Why are people who have survived being hit by cars so obsessed with looking both ways before they cross the street?

I’m British and even though I live in probably the most religious (and most religiously divided) part of the UK...Northern Ireland, I rarely feel the need to ever talk about religion in my daily life. I don’t think I’ve actually talked about religion in my entire life, as much as I have in the past 18 months since I joined this site...on that I do agree with @273kelvin and @Geoffrey51. My sympathies go out to all of you who live in the “Bible Belt” of the USA and who have to deal with constantly being confronted with religion or having to answer questions as to what you believe or don’t believe. That would be my idea of hell!

You are mistaken. As an atheist since age 13, I feel tired of being hassled by Christians about my lack of belief. An example:

Hassled by a Christian Psychologist

Ken, a 66-year-old psychologist from Portland, Oregon. His first message:

• "I really like your playful, creative, giving being. You're more 'spiritual' than most religious people. I'm curious how an 'atheist' can live that way."*

My response:

Ken,

During two Skype sessions, I repeatedly asked to change the subject. I was tired of talking about religion.

"We should be able to talk about anything," you insisted. "I don't want to talk about hiking. Hiking is not a deep subject." With this you shut me down. This is controlling behavior. I felt pressured and hassled by you about religion and spirituality.

Talking with you is not fun for me. I've had enough. I do not want to spend another minute being grilled by you about why I am an atheist, religion and spirituality.

Yesterday a man I used to date, Rich, dropped by as I was kneading four loaves of bread. With a master degree, Rich is highly intelligent and an atheist. Unlike you, Rich immediately saw the insult in your first message.

I told Rich you could not understand how I can have loving kindness without attending church and believing in a god. "I get asked that by Christians all the time," Rich replied.

I would never corner Christians and demand that they explain themselves. Yet you and your compatriots think this is acceptable behavior. "I enjoyed the couple of conversations we had," you wrote. It was not fun for me.

Christians who don't know me often demand, as you did, that I explain:

1. Why I am an atheist.
2. How the universe began (as if being an atheist automatically makes me an astrophysicist). "Nobody knows," I reply. "Science is advancing every year."
3. What happens when people die. "Nobody knows," I reply.
4. What is "spirituality."

You may think your questions were unique. They were not. Rich and I both find being grilled by Christians rude and tiresome. I suggest you see a therapist to discuss your bias against atheists.

Yes, I am perfectly capable of "agreeing to disagree." How else do you think I live peacefully in an area dominated by Republicans and Christians?

Ken, atheists like me are often hassled by Christians, demanding that we justify our beliefs. I don't have to justify my lack of belief in an invisible deity to anyone.

Kathleen

Because we're angry. Angry at how it has perverted every aspect of our lives and society and we want it to stop.

The conservatives would rule us or burn us at the stake

Have you ever been driving and seen a big mutilated corpse by the side of the road, probably a deer? You slow down and maybe stop to check it out and try to figure out what happened to it. It's just too disturbing to look away.

That's religion to me.

My usual reply

As I've answered several times when someone has asked why the members of a website devoted to discussions of atheism and agnosticism such as this one would spend so much time discussing religion - well, of course. People on websites devoted to sustainable transport talk about cars and people on websites devoted to veganism and animal rights talk about the meat industry, so why would be not talk about the one thing that brought us all here?

I ask the counter-question: Why are religionists so obsessed with atheists? (And, for that matter, with adherents of other religions?)

Because, while it's good enough for most atheists to let the believers live and believe whatever they want, it's not good enough for the believers to extend the same courtesy to atheists. Unless all bend the knee (or at least follow the rules they impose in the name of their god- and specifically their god), the believers aren't going to be satisfied.

So maybe if religion withdraws from the public sphere and stops trying to pass laws regarding how atheists behave, atheists can forget religion exists, too.

I am not obsessed by religion. The religious are sometimes obsessed by atheism. I don't care what people believe as long as they don't legislate, adjudicate, execute or bully it into my life or the lives of others.

g

I don't care so much about deconverting people. My focus is on promoting the idea that skepticism is not bad, and their neighbors who do not agree are not automatically communist hippie sex and drug addict radicals.

To me, asking me why I am "obsessed" by religion is to ignore the first 25 years of my life.

I am an Ignostic

I was raised a believer
AS a believer I thought understanding God of the utmost import.
SO I studied that.

This was the 60's. 70's and early 80's, there was no internet. So it was travel and churches, temples, ashrams, and lots and lots of reading. More even than that was interpersonal conversations. If I met someone with a different religious belief I would seek to grasp how they saw the world and what they believed.

That remains very much unchanged. If I do not think or believe in the same fashion as you do, miscommunication is very easy. If I come to see HOW you use language rather than how "I" interpret that language, miscommunication is reduced.

Comparative religious study was a slow evolution of thought for me, over two decades. As a child both home life and society indoctrinated me into a God belief, an undefinable all powerful something. I believed in that at probably 3, through sunday school and songs. Religion began early to teach about God, but I was precocious and I started reading the book, and church history, and the age of reason (after they taught us about Paine's "Common Sense" in school)

So I was dissatisfied with the religions explanations and understanding of God, what I thought ought to be of paramount import. As a boy I still had magical thinking and as such thought "Gee, if I have enough Faith I should be able to act like Elijah, and call fire down from heaven to end the Vietnam War!" The Rev telling me "God don't do such things anymore" showed me we did not have the same definition of God, "you do not get to say what the ALMIGHTY will do in the future!", I thought, and my trust for religious leaders was permanantly altered. I saw them all as other people, struggling to understand as I was, but not having the answers themselves while claimin they did.

