jtp56
What you don't seem to be clear on is that we, as atheists, do not look through the world as atheists. Atheism is simply as lack of belief in a god. You, as someone who believes in a god, see the world through the lens provided by your religion. Whether you're a 6,000 year old earth christian or someone a bit more reasonable, you nonetheless cannot take god out of the equation when you look at reality.
When an atheist looks at the same world and the same universe you do, we do not look at it with the thought that there is no god. The subject just doesn't come up. When we learn about some scientific finding or discovery or theory, we don't have to work a predefined belief system into the finding, because we aren't burdened with one. We have no fear of any scientific discovery just because it would make believing in no god harder. Whereas many of the religious I have known have immediately scoffed at scientific findings as impossible because their god would never do such a thing.
If I were to go out into the fossil beds of North Dakota or something with a creationist and discover some new and amazing and old critter, I would be excited. The creationist would be busy trying to figure out how to diss the finding, because his or her beliefs do not allow that fossil to be what science says it is. It can't be that old, it can't be an ancestor of modern animals, etc. A creationist doesn't dare look at the bone structure, the age of the rocks around it, the relationship to other living and extinct critters, the adaptions it made for it's environment. All of these thoughts are taboo because it couldn't have happened that way because the bible implies otherwise.
With absolutely no god in my life, nothing found by science can injure my world. Even new findings that might totally negate what was thought to be the truth yesterday do not damage anything. All new information adds to and refines our knowledge base. None endangers it. Everything is exciting. Every finding is appreciated. All knowledge is welcome.
And we have an added advantage. We can say "I don't know" without feeling like inferior beings. Instead of giving credit to an unseen deity when we don't know what happened before the big bang or how exactly to explain why there if gravity or any of the many other things that are not yet explained fully, we just say we don't know, comfortable that some day we will at least know more.
The same is true of the non-scientific parts of life. When an earthquake hits Japan or a wild fire tears through Arizona, I know that the events are either natural or man-aused, and that the earth shakes and the trees burn, and I don't have to invoke an angry god or a forgiving god or a punishing god in the equation. When I am injured or ill I don't have to take the time to ask why god let such a thing happen to me. When I am doing well and good things are happening, I don't have to stop and take the time to thank the sky guy.
Based on what I know from the religious people in my life, their religious worldview colors all events and redefines the good, the bad and the ugly as something that somehow involved this god guy. Or his minions. Or his son. Or the devil. And so a believer's mind is seldom unaware of the imagined presence of said imagined being. And they think it is true. And it affects them directly.
Being an atheist only means that we don't add unseen complications to our lives, and don't discolor our lives with ancient texts. At least not the silly ones. Aristotle is still cool.
Looking at the world through rose colored glasses is naive. Looking at the world through voluntarily dumb colored ones is useless. And looking at the world without a prejudice against knowledge is bliss.
Added: When all the other astronomers look at the universe (excluding teh two Kiwi's), they don't do so with a built in time limit. Observations and measurements from multiple fields of study all point to a planet and a universe far older than 6,000 years. And there is incredible consistency. Even without leaving the planet. We have drilled out ice cores from Greenland that contain over one million annual layers. We can see those layers being created this year and last year and the year before and drill out and pull out a core that is one million layers deep. And that is just one of thousands of different proofs. But first you have to toss the preconceived tiny world of christianity out the window, because that's the only place it fits.
