is everyone, in essence, an atheist?

[TKramar]

My experiences would have led me to a belief in God even if such had NOT been taught.

[TRANSPONDER]

Originally Posted by TKramar

My experiences would have led me to a belief in God even if such had NOT been taught.

I can only say that nothing led me to a belief in god from an initial a- theism which I assert that we all share at birth and I can accept that your feelings may have led you to belief in some higher being even without being taught (1). But whether taught be others or by yourself, that is where you arrive from not believing, true?

In which case we are all atheist at birth.

(1) though I would firmly deny and reject that you or anyone else would have arrived at any one of the particular personal gods and theologies and religions on offer without being taught about it.

[TKramar]

I'm not a person who reads the Bible or goes to church.

My spirituality is something that I feel inside. It has an impact on me. It doesn't have an impact on others, because it is personal. It has nothing to do with them.

[TRANSPONDER]

I haven't a problem with that. I have the experiences that I hear related by Believers as 'knowing God'. Apart from the delusions about getting messages from beyond or being visited by demons.

But I just don't see any evidential or logical reason to assume its anything outside all other shared feelings and emotions which we Humans have. Even less to start calling it God and seeing it as evidence for theism. So we are all agnostics/atheists in any sense of what would logically be derived from our state (barring delusion) but some evidently prefer to think of themselves as theist.

It is to your credit that you don't do the religious stuff and the only problem I have is that there is apparently an unwillingness to even entertain the possibility that it might not be what the self - trained (as though the theists never tried to pump - prime you) theist came to believe.

[Dusty Rhodes]

Originally Posted by Trimac20

No but perhaps everyone (or almost everyone) is an agnostic? Unless he/she has seen proof of God, no one truly knows.

Religious belief structures are not built on knowledge. Kinda like a form of Anathema, wouldn't ya think?