Life circumstance then bounced me through six households, all Christian and all of differing denominations as a ward of the state due to my mothers paralytic disability. So as a young teen I saw that the denominations had very different ideas about God, Jesus, salvation, sin, and hell. All of those leaders had the same feet of clay as Daniel wrote too . . .

Blind leading the Blind, but that did not disprove my God assumption. So on to comparative religions, occultist idea's like Theosophy, Hermatic order of the Golden Dawn, the works of Aquinas and Augustine, onto taoism, Buddhism Hinduism, shamanic ideas and various native tribal studies, replete with the psychadelics, and yet all along that path it simply never occurred to me to ask

"Why am I assuming there is such a thing as a God, and then seeking evidence of that?"

So my position evolved over that time from a stauch theist, to a deist, to an agnostic deist, to an agnostic atheist, to an Ignostic, because, well which God idea are we talking about?
Is it actually well defined?
Is it a mystery?
What is the point in making an assumption about what you admit is a mystery, an unknown?

Ignosticism is an Epistomologic position; it is a set of ideas refuting the importance of determining the existence of God. It claims that knowledge regarding the reality of God is altogether unprofitable.

It is the idea that every theological position assumes too much about the concept of God and other theological concepts; including (but not limited to) concepts of faith, spirituality, heaven, hell, afterlife, damnation, salvation, sin and the soul.

Ignosticism or igtheism is the idea that the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the term god has no coherent and unambiguous definition.

IF you cannot even define what you are talking about, or consider it beyond human understanding, how is it you can claim to know anything about it and keep your intellectual integrity intact?

So I have been Agnostic Atheist/ Ignostic for three plus decades. Until the rise of the tea Party, I paid religion no mind at all, I just lived. The only contact I had were those poor unfortunates who would come to my door with their religious idea. Those I invited in and had long discussions with, but that ended after three or four years as they put me on their "No Knock" lists.

The Tea Party however was a different thing, that is religious Ideology all wrapped up in a psuedo patriotism. As an American Citizen and a Vet, that was something I needed to speak out against as I saw it in trw, so I became a Public Open Atheist, but that is political, not religious. Freedom of religion must equal freedom from religion or the equation is unbalanced.

So the answer today to "why am I obsessed with religion" is, because I believe in Liberty and religion is actively seeking to squash liberty through legislation and beaurocratic methodology.

I am not obsessed with religion. But when I see a harm, I should do something about it. If it is something I cannot do anything immediate about it, I should speak out against it. It isn't just religion that I am unhappy about. There are lots of things in life that should be questioned.

It does far more harm than it does good. But that doesn't mean I care about religion. In fact, I don't care about religion at all.

I personally am not obsessed with religion. For the most part, any displays of religion in town I pretty much ignore. My grandma, may she rest in peace, use to say all the time, "I just let God take care of me."

I normally just ignored her God quotes, and just continued our conversations. I felt no need to be concerned or interested in religion when discussing anything. I live in a city so most people are concerned about trying to make a living, or anything other than religion really. You get a few religious people trying to spread their religious views. In the city, religion is pretty meaningless. The culture of the city probably affected my attention to religion now that I am thinking about it.

When I'm online, I don't debate religion, I debate politics; well really I debate economics because I love Capitalist economics, so I don't really get into no religious conversations because I don't care about it. Unless someone is talking religion with me, then I would discuss religion, but that is rare and only happened to me once when I was explaining the non-physicality of moral principles on YouTube and a Christian contacted me.

Why are fucking god botherers so obsessed wih Atheists.

I would simply say: "I am obsessed with religion for the same reasons you should be obsessed with what somebody tries to use their penis. If it is in private and everybody consents, I don't care about it. If you whip it out in public and try to force it down somebody else's throat, we have a problem."

I'm obsessed with keeping it out of my life, to the point that i never bring the subject up unless its shoved into my face by someone/something.

I would love to be able to never think about religion. But I am surrounded by the religious, and Christian privilege is a constant where I live. It's in my face all the time. I can't buy milk at the store a few blocks from me without having the cashier telling me to "Have a blessed day!" Religion is embedded. I have no choice but to be aware of it.

The atheists I know don’t give a shit about religion one way or the other, only here!

:::: slides on the wood floor after full-tilt run from the next room ::::

I love atheism because it takes up so little of my time and my money. I hardly even think of 'god' unless someone reminds me that I need to believe in theirs. Laughable. It's true what they say - Atheism is to religion like "off" is a TV channel..

::: runs frantically into another random room ::::

You are correct. Religion abuses not only its followers, but the non-followers as well. It is a scam for collecting money from the masses -- a scam based on nothing but mythology. It brainwashes children and adults into thinking that the mythology is reality. Religion teaches that morality consists only of hearing and obeying the religious leaders. It disdains ethics, science, thinking and evaluation. It teaches its followers to shun non-followers, thus splitting up families and friendships. We have every right to speak up against the abuses of religion.

People of all spiritual persuasions come with many different personalities. Some are fanatics, some are live and let live and some are just curious.

I am so pleased that I live in a secular country. I have several church going friends but the subject of religion rarely arises

In my case it is out of a combination of self defense and retribution.