Well, I think you’ve been around here long enough to know which way the wind blows on Fluther.

To answer your question, no it doesn’t bother me to tell people that I don’t believe in magic. However, there are some people I wouldn’t tell because they’d be shocked or dismayed, or even hurt, like my kids. Or my Mom, if she were alive. I also don’t say anything to people who are hurting and reaching out to God for comfort.

It isn’t a subject that comes up in my real life anyway, so telling or not telling is nothing for me to worry about.

About the only thing folks on fluther and I agree on. No such person. People can also believe in “God” but not Jesus or christianity or any religion. Most athiests/agnostics, including me will say thete is no Jesus/God as loudly or louder than the people telling us we will burn in hell for simply being honest about our beliefs. I’m surrounded by christians like that and I don’t put up with them.

I am Jewish and also a Unitarian. I have never believed in Jesus as the son of God and for many, many years have not believed in God at all. I have no problem attesting to that nor do I need to argue with anyone who does believe.

Since you ask, I don’t believe that Jesus was anything more than a man, if he actually existed. I can’t imagine why anyone would be bothered by sharing this information. I am an atheist, and no part of that makes me uncomfortable. Why would it?

That’s quite a leap.
From not believing Jesus Christ was the Son of God to that precluding a belief in God.

People can believe there was a Jesus figure in history and believe in God without giving Christianity any credence whatsoever.

@dappled_leaves It could make people who do believe uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable to tell people things that make them uncomfortable, unless I absolutely have to.

@ibstubro Such as Islam. And Judaism.

I am an apostate.

My father was a Buddhist who had been raised in an Irish Catholic family, and my mother frankly didn’t think about anything that hard, particularly religion. They divorced and she remarried the brother of a pastor. I got wrapped up in Evangelical Christianity – specifically the Apostolic Pentecostal brand (That Kim Davis chick from Kentucky? I think my mom got married in her church). I was a Sunday School teacher, a youth group leader, went to conferences all over the country. I was in it to win it.

And now I’m an atheist.

I have not seen sufficient extrabiblical evidence to convince me the Jesus character from the myth was a real person. The best I’ve seen is similar to the “real versions” of Robin Hood and King Arthur, meaning there’s a vague semblance if you really squint, and ignore most of the things that make the character who he is.

Seek is being very circumspect about her experience being raised in a fundamental Christian house hold.

I don’t. No, it doesn’t bother me to tell people that I am an atheist.

Haysoos the nazarine means only one thing to me, bloody long boring movies.
Although to be fair, Robert Powell played him well in the seventies mini series, as comedy performances go.

I do believe in Jesus but I am not a Christian. I believe Jesus has returned, more than once. I believe in God.

I am not always comfortable sharing my beliefs, particularly with judgy, Christian co-workers.

I’m with @ibstubro on this. Personally, I feel that there is plentiful evidence that a little over 2000 years ago there was a man from Nazarath named Jesus; enough that it’s pointless to refute that Jesus existed. The only real disagreement is whether Jesus was the son of God and died for our sins. I don’t believe that he was/did.

I have about as much trouble announcing my non-faith as I do that I am a white male. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of it; it’s simply a fact. There are enough of us non-believers in America (at least the Northern corners where I’ve spent most of my life) that I have a lot of company.

Heathen here.

Huh. Just looked up the etymology of Heathen: From German, “inhabiting open country”. Something deliciously fitting about that.

@thorninmud Are you my long lost love Heathcliff?

I do not understand this question: “Does it bother people that do not believe to tell others that they don’t believe in God? ”

I don’t have any problem telling people I am an atheist Jew. But it’s just not relevant in day to day conversation.

Oh, the second part:

There’s always the worry about possible retaliation for letting someone know you’re a nonbeliever. Oddly enough, while it was easy to be bold about my belief and my demands that said belief be accommodated in basically any way I demanded (different uniform, guaranteed days/times off work, etc), there’s always the chance that a religious employer will hold your nonbelief against you.

That doesn’t stop me, though, I’m just more aware of it. I’ve been shunned from a monthly local craft show in my town after admitting to being an atheist.

Someone saw a painting I did that included a line from the science fiction TV show “Firefly” and assumed the “verse” mentioned in the quote was the Bible. Everything in my shop was some kind of Sci-Fi related homage. She pointed at the painting of an apple and the line “No power in the ‘verse can stop me!” and said, “Are you an atheist?”

My response was, “Well, yes, but that is a contraction for ‘universe’. It’s a line from a television show.” She stormed out of my booth and no one else stopped in the rest of the day. My application for the following month was rejected.

When I started selling for the jeweler I work for at the Renaissance Festival, he kindly said, “I’m a Christian, are you a believer?” I had to tell him, “No, I used to be but I’m not anymore.” Luckily, he said “Ok, we just won’t talk religion.” and that was the last of it.

