On Psalm 109 and Faith

[Ghoulish Delight]

I'll try to respond to some of this without too much parroting of what flippy and Alex have already said very well.

Yes, when you get down to it I am technically an agnostic in that I am perfectly willing to accept the possibility that I might one day be handed proof of the existence of a being capable of the things purported by religious folk. However at this point I prefer the term atheist just because "agnostic" to most people seems not to imply, "I do not have any reason to believe a supreme being exists, and won't until presented with evidence," but rather most people seem to take it to mean, "Oh, so you believe in some sort of supreme being you just don't believe in any of the versions codified by organized religion." The latter simply does not fit.

As for the benefit to me in "conversion", see flippy's post. I tried the agnostic thing for a while. But eventually I grew weary of the constant mental dissonance it caused. I found myself continually redefining this nebulous belief in "something greater than me" over and over to try to make it fit what my experience in the world was telling me to be true, that no matter how amazing, beautiful, infinite, spectacular, breathtaking, etc. my experiences, none of it required a supreme being to have occurred. And so I just felt like I was lying to myself, playing mental games simply because I felt like I was supposed to believe in something. Until I just stopped because it was unnecessary.

Yes, the infinite is difficult to ponder. Yes, the existence of something beyond the infinite is something that makes sense. However, there is nothing that says to me that that "something" is any more likely to be something remotely resembling any amalgamation of god figures humans of convinced themselves of than it is to be an all powerful teapot. No more likely to care one bit about, or have the ability to interact with, my daily life and thoughts than I'm able to care about or interact with the firing of a particular single neuron in my brain.

As I've said, I find value in the fact that religions are attempts to synthesize into easy-to-passs-on form theories about how people should comport themselves in order to maintain a functioning society. No less valuable in that sense than the Magna Carta, the US Constitution, what have you. But (parroting Alex some), mistaking the origin of those for magic leads to poor conclusions and prevents people from evaluating things objectively. Yes, we can all cherry pick that which works and that which doesn't, but to my eye, if you are not accepting that what you're cherry picking from is of entirely human origin, that it is the result of an entirely non-supernatural process of evolving into social beings, then you drawing your conclusions starting from a false premise, the same false premise that all of them started from, and aren't likely to improve much on their flaws.