I don't care about repulsing any religions, I just don't believe in them. Atheism =/= antitheism. It's not reactionary not believing in a religion, it's just the default state of being. I've seen religions I could see myself being a part of just based on their philosophy, I just can't force myself to believe in the supernatural elements of it. There's nothing wrong with religion, I just can't truthfully call myself a believer in any that I've heard of.

I'll be up front and say I'm not reading a 10 paragraph essay on religion, so don't bother replying like that unless you don't care if I read it. Just please, don't be ignorant and assume everyone's (or even most people's) atheism is driven by hate or misunderstanding of religion. It's literally just not believing in in a religion, it's not any deeper than that for at least 99% of atheists. You should engage with atheists in good faith instead of making blanket statements about us, you've got weird assumptions about us that need challenging

It's a broad stroke to claim all atheists are dismissive of the Bible as a piece of storytelling. There are some good stories to ponder, but that doesn't change the fact that as a whole narrative is disjointed and contradictory, and it's a bad influence in many areas for those who would treat it all as fact and act on the worst parts.

And then some like to generalize the entire population into two groups :p

George Lucas creator of Star Wars films

To educate his film audience, in the summer of 1986 and summer of year 1987, George Lucas, creator of the Star Wars films, invited Sarah Lawrence College Professor Joseph Campbell to California to film education about metaphors to the audience to put a stop to this problem in media ecology and media literacy.

Skywalker Ranch interviews in 1986 and year 1987

Joseph Campbell was age 82 in 1986 and age 83 in year 1987, which was his last year alive. In 1988, Bill Moyers published a book of the interviews and a TV series on Public Broadcast Systems network. Released shortly after Campbell’s death on October 30, 1987, The Power of Myth was one of the most popular TV series in the history of public television, and continues to inspire new audiences.(1988)

Former White House director Bill Moyers

Under the Johnson administration he served from 1965 to 1967 as the eleventh White House Press Secretary. He was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations, from 1967 to 1974. He also worked as a network TV news commentator for ten years.

The key part of that audience education in 1987: Metaphors

1. "A spiritual man, he found in the literature of faith those principles common to the human spirit. But they had to be liberated from tribal lien, or the religions of the world would remain—as in the Middle East and Northern Ireland today—the source of disdain and aggression. The images of God are many, he said, calling them “the masks of eternity” that both cover and reveal “the Face of Glory.” He wanted to know what it means that God assumes such different masks in different cultures, yet how it is that comparable stories can be found in these divergent traditions—stories of creation, of virgin births, incarnations, death and resurrection, second comings, and judgment days. He liked the insight of the Hindu scripture: “Truth is one; the sages call it by many names.” All our names and images for God are masks, he said, signifying the ultimate reality that by definition transcends language and art. A myth is a mask of God, too — a metaphor for what lies behind the visible world." - Bill Moyers, 1988

2. "But my notion of the real horror today is what you see in Beirut. There you have the three great Western religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and because the three of them have three different names for the same biblical god, they can’t get on together. They are stuck with their metaphor and don’t realize its reference. They haven’t allowed the circle that surrounds them to open. It is a closed circle. Each group says, “We are the chosen group, and we have God.” Look at Ireland. A group of Protestants was moved to Ireland in the seventeenth century by Cromwell" - Joseph Campbell, 1987

3. "I have had a revelation from my computer about mythology. You buy a certain software, and there is a whole set of signals that lead to the achievement of your aim. If you begin fooling around with signals that belong to another system of software, they just won’t work. Similarly, in mythology—if you have a mythology in which the metaphor for the mystery is the father, you are going to have a different set of signals from what you would have if the metaphor for the wisdom and mystery of the world were the mother. And they are two perfectly good metaphors. Neither one is a fact. These are metaphors. It is as though the universe were my father. It is as though the universe were my mother. Jesus says, “No one gets to the father but by me.” The father that he was talking about was the biblical father. It might be that you can get to the father only by way of Jesus. On the other hand, suppose you are going by way of the mother. There you might prefer Kali, and the hymns to the goddess, and so forth. That is simply another way to get to the mystery of your life. You must understand that each religion is a kind of software that has its own set of signals and will work." - Joseph Campbell, 1987

BILL MOYERS: Do you see some new metaphors emerging in a modern medium for the old universal truths?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I see the possibility of new metaphors, but I don’t see that they have become mythological yet.

