… how?”
“How? You … you … believe in Jesus as your Saviour / Muhammed as the final prophet, who…”
– No. I mean, HOW do I go about doing believing?
“Huh?! You just… BELIEVE!”
– But I don’t know how.
“Anybody knows how. You just choose to believe, and you believe. ”
– But I can’t believe something that I don’t … well… believe. That’s why I’m asking you how you do it. Help me be saved. Tell me how you do it.
“I just believe. What do you mean you can’t? ”
– I mean I believe on evidence. Or if I’ve accidentally believed, and some refuting evidence comes along, I stop believing.
” Then you know how to believe.”
– I don’t. I never choose to believe. It just happens, or it doesn’t. I just need the trick, the technique you use to switch on belief when there’s no evidence.
“There’s no trick. Just…. just start behaving like you believe, and I’m sure it will come.”
– What? Fake it ’til I make it? But that would be… lying to myself. Lying to oneself is even worse than lying to others. Surely your god wouldn’t support that, would he? And even if I eventually could, I might die before I succeed. Then what? I’m doomed.
“Maybe you’re just one of those people who can’t be saved. If you can’t believe, you can’t be saved.”
– You mean, gawd created me, knowing I’d be unable to do the one thing necessary to let me live forever and NOT in burning, hopeless agony?
“I guess so. Sucks to be you.”
– But that would make your god the most cruel, nasty, miserable piece of filth that could be conceived.
“How dare you?!?”
-What do you call an entity that creates intelligent, feeling, aware beings, promising them the ultimate reward, when it knows beforehand that, in fact, they are condemned to the most horrible suffering that can be conceived by the mind of a gawd, and that this same monster is going to enforce and administer this punishment for all the endless, endless eons of eternity?
There’s nothing worse. And the only thing that might approach the unmitigated vileness of such an entity, is a creature that would freely worship such a thing. Ipso facto, the followers of a religion that requires belief to be “saved”, are foul things that shouldn’t be allowed into the light of day.
And yet, they shamble among us.

I’m not being disingenuous here. Find a religionist who will teach you the trick of truly believing what you don’t believe, and for which you have no evidence. All those who won’t, and all those who knowingly worship a God that would intentionally create you and me inherently unable to access more than a few brief moments out of an unending infinity of moments – eternity – must necessarily be the lowest scum imaginable. Oh, wait. It doesn’t end there. That entity made hell for us, so it could torture us forever. What sort of person sucks up to that?

It’s not a nice thing to think about anyone, but go ahead and fault the logic. I’ll be surprised if anyone can. It faithfully follows the internal logic of belief in an Abrahmic God.

Why do you assert that god/God/gawd/fnurb is a “he”?

Not only is that casual assumption (if you don’t have evidence for it) insulting to Greta and to at least half the commenters on this blog, it might very well be insulting to the very deity that you posit.

Think long and hard on that.
You might very well have called Her “him”/”he” just one time too many, and now be damned to eternal suffering. Or, it might be laughing up its metaphorical sleeve at how you (unintentionally?) confirm that the deity is indeed made in the image of man.

No… seriously. I urge you to apply brain to this notion: strip away every last bit of cultural baggage from the god concept, and tell us what is left. Take out everything that might have been attributed to “god” that did not spring from obvious ignorance (back in the Bronze Age), from tribal and political pressures over the intervening centuries, from andro-centrism (which would be self-centrism)… That includes anything that developed from animism and primitive art. Just take away anything attributed to the nature… er… I mean the un-nature of god, that might have any origin in any form of human bias, and let’s see what remains.

@bobthelunatic
Is there more than one sect or school of Buddhists? Have they ever waged war on each other?
Which one was “right” about their take on the philosophy, and how was that eventually determined? If not, why not?
Wait. You said you belong to the Nichiren version. That implies that there are others. What would be a test that could demonstrate that theirs or yours is more correct, more in tune with what passes for reality, more productive?

Have you ever switched between versions of Buddhism? Why? Or are you in the one to which you were first exposed, much as Christians tend to be Christian because their parents were and Muslims are most often the indoctrinated-from-birth children of Muslims… and more specifically, the children of Shiites or Sunis or…

If you never switched among flavors of Buddhism, have you had discussions with persons of the other flavors and determined what it is specifically about their take that doesn’t suit your approach?

