To learn is natural but the behavior may not be natural, in the sense of being part of that species' nature or essence. Dolphins can be made to learn tricks but would you say that doing said tricks are natural to the dolphin?

But would one have been atheist if there had not been offensive theists?

It is a strange question. Atheism is an opinion, or thought. Opinions, thoughts, beliefs and knowledge are all natural in the sense that they are brain generated phenomena.

So Atheism is as natural as Theism. Atheism is as natural as religion, political ideology, beliefs and non-belief, doubt, scepticism, faith, and emotion.

All human babies are born Atheists or Agnostics. They must be taught to acquire belief in a god or gods. We know that this is the case because babies eventually belief in the same identical god of their parents, family, and local culture. If a baby is not taught god belief by repeated meme repetition, he/she will fail to believe in gods. I know a large number of families in which mother and father are both atheists or agnostics. Their children inevitably do not develop God belief. Like me, a 3th generation Non-Theist and my son who is a 4th generation Non-Theist. I know many Christian families and with one exception all of their children are Christian.

However, I suppose that a large number of Non-Theists were trained into Theism. They only later rejected Christianity for a number of reasons. Some simply find Christian dogma irrational and find science explains most of their questions making God an unnecessary hypothesis.

Some Christians give up on Christian Theism or Islamic Theism because of some negative experience with clergy or disagreement with church rules. Those may be termed "Reactionary Atheists."

A newborn baby is naturally Atheistic (lacking a belief or even knowledge of the concept of gods.) Theism must be imprinted on the brain by repeated stories about the local god with the myth stories about the God's character. This is called Meme Transmission. A meme is a complex set of ideas or beliefs that become implanted in a child's brain by repeated stories involving the meme.

A friend of mine in the American FFRF (Freedom from Religion Foundation) explained to me that most US Atheists have converted to non-belief from Christianity and Judaism. The Christians most like to produce Atheists are Roman Catholicism and Protestant Fundamentalism which happen to be the most rigid and harsh of Christian Sects. Their rigidity is more like to drive doubters away.

All of this is natural. It is just as natural for one to be an Atheist or Non-Theist as it is for one to be a glossolalic Pentecostal Fundamentalist.
Beliefs theistic or non-theistic are natural in the neurons, circuits, synapses, neurochemicals, and networks.

Amergin

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Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and neither do you. There is no evidence of God so belief is optional.

If we consider that most religions are organized I think along different lines it would or should have little effect on belief in God..

Native American religions are probably more or less organized around a Shaman... but Christianity has historically had Priests, Bishops and so on.. Islam has Mullahs and Imams.. In the Baha'i Faith there is an elected body that has responsibility and so on. so religions may be organized along pretty different lines..

Historically when peiople adopt a religion those who adopt it are usually considered "non-believers".

In ancient India there were Carvakas or materialists. They believed all phenomena could be explained by atoms and were probbaly most like many atheists today.. They were proabbly more like a philosophical school though.

See:

C�rv�ka - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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"it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God."
- Johannes Kepler

I have found this to be untrue. I have found young children to all be, strictly speaking, Gnostics. They simply know certain things are, even if they can't explain the how and why. Years of their parents telling them otherwise metaphysically "beats the belief" out of them. It's truly amazing to watch parents lie to their 4 year old, and see the 4 year old react. My neice was told to eat her dinner, it was good for her. it was most certainly not, canned green beens and Mac&cheese wasn't really 'good for her', so the parents perpetuate a lie, and the children succumb to it. My neice is a lot like me, and it tears at my heart to watch her struggle with what she sees versus what she is told by her mother and grandmother.

Imagine every time you tell a lie to your children, they know it. What does that teach them? At what point do they stop being concerned about the 'truth' and instead become concerned about what others think? This would explain quite a few things in life today. Any learned behaviour can be unlearned, provided the consequences are not so severe as to scare people away from the false behaviour. At what point do children stop listening and succumb? In my persoanl experince, it was between 2 and 5 years old, but there is that group with a stubborn streak that never succumb...

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I am what I have always have been and will be, I just remember better at times. Thank you for helping me remember, I will return the favor!

New born babies do not even have language yet. They have to be taught words over the first two years. The word God would mean just a sound to a baby nor more meaningful than Dog, Gob, Bog, or Bob. Babies have all of the [quote=Rastus]basic hardware for learning all human functions but that needs to be programmed like your brand new computer. It is absolutely clear that children do no have instinctive religion. A child in Alabama by age 10 is a Christian. He doesn't just happen to be a Christian. He is taught it by meme repetion. Otherwise if it were instinctive and based on odds, the Alabama Child would just as likely be a Muslim or as likely Hindu or Buddhist, or just as likely animist. A child born to a Christian Fundamentalist family in Alabama is very unlikely to start talking and saying Allahu Akbar.

