Colligion

Like the gods, atheism exists mainly in human imaginations. Like the gods, atheism would vanish with the disappearance of religion. Also like the gods, atheism is more of a concern for the religious than for those who are not. Unlike the gods, atheism relies on certain natural principles and can be recognized as an attitude about religion. Unlike the gods, atheism can be described and, once noted, be tested for those conditions that give rise to it. Also unlike the gods, then, even though possessing no material existence, atheism is something real.

Atheists cannot avoid encounters with the rabid misinformation that flies on fetid wings all around the Earth, whose droppings writhe with putrid and poisonous memes that quickly take root in receptive minds wherever they can be found. Simply for the privilege to express our hard-won opinions requires assurances and explanations never demanded of anyone else. We risk making an offense with mild things no one else would ever be taken to task for when they say worse than the opposite. We stand accused of endangering human rights by those whose rights we work hard to defend. We are accused of immorality, amorality, incarnations of evil, and more, by rabble rousing ranters shouting the opposite of truth.

And few of their audiences ever get to know the difference.

Should I resent that? Most likely. I know it outrages others, but I have learned that is a counterproductive response, that it gives me a chance to talk about my ideas to perfect strangers and maybe plant some healthy seeds where the putrid might have prepared some fertile ground.

Will my site be offensive? To some, I can guarantee it will, no matter how cautiously I proceed. I have learned that, for myself, where offense is felt, there exists a chance to learn, a chance to discover better defenses for your own position, or to correct that position and align it better with reality. To reach this point in my life, I have been offended many times with something I had to change my mind about. I have tried to steer a gentle course here, but I did not build this road and cannot avoid all of its bumps.

The radical religious right's aggressive attacks on those persuaded by other views of reality have effectively elevated them to high prominence in the United States, a gain of apparent advantage that may ultimately undo them, but frightens the citizens of the world who know their history. Their campaigns of semantic terrorism against the rest of the world have stirred normally apathetic atheists into considering exactly how it is we go about developing our own systems of thought, and actually discussing and writing down our answers. We are joining groups, forming associations, and putting the results onto the Internet. We even have a lobbyist or two, just to lessen the influence of those who work so hard to stifle us and keep us hidden where little children and flighty old women won't fawn over the gentle people that most of us are. I'll bet you didn't know that! Be very careful: They've trained some of us to bite.

By any realistic standards, and in spite of accusations to the contrary, we can show ourselves to be moral, highly principled people with high values and aspirations. We realize that while we do have principles to guide us, most of them have never been assembled into an easily grasped document made available to the common person so that very many people, including atheists, are ever aware of them. We also realize we have never made an effort to detail just exactly how we go about arriving at those principles. This makes an untenable condition in which most of us have little to use for our own defense. If you follow this document to its end, you will learn about my answer to that: those principles, one common, heretofore unnamed secular method of thought, *colligion, and a basic philosophy upon which it is built.

While fiction may disagree with probability, truth must never. While most possibilities will remain forever imaginary, it is one's own senses, aided by technological innovations, that determine natural probability. Although we have no other verifiable means of self-guidance, religions seek to lead their followers toward denial and distrust of their senses. That leads directly to abandonment of self-confidence to fealty, allegiance sworn to others who are often scoundrels, and the demanded trust in their hoped-for good word accredited as 'faith', misunderstood to mean "faith in (a) god".

Atheism results from looking at the world with the full force of one's own natural senses, and reaching conclusions about what one can be shown to be true rather than taking at face value the word of someone that one has never met, and generally heard about only from third parties at best. It results from noticing, while growing up, that people seem to be hiding stuff from you without satisfying your curiosity as to why; that they keep telling you things that you later learn can't be true; or that they seem to reserve privileges for themselves for no better reason than that you are too young for that, or that children should be seen and not heard.

Since religion results from taking a stranger's word, or the word of many strangers, at face value, it imposes rules against questioning those words for its own protection. The religious receive their indoctrinations from people that nature has prepared human beings to trust: their parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, and to whomever all those people have granted authority. At least, early on, all children will normally trust whomever their elders have demonstrated their own trust before them.

