Is anyone here a recovering atheist?

I was raised nominally Catholic and left the faith when I was in college. I then became interested in existentialism and started reading Nietszche, Camus, Schopenhauer and Cioran. I was an atheist for about 8 years.

I always wanted to live the perfect philosophy.

Their atheist philosophies are kinda fun because you become your own god.

In 2016, I started reading Pascal, Augustine and Aquinas and came home to the Church. Now I pray 5 hours a day and go to Church twice a week. I’ve also made friends with a few Christian professors.

I realize Christianity is imploding in the west. It’s sad.

Any ex-atheists here?

Atheism does not mean you become your own god. It’s quite revealing of your character, and not in a good way, how you keep repeating this lie despite having it explained to you why it’s false. An atheist just believes there is no god. Nothing else follows from that. Like believers, nonbelievers might be good, bad, or indifferent. The point, however, is that if you believe there is no god, you cannot believe that you yourself are god. If one were to believe that, one would not be an atheist.

I wonder why you keep preaching here. I suspect because deep down you know you have no justification for your beliefs.

Nietszche, Camus and Sartre’s philosophies were all about making ones own way in a godless universe; that’s self worship.

Secondly, why do you follow me around then?

I’ve had dozens of experience of God. I know He is real.

Atheism is the next logical step after monotheism. Once you reduce the number of gods down to one, where else can you go?

To Jesus

Why not to any of the other dying-and-rising demigods from Middle Eastern mythology? They at least have the virtue of predating him.

Making one’s own way in a godless universe is not self-worhsip. This is so self-evidently true that it’s ridiculous to even try to explain it.

When someone says, “why do you follow me around?” on a message board, you know that person has no argument, and knows it.

This is a message board. A handful of people post here. I don’t follow anyone around. I respond or decline to respond as I see fit.

You’ve had dozens of experiences with concepts you invent in your mind.

Because they were myths.

Jesus was not.

If you say so. You don’t know what you don’t know.

And you don’t know what you think you know.

On the contrary, they were all equally real.

Not only did they predate him, but none of the others have given their name to two thousand years of oppression and slaughter.

=D>

False.

They were myths.

As was Jesus. There is nothing about the supposed events of his life that hasn’t been lifted from the mythology of one or other of his predecessors.

LOL Jesus was NOT a myth.

No legit scholar believes that.

And there is no contemporaneous accounts of Jesus’s existence. None. Which is odd considering that even in the mid-Roman empire, without TV, radio, the internet or newspapers, word still would have widely spread about someone who healed the sick, raised the dead, turned water into wine, fed the masses with a single loaf and fish, walked on water, and resurrected after crucifixion.

Maia is correct that all these gods are myths, but as I tried to explain to FreeSpirt without success, “myth” does not mean lie and is not a dirty world. Myths are narratives or meta-narratives that we use to explain the world, and ourselves, to ourselves.

With respect to the bible, people like FreeSpirit and, to be fair, many atheists, confuse logos with mythos. The bible and other religious traditions are mythos and not logos.

To say that Jesus is a myth is NOT to say that someone named Jesus failed to exist. Perhaps he did, perhaps he did not. It is to say that the legends that arose around him are myths.

“I do not know, nor have I heard of, any trained historian or archaeologist who has doubts about his existence,” he adds. With the weight of all this evidence, for Meyers “those who deny the existence of Jesus are like the deniers of climate change.”

google.com/amp/s/www.bbvaop … s-yes/amp/

So these scholars believe that he died and rose again on the third day, do they?

And how do you explain the fact that all his predecessor gods were worshipped by being symbolically eaten by their followers, in a feast where the food represented their body and the wine their blood? Did he just copy that from them?

And once again you dodge my point. If Jesus existed, it does not follow that he was divine or performed miracles. You seem to think, or want to argue, that if scholars believe he existed, they also believe that he was divine and performed miracles. I dare so no trained historian or archaeologist thinks that, unless they are Christian and thus biased to believe that.