Atheist?

In America, in this century, atheism is a touchy subject. It's a word that, as straight-forward as it seems,is also very misunderstood.
Being that this blog will be circulating among people who do believe in a God whole-heartedly, I thought it made sense to address my (probably surprising and confusing) lack of belief.
I won't get into it in depth. I just want to make a simple outline to explain myself clearly.


What being an atheist does NOT mean for me:

I don't believe in Jesus or Heavenly Father, but worship other deities.

I am angry at god.

I believe god is responsible for unhappiness and is therefore not worthy of being believed in.

I worship Satan, or some enemy of god.

I was so deeply offended by something in religion that I can't bring myself to believe its doctrine.

I was secretly hoping there was no god so that I could live the lifestyle I wanted, and therefore sought to destroy my faith through anti-religious literature.

I have never believed I had a close relationship with god.

I never felt I really knew if god was real, or religion was true.

I always disliked religion and was bored in church, feeling it was not true, and not right for me.

Ex or Anti-Mormons or anti-Mormon propoganda influenced me and began my path away from the church.


What being an atheist does mean for me:

I do not believe that there is a deity that created the universe.

I believe that the bible and all other sacred texts are and were written by men without divine inspiration.

I do not know for sure how the universe began, and I don't pretend to. Anything we don't understand can be attempted to be understood through the scientific method.

I came to the conclusion through reasoning and logic.

I feel that belief in the supernatural does some good for people, and also does much bad.

I don't believe that I know 100% that there is no supernatural deity out there somewhere, but I don't believe there is, and if there was, I am convinced it could not be a benevolent creator.

I loved god and church and wanted to do what was right. I felt that there was nothing wrong in learning more about my religion and god because it was unavoidably true, and thus I discovered cracks in the foundation of belief.

As I grew up and became more knowledgeable and better at reasoning, I began to witness the world as it really is, and saw the inconsistencies between religious ideology and reality.

This is a great video where a man much smarter and more eloquent than me explains exactly what lack of belief means:



Quote from the video: "To the degree that we can know anything I think it is pretty close to knowledge, at least for me." (That there is no god)