 Most often, that trust relies on their word about what somebody they never met was said to have said sometime in the long-distant past. Sometimes what that long ago person was said to have said makes no sense on its own, and so it gets 'interpreted' by other strangers and then repeated to those who are expected to take the interpretations at face value, even though it strongly disagrees with what some other strangers said differently that was later 'interpreted' to most of the rest of the world.

There is very little to colligate in a factual sense in their behalf. None of these people can put forth anything but literary matter and apologia, misrepresented as "facts", to show you theirs is the one true interpretation, and so most of us choose to stick with something that seems close to what we were told as children, that we took at face value and obediently never questioned while we grew up.

When we look at some of the stories most people believe (and there are all kinds of them) don’t we wonder how they can believe them and still deny all truth for Paul Bunyon, Jack and the Beanstock, or Little Red Riding Hood. We must wonder about that, even though we know most of the stories they do believe were told to them by the interpreters associated with their childhood raising. Still there are stories just like those, from the same time and place, they do not believe, and we can see that, too, in the same way: that their childhood interpretors have condemned them.

As children grow toward maturity, their skepticism increases. They hear their parents discussing various issues, and observe the nature of whatever they provide for evidence and proof. The religious turn to a large body of literature when they seek verification of their own positions, and to dispute the veracity of someone else’s claims. Most such literature is that which contains the creeds for their cults and sects, as approved by their trusted religious leaders. No one disputes the veracity of the literature itself, except for those belonging to a different sect or cult whose body of literature may be entirely dissimilar.

Atheists see that the basis upon which those bodies of literature are built has no foundation in reality. None of it can be tested or in any other way verified to be true by any natural standards.

 Children who remain unsatisfied with the answers handed to them will retain the natural curiosity that drives them to learn, and will apply it toward obtaining that satisfaction in their later years. Some will demand real answers and will insist they be informed about how those answers had been gotten, and why some answers are right and others wrong. They will learn how to judge what is probable and what is fiction, and how to tell what is myth and what is dependable fact.

A small but growing number will learn to rely on their own assessments about such things and to doubt that which they cannot be shown by the use of their own natural senses. Those who have learned to question the origins of the large bodies of literature the religious turn to for their verification and proof will be those who have learned that they belong to just one of many groups who question the value of any particular body of that literature.

So, the big difference between atheism and religion is not in anything but that one approach to learning, the difference between gullibility and skepticism. The religious cannot show it was not crazy men who first told the stories upon which they rely for their evidence to support their claims of rectitude, nor can atheists claim otherwise. There are no facts to colligate about it, nor any colligated facts that support definitive answers. There are only principles that will lead to confident resolutions unless they are violated.

Atheists are, by and large, secular people. By that, I mean to use secular in its original, religious sense, that referred to concepts and opinions that arise from natural reasoning, rather than as from approved sources for theology. The unschooled opinions of clerics were considered "secular" by the higher-ups, especially when they ran counter to official doctrines. People determined to be responsible for the consequences of their own thoughts and actions will demand the freedoms required for self-reliance to attain its fullest heights. It was self-reliance that earned recalcitrant clerics the title 'secular' for their supposedly wayward opinions, and also the atheists of today.

Secularists do not feel secure with untenable answers that supersede all corrective processes to insult the integrity of their own senses. Atheology, or secularity, rather than a process of religion, develops in each individual as a process of principled colligation, wherein seemingly isolated, testable and logical facts assemble into a  body of natural knowledge upon which the individual learns to rely and yearns to increase. We do this almost as a matter of course, as guided by our own moral sensibilities, some of us more aware than others that, unless we know the rules, we will misguide ourselves because of the absence of well-grounded mentors.

