What is an Atheist?
a•the•ist [ey-thee-ist] N a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.
Origin:
1565-75; < Greek áthe ( os ) godless + -ist
-Related forms
an•ti•a•the•ist, noun, adjective
pro•a•the•ist, noun, adjective
-Can be confused: agnostic, atheist, deist, theist
Our seemingly religious culture in the United States has a hard time with atheists. The problem stems from the deep Christian influence on Western culture. Theists, most especially the religious apologists, want an easy way to categorize all non-believers. It makes “debunking” them and defending their peculiar faiths much easier.
The problem is that an atheist is the opposite of a religionist. A religionist - as the root religion suggests - is “bound” or tethered by a set of principals or creeds that allows them to cleave to communities of likeminded individuals through a set of stated beliefs, customs and practices.
Atheists are not bound that way. In fact all it really means to be an atheist is to be a-theistic or without god or gods. In my estimation the truest definition of an atheist is someone who lives without any gods or belief in the supernatural. At least that is how I would apply it to myself if you were to ask me. I am godless. Not only am I godless, I take an agnostic worldview. Even if god were to exist it is doubtful to me that its existence would be provable as the current estate of deity based world religions suggest (at least as I experience them here in the West).
The fact remains that even philosophers with religious tendencies such as Kant and the mathematician Blaise Pascal concluded that god was beyond our capacity to reason. This lead to the ultimate intellectual suicide referred to as Pascal’s wager. The reality is that god is a concept that exists in the mind of the individual believer. That concept is not even 100% the same among similar groups of believers despite their adherence to the same creed. It is entirely subjective and therefore it makes perfect rational sense to demand some form of empirical proof. The religionist’s insistence that there are other ways of “knowing” is all well and good, but unless you can establish the difference between actual knowledge, wishful thinking, fantasy and often downright delusion it is an irrational and even irresponsible way to live your life. Since we know that our physical senses can deceive us, how much more caution should we place in the exercise of our subjective reasoning?
My favorite story attributed to the Buddha tells of a young man who asked whether or not god existed. The Buddha replied, “God exists, god does not exist. The matter of your enlightenment remains the same.” If god is beyond our ability to reason it seems pointless to speculate about his or her existence. Furthermore the inability to reason god into existence suggests the high probability that god does not exist at all. The Buddha has been said to have discouraged his followers from such idle metaphysical speculation. It serves no useful purpose and can drag us away from reality.
My present grasp of the natural world suggests to me that it works just as well without a supreme deity or supernatural forces at play. It is mind boggling to consider the big bang as the start of the universe which implies that all matter and energy that exists now has always existed in some form or other. But, this imponderable reality is no less absurd and, perhaps less so, then the notion of an ineffable and eternal being who created everything ex nihlio or out of nothing. That kind of reasoning seems more like a form of mental retardation than anything else. Where did god come from?
After years of being steeped in religion, first as a Roman Catholic, and later in a variety of New Thought and non-Christian faiths I reached the conclusion that religion has served no functional or useful purpose in my life. I have not found any productive element to attending Mass, praying, eating unleavened wafers, going to confession and fasting or any other religious practice. In fact religion played a huge role in my being afflicted by depression and anxiety. Giving me the permission to discard the yoke of faith my mental health has greatly improved. However, this is me and I am just one of many atheists or nonbelievers. I don’t speak for all atheists or freethinkers.
I suppose if you asked a hundred different atheists to describe what it means to be an atheist or what their atheism meant to them personally you would get nearly a hundred different answers. That is one of the defining characteristics of free thinking non-theists as a group. We are quite independent in our thinking and don’t rely on the improvable and always improbable notions of the theist. We think for ourselves. When we don’t know we say, “I don’t know.” We don’t play subjective reasoning games trying to shove imaginary spiritual beings into the gaps created by our lack of knowledge or understanding.
Atheists don’t have a centralized creed or a set of universal principals that we are all bound to by agreement. This is the biggest stumbling block for many theists or supernatural enthusiasts who try to understand atheism from a religious or spiritual perspective. Atheists can’t be understood this way. We don’t have a set group of principals that define us as a whole like Roman Catholics or Orthodox Jews have. Atheists are just as likely to disagree with each other as any religionist. In fact, as a whole, we can be quite irascible, especially if we disagree with you. However, we are not all nasty militants like Christopher Hitchens.
That being stated it doesn’t mean that I am unprincipled. I have a very sharp sense of ethics and ethical conduct. But, it’s not a creed that I must swear by to gain entrance to the eternal bliss of an afterlife.
Despite my mother’s concerns I didn’t suddenly become an immoral criminal and sexual deviant. Rather I live by a code of personal enlightened self interest, which takes into account the effects of my actions on those around me. I find it personally important to consider both my intended and any potential unintended consequence to my actions. I don’t need a god’s approval or fear of his punishment to do the “right thing.” My ability to make emotional connections to other human beings and even animals helps me do so and behave in a fair and just manner.
But, this is not religious practice. My ethics and subsequent conduct will change as my information changes. It changes through open interaction with others. But, ethics is not religion although most religions concern themselves with a sort of “ethics light” called morality. Morality prescribes certain approved behaviors and sanctions for unapproved ones. Secular society does this as well, but it doesn’t make the practice of democracy a religion.
