Atheism

a : one who disbelieves or denies the existence of a God, or supreme intelligent Being.

"ATHEIST is really a thoroughly honest, unambiguous term, it admits of no paltering and no evasion, and the need of the world, now as ever, is for clear-cut issues and unambiguous speech." -- Chapman Cohen

I think that religion is arguably the biggest delusion observed in man. It is perhaps driven by the human desire to transcend the ultimate fate awaiting each and every one of us as Paul Kurtz states in "The Transcendental Temptation". It appears that only humans, and perhaps some higher apes, recognize that at the end of life is death. No matter how hard you wish or pray, this will be your fate. Belief in the "afterlife" can be comforting for some. Who wouldn't want to be reunited with a dead loved one, friend or guinea-pig? There is, however, absolutely no evidence to support these claims despite thousands of years of promises from literally thousands of religions. If false hope was the only harm done perhaps we could look the other way, but it goes far beyond that. To use a recent example, it is only through religion that you could motivate several young men to strap themselves to a flying bomb, destroy a city and the lives of thousands of innocent people. Religion has long been a tool for the "us vs. them" argument; a tool of divisiveness. The overwhelming majority of people do not even choose their religion. A person's religion is predictably chosen for them based almost entirely on geographic location. For example, if you are raised in the United States, the Hindu religion, popular in India, seems quite strange to you. Their practices and rituals can often seem silly or even immoral to a Christian. Conversely, an Indian native will see the Christian religions in a similar light. And so it goes, around the world, the religion that is familiar in each land seems quite reasonable to the inhabitants but quite unreasonable to others elsewhere. Even within the United States a southerner from Georgia might find the Mormon religion, practiced routinely in Utah, to be unusual and unpractical.

People sometimes question my atheistic views by saying "you don't know that there is not a 'god', do you?". So, they say, "you must be an agnostic not an atheist, right?" Richard Dawkins addresses this line of questioning on pages 147 and 148 of his book, "A Devil's Chaplain". He points out that people refer to the "cosmic awe" of such notable figures as Einstein, Hawking and Sagan as religious because they, as responsible scientists, don't (or didn't) pretend to know the ultimate answer to the question of what started it all. Dawkins writes:

...if 'religion' is allowed such a flabbily elastic definition, what word is left for real religion, religion as the ordinary person in the pew or on the prayer-mat understands it today; religion, indeed, as any intellectual would have understood it in previous centuries when intellectuals were religious like everybody else? If God is a synonym for the deepest principles of physics, what word is left for a hypothetical being who answers prayers; intervenes to save cancer patients or help evolution over difficult jumps; forgives sins or dies for them? If we are allowed to relabel scientific awe as a religious impulse, the case goes through on the nod. You have redefined science as religion, so it's hardly surprising if they turn out to 'converge'.

So when I answer your question by saying that I truly do not believe in 'god' I am referring to the proper definition of 'god' (come on, you know the one we're talking about); the prayer answerer, coin toss decider, lottery helper 'god'.

"What can be said of the nuclear brinkmanship between India and Pakistan if their divergent religious beliefs are to be "respected"? There is nothing for religious pluralists to criticize but each country's poor diplomacy--while, in truth, the entire conflict is born of an irrational embrace of myth. Over one million people died in the orgy of religious killing that attended the partitioning of India and Pakistan. The two countries have since fought three official wars, suffered a continuous bloodletting at their shared border, and are now poised to exterminate one another with nuclear weapons simply because they disagree about "facts" that are every bit as fanciful as the names of Santa's reindeer. ...When will we realize that the concessions we have made to faith in our political discourse have prevented us from even speaking about, much less uprooting, the most prolific source of violence in our history?"

"Imagine what it would be like for our descendants to experience the fall of civilization. Imagine failures of reasonableness so total that our largest bombs finally fall upon our largest cities in defense of our religious differences. What would it be like for the unlucky survivors of such a holocaust to look back upon the hurtling career of human stupidity that led them over the precipice? A view from the end of the world would surely find that the six billion of us currently alive did much to pave the way to the Apocalypse."

"The kind of intolerance of faith that I am advocating in my book is not the intolerance that gave us the gulag. It is conversational intolerance. When people make outlandish claims, without evidence, we stop listening to them--except on matters of faith. I am arguing that we can no longer afford to give faith a pass in this way. Bad beliefs should be criticized wherever they appear in our discourse--in physics, in medicine, and on matters of ethics and spirituality as well. The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. Now, if he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive."

..."it comes down to new rules of conversation--not new laws or demonstrations in the street. Just imagine how different it would be if every time a person in a position of power used the word "God," the press responded as though he had just used a word like "Poseidon." Our conversation with ourselves would change very quickly and very dramatically. Imagine someone opposing stem-cell research on the floor of the Senate with a statement like, "life is a gift from Zeus himself. No man should meddle with it."

..."the people who invoke God in public discourse are either speaking in empty platitudes or making some very suspect claims about the nature of the world, or about the character of their own experience. We should demand that they start making sense, and if they fail to make sense, we should stop listening to them."

Here is a great plea for Muslims to stand up and tell us what they really feel from FrontPageMag.com.