For a general population of Americans being called an atheist is because they do not believe in deities.
Let me give you a progressive viewpoint on the subject.
A couple of points I would like to bring up.
What are the common factors of what atheists understand about the bible?
Mostly, what they understand is Pauline ideas that have been miss translated. And ideas from Christian Movements mostly in the mid-1800’s.
Example: my learning experience. Retired a couple decades ago. Had time to take on a couple hobbies. One was to fully understand religion. The reason was that my family is highly religious. I am not.
My first step was to read and fully understand the bible. I bought all the reference books. Was not after other people’s viewpoints. I wanted my own viewpoints based upon all the facts that I could gather. Really got into research. Spending long days, calling experts across the US and Israel to verify that I was on track. After a couple of years, I leveled off because I knew that it would take a decade for some of the ideas, I was dealing with to be brought out publicly by the experts. And that has been happening. Religious experts are energetically moving the idealism of religion today faster than the public can keep up.
If I would have to guess, I have spent close to 7,400 hours studying religion. Fully enjoy the research today. Who wouldn’t want to learn about their ancestors of the past and not get bogged down in today’s psychological religious traps.
In this time, I only got a few pages into the first book of the Hebrew Bible. Fully read at least forty other books and parts of many more. Most of my research was done by internet.
It was like learning a new language. Hard at first. Then simple to understand once you were into it daily.
What helped was having to deal with my friends, who were preachers. They thought they needed to convert me. Kind of went the other way. Still the best of friends until covid took them away.
God was just a word that meant “knowledge”. Once the Upper Gods were no longer around the Knowledge began to deteriorate. Mankind understood that preserving “knowledge” was what the people wanted. Common factor is that most religions that are somewhat known to Americans are based upon trying to preserve the Holy Grail or in the case of Pauline Christianity the rules of laws passed down from pre-history.
Jesus claimed God is in all of us. Which brings up the question about how many types of knowledge are there?
Genesis explains and warns us about losing the Holy Grail. Which brings up the question of how many types of “us” are there?
Old religion is nothing more than the science of mankind, civilization, and history being passed down by tradition.
To understand past religions, one must understand the subject matter which is “knowledge” and “Homo Sapiens” as our understanding of the Upper Gods are limited.
Unlike every other human species, Homo sapiens does not have a true type specimen. In other words, there is not a particular Homo sapiens individual that researchers recognize as being the specimen that gave Homo sapiens its name. Smithsonian
If the Smithsonian says there are 21, then you can be sure the diversity is much greater. For instance, the recently discovered dwarf human species Homo luzonensis, who is known from just a few bones from a cave in the Philippines, is not included on the Smithsonian’s list.
Some of the Holly Grail common factors are:
Hyperthymesia
Polydactyly
Prodigious savant
Why take the time to study old religion? There are professors today who claim our ancestors were much smarter than people are today.
The savants show us just how much humans skills can deal with knowledge.
Civilization today is close to having the technical expertise to possibly regenerate the Holy Grail into the population. In other words, change mankind.
