I am an Atheist

In which I puzzle over the silly things people find to fight about in the world. Don’t you people have something better to do with your time…?

I am an Atheist. I realize this thought makes some people uncomfortable. They associate Atheism with Satanism, or Nihilism, and believe Atheists to be akin to anarchists or others that seek the destruction of national, political or religious systems.

Proving the old knee-jerk reaction that anything unfamiliar must be evil or at least dangerous.

So I am an Atheist. What does that mean to me? Very simply, I do not believe in heaven or hell, God, Yahweh, Allah, the Earth Mother, any sort of hereafter, or that the Knights Templar are controlling the leaders of the world from their secret base in the center of the Earth.

Again, people tend to see this as a dangerous thing. “Well, if you are not answerable to a higher power, then what is to stop you from shooting me?”, goes the common reasoning.

Very simply, I am not going to shoot you for the same reason most other people are not going to shoot you: I’m a nice guy.

My beliefs are simple, based in a scientific and critical view of the world that has developed from the combination of my insatiable curiosity and “amazing powers of observation”, as Pink Floyd so eloquently expressed it.

I am an avid student of history, as well. Anyone who understands even the smallest fragment of history knows that trying to understand the past without understanding the world’s religions is like watching a football game from the stadium parking lot: there are a lot of bursts of noise and excitement and activity, but you can’t make much sense of what is going on inside.

With the recent excitement in Germany (WWII), Israel, Bosnia, and September 11th, the common man cannot ignore the role of religion as a world-forming force any longer.

As an Atheist, I have the bizarre sensation of watching all these events happen inside an aquarium that I am looking into from the outside. I see the combatants, the fields of battle, the issues being battled over, but I cannot understand the basic motivation of the combatants. I feel like someone watching two Japanese fighting fish go at it with each other: Both fish are obviously very agitated and want to tear the other apart, but I cannot understand why.

Imagine going to your local multiplex theater and buying a ticket to see “Titanic”. Playing on another screen in the multiplex is “Shrek”. And half way through your movie, everyone gets up and goes into the other theater to kill everyone watching “Shrek”.

Why do they do this? Well, maybe the motivation is simply that Shrek is a comedy, and not a romance, and you believe that comedies should not be allowed. Or maybe you feel more people should be able to see Titanic instead of Shrek, so you want to chase everyone out of the adjoining theater so Titanic can play on more screens.

Sound silly? It is. And that is what the world looks like to me through my Atheist eyes.

Still doubtful? OK, what about Muslims and Christians? What is the root of the problem there? In essence, one group believes that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and another believes that he was a particularly good one in a long line of prophets. The irrationality of the other sides’ opinion resulted in one group hitting each other with sticks and throwing the odd rock or two

Unfortunately, two things happened to escalate the situation from a parochial schoolyard scuffle to the ultimately unsolvable war of tit-for-tat that we have now. First, someone threw a rock too well, or hit someone a little too hard with their stick, and the victim died. Since the combatants are invariably male, this put the dead man’s family at a distinct disadvantage in an area where every single hand was needed for coaxing food from the stingy soil. The loss, therefore, was not just one person or a family’s pride, but possibly the entire family. Vengeance is a natural human reaction (no matter what the tree-huggers think about the enlightened state of the human animal), and it was in the air.

Then along came an early arms dealer. So they have sticks 1 meter long? OK, I can sell you a 2-meter stick. Their rocks are 20 grams? I have 40 gram rocks.

The bereaved told their story of loss and woe to their friends, the arms dealer did some business (and then moved quickly along to the next town), and the bereaved family took an eye for an eye.

So what if they had been arguing over the size of a loaf of bread? Or the amount of heat a particular oven baked at? The argument would have been heated (no pun intended), and maybe even blows would have been exchanged. But there is a fundamental principle under debate in this case, and therefore no room for astro-meta-physio-psycho-babble-ical debates on fictional characters.

And there is the rub. When you attribute particular goals, actions or sayings to an individual that may or may not have existed, there is little possibility of informed discussion. One person believes someone said something, and one person doesn’t. The conversation can make no more progress than that

As Richard Dawkins says, we are all Atheists about most of the religions the world has ever known. Atheists just go one god further.

By Christian Jacobsen. All rights reserved.