On Atheism

I think its about time I spoke up about this, even though I've been keeping my mouth shut on this particular issue for years now.  I avoid this one mostly because I used to be about as fervent a believer in this faith as any other member.  At the time, I figured myself smarter than everybody else, and working hard to free them from a self-imposed evil delusion.  And now all I can see is a stupid little kid who was angry at the world for no real reason.  So I'm going to put all my eggs in a basket right here and say it:  atheists are annoying.

There's a Party Line for the atheist religion - a series of assumptions that an atheist in order to be an atheist seemingly must assume as an article of faith.  I'm not talking about people who are agnostic here or people who simply don't care about matters of faith at all, I'm talking about people who are bona fide atheists, somebody who willingly applies that category to themselves and take pride in it.  The first of all is that there is no God or greater supernatural power in the universe, which is fine in of itself I suppose.  Its a very sad and cold way of looking at the universe though, which is something I'll deal with later.

The second bit of atheism is the more annoying bit of it:  its hatefulness.  Atheists for whatever reason often do not simply deny the existence of God, but actively hate God.  Its a weird sort of paradoxical philosophy:  God does not exists and he sucks if he does.  So religion isn't just incorrect, its an evil to mankind that must be eradicated.  This gets worse though.  If an atheist believes religion is evil, he or she must then come to believe that all people with faith are either fools or worse.  They have come to understand a truth of the universe that the rest of the world is ignorant to.  So then the old evangelizing spirit breaks in, creating a small army of self-righteous atheists spreading their ideas.  Militant atheists have to destroy faith, as the very concept of people believing in God challenges their faith.  Religion isn't just evil, its threatening to their fragile assumptions.

Like all faiths, atheism has an air of certainty, but atheism is especially smug.  Yes, modern science has disproven several of the minor features of the Abrahamic god such as God creating the universe and all life in a week, they seem to think that this gives a scientific basis for the non-existence god in all forms.  (This is based directly in the very long-running Western misconception that religion and science are somehow incompatible.)  But its a long step to go to say that simply because our piece of existence wasn't created exactly as Genesis states to say that God, and all other gods do not exist at all.  But being antireligious requires you not just attack a deity-based belief system, but to attack more abstract systems such as Buddhism*.  You have to fight off both Christianity and paganism, both Genesis and the Elder Edda.  Everybody who finds a higher power in anything is inevitably wrong according to the tenants of atheism - even just crossing your fingers is a delusion you should be cured of.

What I find to be most ridiculous about atheism is its bizarre application of natural law upon what is essentially a supernatural power.  Ultimately science can never disprove God, its a hopeless ever-present state changing cycle.  If science discovers what natural process created the universe, it then must discover what caused that.  There is no upper limit to mysteries to be solved, if indeed existence is infinite.  Ultimately for every answer science gives, there is another frontier to overcome, which may indeed be the work of God.

I'll give an example right now:  according to science there are twenty-five or twenty-six dimensionless physical constants - numbers that remain the same no matter what computation you're undergoing.  These constants have values that are essentially arbitrary, but must be exactly their current value in order for our universe to work in the way it does.  This sort of thing appears a lot in particle physics.  Nobody knows exactly why these numbers are as high or low as they are, but they do know that if they were changed in the slightest bit can change the mass of subatomic particle, change the very way gravity works.  The universe is tuned perfectly for matter to exist in the form that it has now, and if it were tuned any other way, life may not even be possible.  Who decided what these twenty-five constants should be but God**?

But none of that matters.  It doesn't matter if God created you from dust, or created the universe, or gave Moses the Ten Commandments on Mt. Zion, or exists only as an esoteric goodness that works in the world unseen.  Even if God has no natural powers, he/she/it has an undeniable effect upon the human psyche.  Every person in the world has to find his or her place in relation to the divine, even if no divinity exists.  Nobody can deny that every day billions of people spend time praying to their gods, acting in a manner as commanded by their faith, and being inspired by their religious texts or cultural myths.  To simply throw all out the entirety of this massive wellspring of the human experience is to be both cruel and inhuman.  Humans need to find something to believe in, they need to believe there is a force out there that guides their lives either directly or in "mysterious ways".

