Reply #26: Actually few people really understand Zoroastrianism

[MineralMan]

these days. It's pretty much a dead religion, having been supplanted by Judaism and Christianity, which may owe Zorastrianism a great debt.

Oddly enough, though, when I was a young man, studying the religions of the world, it was Zoroastrianism and its parental sort of relationship to Judaism and Christianity that informed my eventual atheism.

I posed that conundrum to several theologians during that period, including a couple of prominent ones. They had no satisfactory answers, which led me to believe that all religions are cultural artifacts. Once that was clear in my mind, it became impossible to believe any longer that any supernatural entities existed. Truly, it grew more and more clear to me that man creates deities in his own image, rather than the converse.

I've found, over the years, that most serious atheists have gone through a similar process in arriving at their disbelief. Often, if you want a good discussion on religion, consulting an atheist will give you pretty good one. Either that or an academic theologian. They're fun, too, when you want a good discussion of religious beliefs.