Here's a little piece I wrote way back in April 1998. Fits nicely into this blog:
Being an Atheist
"Religion" and "god." You hear the two words every
day on television, radio, in conversations, and read them in the newspapers.
Religious groups receive publicity and recognition. However there is one
growing group of the population that has not received enough recognition, and
that group is atheists. As a member of this group, I want to elaborate on what
the group is like and what it means for me personally to belong to this group.
Also there are some misconceptions and stereotypes about atheists I would like
to clarify.
An atheist, by definition is someone who does not believe in god, and
before we begin any discussion about god, we need to define what god is. So
here is my personal definition of god:
God is a supreme being which has the
ability and does interfere in people's lives (in some way - good or bad) to a
perceptible degree. Let this be the starting point for the whole discussion.
Therefore, for me personally, an atheist is someone who disbelieves in
god under the above definition. Although there is no specific place that
atheists congregate (like a church), we all share similar value system and a
common disbelief in a supreme being. There are different ways to disbelieve,
just as there are different ways to believe (different religions/ sects/ denominations).
But generally atheists can be subdivided into 3 groups:
1)
"I
hate the world" atheists.
2)
"I
don't care" atheists
3)
Scientific
atheists
The first
group consists of people who at some point believed in god, but who, through
some unfortunate event in their lives became disappointed with the power up
above which was supposed to prevent the unfortunate event from happening and
failed to do so. As a consequence, these people reject their religious heritage
altogether and proceed to become atheists. Their type is very bitter,
pessimistic and sarcastic. This is what most religious people imagine atheists
to be. However it is hard to say whether these people truly disbelieve, because
even though they may have lost their faith in the positive attributes of god,
they may actually still believe in a supreme being, however negative they
perceive it to be. Also some of the people with a pessimistic outlook on the
world belong to this category. From them you may often here that life is
unfair, and if god existed things would have been much better than they are
now. People in this group usually stand out as unpleasant pessimists and very
often serve as prototypes of atheists in general, which they are not (just like
Catholics cannot be considered representatives of Christianity as a whole).
People in the second group usually
come from a weakly religious or non-religious background. They may or may not
claim to believe in god, but the existence of god is not something that's on
their minds very often. At some point in my life I belonged to this category. I
wasn't sure whether god existed or not, but the answer to that question was not
particularly significant to me at that point. Many people in the second category believe in god
and the clockwork universe; that is the world is a clock, which god created
("wound") and forgot about. He never came back to interfere again.
From this standpoint, it really doesn't matter if god exists, for it will have
no affect on us in our lifetime. Even if some of the people in this category
may say they believe in god or say they are agnostic (unsure of god's
existence), I still call them atheists, since the existence of god has no
relevance to them on an everyday basis.
The third group is the one I
currently belong to. Being a scientific atheist means having a scientific basis
for your disbelief. People come into this category after thinking about the
issue for a long time and realizing that there are no facts to support god's
existence "beyond reasonable doubt." There is no hard-core evidence
in favor of god that cannot be explained otherwise. And if at any time
something cannot be explained by conventional means, it does not imply that
this something has supernatural causes. Granted there is no hard-core evidence
in opposition to the existence of god either, but here we have to consider the
nature of the human mind. The mind tends to attribute events to supernatural
causes whenever it runs out of natural explanations, therefore the scientific
atheists say that in all probability god does not exist.
One thing in common about all three
groups of atheists is that all of us tend to have liberal standing on moral and
often political issues. Being an atheist involves reevaluating traditional ways
of thinking about everything in life, not just the existence of god alone. It
involves questioning authority, and evaluating the world in new terms. Since we
have no source that helps us tell right from wrong (like the Bible or Koran),
our conceptions of right and wrong are far from standard. Before we say what’s
right and what’s wrong, we ask ourselves “What does it mean for something to be
right?” Instead of seeing the world as being black-and-white, we perceive it as
consisting of infinitely many shades of gray. Atheists are not the only ones
with that kind of perception of the world, but being an atheist most surely
suggests more than disbelief in god. It involves a whole set of moral and
political values. Also it usually means being more open to new and
unconventional ideas, questioning well established concepts, etc.
One of the good things about being
an atheist is that I do not have to participate in any religious activities,
unless I find them fulfilling in ways other than religious (e.g. being part of
a traditional celebration). Also, not believing in god makes me feel like the
vast majority of things in life is logically consistent, since I never look for
supernatural explanations.
I came from a non-religious family,
and originally I went back and forth between believing and disbelieving. After
a while, I settled into the second category, at which point the existence of
god did not matter to me. In high school, I took a psychology class, and
after finding out more about how the human mind operated, I came to the
conclusion that the only place god existed was in people’s heads, and not as an
independent external power.
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