Whereas religions demand hardheaded gullibility in their adherents, colligation demands skepticism at the start and as an ongoing condition of learning true, dependable knowledge for an understanding of nature’s ways to ensure humanity’s intellectual fitness for survival. Although it may seem otherwise, colligation is not religion but is a practical method for obtaining and advancing knowledge when applied to the testable real world.

And, religion is definitely not a form of rational colligation. It is a distinct form with similar, even in their differences, practices. Colligation will have the same relationship with 'colligion' (a word we've just contrived) as relegation has with religion. Look:

rel·e·gate  tr.v. rel·e·gat·ed, rel·e·gat·ing, rel·e·gates. 1. To assign to an obscure place, position, or condition. 2. To assign to a particular class or category; classify. 3. To refer or assign (a matter or task, for example) for decision or action. 4. To send to a place of exile; banish. [Middle English relegaten, to banish, from Latin, to send, depute -- rel"e·ga"tion n. (American Heritage)

Religious knowledge is about the obscure: Heaven is an obscure place. God occupies an inscrutable position in an obscure manner. Most unanswerable questions get relegated to God.  The religious live an entire existence assigned to leaders who have 'interpreted' God's desires as to how they will act, and who have imposed credos upon which such decisions get based. Sinners, heretics and infidels all get banished from the religion. The process differs from colligation:

col·li·gate  tr.v. col·li·gat·ed, col·li·gat·ing, col·li·gates. 1. To tie or group together. 2. Logic. To bring (isolated facts) together by an explanation or hypothesis that applies to them all. [Latin, to tie, bind --col"li·ga"tion n. (American Heritage)

While religion assigns its sources to obscure places that require 'interpretation' and 'meditation' to comprehend, secularity derives its sources from that in which we all are immersed, and which remains tangible. While religion seeks to give its assumptions meaning with literary facts, colligion seeks to discover what facts really mean in the real world. The greatest and most notable activity of humankind has been the millenniums of effort expended upon the task of gaining an understanding of that which we call 'nature', of which we recognize ourselves as a part. Religion and colligion (relegation and colligation) have been the two very distinct processes by which we have attempted that. Religion is past-oriented answers from previous generations, now findable only in outdated documentation. Colligion is about now, with an eye toward the future.

Knowledge relegated to the obscure—the so-named occult and mystical—relies on faith in the interpreters and has been shown time and again in many ways to be undependable (a criticism those very same people level against science). Faith in a god is not part of it, except that it has been defined that way by the interpreters to hide their part in the process; faith is solely in the interpreters' veracity, and has resulted in a myriad of cults and sects of all descriptions who share mainly a name for their religious creeds and not much else overall.

That is because the source —contrived to be "the word of God"—remains obscure to the average disciple. That condition allows the average follower to be manipulated by how their doctrines get presented, and which parts get emphasized, by leaders with questionable intentions. We can see examples of that all around us, by looking at the world's problems and following events back to their original causes. Try understanding America that way, and see how the failures and downhill slide our own society has taken can be directly attributed to the heel-plowing foot draggers whose credos condemn any real attempts to find solutions, while never giving them a chance to prove themselves.

Colligion, compared to religion, is a relatively new process. Skepticism has been with humanity down through the ages, but has never achieved its current status without the scientific process to support it. Until now, skepticism has been an individual process that appeared only spottily in any society and remained mostly hidden from view because it was so condemned as to be beyond consideration. Science has given it a method and a uniform, verifiable approach that the average individual can learn to adopt. The easy fundamentals, once learned, provide a wholesome view of existence that requires no interpreters, but only instructors to show how to make it work.

Science has granted it credence. I have been only too happy to have given it a name. Colligion has produced all our modern medicines and medical practices, our knowledge of the universe and nature that has led to modern technology and the ability to produce food enough for our overpopulated Earth, and most of the materials from which we build our homes and workplaces. Religion has produced wars and poverty, spread of diseases into virgin territories, and mental and physical illnesses. Does that not make the difference worth understanding and accepting?

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Copyright ©2007 by Lloyd Harrison Whitling. All rights reserved.