I be atheist.
I be relatively moral, I be relatively rational, I be relatively intelligent.
I am not perfect. Humans are limited by their senses and their points of perception.
I found an essay by Greta Christina for Alternet to be kind of provocative:
9 Questions That Atheists Might Find Insulting (And the Answers)
Some questions and my answers below the squiggle (read her essay):
How can you be moral without believing in God?
Easy as pie. The genes from my Atheist father. My mother was a professing Christian. Her moral code was a bit cloudy.
Also, the quiet discussion I had with my Atheist father about life and stuff. My Christian mother admired Al Capone and I kind of think that in her young and innocent and rather attractive youth she had been pretty cozy with a bunch of Chicago hoodlums.
How do you have any meaning in your life?
Good grief! Open your eyes! Open your ears! Open your senses! There's plenty of meaning all over the place. I don't have to be told by some dried up old man about what is meaningful in my life.
Doesn't it take just as much/even more faith to be an atheist as it does to be a believer?
Another easy as pie answer. Don't take nothing to not believe. It's effortless. It's for the lazy at heart like me.
Isn't atheism just a religion?
Nope. I don't have to recite any articles of belief every Sunday. I don't have to sing any boring old meaningless hymns every Sunday and listen to someone's sermons that put me to sleep.
What's the point of atheist groups? How can you have a community and a movement for something you don't believe in?
Geeze! You gotta socialize and be able to talk with someone intelligent ever so often. All you get in church is a bunch of gush that people don't really mean. At least atheists are pretty sincere and authentic because they don't have to pretend to be something they ain't.
And, before I get real low down and nasty, I'll stop stealing stuff from Greta Christina though I do confess I hate God.
I mean, what kind of a God is it that inspires so damned much ugliness and meanness and violence and evil in the world? Like inspiring a bunch of stupid young men to hijack commercial jets and ram them into sky scrapers in New York City? I will never forgive that God!
Or the kind of God that causes its followers to persecute homosexuals and other minorities and to treat women and children as second class citizens.
Or believe that animals don't experience pain.
Or believe that war and slavery are AOK.
It stinks!
Frankly, the closest thing to God is the collective mind of the world on the internet and even that, in all its vastness, is far from perfect. Breitbart and his internet legacy, for instance, big, big error.