Atheism and Me – Part 3

I am an atheist, but as strange as this may be to believe, that doesn’t mean I absolutely unquestioningly unshakeably believe that there is no God.

After all, that would put me on a par with the religious believer who has the unquestioning unshakeable belief that there is a God.

Unlike such a believer, I am willing to be persuaded of the truth of the opposite argument.

Given that I am yet to be persuaded, and God knows he’s had the time to do it, I just think it's very very very very unlikely that there is a God.

How unlikely?

Less likely than a meteorite landing on my car.

Less likely than getting hit by a bus full of performing circus bears on my way to work.

Less likely than finding out that I’m really an undercover secret agent who’s had his memory wiped and is unwittingly carrying out a mission to infiltrate Australian financial services and bring it down from the inside with shoddy spreadsheets.

Now any and all of these things are possible, including the idea that there’s a God, but they’re all so unlikely that it's not worth spending any time at all worrying about them.

Atheism and Me - Part 2

There are many reasons to be an atheist.

There are arguments from materiality, from nature, from the philosophy of logical positivism, and lots of little contradictions in religious scripture which you can have endless pedantic fun pointing out to believers.

But when you get down to it, these arguments are just artifacts of non-faith, in exactly the same way that the rejection of such arguments is an artifact of faith.

I didn't become an atheist because of any of these arguments. And I wouldn't expect anyone to reject their beliefs on the basis of these arguments.

So why atheism? It's actually very simple. The most obvious reason to accept atheism is the simplest.

And it's simply this: every religion is clearly and evidently the invention of humans.

There is nothing in any religion that's even mildly convincing as an argument for the existence of a deity.

Every piece of scripture that is oh-so imperfectly worded, every purported miracle that turns out to be a hoax, every claim of Godly omnipotence that can't seem to do anything more than bestow a "good feeling" in its believers . . .

This is supposed to be an all-powerful, all-knowing, omnipresent God. So why is he completely and utterly invisible, literally and metaphorically?

Why are so many of the claims of His believers so patently false? Why can't they agree on even the basics of the "truth" that has apparently been divinely revealed? Why are there are no miracles? Why are there no healings?

But most importantly, why is there no power in religion? It all so embarrassingly weak.

If all this theology is the construct of a God, then that God is hardly worthy of our praise.

And if it isn't . . . well that would certainly explain a lot, wouldn't it?

Atheism and Me - Part 1

It's hard to define atheism.

The simple statement "atheists don't believe in God" is problematic. For a start, it's loaded with the assumption that there is a God for atheists not to believe in.

And so what is atheism? Is atheism the belief that there are no Gods?

Or is atheism just disbelief in all the Gods currently worshipped in our culture?

Or is atheism, as the name implies, simply the rejection of theism as a worthwhile practice?

The short answer is that atheism means different things to different people. Atheism, unlike a religion, is not a single set of ideas shared by a group of people.

Every atheist is different.

So when I say I am an atheist, what do I mean?

Well, it's pretty simple. I believe there are no Gods.

This is a simple statement, but it carries with it a few corollaries:

I believe the Universe came into being through completely natural processes; processes that can be understood if we study them for long enough.

I believe that every religion is just a conflation of the politics, personality and culture from which it grew, and should be understood in those terms.

But most importantly, I believe that we're on our own out here.

There's no supernatural deity calling the shots. The deferral to a God who refuses to show Himself is just a waste of our time.

We're in charge, and it's up to us to make our own way in the Universe.