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Originally Posted by WhateverDude
It's been said a million times but part of the negative stigma definitely comes from people just being rude about their beliefs/lack thereof.
To me, unless I'm understanding it wrong, atheism seems a little closed minded. I'd be utterly shocked if any religion has ever gotten anything right about the afterlife or whatever but that doesn't mean their couldn't be an afterlife or supernatural being(s) outside of what's been described by human beings. I mean, even we can alter and almost create non-human life from scratch. For that reason I describe myself as agnostic, with extreme doubts about religion.
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Anything is possible, but that doesn't mean we have to treat those ideas seriously if they haven't provided any kind of compelling evidence. For instance, we don't treat the ideas of Flat Earthers seriously. Why should we? There beliefs have been proven to be nonsense. But for all we know there may be some great, all-encompassing conspiracy that may be tricking us believe that the Earth is round, or some deity may be pulling some kind of hoo doo on us. You can't prove otherwise with one hundred percent accuracy. It's impossible. But since there is no evidence to believe this is true we don't treat this idea with any seriousness. The only real difference with religion is that there are a bunch of people that do treat the idea seriously without any better evidence, so we live in societies where believing in this idea without evidence lacks the same stigma as does the belief that the Earth is flat.
The reason I'm willing to make the logical leap that God actively doesn't exist, as opposed to simply not having a belief that he/she/it exists is that humanity has shown a willingness to see agency in everything from the changing of the seasons to the spilled intestines of ritually sacrificed cows that is so extreme and nearly uncontrollable that without any compelling evidence as to his existence I think it is logical to come to the conclusion that the whole idea was made up by people who just can't help but see faces in the leaves.
I used to play video games with at a friend's house when I was a little kid. We both have a tendency toward gamer rage, so we often ended up yelling and cursing at the screen. We even claimed that the game was "cheating", though we obviously knew that an inanimate object wasn't capable of cheating and that there was little chance that the game programmers had designed it to cheat for no apparent reason. It almost seemed like there was some intelligence that was feeding off of our frustrations in order to piss us off ever further in ways that felt premeditated.
Nonsense obviously, but come on, you know you've felt it too. Don't lie.
We even came up with little rituals about it. Don't scream at the game. You'll anger it. Apologize for your temerity and praise the game. Nonsense obviously, but I swear to the Lords of Kobol that we half believed it. It just felt so natural to appeal to something that showed even the slightest signs of unexplainable agency, no matter how much we knew otherwise. It didn't require any kind of legitimate doubt in what we knew to be true, all that was required of us to pray to a deity was the slightest nugget of irrationality.