Lack of Faith: the Atheist Credo, cont.page 2
I never looked for salvation, or religious revelation, or leaders. From a very young age, I saw that people–and not invisible forces–did bad things or good things to other people. It didn’t matter to me if bad people blamed the devil or evil or society or their parents; it was obvious that pain is inflicted by man’s own hand. When my dad punished me for skipping Sunday school to look for money in an alley, I knew it wasn’t God punishing me for placing capitalistic pursuits over spiritual ones–I hadn’t been indoctrinated enough to make that incorrect connection. I had no reason to look further, to God, to see what caused people to do bad things, because I saw them, in full control of their hands. What wasn’t caused by natural, known forces was caused by people.
I didn’t become an atheist to free up my weekends. It would be dumb to be an atheist just to free some time. That’s what unemployment and retirement are for.
Except for a cattle call kneeling confession at my church that made me cry but failed to change reality, nothing specific happened that made me accept reality. My understanding of the world is based on an accumulation of factors whose degree of influence I can’t identify, and these influences impacted my thinking. I simply educated the notion of gods and demons out of my mind. Somewhere along the way, I found that I didn’t need the artificial structure of religious traditions to live a decent life.
Getting the Message Across
There is a single primary fact that people of faith can’t deny: there is no reliable, irrefutable, objective, or empirical evidence that proves the existence of any God, by any name in any language in any culture. However, massive evidence exists which conclusively supports competing explanations of our existence, an evidentiary foundation supported by valid proofs that are incompatible with divine, unseen beings with supernatural powers.
There’s never been any evidence of God’s existence, and there never will be. I am absolutely certain of this, though I am not a scientist, nor a scholar of religions. I am only a rational man relying on collected scientific, philosophical, logical, and psychological knowledge, my senses, and my critical thinking skills.
I’ve just said everything that needs to be said, but people won’t be convinced that there’s no evidence of gods, and by extension of inductive logic, no gods. Believers in God who don’t accept facts and who willfully ignore science are unlikely to be influenced by reason, effectively leaving me to preach to the choir of atheists, while they continue to envision their choir of angels.
Faith is your response if you have stopped reading.
But you want to find errors, bloopers, omissions and technical mistakes in an atheist’s arguments. You seek cracks that will let you invalidate my statements and conclusions. You’ve already thought, “But if there is no proof of God’s nonexistence, how can you say God doesn’t exist?” You’ll want to quibble with the conventional definitions of scientific evidence and how it is interpreted, saying that what you can see and touch and test and retest with repeatable results in a number of recorded and verifiable experiments, confirmed by expert peers in a given discipline aren’t enough to convince you that there isn’t something out “there” that can’t be tested. You’ll want to change the type of discussion, moving to philosophy, asserting that nothing is or can be known definitively. You can’t stop thinking that a lack of evidence currently doesn’t mean that someone won’t find evidence of God’s existence in the future. You think that because some truths alleged by scientists have proven to be wrong, that all science can be proven wrong.
Maybe you prefer to read writers who use logic to discount God’s existence, giving you a chance to destroy their claims that if there were an all-powerful, benevolent God, why hasn’t He fixed the problems of the world? Those writers give you the chance to argue from a set of false premises and circumlocution and hypothetical scenarios and conventional church wisdom and dogma to explain God’s intentions.
Such arguments are mental masturbation without end, happy or otherwise.
Logic and raw data are different fields of endeavor. People use logic to organize data and observations into something that constitutes evidence. What doesn’t exist cannot be brought into existence by logic. A leopard really cannot change its spots.
Reality exists a certain way regardless of how others perceive it to exist. Facts, to be true, don’t rely on whether people believe them. Subjective perceptions or impressions of truth are personal and individual, not universal and often not reflective of reality. Hallucinogenic drugs are usually to blame for the trances that alter a person’s perception of reality.
