Quote - > Quote - I've never understood why atheists defend "nothing" as if it were a something.

And I never understood why religious people defend "nothing" as if it were a something. So I guess we are in a strange sort of agreement there!

Quote - I can see a religion urging its adherents to go out and convert, but why do atheists even care?

 

Because it is good to care about things, about the truth, about people, about the world we live in. Caring is life enhancing, and if you care about the right things it can make the world a better place. I think that even many religious people would agree on that point.

If I worship something that does not exist then you have a point.  If I attribute qualities to something, whether it is the sun or the wind or the cosmic cycle of death and rebirth, and worship that thing, then not so much. 

Atheists seem to always associate the most ridiculous ideas with faith, such as assuming that people pray to an old bearded man on a cloud to save them from a red guy with a pointy tail, simply because that's how one group of people illustrated scripture for a time.  Then, because such an idea is so easy to dismiss, they can't understand how anyone else could ever believe in anything.    

Religious people base their faith on something, be it a personal experience, sense of wonder, link to ancestry, etc.  Certainly any of those things could be dispelled by pure reason.  I just don't understand, when a person looks around and finds no obvious god, what compels that person to assert with any certainty god did/does/will/can not exist. 

I agree that it is good to care, but that is only my assumption based on certain other faiths.  I can't prove that other people's experiences are as valid as my own, that their concerns are as important as my own, or even that objective truth somehow trumps subjective truths - these are  just things I assume to be so.  Ideas like truth and caring seem self defeating in a universe with no larger purpose.  If truth and caring become reasons for doing something in their own right, they would be little different than my notion of what god is.