by Lloyd Harrison Whitling

First, let’s find out what it means to be a naked atheist. How does one arrive at that?

A long time ago (about 600 years, give or take a few decades), the leaders of a very powerful church organization made a deal with some millinery folks that they would promote reasons to purchase cloth in exchange for increased membership from their work force. It goes beyond that, though, I think.

We've got to remember our main three Abrahamic religions came from the desert, where people learned long ago that to avoid searing their skin under the hot sun, they had a choice between spending daylight indoors, or wearing a portable tent so they could move about. In other words, in that place and at that time, clothing was a lessening of restrictions, not an increase.

They being very intelligent folk, more than likely a few of them sooner or later observed that cancers did not appear on the skin that stayed covered up. What better to do to fight this strange evil than to enforce the wearing of clothing, the growing of beards among men, and the covering of women's tender faces. For the most part, the evil would stay away from those who followed this rule, and attacked those who would freely violate it.

That some would inevitably be attacked anyways would only mean they had somehow sinned against the gods, and were being punished. That those same people would know they had carefully followed every rule and still gotten punished could only mean one thing: There were sins in other areas of their lives. The number of identifiable evils would increase over a long span of time, all of them being perpetrated by invisible means, and that could only mean one thing: We must be surrounded by an invisible world inhabited by all kinds of beings of some supernatural form. Whatever sins we perpetrate must somehow interfere with that world and upset its inhabitants. All of the religions we have today resulted from mankind's attempts to comprehend that with no way to measure the results, or to verify the rectitude of their assessments. Even today, men of high station try to explain existence in esoteric terms while inventing new words to convey their ideas: so, we have branes, multiverses, parallel universes, and other such invisible realms we cannot measure nor verify anything about, all being offered to explain invisible phenomena beyond our comprehension.

Enter a new religion. Some call it 'Scientism'. I'm a Natheist. I don't buy it. I don't even believe in 'atheism'. Most people who proclaim themselves atheist accept wholesale all of the above; they don't accept the reasons as real, but they swallow the results without question.

Well, questions is what I do believe in. I believe in asking them, and then asking questions about the answers. I believe in truth, not as something that exists, but as a destination toward which our questions should take us. In this stage of civilization we all share, I believe we will never approach truth without a restart. A complete, fresh restart means we must strip ourselves bare of all our notions, and all the actions and fetishes that result from ancient guesses, and try it again while using the tools developed over the course of the millenniums. That requires us to strip down to the bare essentials, and aim ourselves toward exposure of the Naked Truth.

The introduction of that into my own life required me to act upon it, and decide whether or not I would follow through. I became a nudist after I dared, and found myself still bound by restrictions that increased in number, and faring worse than had I never embarked on this personal experiment. I discovered another poorly understood aspect of nakedness called 'naturism'– an 'ism' without an inherent philosophy beyond the naked love of Nature.

Naturism differs from nudism in several ways, I discovered, and I found inherent to it lovers of nature from all walks of life, each professing any of several pagan, pantheist, Druid or Wiccan nature-based faiths. Although there are exceptions, Christian people seem to find a home in the more structured environment inherent to nudism. I have yet to find another Natheist— a Naturist Atheist, somebody who has what it takes to ask the total questions and apply the answers to his or her own life. I regret that. It seems to me the depth of my rejection of religious edicts ought to be more normal than rare. So much plays against it, though, it's a wonder anyone even makes a part-way effort at it.

Memetics plays a large part in that. Framing metaphors plays along with memes to generate fear that keeps most of us toeing the line and ready to jump, while we consider the vivid-but-absent images our self-appointed moral watch-dogs have learned to paint with their carefully selected words. Our inherent drive to do the right thing makes a handy handle they've learned to grab onto while they convince us about our sinful natures and the evil demons lurking in our hearts. Were that story true, we wouldn't care and they could have no effect on us. We do care, a fact that proves the story to be untrue.

