Is atheism the teenage revolt years?

[outhouse]

I was thinking about god and punishment. To my sons I am very much like God. I hand out punishments and tell them no when they want to hear yes. I also make them do things they don't want to do.

This is all for there betterment, so that they can be productive as adults. Currently they are adolescents.

When they become teenager's they are going to revolt. They will believe they know better than me(they will know somethings better I'm not god). They will want to leave my house. They will want to live there own way.

Then when they become adult's they will realize some truths. There will be a balancing of our lives. Although father and son we will be more compromising.


Now all people don't go through all stages. What I am equating this to is our religious beliefs.

Theist - Child State
Atheist - Teenage State
Agnostic - Adult State

What do you think

I think you have a normal amount of imagination

 

[atanu]

Atheist - Teenage State

What do you think

I think that atheism may be a way to fool others into believing that Revoltifarian is actually a teenager.

What do you think?

 

[krsnaraja]

What about the voices in my head? One just told me to make a sandwich.

When your stomach is hungry, it sends signals to your head signalling it`s hungry. A memory cell will open telling you to make a sandwich.

 

[St Giordano Bruno]

It was for me at first which is probably why so many atheist songs are in the heavy metal genre. You don’t hear many atheist songs played in a genre of music most teenagers hate such as country and western, choir singing or opera. You usually just hear in hip hop or metal with few exceptions of course. I would only embrace atheism because certain heavy metal rockers were atheists and left it there. When my ears had enough I did swing back to theism in my 20's and after much rational thought I swung back the atheism in my 40's - especially in respect to an Abrahamic god.

 

[work in progress]

The thing is that theism and atheism is about belief and gnosticism and agnosticism is about knowledge.

NO, I'm not sure if this bs about combining atheism and agnosticism together started with Dawkins, but he was the first one I came across who claimed both labels and inferred that agnosticism was not a genuine belief claim.

Dictionary definitions of these terms have changed over the years, but the man who coined the term "agnosticism" -- Thomas Huxley...aka Darwin's Bulldog, was fully aware of atheism and self-proclaimed atheists in his day, and yet he did not feel the term described his worldview and went off and created his very own -- agnostic:

When I reached intellectual maturity and began to ask myself whether I was an atheist, a theist, or a pantheist; a materialist or an idealist; Christian or a freethinker; I found that the more I learned and reflected, the less ready was the answer; until, at last, I came to the conclusion that I had neither art nor part with any of these denominations, except the last. The one thing in which most of these good people were agreed was the one thing in which I differed from them. They were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis,"–had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of "agnostic." It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the "gnostic" of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant. To my great satisfaction the term took. Agnosticism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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Huxley would have likely argued that the atheists he was familiar with were sure that the world was the product of natural processes that could be discovered through the scientific process. To Huxley, some lame statement about 'atheism describes my lack of belief in gods' would be disingenuous -- since the atheist who rejects the supernatural, would have some sort of naturalistic worldview out of necessity. Huxley was not willing to take that step, and likely wouldn't appreciate later atheists trying to co-opt his term for his own belief system that centered on uncertainty.

So therefore i think the progression goes something like this:

Atheism - Because babies are not born with the ability to conceptualise anything outside of themselves.

No sale! I got into this on another thread awhile back, but I'll repeat that since research psychologists are leading towards a conclusion that the building blocks of supernatural beliefs -- essentialism and teleological explanations for natural events occur to us intuitively without needing to be learned, then it's totally lame to claim that everyone is born an atheist! Left alone to figure out the world, children would grow up developing supernatural explanations for the world.

Theism - As the individual's thought processes evolve to a point where they can see themselves as separate from the world around them and they try to make sense of the world. In the absence of an explanation the individual will resort to magical thinking.
Atheism - As the individual acquires explanations of the world around them the magical thinking is no longer required.

Atheism started before a lot of the gaps in explanation had been filled in, while I believe the majority of people will hang on to some sort of belief system that includes supernatural even if we do reach an age when all of the great mysteries of the universe have scientific explanations. Different people have different needs, and many people are not going to accept a completely naturalistic explanation of the Universe,and keep looking for God.

 

[cablescavenger]

I was thinking about god and punishment. To my sons I am very much like God. I hand out punishments and tell them no when they want to hear yes. I also make them do things they don't want to do.

This is all for there betterment, so that they can be productive as adults. Currently they are adolescents.

When they become teenager's they are going to revolt. They will believe they know better than me(they will know somethings better I'm not god). They will want to leave my house. They will want to live there own way.

Then when they become adult's they will realize some truths. There will be a balancing of our lives. Although father and son we will be more compromising.


Now all people don't go through all stages. What I am equating this to is our religious beliefs.

Theist - Child State
Atheist - Teenage State
Agnostic - Adult State

What do you think

I like the analogy, but if you see see the teenagers as Atheists, and yourself, the parent as agnostic, then the truth is they probably do know better than you, they just have fewer social skills.