Win some, lose some.

@Dutchess_III ”@dappled_leaves It could make people who do believe uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable to tell people things that make them uncomfortable, unless I absolutely have to.”

I don’t think I could live like that, to be honest. I mean, if someone else is discomfited by a diversity of thoughts or opinions, I feel no obligation to shield them from it. It is their problem, not mine.

That being said, as @Rarebear said, I rarely have a reason to bring up my lack of faith in everyday conversation, unless it is relevant to what’s being talked about.

I’m thinking of people close to me @dappled_leaves. If my Mon was still alive, there is no way I’d tell her I am an atheist. She wouldn’t berate me, she’d be heartbroken.

I don’t say anything to my daughters because they still rely of Jesus for comfort, as I taught them to do, growing up.

Pretty sure my son is an atheist. We’ve touched on it, but that’s all.

We all make exceptions for people we love.

I don’t believe in Jesus. Never have, never will. I have no problem saying that.

When people start ‘witnessing’ to me, and trying to sell Jesus, that’s obnoxious and offensive.

Christianity is the only religion that goes around actively recruiting members. Pretty sure that started with the Roman government back in the day. The more people they could convert, the more they could control = more money & power.

Not enough.

Is reading porn a sin?

Islam and scientology don’t recruit?

Islam doesn’t recruit the way Christianity does. They just kill the “non believers.”

Scientology is an offshoot of Christianity, no matter how they try to present themselves. They’re fully immersed in the ideals the Roman Government infused into young Christianity.

Scientology has nothing to do with christianity, they believe in space aliens and reincarnation and shit. Islam recruits even if it’s at the business end of a gun.

Did such a person exist? Yes, I think so
Was he the son of God? I don’t believe that is literally true
Do I want to convince others that my beliefs are right? No, they are just right for me.

I believe that there probably was a Jesus, and that he was popular enough to have been judged a threat to Jewish officialdom in Judea. I believe these things because they are plausible explanations for the origin of the cult with him at its center. There is nothing remotely plausible about the rest of the nonsense, and as you can see for yourself, few here are embarrassed to admit it.

I believe there was probably someone who corresponds to Jesus Christ, who probably didn’t have exactly that name, grew up with a good cross-cultural education that included not just Judaism but other faiths, and who was a very benevolent spiritual leader who inspired other humans to write the ancient first version of the New Testament.

I think the literal resurrection story is clearly a re-imagining of ancient stories of death and rebirth found in other earlier religions, who have their origins in the nearly universal stories found in indigenous traditions around the world, which is about the cycle of life and death and rebirth that is found throughout nature and is metaphorically related to the cycles of the seasons, the moon, day and night, on and on.

I think that many modern forms of Christianity suffer from several problems of over-literalization, over-emphasis of their own form as the one right way, and over-use of cherry-picked Old Testament severe passages in ways that I don’t think the actual Jesus Christ would have endorsed at all. The Old Testament was part of religious wars with rival groups in the Middle East who had some female gods, and the resentment against the feminine still colors it, as do the Sun God religious war aspects.

I think my spirituality and morality would tend to fit in pretty well with the actual historical person who was the inspiration for the Biblical Jesus Christ: love, tolerance, forgiveness, humility, tending to everyone’s needs, shepherding animals, pacifism, not messing with people though monetary exploitation (begone, moneychangers!), etc.

I also believe there was a historical analog to Mary Magdalene, and that she was more or less a peer and equal of Jesus Christ, and that the Church has suppressed its accounts of her in order to better fit their patriarchal values.

But I’ve read about the many bad medieval Popes, the Inquisition, the Salem with trials, priestly child abuse, TV greedbag televangelists, ministers who incite homophobia, and on and on.

I also understand from a wide variety of theologians and scholars and spiritualists of various flavors, that the real spiritual message of all religions is not literal magic cartoon characters, but metaphor for the actual universe and our actual experiences, accumulated wisdom, and so on.

I believe the resurrection of Christ and the entreaties to find salvation in accepting Christ as a savior is all metaphorical. It’s about releasing ego traps and connecting to one’s own inner spirituality, benevolence, and true self, and letting the ego identity die to be “reborn” as that better and truer self, finding one’s own connections to the universe. I get that, and do accept that message.

However, I think Christ would not make the error of ego and claim to authority and exclusivity that the Christian churches and/or it’s less balanced followers have often made, where they get that message backwards and make it into something that comes across as “conform to our doctrines or suffer eternal inescapable soul torment!” That’s not love, and not something Jesus would condone, any more than he’d condone attacking homosexuals or charging interest on debts to the poor, or letting people starve or be homeless while others have all they need and houses stand empty, or denying medical care to people unless they pay up, or imprisoning people who smoked some marijuana, etc etc etc.