We are animals, not vegetables or rocks. Our drives are those of animals, but we suppress them by artificial means that end up doing us more harm than good, in most cases. Rather than apply science to the development of rules, we have applied opinion and fright. We mock the studious, and elevate the status of those who espouse ignorance and denigrate reason, and who know nothing about science beyond what they've been told is wrong with it. Shed of our natural sources of joy, we waddle about in our overstuffed bodies while we wonder what causes our plight. We need to promote Natheism. In our cultural stupor, we have no idea what it is, and so it scares us.

In our artifice-based cultures, the steps required to achieve Natheism are made dangerous by a lack of tried and true information. The information we do have available is all rendered questionable by the presence of overabundant forces of evil moralism in our midst, who busy themselves at the generation and dissemination of questionable doctrines supported only by their various religions. Moralism is a doctrine generated by strict father advocates, who insist we are all inherently evil and need to be forced into compliance with their sick vision of humanity.

Anything unorthodox a budding Natheist may attempt will, of course, prove them right, because we start out regarding all information generated by authorities as being suspect. At a young age, any inexperienced person is still naive enough to believe nothing will happen to him or her, nothing will go wrong while he or she takes matters into personal hand to test the waters. In many cases, the loss of a daring, bright, and enquiring mind is the result.

I count myself lucky. Being not a really brave person, I held back on the strong stuff until I could observe what happened to others. That caused me to avoid strong drugs and shy away from introducing chemical mixtures into my blood stream. It also caused me to avoid sexual experimentation and to remain true to the woman I fell in love with half a century ago. I am not, as I said, a brave person. I also am not a really very smart person. Knowing that about myself made me become a very careful person in search of a goal, and I have chased it all my life. I wanted to find my way along a path toward The Naked Truth.

I have found some rules anyone venturing into untested waters (at this stage of the game, the phrase 'untested waters' is only meaningful thanks to the superabundance of moralism in our midst), that I will offer here for your consideration:

1) Know your goal, and make sure your reasons match the steps required for your advancement toward it.

2) Honesty and trustworthiness: The important person not to lie to is yourself. If you can trust yourself, you will act in such a way that others will learn to trust you, if they are themselves also trustworthy. If and when you lie to yourself, acknowledge it and earn your own forgiveness by making an honest effort to set things right. To do less is to dishonor the goal you have set, and to lessen your own chance to achieve it.

3) Responsibility: Teach yourself to become aware of how human relationships work, so you can observe that what you expect from others may not be what they expect from you. Assume responsibility where it is not obviously required, and make it obvious to others you consider yourself responsible for the effects of your own deeds and will act accordingly. The responsibility to steer yourself on the pathway to your goal belongs to you and no one else.

4) Respect: the only way to gain respectability is to earn and give respect, which requires each one of us to learn tolerance and to not demand that others be a clone of our own selves. If you fail to set a goal that you respect, reorganize yourself to see what went wrong. Look for a respectable goal if you don't already have one in mind, and work to establish that and tend to it. Remember, it is you who must respect your goal, and no one else.

5) Honor: Learn to know and practice your own set of ideals, and make them a standard to live by. Those ideals are best that assure maintenance of your own welfare so that you can provide the best kind of nurturance for all those things and people you care about, and for the community you share with others. Life sometimes imposes too many requirements, and you must honor that which is most important by your recognition of it, and let slide those things that matter little if they matter at all. What matters most is your lifetime goal, which is yours to honor if anyone would honor it at all.

6) Understanding: Learning is meaningless without an understanding of how to apply it. Learning comes through the head, and understanding through the body by the practice of what you learn. Learn what is required to achieve your lifetime goal, and practice to gain the understanding you need to get there. To understand also gives you a sense of the value of others' contributions, and of how you can increase your value by your contributions to them.

7) Community: Our lives are increased by the presence of others in them, a fact that demands to be rewarded by sharing them in our concerns and by the practice of empathy.