Atheistic explorations

Here’s a link to an atheist manifesto. It’s written by Sam Harris, author of “End of Faith”, which can be found in the sidebar to the right. It’s pretty strident, but I agree with most of what he says. My one objection is that I think many people believe different, subtler versions of God than the version Harris attacks. Religious believers are often a lot smarter and more in touch with reality than we atheists give them credit for. This doesn’t mean they are correct in their beliefs, but they aren’t all reality-denying lunkheads.

Sometimes I find that I have very similar beliefs to people who say they believe in God; I just feel they’re using a bad, misleading label for their beliefs. One way of stating my atheism might be, “The word “God” is the wrong word to describe what I believe.” The word “God” has been used in so many ways that to say “I believe in God” is an almost content-free statement. You should have to make all sorts of more specific follow-up statements so people have some idea of what you’re talking about.

The same could be said for not believing in God, so I suppose I should elaborate a bit: I don’t believe in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, or in any philosophical cousin of his, or in any kind of supernatural being whatsoever. I don’t believe that the word “God” is a good synonym for “good” or “love” or “justice” or any other abstract concept (whose existences I do not deny), as it leads our brains down an anthropomorphic slope already slick with the grease of ignorance and superstition. I do not believe that the Earth or the Universe has any immanent consciousness or emergent form of being, certainly not one that would merit being called God. I believe that when people think they are connecting to God, they are connecting to parts of themselves or parts of others from which they are normally cut off, and that are perhaps more powerful than they thought possible for a mere mortal.

I think one thing that leads to atheism is a sort of inability to whistle past some of the glaring contradictions required to maintain a theistic worldview, at least according to the prevailing religious traditions. For some people, it’s just not a problem to believe in an all-powerful, all-loving God, despite the horrendous evils that happen in the world and that such a being must be responsible for. They are fine with the contradiction. Or they are willing to believe that such injustices are rectified in some kind of afterlife, despite glaringly obvious problem that it’s really hard to verify such claims. It doesn’t bother them that they don’t believe in Thor, Zeus, Horus, or Wangdu the cattle god (my own personal invention), but for some reason they do believe in this YHWH character or some later version of him who in many ways seems remarkably similar to the earlier, discarded beings. This doesn’t bother them, but these things are like fingernails on a blackboard to me: intolerable monstrosities that would make theism extremely difficult to swallow, even if there was a lot of evidence to support it.

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