Hello. My name is Quinn, and I am an atheist.
I am also a (not very anonymous) recovering alcoholic, which makes the aforementioned atheism difficult to maintain in the face of fellow members of Alcoholics Anonymous. And it requires a fair amount of mental contortion and gymnastics if one intends to put into practice any of the principles on which most recovery programs are founded, while maintaining one’s non-belief.
My upbringing was a little atypical – my parents never mentioned religion at all that I can remember. To this day, I’m only 50% sure they are also atheists, the other 50% is that they straddle the line between atheist and just-don’t-care. Though every year my dad says the Singularity is only 10 years away (he’s been saying this for the last 20 years), so they do have their little oddities. As a child, religion for me was no different from other bits of make-believe or the fantasy books I was constantly reading.
That started to change in high school – I was talking to people my age that were religious, and generally trying to figure the universe out. I went to church once or twice with my grandmother, but found the sermons pretty offensive. I stumbled into paganism after a blow up in a star trek email discussion group (long story), and thought that it sounded nice.
I’m a Native North American, Ojibwe, grew up in Canada. 34 years old now. Family is Catholic, and went to Catholic school for my education.
Though the schools were there to continue indoctrination, I do have to admit the teachers were quality teachers who genuinely cared about the well-being of the students. They practiced their craft well; helping those who struggled and offered challenge to those who excelled. They put up with us teenagers doing teenaged things like getting drunk, smoking, and skipping school, and taught us when we were ready to learn. So I learned.
I suppose the easiest thing to say is “because there is no evidence for the existence of any super natural being.” Ultimately that’s what it comes down to.
Notice that “Santiago” in my name? That’s because I am a semi-professional magician and “Santiago” is my performing persona. This is relevant. You see it was my research in to magic that put the final nail in the coffin of religious and supernatural belief for me.
Stop me if you’ve heard this before: “Atheism is another religious belief”. “I don’t have enough faith to be an atheist.” “Someone curdled the contents of my brain pan and replaced them with a thurible.” Yeah, familiar nonsense, isn’t it? And now a Canadian “legal philosopher, writer, professor and practicing legal consultant”, Iain Benson, is forcefully regurgitating them again, with the added bonus of amazingly false claims.
“Atheists, agnostics and religious of all forms are believers and all have faith. The question is not whether they are believers but rather, what they believe in,” he says and insists the “new atheists” such as the late Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins, who pride themselves on “not having any beliefs,” are wrong.
“Atheists are men and women of faith. Their faiths are different but they are still faiths and their beliefs still beliefs, no matter how much Dawkins and those like him wish it was different. Humans are stuck being believers, and that’s all there is to it,” he says.
We pride ourselves on not having any beliefs? Really? I have lots of beliefs, and I question them whenever necessary; I also expect my beliefs to be supported by evidence. I believe the earth orbits the sun, and I have evidence for that. I believe the earth is 4½ billion years old, and I have evidence for that. I believe life evolved, and I have evidence for that.
I don’t have faith, though, unless you’re willing to redefine “faith” to such a degree that it has no relationship at all to what theists mean by the term.
Here’s the problem: it’s not belief, because of course everyone has beliefs. It’s false beliefs. It’s beliefs that contradict reality, or are internally self-contradictory, or dogmatic beliefs that cannot be revised in the face of new evidence. Atheists try their best to get rid of those (although even there, we’re not perfect), while theists like Benson embrace such nonsensical jibber-jabber enthusiastically, and try to use their demonstrably false beliefs to guide public policy.
We all have a body of common beliefs: you’ll die if you jump out of a tenth story window, you should have a competent mechanic check out that used car you’re planning to buy, we can learn more about the world by observing and testing it. These are the set of pragmatic beliefs that allow all of us to function from day to day.
Then there are the set of entirely bogus and nonsensical religious beliefs layered on top of the useful common beliefs: you will live after death, a god cares about what you do in the privacy of your bed, we’re all damned sinners who will go to hell unless we belief in a zombie blood sacrifice. Sensible people reject those.
Although “dogmatic” doesn’t necessarily mean being rude, common usage helps prevent any real understanding of what dogma is. “Which is why so many atheists and men and women in the street think, like Dawkins and Hitchens, they don’t believe in anything. But they do.”
But a lack of understanding has enabled contemporary atheists to present their belief system as the only one that should have public recognition, forcing their own so called “non beliefs” on others.
No, you can believe whatever you want. What you can’t do is determine public policy by your dogma, which poorly reflects the realities of the physical world, nor can you use the state to indoctrinate children into your set of falsehoods.
