What is your general attitude towards those who believe in religion whether they are jewish, Muslim, Christian etc etc.
Do you get on well with any religious friends and neighbours?
Have you ever thought of believing in a religion at some point?
If you do not like the faiths, why?
If you DO, also why? Does this come from your family? Maybe something went bad during your life?
I get that Lemmy might have the same stereotype in Reddit that there are loads of atheists, but there’s a good reason why despite criticism of religion, it is still here.
P.S. I am not religious or anti religious in any fashion, I am agnostic.
This position is a straw man. Atheists generally do not believe that God categorically does not exist. Instead, we usually say that we don’t believe in God because there is insufficient evidence. Much like the proverbial invisible unicorn in your backyard - since there is no reason to suggest that it exists, there is no reason for it to affect how we go about our daily existence.
When it comes to whether you’re agnostic or atheist, I think it helps to answer the following question on a scale of 0 - 10: How confident are you that God exists? If you say around 4 or 5, then you’re agnostic. If you say between 0 and 2, then you’re an atheist.
The one thing that still remains unclear with regards to science and god is the big bang.
The way I have heard it explained is that before the big bang there was nothing.
Which to my mind becomes:
This does not make sense to me, how can nothing explode?
So there are three categories of answer to this question:
A. There was something before the big bang which exploded, though this offeres not explanation of how the thing that exploded came into existance, I have heard theories about how the universe is cyclical and how it will eventually collapse into a new big bang, but that doesn’t answer the queation about the first big bang.
B. God exists and triggered the big bang, that means that the god entity exists outside of our universe.
C. We are just a highly advanced simulator, the big bang was the the program starting our simulation.
There is no rule that says the universe must make sense to human beings. In fact the more we learn about it - subatomic particles, quantum mechanics, the multiverse, etc. the stranger it becomes and the less it appears to operate in ways that are intuitive to our primitive primate brains.
Hell, even space and time might not be fundamental properties, and could themselves be abstractions which emerge from an even deeper underlying reality…
All of which is to say your list should have an extra option:
D. Who The Fuck Knows?
It’s more like what happened before big bang has no consequences to what happened after. Because this, we have little idea what happened before because there’s no direct evidence.