That's making the broad assumption that religion won't "eat you alive".
My personal experience deeply contradicts that.
My perspective is that atheism is not a lack of worship, but a lack of faith.
Faith requires you suspend critical thinking on a predetermined set of claims. Atheism, to me, is the rejection of faith; to direct critical thought to all claims.
Taking that to its conclusion, I worship critical thinking. I can't think of a better way to avoid being eaten.
Faith was always described to me as a belief in something that cannot be proven. In my experience, however, especially in terms of Christianity, faith is a belief in something that cannot be proven, and - crucially - can be disproven. To put it more clearly, faith detaches a claim from reality, and puts it into a realm above criticism.
As a small example, the idea that the first human male was created directly by a deity contradicts the existence of early hominids, cannot account for retroviral DNA sequences present in both humans and apes, etc.
St. Thomas Aquinas was an excellent philosopher, whose contributions to human thought will likely continue to be studied for generations to come; whether or not they are based in reality or abstraction. My disagreement with Aquinas is that the ideas of Christianity that are based in the abstract are expressed as literal fact, even though such "facts" and their origins are deeply contradicted by evidence. There is a name for the inability to criticize Christianity for contradicting with evidence: "faith".
My experience with faith is a little closer to this century: Mormonism. A flavor of Christianity invented by Joseph Smith, who founded his church in upstate New York in 1830. As a decedent of several Mormon "Pioneers", I was raised in that church. I had deeply held faith in its claims, and even "served" a mission; going door-to-door sharing my beliefs with anyone willing to listen.
Later on, I learned a more complete history of the Mormon (LDS) Church, and for the first time applied critical thinking to what I had until then held out of reach with "faith". If you want a picture of what this experience is like, I would recommend this heartfelt letter[1] to a stubbornly faithful spouse. It both expresses the emotional journey of leaving the Mormon faith, and provides detailed information and context on the subject.
I haven't spent as much effort deconstructing Christianity on the whole, but there are no doubt similar resources available to the subject. Suffice it to say, after becoming familiar with faith, I see the same pattern applied with all religion.
The definition of faith as believing in something that can be disproven is a contradiction. You believe your religion is disproven, that is why you no longer have faith in it.
“Can’t be proven” and “can be disproven” are not the same thing. There’s a whole range of concepts that are unfalsifiable, and religion is the typical example of this.
I absolutely did have faith in my religion, despite the fact that it can be (and had been) thoroughly disproven. Mostly because I simply wasn't aware of that fact.
The LDS (Mormon) church, like most religious groups, put a lot of effort into insulating itself from criticism. It presented me a narrative about itself that is contradicted by historical record, most of which is published, albeit less energetically, by that very same church.
I walked around with a King James Bible every time I went to church. I spent a year learning about The Old Testament in seminary, and another year learning about The New Testament. The Book of Mormon itself directly quotes the King James Bible, errors included. It absolutely is a flavor of Christianity, no matter how unappetizing you find it.
The entire story in The Book of Mormon is about Jews who fled the old world, settled the Americas, and worshiped Jesus. The only substantive divergences from Christianity that Mormonism has are additions.
But go ahead and detach my criticisms from your religious belief. After all, that is what faith is all about.
You start getting into 'no true Scotsman' arguments at this point. Is the only "true" Christianity that which professes the Nicene Creed? Teaches the Real Presence? Other?
However, just because the Mormons are using the same words (from the same book) does not necessarily mean that they have the same theological concepts:
> This brings me to an example which does involve error of a sort sufficient to make successful reference to the true God doubtful. In the post on Geach linked to above, I cited the 2001 decision of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith that Mormon baptisms are not valid even though they seem at first glance to make use of the correct Trinitarian formula. The reason for the decision is that the Mormon conception of God is so radically different from the Catholic one that it is doubtful that the words truly invoke the Trinity. It is not Trinitarianism per se that is the issue, though, but rather the radical anthropomorphism of the Mormon conception of God. As an article in L'Osservatore Romano summarized the problem at the time:
[…]
> The Mormon conception of deity, then, makes of God something essentially creaturely and finite, something which lacks the absolute metaphysical ultimacy that is definitive of God in Catholic theology and in classical theism more generally. Even Arianism does not do that, despite its grave Trinitarian errors. To be sure, Arianism makes of the second Person of the Trinity a creature, but it does not confuse divinity as such with something creaturely. On the contrary, because it affirms the full divinity and non-creaturely nature of the Father, it mistakenly supposes that it must deny the full divinity of the Son. It gets the notion of divinity as such right, and merely applies it in a mistaken way. Mormons, by contrast, get divinity as such fundamentally wrong. Hence their usage of “God” is arguably merely verbally similar to that of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, et al. They can plausibly be held not really to be referring to the same thing as the latter, and thus not worshipping the same God as the latter.