Salvation and heaven are metaphors, but I’m not sure about what happens with death and consciousness and so on. I’m interested in all of the well-documented accounts of near-death experiences and past-life hypnotic regression, and I find that far more interesting than the suggestions from conventional Christian church interpretations of an afterlife, because I think they’ve grossly misconstructed so many things, and I find the moralizing and grasping for conformity that I’ve so often encountered to be repulsive on so many levels. At a metaphorical level, I think if someone lives a good benevolent life and honors their true self, that they will tend to be greatly rewarded with happiness, and if they instead behave badly and don’t take care of their psyche, they will tend to suffer horribly at one level or another (or many). I think there is something about our consciousness that we don’t understand, that is not just mechanical physical goo, and that that aspect probably does survive the death of a body because I think our consciousness is probably something else, and so I think that euphoria or torture we find in life probably does survive death and wash up in whatever other bodies our consciousness attaches to afterwards.

So yeah, in my own way, I think I do believe and am a really good ally of the actual JC. I just think many forms of Christianity have gone way off point in many unfortunate ways.

I believe a man called Jesus Christ may have existed as a moral philosopher; but nothing more. I am a modern deist. Most modern deists, reject revelation, prayer, miracles etc.

Therefore I do not believe Jesus Christ was the son of any God. As a matter of fact, the very idea that a God would have human offspring is counter productive to what I see as the role of the originator of all existence.

However you should know that I was raised Catholic, remained Catholic for 18 years. I then regarded myself as an atheist for 11 years; then finally a deist.

I believe that the “historical” Jesus Christ was, like many figures from folklore, at best a composite of several different men then exaggerated and blown-up in subsequent retellings into mythical proportions.

Relevant (will be TL;dr for many)
http://www.nobeliefs.com/exist.htm

OK, Scientology isn’t a Christian organization. However, he carries the Christian / Roman standard of converting anyone and everyone he can for monetary gain.

Other religions, such as Islam, Judaism, etc. exist for their own sake.

Converting to Judaism is a pain, literally. If you’re male you have to get the tip of your dick cut off. That’s a disincentive for many.

I’m a rare breed her on Fluther. I am a follower of Jesus. My faith informs my politics and my interactions with others.
The amazing thing to me is that some of the most Christlike people I know are atheists. I think God must have a sense of humor. Then again, the people Jesus loved in his day were not the spiritual elite’s so I’m thinking he would probably get along better with atheists today than the churchy crowd.

^^^ <3

@Rarebear you timed that so I’d have just taken a sip of beer, didn’t you!!

Why would you find that amazing, @Judi?

< Raises hand.

To me a life without Jesus is no life at all.

@Dutchess_III “Is reading porn a sin?”

Not if it’s bible porn… And there’s a lot of it.

”“Your stature is like that of the palm, and your breasts like clusters of fruit. I said “I will climb the palm tree and take hold of its fruit” Song of Songs 7: 7,8”

Gets me fired up every time.

It isn’t of value to believe that a man named Jesus Christ existed. To be a Christian, you only have to be a follower of his supposed teachings.

@Dutchess_ll, not so much amazing as it is cool. Typically paradoxical of the Jesus I know

I’m an atheist and I’m quite happy to tell people. However, it doesn’t generally come up in conversation. As to Jesus Christ, I think he existed. I suspect he was a charismatic man. I don’t think he was the son of a god.

@Dutchess_III “Islam doesn’t recruit the way Christianity does. They just kill the “non believers.”
There is so much wrong there that I won’t even…

@Judi “The amazing thing to me is that some of the most Christlike people I know are atheists.”

I’m not sure why that’s so amazing. To my mind, it just means that you don’t need to be threatened with eternal damnation to be a decent person. Then again, even Christians have a wide range of interpretation of “Christlike”, so it stands to reason that a far more varied group like the religiously unaffiliated would have as wide a range of views on things like tolerance and altruism as those who actually share a common moral center like the Bible, if not wider. Since some Christians are all about helping the needy and leaving judgment to higher powers instead of being like the WBC, it follows that even Atheists can be all-loving and charitable. People are people regardless of their faith (or lack of), and some people are just naturally nice.

Unless the topic comes up, or someone asks, then I don’t typically tell anyone that I’m an atheist.

And if I do tell anyone—it does not bother me at all that I do.

I was indoctrinated into religious belief from the age of 3, and it took over a decade to mentally unshackle myself of it.

And since others have brought it up—Jesus is almost certainly ahistorical, and was not regarded as a physical and earthly being by early Christians. Robert M Price, and in particular Richard Carrier, have done a thorough and compelling job of debunking the (very bad) arguments for Jesus’ historicity.

@MooCows Actually I find life as an atheist to be perfectly fulfilling.

I agree with @Mariah. My life without Jesus is when my life began.

I’d definitely say that Christians are a minority here on Fluther. I hope that doesn’t make you feel uncomfortable.

