We are all born without any concept of religion or a belief in a Supreme being but I wouldn't call that atheism. Atheism is coming to the conscious decision that God doesn't exist. It would be interesting to see a group of say 1000 or 10,000 children with no knowledge of religion or having ever been exposed to the idea of a God and observe over time if their society developed some form of religion. Belief in a higher power or powers is pretty universal to all the cultures in the history of mankind. From the ancient Romans and Greeks with their multiplicity of gods, the isolated tribal cultures and sun worship or whatever all the way to the monotheism of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, there a similarities of shared legends such as the Great Flood and other things.
The failure is arguing without evidence, the very same failure of believers. The atheists argument is as equally flawed as the believer because neither of them possess evidence one way or another. I will use your term, "imaginary things." You have no evidence that God is an imaginary thing, no more than VBall has evidence that God is real. It's nothing personal toward you or VBall, because in fact none of us has the evidence to prove our point. So for one side or the other to consider themselves intellectually superior to the other is foolish because they can never prove their point either. This is the flaw. It is significant because, as I originally stated, the flaw is arguing any point without evidence and the Atheist has no more or less evidence than the Believer, and thus, makes their side of this argument no better than the believers. I used the Unicorn analogy because it is, in fact, not the same as God. Here on earth we know for certain that Unicorns do not exist. Here on earth we do not know for certain whether God exists or not. So when someone says, "I believe in Unicorns!" and someone like you or me says, "Bullshit!" we have evidence to show that Unicorns do not exist here on earth....no more than Vampires or Sasquatch. When someone says "I believe in God!" and someone else says, "Bullshit!" there is no evidence for either side of the argument thus rendering both sides equally foolish. This is the shared failure of both arguments.
There are a lot of people who actually do believe in Sasquatch. I don't but some people do. Listen to the Coast to Coast radio show sometimes. The callers cite rumors of sightings and imaginary personal encounters and all kinds of shit but they can't prove that Sasquatch exists. I can't prove that he doesn't exist but I would think that with so many of them running around that somebody would have found a Sasquatch skeleton or some unusual DNA by now. The point is that I wasn't born either believing or not believing in Sasquatch. But what if say my beloved old grandfather had told me a story about having seen one. Now believe in Sasquatch. As I get older I begin to doubt the existence of Sasquatch more and more. But I am confused. My grandfather was an honest man who never lied to me. What am I to believe?
Well, I think it is clear that the action of believing this myth is not the same as choosing to believe no myths. Suddenly you go from agnostic with regards to unicorns to belief without evidence that unicorns are mythical. A fossil yet unearthed could disprove that. We don't really know that unicorns don't exist, we just see no evidence off it. We don't know if Odin, Zeus, Yahweh, or Baal exist, we just see no evidence of it. Same thing. Your Indian name is Hair Splitter. I suppose we will have to examine the entrails of chickens to determine Gods Will.
Whether or not Odin, Zeus, ect. exist will never ever be proven one way or another. If unicorns ever existed it is a certainty that one day it will be scientifically proven that they did. It won't ever be proven that they didn't. How did the concept of unicorns come about. Maybe a caveman who was a bad artist painted a skinny rhinoceros on the wall of his cave. Unicorns are in the Bible: Modern readers have trouble with the Bible’s unicorns because we forget that a single-horned feature is not uncommon on God’s menu for animal design. (Consider the rhinoceros and narwhal.) The Bible describes unicorns skipping like calves (Psalm 29:6), traveling like bullocks, and bleeding when they die (Isaiah 34:7). The presence of a very strong horn on this powerful, independent-minded creature is intended to make readers think of strength. The absence of a unicorn in the modern world should not cause us to doubt its past existence. (Think of the dodo bird. It does not exist today, but we do not doubt that it existed in the past.). Eighteenth century reports from southern Africa described rock drawings and eyewitness accounts of fierce, single-horned, equine-like animals. One such report describes “a single horn, directly in front, about as long as one’s arm, and at the base about as thick . . . . [It] had a sharp point; it was not attached to the bone of the forehead, but fixed only in the skin.”3 The elasmotherium, an extinct giant rhinoceros, provides another possibility for the unicorn’s identity. The elasmotherium’s 33-inch-long skull has a huge bony protuberance on the frontal bone consistent with the support structure for a massive horn.4 In fact, archaeologist Austen Henry Layard, in his 1849 book Nineveh and Its Remains, sketched a single-horned creature from an obelisk in company with two-horned bovine animals; he identified the single-horned animal as an Indian rhinoceros.5 The biblical unicorn could have been the elasmotherium.6 Assyrian archaeology provides one other possible solution to the unicorn identity crisis. The biblical unicorn could have been an aurochs (a kind of wild ox known to the Assyrians as rimu).7The aurochs’s horns were very symmetrical and often appeared as one in profile, as can be seen on Ashurnasirpal II’s palace relief and Esarhaddon’s stone prism.8 Fighting rimu was a popular sport for Assyrian kings. On a broken obelisk, for instance, Tiglath-Pileser I boasted of slaying them in the Lebanon mountains.9 Extinct since about 1627, aurochs, Bos primigenius, were huge bovine creatures.10 Julius Caesar described them in his Gallic Wars as: a little below the elephant in size, and of the appearance, color, and shape of a bull. Their strength and speed are extraordinary; they spare neither man nor wild beast which they have espied . . . . Not even when taken very young can they be rendered familiar to men and tamed. The size, shape, and appearance of their horns differ much from the horns of our oxen. These they anxiously seek after, and bind at the tips with silver, and use as cups at their most sumptuous entertainments.11
My evidence is personal but certainly nothing the scientific community or anyone here would accept as proof. And FTR, I absolutely don't consider myself or my point of view on this topic to be intellectually superior.
Atheism is the belief that there is no god. Parse words all you like, but people don't think there is a god until someone else tells them otherwise. Yes, but as we progress and discover new things we stop following those practices and beliefs. We no longer stone people. We don't have public hangings. We know the earth is round. Some of us even have running water inside the house. I'm sure that some might attempt to create stories that explain the things they don't understand, which is kind of a pretty solid argument for atheism. I can't honestly answer how that would work out. I'm sure there is a study out there, but I'm not familiar with it. I do have some familiarity with studies of children exposed to religion and the results are not flattering. Perhaps there is hope as atheism is on the rise.
