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Not an easy question to answer, but I will give it an honest try. I think
you will be interested because this site contains little that duplicates
other sites, whether in reference to content or point of view. It seems to
me that atheism is one of the least poorly understood subjects among
atheists and theists alike, and that ought to be rectified NOW. It is a
whole lot like being black-skinned or white, and having people demand you
to explain to them why you are that color. You know you had little or
nothing to do with it, but that you are being judged according to it
rather than something actually important, and so you feel a need to
somehow explain. Good luck trying it off the cuff. It took me decades to
get a cogent grip on it, and I accomplished that only because giving a
damn gave me persistence.
If you want to know about atheism, ask an atheist. If you want to know why
you should become an atheist, go to church and read your Bibles. Most of
what gets understood or believed about atheism hails as misinformation
from the theist camp. Most of what causes rifts among us, and serves to
differentiate us one from another, hails from latent remnants of the
religious camp, misinformation still resident in our atheistic minds. We
should likely start out realizing that, understand that, make ourselves
adopt an ongoing awareness of that, and make all the rest of it seem
cogent as a result.
Ponder this for a moment: Were there no theists going about proclaiming
about how their particular gods said this, that, or something else; if, in
fact, no gods had ever been heard of and no notions had ever been said
about them, then, who would we be calling atheists? Who would be there to
express their doubt, their skepticism, their ridicule about sources of
information that could lead to such proclamations? Without theists to
declare a god to be a real and present danger, there would be nobody to
doubt them, nobody mortified with chagrin or embarrassment about such
improbable announcements. We would all be 'atheists', or we would all be
natural humans with no counterfactual notions to inherit from history.
To declare we would all be atheists parrots the theist viewpoint, which
cannot accept that gods are specters born in visions of fantasy and fear
to be perpetuated by parasitic memeplexes, nor that visions about
nonmaterial existences are immaterial. Theism being the predominant mental
condition world-wide, most of what serves to describe atheism and atheists
comes from that camp, including that which serves to be 'official'. All
the torment over 'hard' and 'soft' or 'strong' and 'weak' atheism has less
to do with atheism than with what atheists do as a result of it in the
midst of aggressive, space-encroaching, privacy-violating, tax-avoiding,
facts-desecrating theists.
Atheism refers to nothing more than absence of belief in gods and all the
rest of theistical creations. It is without theism. It is not
'disbelief', 'lack of' belief, nor anything else that implies a purposeful
state—those result from exposure to theism! 'A' (without) means just
exactly that: "We ain't got none!" Think of it in booze terms: If a person
does not believe in drinking alcoholic beverages, is he called an aboozer?—
an aalcoholic?— an adrunkard? More: If he might drink under the right
circumstances, but he has never been in the actual presence of alcoholic
beverages, even though he has been told about them, with what a-word would
you identify a person like that? An ainebriate?— atippler?— asot? Here's a
good suggestion: adipsomaniac?
"Are you saying that dogs and cats and trees are atheists?" Well, do we
figure that dogs and cats and trees fight each other about gods? Of course
we don't. That kind of question comes from the theist way of looking at
things. To an atheist, dogs, cats and trees are only dogs, cats and trees.
They have no gods we know about. We know there are only
atheists in this world because there are
people who believe the incredible, brag about their beliefs, and demand
for everybody else to believe right along with them.
The proper kinds of questions are
important, and so we must take all kinds of pains to frame them as
correctly as possible, and to choose the kinds of standards that serve
us best as human beings. Those provide the proper frames so we can
develop the most accurate pictures that are possible to generate. That
requires us to stay mindful of what we are, what most affects us, to
test for those effects, and to maintain complete, accurate and
correctable data so we can render the best evaluations.
Religion: The religion
problem is even more prevalent than you'd think, and for reasons seldom
considered. There will always be requirements to act and 'be' for which
we have no data to assess. We must then proceed according to instinct,
emotion, inspiration, our best guesses and logic. Aside from logic, that
has always been religion's domain. That is where religion is proper,
because it enables a picture we can work with for guidance.