What inspiration can an atheist get?  As powerful as the fundamental laws of math and science might be, they're hardly a guide to life.  Jesus Christ teaches us to love all people no matter their station, Judaism teaches us to give to those less fortunate and love our community.  Every religion on some level demands that we help those less fortunate than ourselves, love thy neighbor, have families, and make our world a better place in which we found it.  This is what every religion teaches.  Proper religion, no matter what the faith, can find life lessons and beauty in these stories in which we teach.  The Bible, even if just a story, still is a largely beautiful book (except for those rather unfortunate parts in the first half about all the smiting) that inspires people to write symphonies, give alms to the poor, and boldly more forward and advance the human race.

What does atheism teach?  What lessons can you learn from a dark universe in which our very lives, our planet, our emotions, our concept of good and evil, all came from random chance and have no meaning of any kind?  If even our very outlook on life is just a quark of evolution and misappropriated survival instincts, if our very DNA is all just the result of constant dice rolling by chemical compounds, what meaning is there to anything?  Sheer cynical atheism says nothing is looking out for us, the universe is going to break apart, and you're going to die and everything you've done will be forgotten in the end.  We came from nothingness for no reason, and just as pointlessly we're going to fall back into the void.  What lesson is there to be learned from that?  Why even get up in the morning?

You know, for a philosophy that claims to answer so much, it really doesn't answer anything at all.

What I find to be the worst argument about the atheist movement is this unspoken assumption the religion has to be harmful.  It cannot possibly be a good thing and must be destroyed.  I've heard such ludicrous statements as "religion has caused more suffering than other institution in history".  As history student, I find this be an unbelievably false assumption and close-minded interpretation of the facts.  I mentioned above that people all over the world find meaning from their faiths.  Just listen to John Newton's "Amazing Grace", a hymn written to celebrate Christian redemption if you are so foolish as to say "nothing good has ever come out of religion".

Today you may be fooled to believe that religions can cause nothing but harm.  At this moment Jihadists have declared war upon the entire world, the Holy Land is filled with constant warfare, misguided fundamentalists of several faiths deny scientific fact because they think it threatens their beliefs, the Catholic Church is racked by endless scandal, and every day another person martyrs another or are martyred in the name of their God.  But this century (and the last one indeed) is unusual in the size and scale of its religious strife.  For most of the human experience, different faiths have lived side by side in relative harmony, those few unfortunate periods of Holy War being overrepresented in the annuals of history - mostly because those periods are the most interesting.  Today some of the world's largest charities are created in the belief that God has commanded them to help others**.  For many periods of history the only groups that helped the unfortunate were religious orders.  By far religion has done and will do far more good than bad.

I'll admit there are a few humanist philosophies that have groups that work to better help mankind.  But on what basis are they working?  Pure contentment and gratification?  You know that your positive emotions are just manipulations by biology to keep you content enough to reproduce right?  Unless you take it as an article of faith that there is goodness in the universe, that justice and equality are things to strive for, and that living is a good thing, you can never even continue living.  Belief in the goodness of mankind is a faith in of itself.  Belief that the world can be made better through scientific progress is a faith.  You can worship humanity, or a vague morality to the world, but you have to take it as a matter of faith that there is such a thing as good and bad.  In a random universe, how can such divided concepts exist?  All you have is a long string of chains of events with no moral effect one way or another.

What I'm saying here is that its okay to be irrational.  Squeeze your rosary beads, pray in the direction of Mecca five times every day, and don't eat meat.  Its fine.  Find something that gives your life meaning, find something that you love, and just don't be afraid to worship it.  If you love your God so much that you want to paint a picture or compose a song, do it.

Just try to understand if somebody else finds something else meaningful, or thinks you're an idiot for believing what you do.  Its good to just chill out, you know?

ツ

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* For whatever reason I have yet to hear an argument against the concept of reincarnation or any other non-Western religious concept.

** Atheists believe that man created God.  So when a person does something in the name of God, its probably a good question to ask if they're doing it because God told them to, or did they choose their God because that divinity fit their world view.  Will a good person become a monster because he thinks that "god hates fags"?  I rather doubt it.