Your paradigm for distinguishing religions strikes a chord with me. I distinguish political groups and ‘philosophies’, not along a “left” to “right” spectrum, but along a spectrum of greater or lesser willingness to initiate force against another person or group of persons.

Personally, I first distinguish religions between “Death Religions” and “Life Religions”. The latter tend to be really philosophies and not fit any atheist arguments taken to completion that I’ve seen, including Hitchens of which I’ve listened to many-my favorite contemporary (or recently so) atheist.

I do not find atheists to be any more open minded than the christian society I live in (US). They, including myself at times, are just as fanatical, and therefore just as unproductive in spreading their truth as that they detest. I practice Nichiren Buddhism and do not worship nor believe in any gods, therefore I practice an “atheist faith” or “atheist religion”. Yet, even upon learning this, most atheist arguments against me revolve around anti-theist arguments, which in many cases I know better than they.

In the end I find most atheists know very little about Buddhism, just like most Christians. Yet, they don’t try to learn or listen and then pose an argument based on what I say, no it’s usually irrelevant rhetoric, showing they don’t follow what I said, and are just closed to begin with. Both groups have seemingly equal numbers with full cups, thus a lack of humility. Atheists have the truth that their is no god/s, and Christians have their truth that they have an all powerful buddy.

Many times both groups give very similar responses. Allow me to compare the ignorance and closed mind behind the voices:

Christian: “But Buddha didn’t create nothin’!!” (Which is true, and therefore baffling when revealed to the christian)

Atheist: “Just another crutch, just like any other religion”. Now, they make a similar statement as the christian, that of rejection and ignorance, but at least one that allows some follow up discussion before hitting a wall with them. Christians care about creation, atheists about what is tangible, both care about stuff.

However, the atheist should be more polite as I too am JUST as atheist as they and on their side, and in most cases more of an activist (signatures for taxation of religious property, letters about pledge to ACLU, attacking christian bigotry or any bigotry, etc.) But they are not. Buddhism in practice is maybe slightly more “religious” than secular humanism. I would argue both are based on reason, Buddhism just goes a bit further to examine how life interacts, but I see no fallacies, nor bigotry, nor otherworldly issues. It focuses on this world, here and now. Teaching that a land cannot be pure, but rather that the person and land are one-therefore it WILL be pure, only if your mind is pure. It has no final destination, no beginning, no end, and thus even if one attains enlightenment, they are not done-as the mind changes from moment to moment, and thus Buddhist Practice is neverending. This also means that knowing the truth gets me nowhere unlike say a christian-they’re done, only the 1 commandment (believe in jesus) is required, the golden rule is not (matt, mark, luke all talk about the one unforgivable sin, proving that doing unto others is fluff, a bonus, yet no real motivation to do so as #1 gets you saved) necessary-this is why they spend so much time attacking the liberties of others, they are bored, waiting for the rapture. My life is based on cause and effect, and I see it the same with all others, thus many ignorant of Buddhism at this moment are better Buddhists than I. So, superior teaching yes, superior person-certainly not.

And the teaching is for this world-thus, I test it now, not after death-which is clearly a trick, like a back alley drug dealer that promises to return in 10 minutes. From the atheist perspective-it wouldn’t make much sense for me to keep practicing unless I benefit from it as I go.

I have no bigotry, experiences in Buddhism that reveal the true nature of reality, reveal it is the same for all things, ants, planets, whatever. Thus, equality of life is inherent in the philosophy. Women are just as likely to be leaders, lots of gays, and of course many colors, all have the same 10 life conditions to be experienced. Never seen any of the teaching need to change due to either science nor society/liberty.

Yes, I believe in reincarnation-but it is irrelevant, my goals are now, in this life. My faith is not in the unknown, but rather in THIS world. Faith in Buddhism, is very much like the scientific method-doubt is the most important tool. No deepening of faith can happen without doubt-trying to disprove.

