Religion does not make great scientific discoveries that advance mankind's survival and comfort on our planet because they have only one answer for any question, and that (in the main, the answer already given) is the answer. They claim we cannot prove a negative but, even after thousands of years of working at it, they cannot prove a positive. That doesn't stop them from believing it, it just makes them unconvincing, enough so that people are leaving their ranks and joining ours but not the other way around (but for a few apostates who visited us long enough to feel entitled to proclaim themselves "saved from the horrors of atheism" upon their repentance from our evil ways, evil in this case being misinterpreted to mean anything that works against their particular chosen religion).

We need to stop fooling ourselves now. We atheists will never accomplish much until we start living and thinking in all the ways we would have, had we never been influenced by their belligerent presence. Maybe it does sound like wishful thinking about wild pipe dreams to anybody who has never given it much thought, but there is a lot we can do. The first is to understand just what they have done to us and how forceful and pervasive that has been to modify our thoughts and feelings away from being healthy, natural humans.

Most of us are more like them than we are what we ought to be were they never present. Example: In spite of our denials, we do believe in stuff just as fervently and powerfully as any religious persons. The difference is, as Thom Blaylock set forth in his The Honest Man's Philosophy, the manner in which we attain to belief.

Directly attached to that difference is our own perception about the nature of what we call 'faith'. Rather than reject such terminology outright, and then rebuke me for being so brazen as to find a natural use for it, we would get farther along the path to knowledge if we'd stop to study the various words we decry as "religious" and come to some kind of agreeable understanding about their meanings.

After all, if something holds some kind of meaning and that meaning is real, we do ourselves a large disservice by not accommodating that into our own lives. Such stuff that arrives free, with only a requirement that we learn to understand it in a proper fashion, is stuff that only a fool or a wastrel would put down as though it might be dirty. A massive portion of the answer to the question our subtitle poses is found in that practice by itself, and in all to which that practice leads.

Many of us arrived at our apostasy as a result of our inquiring minds. We wanted to know the five w's about everything anybody would tell us. We wanted to be shown what is true and why somebody believed it. Lots of stuff never got shown to us, and lots of contradictions could not be ironed out to our satisfaction until, one day, as though it needed to slap us awake, we realized, "Hey! I am an atheist! I have looked at all those things, and none of them are true. That's why I can't make myself believe them!"

And so, we arrive at the nature of our faith, to be found by the asking of a simple question, "Do I believe myself or them?" "Do I trust myself or am I self-delusive?" "Is something so wrong with my five senses that I cannot rely on them or my ability to figure things out, so that I have to depend on others to tell me what is true, even when I find it impossible to believe?"

However firm the denial nor how wily the apologetics, faith is never directly about gods. It has little to do with religion, except as a religious statement. Faith is always about people. It is about the trust you have for all the people who have taught to you the things you know and believe in your life: your parents, uncles, aunts, gran'ma and gran'pa, pastors, teachers, the man on the box you sometimes see downtown, your newspaper and TV, the cruel-sounding man on the radio, are only the most obvious members of a big, long list.

Few of them seemed to agree with everything the rest told you is true. All of them disagreed with some part of everything all the rest told you is true, so that no part of that escaped disagreement by somebody, not even the part about whether or not God is real, a male or female, and where God lives. You were told by all, "You just have to have faith." Nobody would tell you why or how; they always just told you to believe "in (their particular version of) god". You must have faith, in other words, in the composite picture that rose up in your mind from all their words.

But, in your particular mind (as it must in most) that composite picture turns out to be of nothing. You drew a blank about the impossible improbable. Does that make you out to be a bad artist, or the rest of the world to be liars? Most of us refuse to think of Mom and Dad, and dear old Gran'Pa and Gran'Ma in that way. We cannot think of them as telling lies. We know of no reasons why they should. We must be wrong about the people we regard as being the most important in all the world. They did pretty much agree with each other, at least on all the major points. They have to be right. We must be wrong.

Most of us lost faith in ourselves at that point, and life began a new struggle to retain enough of it to accommodate our own survival needs while we went along with the demands of the religious. A few of us went on testing, testing, testing until we became convinced that the real question we needed to ask is, "Why are they lying to me?"

