Belinda wrote: ↑Sat Nov 21, 2020 11:30 am
Omnipresence is a lovely idea but I am afraid it is only cultural.
Don't be afraid. There's no such thing as an "omnipresent culture." Nor is "omnipresence" an idea unique to culture. It's actually a very simple, universal concept: the question is, does any Being in the universe possess that quality?
Whether God self revealed them or not I remember a good few epiphanies.
Well, I can't say whether or not your epiphanies were good, or even real. But obviously, there are two errors we can make when we have intense personal experiences: one is to be too credulous of them when they are not authentic; the other is to be too hard-hearted to believe them when they are real. Which yours were, you'll have to decide.
As for 'atheists', some of these are dogmatic and some are more like agnostics,
They don't have their own nomenclature worked out properly. And there's a very strategic reason they refuse to do so, though they could, very easily.
It has to do with attack versus defence. When on the attack against "religious" people, Atheists want to affirm dogmatically that God does not exist. If they did not, why bother being an Atheist at all? But when the Theist pushes back and says, "What proof have you for your dogma," the Atheist wants to be able to slide back into the more defensible position of saying, "Well, I'm not saying I know; I'm just saying I doubt strongly." Of course, this then deprives their initial dogma of force -- it reduces it to being merely a statement of the lack of personal experience or conviction, and not at all a truth claim that would bind anyone else. So the Atheist reverses this again in order to attack.
Keeping the definition of "Atheism" vague and vacillating is strategic. It's not that it actually IS vague between the two positions, or NEEDS to be left so. It's that the Atheist doesn't want to answer for the consequences of the logic of Atheism itself. In attack, he wants to be definite, and in defence he wants to slip away from any burden of proof to defend his definiteness.
So it's a shady double game. But the truth is that etymologically, Atheism is a very clear, simple idea "No [belief in] gods." Period. Agnosticism etymologically simply means "don't know." So degrees of uncertainty are all agnostic, and a declaration of there being no gods is Atheistic. The former is a declaration of personal confusion, and the latter a truth claim. Very simple. But the Atheist has no advantage in being as honest as etymology would indicate he should be, because he knows that pure Atheism is indefensible.
Some of these have been actively harmed by religious others, and this has been a stern lesson to them to distrust all religiosity.
That's quite understandable, instinctively. But obviously, it's also an overreaction, and disproportionate to the facts.
I may be fearful if I was once bitten by somebody's pet animal. It doesn't remotely imply all pets bite. Such a reaction is phobic and excessive, obviously. They maybe need to settle down and learn to discern the difference between a rottweiler and a goldfish.