Devil-Worshippin' Atheist Is A Contradiction In Terms

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Diwali (India)
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Birthday - Carrie Fisher (actress, author)
Overseas Chinese Day (Taiwan)

 

This week CSI was set loosely around religion, and so that got all us CSI Nighters discussing our own religions. And once again, we saw that CSI portrays ahteists the way everyone portrays atheists on TV: in anything but a positive light. Usually on TV, atheists are amoral or downright immoral, depressed, soulless buggers who hate everybody in the world. Maybe they had a lot of disasters when they were kids and they are embittered. They are cynical and often nihilistic. People even confuse atheists with theists, claiming that atheists hate god.* And generally, if they are redeemed at all, it is through admitting that they aren’t as skeptical as they’ve been pretending to be.

 

This annoys me to no end, because I am a very happy, amicable, and spiritual atheist. And I think that’s what people don’t understand about atheism, is that it doesn’t automatically mean that you’re depressed, or angry, any more than religion equals happiness.

 

It’s not that I don't believe in a god because I am cranky; it’s that I don’t believe in a god because I can’t. I wasn’t raised religious—my parents were Catholic, but that was long before I came along, and by the time I did the closest thing to religion my family had was Joseph Campbell’s philosophies. Rationality, the scientific method, and simple empiricism are what I have to work with, and from this perspective all religions strike me as equally daft.**  I am probably just as intractable as anyone in this regard; my policy of waiting until all the evidence is in is deep-set and unchangeable.  If you gave me damn good proof that there was a god I would change my mind accordingly, but what wouldn't have changed would be that I need all the evidence first.

 

And the thing is, I like it that way.

 

That’s what people seem to find hard to believe. Poor Amelia in her deprived world, where no supernatural ever happens and there is no magic. Isn’t that a sad, shrivelled way to go through life?

 

No, it’s not. The thing that amazes me, that inspires me with wonder and whatever passes for spirituality in an atheist, is how everything fits together, how nature is connected, how there’s a reason for everything and an explanation even if you don’t know what it is.*** There’s this big, intertwining tapestry of cause and effect, and if you dig deep enough you’ll find it. The natural world seems to me even more awesome than “god did it,” which people seem to think is what everyone wants to believe.

 

I’ve often read op-eds and complaints about how our society is going secular and replacing religion with science. I always thought that was a good thing. If everyone knew how much cooler nature was when compared to some concept of the supernatural, nobody would go back.

 

Atheists on TV always hate being atheists. Hell, they hate everything, or they just don’t care. Which can’t be true, because if I’m a loving, happy, caring atheist, there have to be others. We need more like that in the media.

 

Amiable atheists of the world, unite!

 

 

*Okay, it is true that I find the Judeochristian/Islamic god to be a real butthead, but I also think that of Hera the Greek goddess and Lord Voldemort. But I don’t think they’re real people, which is what the atheists on TV seem to think about their god of choice.

 

**I am willing to make room for metaphor—after all, I do like Joseph Campbell, and he believes all myth to be metaphor. So if you subscribe to a belief that way, you’re in the clear on that count.

 

***This is also why I would be seriously disappointed if stage magic turned out to be some sort of actual magic. The thing that’s so cool about stage magic is that they can make it look like magic when it’s not.

Comments

[kurupira.livejournal.com]

amicable atheist right hurr, yo. represent.

really though, ditto to everything you said. I'm not atheist because of any traumatic childhood experience, nor do I hate life, God, the world, or anything really, except maybe calculus.

[enigmania.livejournal.com]

Word.

Have you read the book "A Short History of Nearly Everything"? It's full of awesomeness, both of the natural world and the crazy people who figured out the stuff we know about it.

[blackbyrd2.livejournal.com]

I was kinda of pissed off at first, thinking there was still a god, but an idiot one, or possibly a malicious one.

It was clear to me that there either was no god, or if there was, he had no idea we were even around and wasn't playing an active part in the game (so to speak.) In other words, if there was a God, he'd started things up and then left the building.
Once I got that settled, and came to grips with it, I realized that, for all intents and purposes, they were the samething; No god.

Now I'm a happy atheist, or at least only angry at the silly (and sometimes maliciously stupid) people who insist on believing in one. And who believe that they are somehow more moral than I, although they (supposedly) try to do the right thing out of fear of being caught and punished, while I try to do it because I choose to.

[jadewing.livejournal.com]

I'm not an atheist, but more in the agnostic category in that I believe there is a higher power, and as the first God I learned about was the Christian one, it's sort of what I'm inclined to. But I'm also a heathen in that I do not ally myself with any church in particular. Personally, I think the whole point of Jesus being down here was to smack us all upside the head and try to get us to actually love and acccept not just everyone else, but ourselves as well. Somehow over the centuries this got warped into this myriad of factions and a whole lot of people who use it as an excuse to say they're better than people who don't go to the same church. I also highly suspect a lot of creative editing has gone down with the scriptures themselves over the centuries, considering that it all had to be copied by hand by monks who could possibly be under orders to play with the wording for political motives.

When it comes to science, I also honestly think it's almost proof in itself that there is a God in how amazingly things have been set up so that everything works. Except for, you know, the polar ice caps. Science is like this gigantically huge mystery novel that explains how everything works, going eventually down to every atom, and is likely still being added to. As scientists, our job is to try to read as much of that book as possible, and the translation key is the world itself. I figure that God is the author, and what author wouldn't want their work read? I hardly think that scientists kill God; quite the opposite, in fact. For example: Big Bang Theory. There's evidence, and I'll totally believe it. I still don't know what set it off though, and until we find out, I'm going to nurse the hunch that it was a higher power. God is the explanation I have for the unknown, pretty much, but I'm willing to accept explanations that solve the unknown because I don't think that's any sort of sacrilege.

I think that's why a lot of religious people have problems with scientists. There are all sorts of mysteries surrounding creation and the meaning of life and so on, and the vast majority of faiths explain those mysteries through their own mythology and scripture. When scientists unravel the mystery, they take it as muckraking in sacred ground, whereas I view it as uncovering more and more of a divine mystery that God presumably wants us to solve.

And on that note, Hail Xenu!

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

I'm quite religious, but I don't believe in the supernatural or magic or the like, and to me God is a more a metaphor for life. A God who causes miracles and generally meddles in human affairs is way too petty a God for me to believe in. I am also a little tired of being lumped into the same group as, say, Christians, just because they're an offshoot of my often far more sensible religion.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_wastrel/]

I was a serious Christian for about seven or eight years during my teens, during which I got angry at atheists a lot and was fiercely protective of my beliefs even though most people around me didn't share them. It took me a long process of reflection, discussions and self-examination for me to realize that I can't really believe in God anymore, and the "best" I can do now is agnostic, since I don't know, I don't assume, and I try to understand what the possible advantages and disadvantages of believing and not believing are so I can benefit from the former and avoid the latter. I'm an agnostic because I'm pragmatic. =P

I've read some utterly fascinating things about quantum mechanics, brain waves, electro-magnetic energy, string theory, fractals, the Jungian collective unconscious and the Schumann resonance. I think that some day science will have advanced to a point at which we'll finally understand which greater interconnecting reality all of those religious texts were trying to hint at.

I think that in a meaningful kind of way, the universe has a soul, and even though I don't pray anymore, I can still say "God rest its soul" about a dead animal by the side of the road and mean it. I don't want this being's existence or disappearance on this planet to have gone unnoticed because I feel that it deserves better than that.

I don't know whether there's a God or not, but I do know this: reality in and of itself is an extraordinary thing.