Where religion fails is when we find
ways to gather data in some areas and that data disagrees with
religion's picture. When religion causes us to disallow the new
information, to condemn it, or to work to condemn those who seek to
present it, work with it, verify it, and put it to use, then religion no
longer works for humanity, but works against it. I am willing to
concede, however, that religion serves to keep science on its toes by
acting as science's skeptic in a fashion much like the skepticism you
will find among atheists. In our time, religion has far overstepped
those bounds, and threatens us all in too many ways with its overbearing
dominance.
I believe religion is a
matter of teaching and that, once learned, it is very hard to shed and
impossible to completely shed. There are ways of thinking that are either
religious or (we could call it) scientific, that stay with a person who
has abandoned religion, and gets learned by people exposed to the
religious even though they may never have adopted a religion for
themselves.
This is a hard message to
deliver, but even the most adamant, religion-hating atheists are,
themselves, religious in many ways. The clearest and cleanest *applicable*
definition of religion I have seen to date is one I found on American
Heritage Dictionary under 'faith':
Religion is maintained
in spite of contrary logical proof or contrary material evidence.
You will find the word 'religion' in the Xian Bible, usually in
reference to an organized version, and you will find lots of mention of
faith, which most people seem to use interchangeably. Faith is generally
used in a personal sense as a synonym for religion when the latter is
also in that sense.
Using that as a
guide, you will find atheists all around arguing over subjects and
taking positions for which they could not possibly offer verification
—other than what "somebody wrote or said in…", and referring to literary
materials exactly the same as do the admittedly religious. Start up a
discussion about determinism, Popperism, why it is illegal to go naked
on the streets, if smoking in public should be a crime, reincarnation,
why have only one marriage partner, and more, and observe religion at
work in atheist minds.
I try to operate under
three states of mind in my own life, and to stay mindful of which of the
three I am dealing with in any certain area of thought:
1: This can be demonstrated to be true;
2: This is true from hearsay and it
makes sense to me because _________…;
3: This may be
true but I have no way to verify or test it.
I call the processes
involved colligion,
the opposite of religion.
I also try to avoid
three states of mind in my own life, and to stay mindful of which of the
three I am dealing with in any certain area of thought:
1: This can be demonstrated to be a
lie, falsehood, or misconception;
3: This seems
illogical, irrelevant, or nonsensical but I have no way to verify or
test it, so I must hold it in abeyance.
After more than half a
century "in the works", it works for me, and keeps me from jumping onto
bandwagons that sound like fun but are heading for a wreck. What a
person believes is their own business, until they try convincing me
about it. I run it through the process if I have never heard of it
before, and adopt or dismiss according to those results. I believe
children should be brought up according to some similar process of
thought, and that the world would take care of itself if we would let
it, and we could then rid ourselves of destructive tendencies we all
share.
Theists are directly responsible for spurring the development of atheism
as a component of a
whole list of philosophies. Among their own ranks, atheists who
pretend to be theists (for whatever reason they may do that, including
fear of their associates, uncertainty, new insights to spur the questing
for truth, the realization that "God works in mysterious ways" gets
offered to answer more questions than does anything else, for purely
business reasons, or as a way to a powerbase where they can continue to
manipulate their fellow flockmembers…) are known as hypocrites whenever
they get discovered.
Hypocrisy is denounced as a sin in the Xian Bible, in an effort to keep
the flocks all marching to the same beat, and to forestall flockmembers
from usurping the established power base. Condemning hypocrites serves to
prevent true believers from listening to them or admiring them, and so
keeps their influence from spreading. In spite of the fact that atheists
are considered the least trustworthy group among Americans, it makes sense
to think that people willing to acknowledge their demand for verification
as a condition of belief must be far more honest than any hypocrites, and
that makes theists far less trustworthy in actual practice because any one
of them could be a closeted hypocrite.
1Statistical
data does, in fact, bear that out.
