Quote:
Originally Posted by tame_deuces
When I was young there was plenty of social pressure to denounce religion. If you were religious you were a loser, if you came from a religious family your friends would comfort you for your misfortune. Religious subjects were intensely disliked, and showing an active interest in them would quickly earn you a stamp as an outcast.
There is no belief or lack thereof which can not be subject to social pressure. It's just a matter of where you are.
This. For 12 years of schooling in atheism (public eduction in the NE US), I'd say the pressure was to be atheist. Anyone who believed in God was ridiculed, mocked, even ostracized. Not accepting Liberalism was just as bad if not worse. I witnessed people being indoctrinated in the name of science. I graduated high school believing 99% of the world was atheist and science probably proved atheism--it took years in the real world to discover how blind I was.
Atheists have a faith view that religion pressures people and indoctrinates them. The truth is, people know about the metaphysical because they are metaphysical beings, and no amount of atheist pressure can completely cover it up. "Science" as we call it now, should be limited to what it is--natural philosophy. It should not claim to speak of the metaphysical, yet what has happened is people have assumed that since science doesn't discover the metaphysical (which by definition it can't), the metaphysical does not exist. This assumption-this faith view-has been particularly detrimental in the public school systems in the NE USA; I'm not sure about the rest of the country.
People will always yearn for the eternal, not because someone tells them to, but because they know it within themselves. Atheists can try to explain it away, but the truth is:
Quote:
Ecclesiastes 3:11
He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
It is the atheist who has done his best to try to cover God up in his own mind, and he fails miserably, but is very angry when others do not lie to themselves in the same way.
It's funny how in catching up with people I went to high school with--all my honors and AP classmates who have great careers, excellent college educations--by far most of them now believe in a higher power, a god-not many are still atheist. I guess all that atheist pressure and indoctrinating didn't work for most of them! From what I can tell, having families of their own (seeing the wonder of children, experiencing love more deeply), living outside the box of the pressure we had in high school to be atheistic, liberal, faithless, and thinking on their own has led them back to an understanding that atheism fails, and God must exist.
M