Maybe you prefer that I be accommodating and say that all perspectives are equally valid. They aren’t. I won’t show respect for irrationality or for those who wish to remain irrational.
So, what structure should I use to share my thoughts on this topic? Maybe I can drop in a forum app for others to discuss their different views. Maybe I can provide succinct responses to the most common demands that atheists provide proof there isn’t a God. Maybe I can discuss the nature of belief and the desire of people to believe in nonexistent things, such as a “soul,” as a defense mechanism so that they can pretend that they don’t fear death, that death isn’t the end of their presence and their deeds. Maybe I can list all of the other things that also don’t exist, because they are all comparable to God in the single shared characteristic of not existing.
A combination of these structures might have value to people who truly want to learn.
Atheists aren’t pounding the same message in the same way and expecting a different result in people’s understanding of reality, a method that someone has defined as one of the signs of insanity. People don’t exist in a vacuum; people are different, and their situations are different, so the insanity definition fails, as so many simplistic definitions fail.
Some atheists pretend to be respectful of others’ kooky beliefs just long enough to insert their own assertions. Some rationalists succeed through comedy, others by using diversionary tactics. Others educate in the principles of logic, and still others ask tough questions for believers to consider, hoping that believers in the nonexistent will see the contradictions in their world view in some sort of epiphany, in a moment of clarity and insight, and come to a discovery of the truth on their own.
I’ve heard asked by people who know better ask, “What’s wrong with a little make-believe in a harsh reality?” Make-believe preserves and promotes misconceptions that masquerade as happiness.
I’ve heard some people say, “If some people need religion to have the courage/strength to believe in themselves, then more power to them.” Disavowing reality disables and saps one’s power. It’s like taking a drink for courage that then makes you too impaired to fight well.
I’ve heard some people say, “I’d better hedge my bets and believe in God, just in case all that hell and damnation stuff is true.”
I’ve heard people say that religious people enjoy better health, attributed to reduced stress because, with God in control, they release the stress of taking control of their lives. A positive frame of mind is the practical result of believing that God will make everything all right in the end.
These are pragmatic reasons to believe in God, not reasons based on evidence.
Then I asked myself, why. Why do I care if others are perfectly happy or unhappy in their beliefs? Why do rational people continue to try to squeeze that small kernel of fact through the Christian’s armor like a math teacher trying to get a child to understand the concept and value of long division? Why do I want to get through to those who find it emotionally satisfying to believe in things that aren’t real?
The desire to express my viewpoint with others is something I share with believers who witness for their religious beliefs. Cynics would say our reasons differ, that believers want to put more people in church pews to collect tithing and donations, keeping the church operating and allowing it to continue giving aid to the needy.
Why promote atheism, a rational position?
Because I prefer to deal with fully rational people. Dealing with rational people, I meet my goals sooner. I’m not forced to anticipate the variety of irrational thoughts possibly going through someone’s head, which I’ll have to address with a straight face. I won’t have to construct multiple approaches to negotiate through nonissues to achieve outcomes that are equally beneficial to me and others. I value quick, efficient solutions that don’t require a lot of selling to those with different mindsets.
People who actively divorce reason, if only in the most identifiable area of God’s existence, often use the same flawed reasoning across a spectrum of issues in their daily lives. Religious faith and belief in the existence of spirits and souls has a high correlation with an associated trait of poor critical thinking. People of faith refuse to accept objective facts and must continue thinking irrationally as a habit to reinforce their faith, else admit flaws in their religious beliefs, which are based on flawed reason. Believers see the world first through an emotional filter rather than an intellectual one. They are more intolerant of different viewpoints based only on their difference, and have generally faulty belief schemas and perceptual processing, and an inflexible adherence to a memorized and narrow structure of how life should be for everybody.
These people gain political or capital power over me and exercise poor judgment and make poor decisions that directly impact me through the bad laws they draw up or the bad corporate policy they force me to obey if I want to make a living.
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