Not to you apparently..Duh...
You would have to admit, the whole story is difficult to believe if one is not indoctrinated into it. I've been trying to believe it unsuccessfully for nearly 8 years.
Do you think i believe this stuff for no reason, that there's no evidence?
Not quite, more like people have different standards of evidence and biases that lead to different conclusions. The thing is, though, if you want what the bible says to be true, that most certainly means your bias is in favor of it, due to emotional attachment. Contrary to what you might hear, atheists such as myself don't want the theory of evolution to represent reality, the evidence is what leads us to that conclusion. If evolution was disproven today, I might be surprised, but I wouldn't be sad or angry. I'd probably be happy if, in disproving it, it was replaced with a theory that better represented reality.
What makes you assume that?
The majority of the time, the evidence that convinces people like yourself of the existence of a deity doesn't satisfy the standard of evidence within a skeptical mind. Personal miracles are a great example of this; anyone can claim to have witnessed a deity's influence, and as real as the event might seem to them, other people have no reason to view their eyewitness account as trustworthy, due to the fact that eyewitness testimony is considered to be exceedingly unreliable. That, and most of the people that claim to have had these experiences were already religious, and biased in favor of a supernatural explanation.
Popular prejudices?I do not concede.
Everyone has some degree of bias, no matter how hard they fight against it. If you were indoctrinated as a child, then a bias in favor of theism was ingrained into you long before you had the mental fortitude to actually evaluate the situation without that favoritism. While I was not indoctrinated into atheism by any means, I was raised in a nonreligious household, and my naturally inquisitive mind lead to certain events that built up my skepticism at a ridiculously young age. That being, I figured out icons such as Santa Claus were not real on my own, one by one, and that my mother had lied to me when she proclaimed their existence. When I did hear about god, it gave an impression similar to these figures, but the adults around me were very dodgy whenever I asked questions about it. But, based on what I heard from others, I tried to get this being to interact with me or show itself, most frequently by praying when all seemed lost. I never once got a prayer answered, not even years after I made it. If I prayed to find a lost toy, the toy was never found, even if I persisted in looking. If I invited the being to converse with me, I heard nothing. By the age of 8, I concluded that the being must be as much fantasy as Santa Claus. Still, in truly hopeless situations, I would think of praying as a last resort, something worth a try, but they were never answered. By the age of 10, I didn't bother anymore.
Seek truth and find it.
Test everything.
I do it all the time. I have yet to find conclusive evidence for any deity or deities.
To continue the above, when I turned 13, I experienced the first death of people close to me; my great grandmother and my paternal grandmother died within a month of each other. I was devastated; these wonderful people that had been such a positive influence on my life, gone forever. While death creeping closer had bothered me for years even by that point (curse my unnatural tendency to look ahead), it had never filled me with such profound dread and anguish. I could not accept that these people were gone, that my life would be watching those I cared about disappear one by one, until I too followed them into oblivion. In desperation, I seeked anything that would serve as even paltry evidence for an afterlife. This resulted in a weird mental state that lasted for a year or so, as well as starting my sequence of churches that I attended throughout my life. I kid you not, for a period of time, the show Ghosthunters convinced me that an afterlife existed. I even thought dreams could tell the future XD. Yet, even my church attendance never convinced me of the existence of any deities.
My fruitless search eventually made me very bitter. The promise of faith to comfort me in my despair never came. There... was no god. There... was no afterlife. There was only this temporary existence, doomed to be taken away at some unknown point. So fragile. Nihilism set in, as well as an angry jealousy towards those that had found faith, forming an emotional hurricane of angst and sorrow. Briefly, I was a gnostic atheist, convinced that no deities could possibly exist, that my own life experiences proved as much.
But, a college philosophy class changed my outlook entirely. How ironic that the institution associated so strongly with people losing faith would rekindle my desire to seek it out. When I presented my arguments that I felt once and for all disproved the existence of deities, I got my butt kicked debating the instructor. Now this man was no theist himself, but he showed me the truth: we don't really know if deities exist or not. This didn't really provide much comfort in terms of my theological perspective, but it rejuvenated that goal I had given up on. I know not if deities exist, but if they do, I am going to find undeniable proof, and share it with the world! Even if there is nothing to find, I will never be certain of that, and will never know that my search is in vain. If I find conclusive evidence that disproves the existence of deities, as unlikely as that is... I will keep my despair to myself. I see little point in destroying an institution that I have attempted to become a part of for most of my life, or spreading my unhappiness. It certainly wouldn't remove it completely either, as there will always be people that stick their heads in the sand to avoid the truth, so any social benefits assumed with the end of theism wouldn't occur.