@jerv I guess I’ve been way to disappointed by people who call themselves Christians but don’t model Christ. When I was a fundamentalist I bought into a lot of the culture that says “we’re special” “set apart.”
The more I studied Jesus the more I realized how many people in the Christian community didn’t even make an effort to model him.
I guess that since I left the fundamentalist movement and started making a more diverse set of friends I have been pleasantly surprised that atheists seem to “get it” better than most Christians I know.
Not saying all Christians are selfish bigots but a lot of them come across that way when they relate to “the world” as they call it.
They are perfectly loving in their own communities but afraid that the devil is going to bite them if they deal with unbelievers.

Know? Yes. Believe? No.

I believe that Jesus existed, certainly, but given that I don’t believe in the exclusivity of religion, I do not believe that the teachings of Jesus are the only correct religious path. I am a theist, but a non-religious one (yes, that is a thing). I believe there is wisdom in Jesus’ teachings, as there is in the teachings of other religious figures and traditions.

It doesn’t bother me to voice my beliefs, though I have found sometimes that my beliefs are unappealing to atheists and religious people alike (given that they are essentially neither). But I can’t help what I really truly believe.

It doesn’t surprise me that more people are moving away from religion, especially mainstream Abrahamic religions. In America at least, Christianity has become more and more defined by reactionary conservatism, and, at least when it comes to social issues, these folks are fighting a losing battle. When Christianity becomes associated with and a source of justification for bigotry, narrow-mindedness, and reactionary policies, it doesn’t surprise me at all that people move away from it. People tell me I have to believe the earth is 6000 years old or that all homosexuals are going to hell or that Muslims worship a false god to be a Christian, and I simply don’t believe these things. And then you have Islam, a religion that has become more and more radicalized in recent decades—while a select few are attracted to this, the majority are put off of it and again, religion is increasingly seen as causing more problems than it solves.

The more religions try to turn back the clock or control the lives of people who are not a part of that religion, the less appealing it becomes. Religions don’t need to turn back the clock, but they do need to go back to their roots—back to what really matters on a spiritual level, not these uphill political battles, if they hope to draw more people in.

@jerv I’ve never seen an ad promoting Islam. I’ve never found a radio station dedicated to that religion. I don’t have Muslims knocking on my door. I’ve never had anyone from the Islamic faith go out of their way to preach at me. I never see it even mentioned on Facebook. I understand that Christians in America vastly outnumber Muslims, but if the Muslims were trying to actively convert, I think I would have heard something by now. At least one little something.
Oh, I know I can find something in two seconds, with one click on the mouse, but if I have to go looking for it, that doesn’t count.

There was no need to trail off in astonished, dramatic disbelief. Please feel free to correct my misunderstanding.

@Dutchess_III

I don’t think the active recruitment part of your statement was what @jerv was objecting to.

What was he objecting to?

You can’t figure that out? Seriously?

“Islam doesn’t recruit the way Christianity does. They just kill the “non believers.”
Jerv: “There is so much wrong there that I won’t even…

Since he wasn’t referring the the first part, he was referring to the “kill the non -believers” part. The comment was tongue in cheek, of course. What’s with the sarcastic snark you guys? Eat a Snickers.

I usually avoid commenting on questions about religion but I’ll make an exception this time by repeating, word for word, what my friend @janbb said:

I have never believed in Jesus as the son of God and for many, many years have not believed in God at all. I have no problem attesting to that nor do I need to argue with anyone who does believe.

@Pachy Great answer, I must say!

@janbb, right backatcha.

Because this is what happens when you argue about religion:
http://giphy.com/gifs/funny-gif-tv-slap-sMQaLHK09I4w0?utm_source=iframe&utm_medium=embed&utm_campaign=tag_click

@Dutchess_III Without visual/auditory clues, it is rather hard to tell.

K.

I remember that episode, @Rarebear!

I think it’s possible Jesus existed as a good and decent man, but I’m an atheist. It doesn’t factor in to my daily life very often, but I have no problem saying I’m an atheist when it’s relevant. My best friend of over 20 years didn’t know until just a few years ago, when it emerged in the natural flow of a conversation. Prior to that, it just hadn’t come up!

^^^^ Exactly. There is no reason to bring it up, any more than you’d bring up the fact that you don’t like chipped beef in cheese sauce for no reason.

Chipped beef in cheese sauce makes me vomit, BTW. I feel this is something y’all should know about.

I do not think such a person as Jesus Christ ever actually existed. The Bible tales of him were written long after its contradictory claims for his lifetime, there are obvious changes in the basic tale as time passed and there are big contradictions about him in the Bible. No one else recorded him until long after the Bible’s dates for him either. If such a remarkable man actually had existed, everyone around him would have written about him. Some accounts of him are much later forged additions to ancient writings by medieval Christian copyists.