Are people really atheists, or just rejecting religion?

I am not an atheist in the sense of believing in no spiritual dimension, or believing that material reality as we can see and measure it is all there is. I think there is an entire spiritual realm overlapping our physical one, and that the part of us and of all living things that we might call a soul is part of that spirit realm.

However I am not an adherent of any organised religion and think every organised religion is full of bunkum and nonsense. And yet I do not entirely dismiss them either. For though clouded and obscured my much that is clearly nonsensical and can only be understood as allegory at best, most if not all organised religions do I think contain within them kernels of deep truths.

And in my inner musings at times I am finding myself struck by all the apparent climatical, medical, social, political, and economic calamities we seem to be increasingly facing and often bringing upon ourselves all over the world, and how this resonates with the biblical end of days prophesies. Certainly, whenever I have raised this with Christian believers, many seem convinced we are in those days, and have quoted things at me that do seem to resonate with what is happening. For example only last week in work I was chatting with a customer about this who turned out to be a believer, and she told me that it was prophesied that the seasons would no longer be recognised and would be all over the place, something about being unable to tell one season from another. An exaggeration of the current situation for sure but recognisable.

I do find myself increasingly wondering if the biblical end of days prophesies also contain some rather large kernels of truth.

For a while now I have intended to look into this further, but never seem to find the time.

The notion that the Earth and the whole of creation was created in just 6 days is such obvious nonsense, that it undermines any temptation I might have to become a true believer when Christians spout this.

For one thing there is  a wealth of evidence that suggests that the universe is well over 13 billion years old at least, whilst our Sun is only 5 billion years old. the Earth only about 4.5 billion years old. There is evidence to suggest that microbial life came into being very early on but that complex multicellular beings able to walk on land only appeared in the last few hundred million years, whilst our own species has only been around for maybe two or three hundred thousand years at most, our pre-human hominid ancestors a few million.

Clearly these are much wider timescales than 6 days.

Devout believers who might have some hope of making me sit up and listen tend to undermine their plausibility entirely when they believe something so obviously untrue according to all the evidence. True deeper truths do need to be acknowledged and understood I think, but they need to be fully consistent with material reality around us or they will just be nonsense.

Unless we are a computer simulation.

I can see that several of you are conforming to my original point. You are telling us that you don't believe in a god because you don't believe parts of the bible.

Forget the bible, forget comfort in there being an almighty, forget organised religion.

Do you think the universe was created by something, or do you think it came from nothing?

Do you find the dichotomy quite suggestive?

It suggests to me that there is a great deal we haven't scratched the surface of - or that we may be looking in entirely the wrong place, or have things upside down or inside out. However, that's all very vague and unhelpful.

I have seen atheists who fancy their hand in cosmology skating precariously over this issue. They actually have my sympathy - at least they try to make sense.

Yes and because the language was only basic so they had to describe things in what was familiar to the reader of the time. Likewise in China the language is very old, hence for dolphin we have "sea pig". We also have "fire chickens" for Christmas.

It is incomprehensible to the human mind,so god was invented.