I don't think all atheists are necessarily arrogant, but a lot of the smartest and most intelligent people I know are atheists/Agnostics. I hate that religious people/Christians in general have to cherry pick individual atheists to make them look bad. Atheism is not necessarily the belief that God does not exist, but merely is the belief in the lack of a God, because there is no other way to perceive the world. I am not a supporter of atheism per se, but there are a lot of strong and intellectual arguments that can be made in its favors by the likes of Nietszche, Russell, and Schoepenhauer.
A lot of the atheists today don't know how to formulate arguments and to employ logic properly in these arguments. I though have to say that the vast majority of religious people I met are ignorant, arrogant, and very self-righteous. They are very against anyone that can think for themselves or who has an independently affirmative approach towards life.
There are bad religious people and bad atheists/agnostics, but I think the worse tend to be religious people, because they lack one thing a lot of atheists/agnostics have, and that is intelligence. Their are many flaws in religious arguments that have long been dismissed by great minds, but people still live believing in these ideas and mentalities when mankind has advanced and progressed far beyond these points.
Religion harbors hypocrisy a lot of time, and you need look no further than the Semitic religions to see this, like Judaism. Islam lives in a backwards mentality, and believes that their rituals, cultural customs and practices, and their theocratic system will save them. Its all a pile of bullshit, and some lame men can waste their time communicating with some imaginary being, which exists merely as an extension of their sensibility in relation to their sensual self of anthropological self in the world.
Judaism is built on a legalistic structure, but they assert these laws are vessels through which one can reach the divine. The divine has chosen these laws as something which is set apart from normality, and this is nothing but a purely anthropological perspective of the divine. They make a hypocritical claim like to make their law appear to be all divine, and this gave the priest some divine power and authority to communicate with the mystical.
Nietszche said to beware of those who claim to see things which only they can see or understand, because its usually full of bullocks(Not directing this at you Sigur). Its interesting that once the Romans destroyed the temple, and the priest's access to the divine that all contacts and messages with the divine were lost.
One would think that an all powerful God can be communicated with without having to reveal and manifest himself with a secret and hidden place of a temple to a priest. This chosen mentality which religious people take on is rather arrogant and pretensious in my opinion, and they like to claim that we are all equal.
Everyone is only equal for them if they are the chosen one above all else, and that is why I think the religious mentality is a hypocritical and insidious one riddled with all kinds of insecurity and inconsistencies.
It could be said to be a security blanket for all the fears and anxieties which life casts on mankind. I am a believer that one must live his life well aware of the cruelty and unforgiving nature of life, and willing it to treat it with a cold and impersonal approach. I am not saying there is no God, but I am saying its safe to say he does not interact with this realm of existence and consciousness.
I have gone through my life and never experienced anything, but rather all life just to be a great is, which is incapable of being put into words. The people who use the irreducible argument that a God must exist because there is no other way to explain it need to read up on their philosophical and scientific books.
Just because there is nothing to explain a cause does not mean that we should arbitrary some general and vague being to that cause. Its all a pathetic and rather illogical attempt to fill the void between reason and the chaos which is the cosmos. Life is random and crazy, and it takes meaning once we give it some meaning with both a combination of reason and actions.
Everything about life will never be known, but we can try our best to improve and cultivate ourselves and those around us. All else is a chicanery and full of bullshit. I don't dismiss the possibility of a God nor do I find religion to be bad. I just think that convincing yourself too much of these modes of existence and forms of belief tends to lead to just as much of a nihilism as of those atheists who religious people accuse of being such.
It can lead to all kinds of cruelty, ignorance, and violent behavior, which made Europe abandon the Medieval approach to religious situations. Religion was nothing but a tyrannical and totalitarian force with a ridiculous amount of power at their hands, and unfortunately a lot of Christians, especially Catholics, belief in the nonsense spewed out in the Middle Ages.
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