After reading the
DarkSyde's diary about atheism I felt I had to clarify a few misconceptions. The first thing is that his definition "I am a human being in which god-belief is absent" is a little simplistic. Most atheists I know do not have strong convictions about the absence of gods. It is impossible to logically disprove the existence of gods. However, it is possible to prove probabilistically that any particular god is infinitely unlikely. I believe it would be rational to believe in gods should their be credible evidence supporting their existence and I think it is crucial to rely on a scientific method to arrive at such evidence.
More about morality and the atheist life below.
Contrast this with agnostics, who put some degree of certainty to the existence of a particular god. Right now, however, from all the knowledge I have gathered throughout my life, I have failed to encounter a god that was more likely to exist than, say, the
Flying Spaghetti Monster or
Flying Pink Unicorns. And I did put much effort into probing the most intelligent believers into convincing me and in reading the known apologists like
Pascal and
Thomas Aquinas.
I think one reason why atheism is so despised is that it is often confounded with nihilism or "anything goes" morality. Theists think we simply do not have a morality or that we act morally despite our atheism when in fact, we have a morality that is stronger than anything faith based because ours is based on reason and the lessening of harm while theirs is often based on twisted interpretations of what some beings of questionable existence are thought to have said. That is, even if we are only moral despite our atheism, they often act immorally because of their theism.
For example, Christianity when evaluated rationally often fosters immorality. It attacks innocent minorities like homosexuals who have done nothing to them (even though it's quite unclear that the bible is really against homosexuality.) They don't let gay couples participate in social events, single them out, frown upon them in their families, skip over them for jobs etc.. It's the I-won't-think-for-myself and let myself succumb to group think attitude of faith-based religions that is so dangerous with regard to morality because it often wrecks believers' ability to reason about morality by themselves. It is easy for a person that is not indoctrinated to rationally evaluate if he or she is living a moral life by just asking the question: "Am I harming people who aren't harming me?" There is nothing rational left to morality when it isn't based on the principles of harm.
There are many ways to live in atheism. Atheism does not mean believing in nothing or valuing nothing. Most atheists value life, value the beauty and grace of human relationships, of nature, and of the general order of the universe. Some have a pantheistic attitude like that of Einstein and Spinoza.
Being an atheist does not even mean that we can't read religious texts for inspiration about life, Unitarian Universalism to which many famous figures have associated with, isa Christian based atheist church that accepts people of any religion and relies on reading any inspirational literature of different religions or general philosophy in their Sunday worship.
Philosopher George Santayana was a champion in this kind of atheism. He was himself pro-religion but only for its social and poetic uses. He was against all the fact twisting and intellectual dishonesty. He thought that it was preposterous to think religious writings were the truth about external reality and that this literature instead existed as poetic contemplative material that helps us relate with our feelings about the world. Religion to him was a guide to introspection. He argued that since feelings are internal to us they are more real than external reality which is distorted and filtered by our senses. It was thus important to connect with our internal mystic thoughts and poetry and religion were great facilitators. Most importantly, he thought we had to recognise that religion said nothing about the real external world.
He put much importance on distinguishing moral and psychological ideals versus what is real and always separated them so that the ideals were never literally about the real but were still useful concepts to help us think about the human side to the real world.
Poetry is religion allowed to drift, left without points of application in conduct and without an expression in worship and dogma; it is religion without practical efficacy and without metaphysical illusion. The ground of this abstractness of poetry, however, is usually only its narrow scope; a poet who plays with an idea for half an hour, or constructs a character to which he gives no profound moral significance, forgets his own thought, or remembers it only as a fiction of his leisure, because he has not dug his well deep enough to tap the subterraneous springs of his own life. But when the poet enlarges this theatre and puts into his rhapsodies the true visions of his people and of his soul, his poetry is the consecration of his deepest convictions, and contains the whole truth of his religion. What the religion of the vulgar adds to the poet's is simply the inertia of their limited apprehension, which takes literally what he meant ideally, and degrades into a false extension of this world on its own level what in his mind was a true interpretation of it upon a moral plane. This higher plane is the sphere of significant imagination, of relevant fiction, of idealism become the interpretation of the reality it leaves behind. Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical with religion grasped in its inmost truth; at their point of union both reach their utmost purity and beneficence, for then poetry loses its frivolity and ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive."
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source
There are other doctrines that can guide the atheistic life. Humanism is a well known philosophy. The Church of Reality is a new church based what is real. Yoism, Buddhism and others here are mostly atheistic groups.
It is interesting to see that atheism is not a new movement. Great atheist literature was written by Philosophers that lived before Christianity even existed. For example Lucretius in his beautiful epic poem "On The Nature of Things" wrote:
When before our eyes man's life lay groveling, prostrate,
Crushed to the dust under the burden of Religion
Which thrust its face from heaven, its horrible face
Glowering over mankind born to die,
One man, a Greek, was the first mortal who dared
Oppose his eyes, the first to stand firm in defiance.
Not the fables of gods, nor lightning, nor the menacing
Rumble of heaven could daunt him, but all the more
They whetted his keen mind with longing to be
First to smash open the tight-barred gates of Nature.
His vigor of mind prevailed, and he strode far
Beyond the fiery battlements of the world,
Raiding the fields of the unmeasured All.
Our victor returns with knowledge of what can arise,
What cannot, what law grants each thing its own
Deep-driven boundary stone and finite scope.
Religion now lies trampled beneath our feet,
And we are made gods by the victory.
You hear these things, and I fear you'll think yourself
On the read to blasphemy. Not so! Too often Religion
Herself gives birth to evil and blasphemous deeds.
At Aulis, for instance
[...]
You too,someday, will try to turn deserter,
Taken by so-called prophets and their ravings.
That's no suprise. What dreams they'll engineer
To overthrow your reasoned way of life
And stir up fear and trouble all your fortune!
They know their trade-for if men could see the hardships
Have their sure end, made strong by reason, they
Might then withstand those superstitious threats
[...]
And so this darkness and terror of the mind
Shall not by the sun's rays, by the bright lances of daylight
Be scattered, but by Nature and her law.
Whose fundamental axiom is this:
Nothing comes supernaturally from nothing.
Fear grips all mortal men precisely because
They see so many events on the earth, in the sky,
Whose rational causes they cannot discern-
So they suppose it's all the will of the gods.
But once you've seen that nothing is made from nothing
We'll find our path and see straight through to what we search for:
we shall know that things can come
To be-and in what manner-without gods.
And great mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace Once said
"I have no need of that hypothesis." (Je n'ai pas besoin de cette hypothese), -Le Marquis de Laplace, as a reply to Napoleon, who had asked "How can this be! You made the system of the world, you explain the laws of all creation, but in all your book you speak not once of the existence of God!"")
I hope this diary will have straightened out some of the misconceptions and fears that are widely held about atheism and that it can also give a positive perspective to those who have been thinking of adopting it but were frightened by the apparent feeling of nothingness associated with it.