Anyway, just wanted to add those thoughts as atheists are certainly a minority-but that is all the more likely the cause, we are after all the most hated group in America. And the American Experiment ended in 1954 when all religions and lack, were kicked out except christians. I am treated no different as a Buddhist, as I make the distinction clear very quickly-that it requires I’m an atheist. Gods are mutually exclusive with Buddhism, at least most sects. And the sects that do have gods, regard them as lower than human beings. Not too many atheists in the US know that sort of thing, nor do many of them pause to consider how vastly different it must be. I studied and practiced religions until one of them worked-changed my life, that’s why I stopped searching. But even then, I still believe in studying religions to understand others better. Like 20% of my town is Mormon, so I’ve studied up on their theology and frankly, after a while, they became my favorite christians-they seem to be the only ones that actually do much positive for others and each other. Nor do they hiss upon finding out my beliefs-but they too are very closed minded. I learn from them, years into it, I realize they know nothing of my belief. Same with atheists, same with other christians.

But in this case, atheists the worst-as they show duplicity (redefining atheism to try to exclude me, pretending it addresses more than one question-gods), and they show me the same anger as they would a christian, even though by what they say-they know nothing about me and I find it unlikely they have a valid reason at the time against Buddhism as I do look, and find rhetoric.

Nothing wrong with guarding against nonsense-but to be closed means to stop learning. I don’t believe that, everyone is my teacher, everyone. Atheists would do well to realize they too can learn something from anyone, be it a crazy looking street preacher about doomsday, a little 2 year old (naturally atheist), or the guy responding to YOUR question that happens to be Buddhist, as that is usually the case, I don’t bring up religion-they do.

Lastly-atheists need to remember, they are the guardians of the Constitution-that’s why they had to get kicked out for Liberty to be lost.

There are many atheists that, if they are intellectually honest, will admit that they not only don’t believe in God, but don’t WANT to believe in God. The late Christopher Hitchens is a good example of this. There are emotional reasons to reject God. Being an atheist means you have complete autonomy with your own life and are not subject to objective moral rules and duties that can be burdensome or unpleasant. You get to sculpt a morality that is conveniently more accommodating to your own desires and wishes. Atheism is also intellectually lazy. Instead of having to wrestle with trying to answer life’s greatest questions such as human meaning, purpose, and why evil and injustice exists, you can answer every problem with “chance.” Things are the way they are because they just happened that way. There is no objective meaning or purpose to life, so the question itself is not even worth asking.

There are many conceivable reasons why someone would be an atheist that have nothing to do with logic or with following the evidence where it leads. It could be attributed to something as simple as being mistreated by religious believers or bad experiences with religion. In fact, I can’t think of anything else that is more likely to make someone an atheist than religious hypocrisy and cruelty or vice inflicted in the name of God. Why would one believe in a perfect, maximally great God if his representatives fail to reflect him accurately?

Another problem with your argument here, and it’s one that plagues so many atheists, is that you have unfounded, absolutist, exclusivist faith in empiricism, as if it is the only valid epistemic outlet. For you atheists, the only knowledge that is acceptable or worth anything is the knowledge that is gained by empiricism. Any other kind of knowledge, including rationalism and pure logical inferences, is rejected out of hand. If it is knowledge that cannot be repeated or tested, or be reproduced in a laboratory, it’s automatically discounted. The irony of such absolute faith in empiricism, is that empiricism cannot justify itself. The scientific method is ultimately dependent on the faith-based assumption that reality actually exists and that our perceptions of it are reasonably accurate. We assume reality exists and that empiricism is valid because of personal sensory experience. Yet atheists always mock and deride believers who encounter God through their sensory experience. Personal experience is excepted by atheists when it comes to empiricism but rejected a priori when it comes to religion and the supernatural.

Lastly, you’ve made several factually incorrect statements. You said science has shown that the Earth is not unique. Wrong. Science, as of yet, has not discovered any other Earth-like planets that contain intelligent life. Unless and until science finds another Earth, it is still valid and appropriate to say that the Earth is unique. You said that humans are not special. I’d like to know of some other species science has discovered that has all the same capacities that humans do or more. I have not heard of one yet.