Stages and Phases
in the Development of Atheism

by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

"Our duty is to believe that for which we have sufficient evidence, and to suspend our judgment when we have not." --Sir John Lubbock, British naturalist--

All it boils down to is information and misinformation, the absence and possession of either. All of us get born with no more than what nature provides for us, as naive atheists, until we receive our training and indoctrination into whatever religion prevails around us. That may seem obvious to you, but the religious will work hard to deny it, and some of us will agree with them.

A lot of effort gets put into trying to understand the phenomenon that we know of as 'atheism'. Atheists have, for years, bandied about such terms as 'hard', 'soft', 'strong', 'weak', 'positive', 'negative' and so on and on. And, on. Arguments rage hot about it, people take positions, apologia appears, and we have a quasi religion to support.

There's no need for that, we are not theists, we have arrived at atheism (those of us old enough to have made a decision about it) as a result of a lot of honest contemplation that we ought to bring to bear upon understanding our own selves. Can you think of one good reason why not?

Why should we not understand our own selves? If we understand words as conveyers of information that we can pass human to human in various forms, we can apply that idea to this problem and test it while doing so. At the outset, atheism carries no information, it is simply an absence of a certain type of information related to the various gods mankind has contrived all throughout historical time. Beliefs acceptive of any one makes a theist; the condition of being pure and free of any such beliefs makes an atheist.

To avoid the previous arguments, let's call such an empty-headed person a 'naive' atheist and say that represents the period of development that occurs between birth and the first utterance of a word. "Hewwo, you widdle atheist, daddy and mommy wuvs you an' we're gonna teach you about Jesus." Theism begins about now.

Once in a while, lessons about Jesus (or Muhammad, Diana, Fidel, Baal, etc.) do not stick in a mind that cannot be satisfied with non-answers to nagging questions, and a search for truth begins. Some switch religions. Some never find it, and insist no truth exists. Some of those who switch continue to search until the entire idea gets abandoned. Those few become atheists, no longer naive.

It is not 'disbelief' at this point, just simply that belief has gone, become absent, has vaporized and left, usually to leave behind agnosticism in a person who will insist no one can know if gods exist and if any religion is true. Many remain stuck at this stage, lose interest in the whole question, and never advance any further.

Prodded by aggressive theists and their own need to know, others mature into a full-blown disbelief as they gather and process information about the various religions and work to discover truth in any of them. The various terms that have long been bandied about represent attempts to reach an understanding of this stage of the information gathering process.

The problem inherent to them is that they all treat human beings as immutable in whatever form they were found in at a certain point in time. They do not recognize human beings as malleable, plastic, alive, and capable to continue the journeys they set out on, wandering in circles though they may be. The journey that led to a point in time that whatever term applies to them is not acknowledged, and they are presented as rooted at that spot.

We have, by now, a picture of atheism as a quest for information that spans over time from naive 'baby' atheism to various stages of maturity. What represents naive is absence of information; what represents maturity is information well earned and considered; what represents religion is misinformation and apologia (slanted misinformation).

It is my opinion that this kind of view presents atheists as people concerned with personal growth, capable and interested in truth and the process of gathering knowledge that has carried them toward it, that have stood up to the tests and battles carried to them by aggressive theists that serve mainly to prickle their interest and keep it alive. It is easy to abandon the trek, to jump into the next bandwagon to pass honking by, and enjoy the many tempting comforts offered by hypocrisy.

We are talking about strong people, people whose faith is in themselves and their ability to learn, make decisions, and take full responsibility for whatever will be the results. They have not yielded to the temptation. They have learned to recognize and shun misinformation for what it is, and for what it is not: It is not the truth.

Truth is a goal, an aspiration, not something one can possess. To aspire to it and be maligned for that honorable trait seems like a condition one could call 'evil'. To not recognize it by attempting to apply names like 'hard', 'soft', 'strong', 'weak', 'positive', 'negative' only serves the purposes had by the maligners, to advance the causes of misinformation and whatever vested interests that support those. So, what it really boils down to is, a religious person is really an atheist whose head has been contaminated with misinformation.

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"To deny a right to the experience of pleasure is immoral unless that denial can be justified by a valid presentation of how pain will result from that experience in an amount that would render the expected pleasure regrettable; or, if it can be shown that pain will be induced in others innocent of any involvement. The role of science in moral issues should be to test that, predict that, and find harmless ways to demonstrate that."

— L. H. Whitling in the eBook, Secular Morality —