Theistic belief does not have a natural circuit already in the brain at birth. Like my father and grandfather, I never believed in God. Yet my parents did not teach me to NOT BELIEVE. They simply didn't discuss the issue, so I never heard about God until I entered pre-School and other kids mentioned it. I was never taught to believe in God so God belief never was programmed into my brain in the formative first6 to 9 years. The child's newborn mind is a blank slate of ideas and his/her action is exploring the space around him and asking questions when he can speak. "Daddy, why is grass green?" "Mum, what is this? And what is that?" "How did I get here?" They don't know those answers which is why they ask them.


I think that all western children are receptive to faerie tales (Jack and the Beanstalk, Mother Goose, Hansel and Gretel, Leprechauns, Peter Pan, and the Book of Genesis.) They will accept initially anything but eventually they have doubts. Parents tell them that all of the faerie tales are make believe except the Bible. Naturally children would question the bible as well, as many really do. But their questioning of the Bible is met with anger and punishment or scolding. Parents repeat Bible stories daily and repetitively. That is the only way the irrational belief system can get by the rational sceptical filter of a healthy human brain. But endless repeat like brain washing eventually wears out the Sceptical Filter becoming believed as true. They are told to deny contradictions and never to doubt.


Wrong. Children are born with a natural gullibility. Evolution has made them gullible because they must be to learn what is necessary to succeed in their parents society. For a child to survive he/she must believe parents when they tell him/her to not wander off, to not speak to strangers, to not approach a big dog, to never play with fire. Children would not live long if they didn't believe those commands to be the truth. That same receptiveness makes children gullible to believe both faerie tales and scriptural faerie tales. They can't tell the difference until at a certain age, 6 or 8 parents tell them that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are make believe. The child accepts that reluctantly. The child halfway suspects that the parents will come clean and admit that God is also make believe. That is the time repetitive indoctrination is accelerated in schools (esp. Christian "Academies") or Sunday School and picture books.



I think that all humans with a normal brain doubt the very irrational stories that make up Christian belief. They are told to suppress such doubts because that is Satan tempting them. Some who can't help but see the rubbish of the Book of Genesis. Some of those will keep quiet because of peer, family, and social pressure. Many of them who go to secular, liberal, and free thinking universities no longer have their minds chained by fear and pressure. That is why many if not a majority of Atheists and Agnostics abandon supernatural belief in college.

Most Atheists in America are former Christians, who reject its superstition and mythology when they become FREE TO THINK. Freedom to think makes them really analyse all of their mythical beliefs and find them to be rubbish.

My experience is different because I was never forced to believe in supernatural things. When I found out my mates at school believed in this magical being called God or Dia (Gaelic), I began to ask questions. Then the school initiated Bible studies. I saw the cartoon story of Noah's Flood. Animals walking two by two up the plank into the Ark followed by the drowning death of millions of people including children and babies, billions of animals. Christian children just took the story matter of factly while I found it vulgar and repulsive. When I spoke up in class, the teacher was stunned and other lads started to think for the first time. Many of those Christian children became Atheists or Agnostics between then and the end of college. I often wonder how much my revulsion to Noah's Flood started the other lads to not accept blind faith.

Amergin

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Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and neither do you. There is no evidence of God so belief is optional.

The Joy of Freedom


When I became convinced
that the Universe is natural,
that all the ghosts and gods are myths,
there entered into my brain, into my soul,
into every drop of my blood, the sense,
the feeling, the joy of Freedom.

The walls of my prison crumbled and fell.
The dungeon was flooded with light
and all the bolts, bars
and manacles became dust.
I was no longer a servant, a serf, or a slave.
There was for me no master in all of the wide world,
not even in the infinite space. I was free.

Free to think, to express my thoughts,
Free to live to my own ideal,
Free to live for myself and those I loved,
Free to use my faculties, all my senses,
Free to spread imagination's wings,
Free to investigate, to guess and dream, and hope;
Free to judge and determine for myself,
Free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds,
all the "inspired" books
that savages have produced,
and all the barbarous legends of the past.

Free from popes and priests,
Free from all the "called" and the "set apart,"
Free from the sanctified mistakes and holy lies,
Free from the fear of eternal pain,
Free from the winged monsters of the night,
Free from devils, ghosts and gods.

For the first time I was free.
There were no prohibited places
in all the realms of my thought:
no air, no space,
where fancy could not spread her painted wings.
No chains for my limbs,
No lashes for my back,
No fires for my flesh,
No master's frown or threat,
No following another's steps;
No need to bow, or cringe, or crawl,
or utter lying words.

