@Anastasia-Smith said in To the christians here: Do you know a rational reason not to believe in angels?:
There might have been a time where I thought angels, demons, vampires and werewolves were a thing but that time was way back. What I believe is that people are allowed to have their own opinions (if they're not messing around with someone else's interests) and ridiculing them for that is completely irrational. I mean mind your own business goddammit 🙂. Being a Christian I'm surrounded with people who hold completely opposing opinions for different things and well most of them do believe in angels I suppose.
Well you might be right about why many people don't believe in angels: due to the fact that my family did not pretend that santa or vampires or any of those things were real, angels never fell into the same category, the category of children's stories. But then again, I was an agnostic for quite a few years, so I too did not believe in angels for a long time.
As for why I don't believe in angels...I guess its because I HAVEN'T SEEN ANY(according to my power of reasoning). The attributes attached with these invisible agents are far from reality. I mean people have different beliefs about their characteristics, ascribing to them incompatible attributes..plus the only basis for belief is the subjective impression that "this is so"..
The basis for the christian belief in angels is – not surprisingly – the accounts of the bible. I mean ofc people, especially in the esoteric world, have created quite the mess of beliefs about them, like certain angels bringing wealth and what not.
The biblic accounts show quite the different image. Actually they show two kinds of images.
All angels that appear in stories, like the three men visiting Abraham, or Rafael traveling with Tobit's son, just as well as the angels in the ghospels or the acts appear simply as young men. In the ghospels they wear strangely white clothes. No wings, no nothing. The only thing that "outs" them as angels, is the fact that they just appear and vanish as they wish, and that they are always in the right places. And the fact, that whoever meets them is shocked and realizes that something outworldly has happened, even Mary.
All angels that appear in visions (Daniel, Apocalypse), tend to have wings, not only two but more, and they sometimes look like men, sometimes like strange creatures. And God sends them to do things, which they then do. Period. No more attributes than that are given.
And then guardian angels: we believe in guardian angels because of the one simple phrase of Jesus which he said about children: "that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father who is in heaven." (Matthew 18:10).
Now I personally think you have a big problem, if you are christian and do not take the accounts of the bible seriously – at least the ghospels. And by seriously I do not mean to think that they are complete or perfectly transmitted, but are collections of stories that really happened somewhat as they were written. And this clearly includes angels talking to people.
It is quite simple to see: If you say angels did not talk to people, you are applying your personal criterium (haven't seen any), and use that to filter the bible. Then you might also apply another criterium, like miracles do not happen (haven't seen any), ergo Jesus did not do any miracles. Then demons disappear too ofc. And there you are believing 20% of what's written in the bible. Yup, Jesus drove out quite a bit of demons and talked about hell a lot. And then maybe not believe in Jesus having been resurrected bodily but only spiritually and there you have it:
I mean, who takes a book, says 90% of what's written in there is not true, only those 10% I selected for my own set of reasons, cannot be called anything but irrational. And the rest, you do not take as it is written, but require complicated theological theories to imply something else. I mean who would believe such a story?
IMHO, there are only two rational standpoints toward the things that are written in the bible: agnosticism (not believing anything that's written), and actually believing that the accounts of the ghospel and the acts have actually happened.