...

BILL MOYERS: Do you think there was such a place as the Garden of Eden?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Of course not. The Garden of Eden is a metaphor for that innocence that is innocent of time, innocent of opposites, and that is the prime center out of which consciousness then becomes aware of the changes.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Every religion is true one way or another. It is true when understood metaphorically. But when it gets stuck to its own metaphors, interpreting them as facts, then you are in trouble.

BILL MOYERS: What is the metaphor?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: A metaphor is an image that suggests something else. For instance, if I say to a person, “You are a nut,” I’m not suggesting that I think the person is literally a nut. “Nut” is a metaphor. The reference of the metaphor in religious traditions is to something transcendent that is not literally any thing. If you think that the metaphor is itself the reference, it would be like going to a restaurant, asking for the menu, seeing beefsteak written there, and starting to eat the menu.

For example, Jesus ascended to heaven. The denotation would seem to be that somebody ascended to the sky. That’s literally what is being said. But if that were really the meaning of the message, then we have to throw it away, because there would have been no such place for Jesus literally to go. We know that Jesus could not have ascended to heaven because there is no physical heaven anywhere in the universe. Even ascending at the speed of light, Jesus would still be in the galaxy. Astronomy and physics have simply eliminated that as a literal, physical possibility. But if you read “Jesus ascended to heaven” in terms of its metaphoric connotation, you see that he has gone inward—not into outer space but into inward space, to the place from which all being comes, into the consciousness that is the source of all things, the kingdom of heaven within. The images are outward, but their reflection is inward. The point is that we should ascend with him by going inward. It is a metaphor of returning to the source, alpha and omega, of leaving the fixation on the body behind and going to the body’s dynamic source.

BILL MOYERS: Aren’t you undermining one of the great traditional doctrines of the classic Christian faith—that the burial and the resurrection of Jesus prefigures our own?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That would be a mistake in the reading of the symbol. That is reading the words in terms of prose instead of in terms of poetry, reading the metaphor in terms of the denotation instead of the connotation.

BILL MOYERS: And poetry gets to the unseen reality.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: That which is beyond even the concept of reality, that which transcends all thought.

...

.... like music does, vibes and beyond ... George Lucas hosted and filmed these interviews with a 83 year old professor from a women's arts college to educate his cinema audience about "The Force" science fiction vibes and meanings.

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.” ― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, year 1995

..

... We had these problems worked out by teachers and educators in the 1980's and 1990's. But we are drowning in so much fiction storytelling / fiction memes in year 2025 that people can no longer locate and recognize the non-fiction educators and teachers on the very subject of mixing fiction and non-fiction! It's horrific how much we have lost our minds and information systems to fiction content.

“Educators may bring upon themselves unnecessary travail by taking a tactless and unjustifiable position about the relation between scientific and religious narratives. We see this, of course, in the conflict concerning creation science. Some educators representing, as they think, the conscience of science act much like those legislators who in 1925 prohibited by law the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. In that case, anti-evolutionists were fearful that a scientific idea would undermine religious belief. Today, pro-evolutionists are fearful that a religious idea will undermine scientific belief. The former had insufficient confidence in religion; the latter insufficient confidence in science. The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods and have different purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.” ― Neil Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, September 26, 1995

We had these problems worked out by teachers and educators in the 1980's and 1990's. But we are drowning in so much fiction storytelling / fiction memes in year 2025 that people can no longer locate and recognize the non-fiction educators and teachers on the very subject of mixing fiction and non-fiction! It's horrific how much we have lost our minds and information systems to fiction content.