Faith: We have already looked at the word 'faith', and perhaps have observed how important it is for us to recognize it as still applicable to our needs. It does, in fact, enhance our understanding of our relationship with the rest of the world in that respect, by pitting self-confidence against faith in others. Something that has gone unmentioned here is the manner we open ourselves up to religious attacks by denying this word any value in our own lives, when they begin to use our denials as an 'in' to discredit everything of atheism. Our proper answer: "I have faith in myself; and it is not God that I doubt nearly so much as it is you and your wild tales."

Belief: Atheism is not a system of belief and is not a creed, but that does not mean atheists attain to no beliefs or creeds. As stated, atheists tend to arrive at belief in a self-reliant manner incorporating skeptical questioning and validation, and building from testing that to gain a reasonable picture of what works. New information meets the same rigorous onslaught as the old survived before it can be adopted or used to modify beliefs already accredited. When we cannot personally test all things, we do have a loose set of principles we follow, and to which we subject new ideas when we find them interesting, usually without ever realizing we have done so.

So, when the religious accuse us of having beliefs, once we have finished having them describe them to us, we then can tell them, "You may have noticed the things you claim I believe in have all been demonstrated as true. That's why my beliefs are about things that are real. Can you say the same about your beliefs, and show me why they're true?"

Religion: While atheism is not a religion, atheists are among the most religious people in the world. Religion is about belief (see belief), but it is about unverifiable belief. If belief can be verified, it then is science. What makes a belief atheistic instead of theological is nothing more than the absence of a god in whatever edicts are inherent to it. That's all of importance that is different between the so-called "atheistic communism" practiced by the USSR or China, and the "Christian Communism" of the time-frame in which the Christ story was set.

Verifiable beliefs depend on correct interpretation of data from the senses with which we arrived on this planet, and that we depend upon for our own welfare. We must rely on what they tell us above all else, and dismiss the tales that people tell us to scare us into doing their bidding while forsaking the needs of our own selves and those who depend on us for their best survival. Many philosophies atheists adopt must be included in that dictum, for they all work against the mass of us in the long run.

Sacred: A word that means dedicated or set apart for worship of a deity. Sure it does. You betcha. Religion steals our words and makes them God-words and we don't demand them back! The sacred trust has nothing at all to do with gods, it has to do with performing as promised to other people. As sacred cows may be how we have been trying to treat religious edicts, that we should not question nor criticize them, and follow suit on all their demands even when we disbelieve them, but that is what I told about at the beginning of this piece. What we should hold sacred is that which proves worthy of our respect, and no more than that. That would be people who attend to their sacred duties, their sacred responsibilities, the sacred love of their life, the sacred vow they once made, and the sacred debt the wealthy owe to the society that enabled their amassment of riches, in the USA to be paid back in the form of taxes set according to the nature of their enablement.

Sin: A word most atheists will insist to be religious only and without question, with which the common dictionary description mainly agrees. Sin must, however, be recognized as useful also to secular people. In part, Oxford American describes it as "something contrary to common sense," while all dictionaries refer it to the "breaking of moral law." However radical an atheist we may be, we all have a sense of right and wrong, and so a sense of morality that can (and often will) be sinned against. The most righteous of the religious, by their own standards, will often be seen as sinning against humanity and against their own heirs, were a secular moral system used as a referent to regard their actions.

Evil: More than just an opposite to 'good', evil gets associated with descriptors like 'ruin', 'injury', 'pain', 'harmful', 'ominous', 'misfortune', 'blameworthy', 'anger', 'spite', 'malicious'…. Evil refers more to the attitude that leads to such conditions as those words describe, than it does to mere 'badness' of an action or a person. Does evil exist? No, but it can be the best way to describe the effects of religion upon humanity, and ought to be so used and understood about something that can be so easily demonstrated and documented.

Righteousness: A buzzword for the religious, being righteous refers to that which meets specific moral standards, or the common standards for right and wrong. For secular people, whose standards are most often gained as individuals rather than as edicts handed down to a group, righteousness would equate with the absence of hypocrisy observed in those persons who live according to what they describe as 'right'.

Virtue: Such a righteous person would be referred to as 'virtuous' and regarded as trustworthy and honorable. Associated with such terms as 'excellence', efficacious, 'effective', 'good', 'beneficial', 'quality', 'ideal', virtue refers to something proper and fitting for the place or use under consideration, as something or someone that can be trusted for a specific task (such as the task of living).

Copyright ©2005 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.