How do you know?

Why not? I feel like demolishing an idiot today.

How do you know God doesn't exist?

How do you know the thousands of other gods conceived of by man throughout history, most of them ones you've never even heard of, don't exist?

I went off to college i because atheist

Seems more like you define atheist as "someone who doesn't go to church."

However in all honesty how can you be so sure that there isn't something's out there? You don't know so you can't claim there is nothing just like I can't claim that I know God exists.

I bet you think this puts us on even ground. If I claimed to have an invisible dragon in my garage and I couldn't prove he existed but neither you could prove he didn't exist, would you say we were on even ground? "Well I'm just as likely to be right as you are so let's just call it a draw!"

Probably not, unless you're full on committed to being an idiot.

Now I do not by any means excuse what happened but why do actions of the past dictate your feelings now?

You'd be wrong as fuck if you thought that religions doing terrible shit was all in the past. That should be blindingly fucking obvious. Jesus Christ.

y point is there have been confirmed miracles with zero scientific explanation.

No, your point is that scientists FROM THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, amazingly, will sometimes confirm things as a miracle from god! Moreover having zero current scientific explanation, which I dispute, does not make it a miracle. Not anymore than having no current scientific explanation for some UFO sightings meaning that we have 100% been visited by ET. I promise though, if you had actual third party scientists investigating we'd have some pretty fucking good explanations for most of these if not all. Indeed, many of these types of miracles are disproven regularly.

One thing priests do as part of their studies is learn how to interpret and know what the actual meaning of certain passages mean.

There is no "actual meaning." The bible is like a poetry book. You can interpret it any way you want. It is not like a math or science book where the facts and truth are not up for debate. You cannot possibly be claiming that all priests share a single interpretation of the entirety of the bible. I grew up Catholic, I fucking know that's not true. I went to Catholic school for nearly a decade, I went to Catholic camps, retreats, the whole nine fucking yards. I fucking know how delusional and varied your beliefs can be even within the same goddamn Catholic church.

Everyone else just kinda picked the things they like and picked out what they didn't like and said ok let's this instead

Catholics do that too. Don't fucking lie to yourself.

Second part to this is why do you give the bible so much shit. As much as you want the bible gives messages and advice that are really good to follow for anyone. Does that mean every single sentence in there is gold, no but that doesn't mean that it doesn't hold very valuable information.

The same can be said for Harry Potter or Aesop's Fables. There's a lot of good stuff in both those books. Lots of great life lessons. The primary difference I guess would be the latter two don't claim to be the infallible word of an omnipotent deity containing absolute truth and doesn't have a need to be worshiped. Yes. Things get held to a higher standard when they claim that bullshit. Amazing, right?

If you walked around claiming to be a perfect human being, you'd be criticized for every mistake you ever made. Meanwhile, I don't claim that and lock myself out of my car. No one's going to jump down my throat for it, I'm only human.

5) last but not least, what is so wrong with religion?

Other than all the terrible shit throughout history? Like the Crusades, witch burnings, Inquisition? Well let's see, in just the US I see religious groups trying to eviscerate science education in the classroom. They want to replace evolution with creationism. They want to replace sex education with abstinence only bullshit. They want to rewrite American history to say that Moses was a founding father. They want to destroy the separation of church and state. They want to deny gays equal rights. They are a significant source of opposition to tackling climate change. Religious folks are more regressive as a whole when it comes to women and minority rights in general.

So yeah. They are a net negative on society. They keep society from making progress. And why? Not because they have any facts or evidence, but because there's this book, see?

supposed to foster peace and helping my neighbor and my actions are the complete opposite then guess what I'm probably not really part of that religion.

This is a well known logical fallacy called the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. Learn it and realize how dumb you are and avoid it in the future.

/r/atheism Thread