Devil-Worshippin' Atheist Is A Contradiction In Terms

[bloodyrosemccoy]

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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

[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.