Contrary to Benson’s freaky views, atheists aren’t trying to demand that politicians and teachers be atheists — we insist that they be secular. Big difference. Use secular principles to work out what is best for people in the material world. Weirdly, Benson seems to understand what “secular” means.
“We need to reclaim the true meaning of the ‘secular,'” Professor Benson says, pointing out that the word is misunderstood in today’s world and taken to mean “non-religious” when its real meaning, and legal definition is derived from the Latin word “saeculum” meaning “world.”
“Secular was used historically to distinguish between those things that were deemed to be ‘in the world’ and those that were expressly and technically ‘religious,'” he explains using the Catholic tradition to distinguish “secular priests” or those who work “in the world” from “religious” for those men and women who have taken specific religious vows and may live a cloistered life.
Yeeeeeessss? Atheists know what “secular” means. Perhaps Mr Benson should talk to a few sometime — his babblings reveal a profound ignorance.
According to Professor Benson, religious believers have as much right as anyone else to function in society according to these beliefs.
“Likewise religious institutions have as much right as non-religious institutions. Everyone has a belief system of some sort and those who draw on religious sources should not be put at a disadvantage,” he insists.
His support of equality for religious and secular institutions is commendable. Then I suppose he’d agree with me that the special privileges of tax exemptions and lack of regulatory oversight for changes should be abolished?
Since both religious people and atheists can share secular values, I don’t think it’s depriving the religious of their rights by insisting that everyone should be competent at their secular role; the special knowledge of religion/spirituality ought to have as much relevance to secular positions as knowledge of the rules of Dungeons & Dragons.
I am an atheist because of my personal experiences. I am not an atheist because I am a rationalist or because I am a student of the sciences. Indeed, the opposite is likely true. I became a rationalist and enthusiastic about science after my scepticism about gods emerged. It was my attempt to find reasons why gods probably don’t exist that led me to logic and empiricism.
There is a common line of attack Christians use in debates with atheists, and I genuinely detest it. It’s to ask the question, “where do your morals come from?” I detest it because it is not a sincere question at all — they don’t care about your answer, they’re just trying to get you to say that you do not accept the authority of a deity, so that they can then declare that you are an evil person because you do not derive your morals from the same source they do, and therefore you are amoral. It is, of course, false to declare that someone with a different morality than yours is amoral, but that doesn’t stop those sleazebags.
I was probably born an atheist; I can’t remember one way or another. After a long try at Christianity mostly because that’s what just about everyone I ever knew acted like they thought, I realized I know nothing of any reason to believe in any God. So, I returned to no belief as a natural honest action appropriate to no evidence otherwise. Born again.
Robert Huckabee
United States
So you’re looking for summaries of the Women in Secularism conference, because you, like me, weren’t able to go. Here you go: Skatje Myers, Jen McCreight, Ashley Miller, Skeptical Seeker, and Catherine Dunphy. I’m a little jealous.
Now what I expect to happen, though, is that this long list of speakers — Lauren Becker, Ophelia Benson, Jamila Bey, Greta Christina, R. Elisabeth Cornwell, Margaret Downey, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Debbie Goddard, Jennifer Michael Hecht, Melody Hensley, Sikivu Hutchinson, Susan Jacoby, Jennifer McCreight, Bernice Sandler, Wafa Sultan, and Rebecca Watson — will receive greater recognition, and at the next conferences I attend, more of them will be invited, and I’ll be hearing much more from them.
It’s another day of flying about for me (and tomorrow, there’s even more flying across the Atlantic), so here’s something to chew over: My Telekinesis, a site dedicated to explaining how to do all kinds of magical things with the power of your brain. It even has instructions! I was all keen on trying to levitate while I wait for the next leg of my flight, but the first step I was supposed to take was to “open my third eye”. I’ve only got two. I don’t think it was fair of the author to lead us cripples on like that.
I also noticed that the author had to explain that his technique works best when you’re asleep. Nice — I should contribute an article explaining my amazing mental power, called “dreaming”.
Being the kind of guy I am, I jumped straight to the article about evil powers. It wasn’t very helpful.
Dark Bomb
First take all of your energy and convert it into darkness, if you dont have energy then you should draw mana from the darkness. Then lift your hands over your head and pull all the darkness energy into your hands. You should do this until it is feeling very heavy. Then make it unstable by making it to where it will explode on contact. To do this simply imagine it like a bomb. Then throw it hard against a target or down on the ground. It will hurt you and everything else in its way.
It’s got 350 comments, and they aren’t all “Bwahahahahaha!” There are people enthusing over using this power against bunny rabbits and people — somehow, the idea of some nerd concentrating really hard and waving his hands at me (or a bunny) doesn’t scare me very much.
(via rationalbrain.)
