Scripture = what you’re taught by your religion, god did it, no secular explanation-> what theists tell us. We don’t believe in the scripture, ergo we get nowhere. Try to explain without the scripture. I understand it’s easier to tell us we’re dumb than reason it out. Try?
I don’t think you know what I believe at all, but you think you do. Atheism is not a single denomination. Just as I do not know what you believe, specificlly, unless you lay it out, theism is not a single denomination - like you did with the lego analogy, which was actually really good. It made me re-realize our difference more clearly. That’s all you really had to do. And then top it off with what would make sense to non-christian: ‘my belief is <insert belief> Becaaaause.....<reason>’, not ‘it’s like this can’t you understand you dumb atheist’. Ergo we’re probably both epic fail here, I’ll give you that. It’s easy to fall in this category. But it happens when you argue from scripture - or don’t explain why you believe - from my perspective.
In short to us, you, christianity, is superimposing an explanation for the origin question. To us, nobody has a definity answer, no concesus - that’s the view I hold. An unknown. Because it’s unknown. I understand perfectly your lego view, and that it could make sense, that it was created for us - if I believed in magic, maybe. I don’t see any evidence for this at all in reality. Reality is all I can examine. That leads me to not guess magic for the unknown. Every mystery ever solved has proven to be...not-magic (queue piano music). Magic being a creator, a non-answer to me. I might as well substitute anything for it, but I default to non-magic causes so far, the null hypthesis, occams razor. The furthest back I personally understand is LK’s something from nothing. It does expain our existence. I get this has regres problems again. So it’s an unknown.
The chain breaks when you simply default to a hypothesis, god. Why is that, is my question. Other than ‘it can’t possibly be anything else, and I know every posibility, so only what I can think of is an option, I know god, ergo it must be god if it’s not something else I know’. That’s tiresome to a non-christian. It seems to us you’re jumping steps, gaps, god of the gaps, not leaving anything to other explanations. Or even leaving it open. That’s a paradigm of religion, claming to have explanations for everything, or so it seems to me, especialy here. That’s just not the case with everything else in this world, why would it be the case here? What compels a christian to disregard the explanation of ‘we don’t know, yet’ or ‘we don’t know, may never do so’ or <insert any of the other religious explanations differing from your own> and jump to ‘the christian god did it’? My experience is that the behaviour, thought, is learned, rather than reasoned. That may not be the case for your or Lumi, I’ve no idea. But so far you’re not giving us anything but scripture or, to us, flawed logic, god of the gaps.
I wish you’d travel more, to say, northern europe, you’d realize the political analogy is not very fitting to our understanding of politics, at all. My wife is american, so I do get some of it, but really? In any case it’s not trying to understand. It’s name calling, labeling and a bit insulting I suppose. You do you. I wish you didn’t.
In essence: I don’t want you to try and convert me to this religion or shame me for not understanding it the way you do. I’d love to hear reason, argued, well thought out arguments for why you believe individual parts. Origins, is central to your belief, sure, good lego analogy. I can’t answer it. I can guess, like you, but I’d never say the guess is the only explanation and blaim others for not believing it.
Consider this: if you would say ‘I don’t know, and don’t claim to know the origins of existence, and I do not label it devine’. What would it be then, in this world, that makes you believe in a deity? Could this setting bring us closer to discussing religious views as it is now? That would work for me, in that it could be confined to reality. Which is all I believe we can say anything about. I’ve seen plenty of debates with this as basis, which intrest me. The former too, and not so much.
Merry x-mas, you believers-you