There's some 'inside baseball' differences on what people's practical day-to-day beliefs are, and what the actual theological underpinnings are. Most folks will not know about them.
Your argument is that because Mormons don't believe in the Trinity, that they don't believe in omnipotence and omnipresence.
This argument is false. Mormons believe that the Trinity is two living immortal men (Elohim and Jesus), and one omnipresent spirit.
They are also very inconsistent with the idea, since originally they did believe in the Trinity, but later Joseph started preaching the three beings doctrine, and had the Book of Mormon edited to reflect it.
But all of this is splitting hairs. There is no point arguing whether Mormons worship the wrong version of God, because God is fiction in the first place.
> Faith was always described to me as a belief in something that cannot be proven.
That is certainly one way to define it. Faith is the sibling/cousin of trust as the first two videos go over. If US Census Bureau says the population of the US is 331M, you are trusting them, putting your faith in their methods, that they are getting it right:
> In my experience, however, especially in terms of Christianity, faith is a belief in something that cannot be proven, and - crucially - can be disproven. To put it more clearly, faith detaches a claim from reality, and puts it into a realm above criticism.
Most Christians simply have faith / trust that God does exist. Most Christians also trust, have faith, that when they wake up in the morning and reach for the light switch the room will get brighter, and when they turn the faucet water will come out. Some Christians will have understanding of how and why these things happen (and what could be the causes if things stay dark and/or dry).
To take your day-to-day knowledge of "faith", or what most people think as "God", is to a certain extent looking at a straw man. Most folks don't have time or energy (and in many cases the intellectual horsepower) to get into the steel man version of the idea. Not many folks are going to bother with analyzing, e.g., Aquinas' argument that God is "ipsum esse subsistens," translated by Bishop Robert Barron as "the shear act of 'to be' itself": the idea of God not simply as a noun but as an action (i.e., verb). Something very different than the Sky Father With a Beard image that most many probably visualize.
Further the question of whether, in the case of the Christian God, it is something that can be (dis)proven is completely separate than the definition of "faith". The two books by Edward Feser linked to give proofs—in reason/logic sense, not the proverbial sense of (physical) evidence—for the existence of God. None of which involve any religious texts or revelation.
> My disagreement with Aquinas is that the ideas of Christianity that are based in the abstract are expressed as literal fact, even though such "facts" and their origins are deeply contradicted by evidence. There is a name for the inability to criticize Christianity for contradicting with evidence: "faith".
The arguments for a {g,G}od (in the general sense) existing are different than those than the argument(s) for any particular God (Christian or otherwise). Aristotle put forward the argument (see the third link) that there must logically be an Unmoved Mover in ~350 BC for example.
Your argument illustrates exactly what I'm talking about.
If it's just a belief in God, then why call it Christianity? Does the historicity of the Bible have no bearing on what it means to be Christian?
Instead of confronting the origins of the claim of God's existence, you carefully dodge it by saying I can't disprove the existence of God.
Of course I can't disprove the existence of some ethereal diety, but I can disprove the existence of Jaweh and Jehova, at least as they are described in the Bible.
So if the story of God in the Bible isn't history, then why should I fall back on a belief of God in the abstract? If I can illustrate the origins of the Christian God as fraudulent, then I see no reason to assume the existence of a God anywhere outside fiction.
The devils greatest achievement is taking God's one true gift, our rational mind, and convincing people they need to use faith, a direct rejection of our rational capabilities, do be close to God. So beautiful in its sublime deception. So powerful, it insidiously destroys the most intelligent minds.
My personal experience deeply contradicts that.
My perspective is that atheism is not a lack of worship, but a lack of faith.
Faith requires you suspend critical thinking on a predetermined set of claims. Atheism, to me, is the rejection of faith; to direct critical thought to all claims.
Taking that to its conclusion, I worship critical thinking. I can't think of a better way to avoid being eaten.