Unbelievers are also commonly accused in religious scriptures, but only as
a part of apologia are atheists mentioned. "Those who believe not" refers
to people whose beliefs differed from the writers of those particular
scriptures and openly doubted their word (mainly in the Old Testament) and
especially Jews in the New Testament. Atheists, people who believe no
religions, appear to have been unfathomable in those times.
Another example of atheists allowing theists to put words in our mouths:
Agnosticism is only a sub-category of atheism, an attempt to
establish a gray area in a black-white picture (you either believe or you
don't). An agnostic appears to be an atheist who wants to eat his cake
while still being able to keep it. Agnostics and theists alike will decoy
us with a question about whether or not a god exists. The real question is
not that at all, but is about our willingness to believe people can
successfully lie about so many things to so many people in so many places
for so many centuries, and still be convincing in our time.
It is not about believing in a god (Do you know what god?) but is about
believing in the messengers who carry tales about it (Do they know
what god? How? Are they lying? Can they demonstrate their veracity?) It is
not a matter of simply deciding, "Hey, I am going to believe in this." If
that is how their own beliefs came about, then it is entirely possible
they do not believe, but are only pretending, and then pretending they are
not pretending. Were I to do that, I would be dishonest. I think
that about them, if I'd think that about myself.
In our own times, atheists arrive as individuals to their various
conclusions about what represents the truth in all the matters theism
strives to ordain with its own interpretations. We seldom wholly share a
consensus of opinion about anything, let alone represent an army on the
move against religion. We do not even agree whether religion is a kind of
mental illness, but we do agree that, like the gods they worship, our
threat against them is mostly a product of theists' imaginations.
Accepting information about atheism from theists is to apply that same
basis to our own conclusions, and give precedence to the imaginary over
what is real and present to our several senses.
"Freedom of religion" often gets expounded upon by members and leaders of
all the camps on all sides of political claptrap. That doesn't mean
"freedom of any religion we approve but not those that make us
uncomfortable or that we've never heard of." It means freedom to follow
the calling of one's own faith and conscience. (From
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/starhawk/2007/07/pagan_chaplains_and_public_ser.html
)
Perhaps that way of stating it would also work for us. The
absence of faith, known as atheism, also seems to call upon at least a few
of us to respond to it by proclaiming such reasoning as led us to, and
maintain or even increase, our dissent against the religions. That is our
conscience for which we must choose to uphold and defend that we believe
to be true, or against which we may yield because of its overwhelming of
our efforts to stifle it. So, "freedom of religion" actually serves as a
synonym for the more properly expressed "freedom of conscience": "Do as
you will; harm no one."
It is
our own self-confidence that supports our conclusions about what we
have attested as true, and our conscience that calls us to defend it
against those who flagrantly slander our sciences. Our absence of religion
does not predispose us to not understand this, but ought to prod us to
provide a secular slant to it that we can promulgate among the masses.
After all is said and done, atheism is the calling of atheists. Because we
have not yet learned to put words to that calling does not mean it does
not exist, nor that it does not take place in our heads and at the core of
our passions, and that we have no right to it. Who calls us? In whom do we
place our faith? In whom else?
Have I aimed to speak for all atheists on this page? No,
nor do I on any page in this site. As large a percentage of atheists will
disagree with me as will theists. The notion that any atheist speaks for
all the rest, whether said by an atheist or a theist, gets inherited from
theism and, like all the rest of the indoctrinations we endured as
children, whether from pulpits, parents, or wherever we were trained while
young, or from errors set down on paper or
(2)film, it
becomes part of the dogma that often fails to get shed when a person finds
the courage to reject the rest of wrongheaded theism. Avoid those who brim
with confidence, and look for truth among those beaten and bruised. We are
freethinkers only in those areas where we know exactly where our
information came from, and why we believe its rectitude. It is in the
areas we have not given much thought, but have accepted as true without
investigation, that we remain theists (and, so, religious) in our
attitudes and actions, if not in name. |
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