I was free.
I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously,
faced all worlds;
And my heart was filled with gratitude,
with thankfulness, and went out in love
To all the heroes
and the thinkers who gave their lives
for the Liberty of hand and brain,
for the freedom of labor and thought;
To those who fell on the fierce fields of war,
To those who died in the dungeons with chains,
To those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs,
To those whose bones were crushed,
whose flesh was scarred and torn,
To those by fire consumed;
To all the wise, the good, the brave of every land,
whose thoughts and deeds have given freedom
to the sons and daughters of men and women.

And I vowed to grasp the torch that they held,
and hold it high,
that light might conquer darkness still.

--Robert G. Ingersoll (1833-1899) the greatest American Free Thinker


Posted by Amergin

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Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and neither do you. There is no evidence of God so belief is optional.

This i disagree with...I have memory from when i was very young...and even then i knew most the time the truth of what was being said...no answer to why or how...but shared some stories when i was older with my mother ...for her to have an alarmed look on her face to say i could not know what i was talking about..and i would continue to give detail of our history and she would just sit in amazement wondering how i knew these things..so anyway.....i guess we each are some type science project...and even though i disagree with this post...i love your posts...

Cheers sendy47! Many studies have shown that people retain little memory of events under age 2, and only a small number can remember age 3. What you remember is what your brain could remember when the first year of myelination of central axons in the Centrum Semi-Ovale that enables different areas of the brain to connect to each other. Concepts in babies are simple and consist of Mum, Da, eat, drink, and Mum's voice. The baby can only understand the soft emotional tone of Mum but not the semantics. My own earliest memory was about age 3. My parents decided to not mention God or Spirits until I was old enough to understand the words. As such I never considered the idea of God to make sense.

For those who claim that newborn babies actually believe in a God of whom they have never heard of before, the onus is on the person making the claim that babies believe in God, to offer evidence and proof.

It is true by my experience and of paediatricians who told me that small children age 3 to 5 will believe almost anything told to them by adults. I saw a telly special showing this. It was this information that made me realise the newborn brain is not fully developed. It has neurons and axons, but many of the axons do not conduct until they are fully myelinated in a process that takes about another year. This is not my opinion but hard embryology and developmental paediatrics. The myelination of the long tracts takes almost a year as well which is why most babies cannot walk well until a year of age. Even then it takes lots of programming by stumbling and trial and error to expand the very simple gait (few successive muscles involved) to mature gait in which tens of different muscles acting sequentially for walking. This takes not only myelination of axons but the development of complex motor, motor association, Cerebellar, and Basal ganglia groups of neurons. If that has to be "learned" then a complex cognitive idea like God or Gods would take at least as long or longer.

This is why I have a very strong opinion that newborn babies cannot walk, speak words, and not form complex beliefs until the brain is fully mature anatomically then progremmed by parental input.

Amergin

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Militant Agnostic: I don't know, and neither do you. There is no evidence of God so belief is optional.

I kind of agree and I kind of don't. I feel like atheists have this double standard type thing going on. Like with your argument that babies are born atheists, or when atheists say that the burden of proof is on the believer, or the god of the gaps argument. It works both ways.

Like with babies. Yes they are atheists in the sense that they lack a belief in god/s but they lack a belief and knowledge of everything. Saying a baby is an atheist is saying what it is not. It is not a theist. If someone is not a theist then they are something else because everyone has a world view. So, you may not be a theist but you are a materialist. Are babies born both atheists and materialists? No they are not. They are also non-materialists because they are a non-everything. My point is that someone could make the argument that materialism is something that you are taught and babies are born non-materialist. Therefore it is unnatural to be a materialist. Babies being born "atheists" proves nothing in favor of atheism or theism. It could be more accurately stated that babies are born without a world view and everyone is either taught or learns a world view.

The burden of proof is not just on theists to prove their world view. The burden of proof is on both. Theists have the burden of proof to prove there is a god and atheists have the burden of proof on their world view. Of course atheists don't have to prove there is no god(unless they make the claim that there is no god) because like I said before atheism is stating what you are not but since most atheists are materialists the burden of proof is on them to prove that materialism can answer everything.

The god of the gaps argument also works both ways. A believer may place a god in a gap of understanding to explain an unknown but atheists place materialism in a gap of understanding to explain an unknown. So, it could be said that atheists believe in the matter of the gaps.

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"I fully comprehended the power of the human mind at the exact moment I came to the realization that I'm totally insane and have no idea what I'm talking about."