Perhaps this sounds like a set of principals to you. In some ways you are correct. Any thoughtful person could be said to have a set of beliefs or principals that we live by. But, that is not the same thing as a dogmatic religious creed, which so many try to suggest that atheism has. Some of the confusion may result that there are atheistic religions such as Buddhism, which has no central beliefs in god or gods. But, Buddhism is a religion that happens to have an atheistic or agnostic, at the very least, worldview.
Buddhism is another spectrum on the world religion tree with its own set of principals or creeds and prescribed rituals and behaviors. It is a religion that simply has no gods just as some aboriginal groups in Australia have no gods, but have religious practices. Atheism is not this way. Not all religions are centered around any god or gods and despite our monotheistic biases a religious spectrum such as Christianity is actually a rarity in comparison to the many forms of religious expression. So while there exist, non theistic religions that does not equate to atheism, having a creed of itself.
Over the years I have heard some fantastic and amusing misunderstandings of this. One friend recently suggested that to be an atheist means you reject only the Christian god. Not really - if you reject one god, but accept others you are still a theist. You may not be Christian, but you don’t qualify as an atheist. The only exception might be someone such as the fictional fantasy character Conan the Barbarian, whose deity Crom disregards Conan’s prayers to the point where the warrior simply chooses to disregard the worship of Crom as not useful to him. Conan lives without god or gods, but his otherwise acceptance of the general reality of Crom or in other supernatural events eliminates him form the category of the true atheist.
Another amusing statement was that an atheist is someone “who thought that you have to believe that everything in the bible is true to be a Christian” or believer. That is patently ridiculous. That statement describes a type of fundamentalist literalism that is not shared by all believers. Many post modern Christians view the bible as an ad hoc mixture of history, myth, poetry and prophetic uttering that is not always reliable.
Personally, as an atheist my studies have suggested that even the so-called history in the bible is rather revisionist if not downright crackpot. Tradition gets confused with actual fact based history all the time. Despite more than a century of archeology there is little evidence to support much of what is written in the texts of Exodus and Joshua. Even Jesus is little more than a quasi historical figure whose real existence is confused by the mythical imagery of the risen Christ of Pauline Christianity.
My being atheist has nothing to do with how I personally view the bible or what I think of other people’s views of holy writ. These views are as much a spectrum as Christianity is a spectrum and will vary, sometimes greatly. The biggest mistake our culture makes with Christianity is to consider it one religion. It is not. You may think that your Christian beliefs are the true form of the religion, but that is a matter of personal opinion. Christianity is a branch of monotheism off the world religion tree. You can start making distinctions such as Orthodox, Roman Catholicism, Catholicism and Protestantism. Each of these categories has sub categories making Christianity a very diverse type of monotheism that shares a few characteristics.
Atheists need to help non-theists make clearer distinctions. It will help when we stop using the language of Christianity in our discussions. The fact is debating Christianity, while entertaining, is non-productive because Atheism and Christianity are not apples and apples. One is a religion based on supernatural premises; the other is the absence of gods and the supernatural. It is not a religion at all. Now there are atheistic philosophies such as Secular Humanism and non-theist religions such as Buddhism, but these are not the core of atheism, which is, as our definition suggests, is to be or to live without gods. That is all.
When I say I am an atheist all I am saying to you is that I don’t believe in any gods or supernatural things. There is nothing more to it.
Origin:
1565-75; < Greek áthe ( os ) godless + -ist
-Related forms
an•ti•a•the•ist, noun, adjective
pro•a•the•ist, noun, adjective
-Can be confused: agnostic, atheist, deist, theist
Our seemingly religious culture in the United States has a hard time with atheists. The problem stems from the deep Christian influence on Western culture. Theists, most especially the religious apologists, want an easy way to categorize all non-believers. It makes “debunking” them and defending their peculiar faiths much easier.
The problem is that an atheist is the opposite of a religionist. A religionist - as the root religion suggests - is “bound” or tethered by a set of principals or creeds that allows them to cleave to communities of likeminded individuals through a set of stated beliefs, customs and practices.
Atheists are not bound that way. In fact all it really means to be an atheist is to be a-theistic or without god or gods. In my estimation the truest definition of an atheist is someone who lives without any gods or belief in the supernatural. At least that is how I would apply it to myself if you were to ask me. I am godless. Not only am I godless, I take an agnostic worldview. Even if god were to exist it is doubtful to me that its existence would be provable as the current estate of deity based world religions suggest (at least as I experience them here in the West).
The fact remains that even philosophers with religious tendencies such as Kant and the mathematician Blaise Pascal concluded that god was beyond our capacity to reason. This lead to the ultimate intellectual suicide referred to as Pascal’s wager. The reality is that god is a concept that exists in the mind of the individual believer. That concept is not even 100% the same among similar groups of believers despite their adherence to the same creed. It is entirely subjective and therefore it makes perfect rational sense to demand some form of empirical proof. The religionist’s insistence that there are other ways of “knowing” is all well and good, but unless you can establish the difference between actual knowledge, wishful thinking, fantasy and often downright delusion it is an irrational and even irresponsible way to live your life. Since we know that our physical senses can deceive us, how much more caution should we place in the exercise of our subjective reasoning?
My favorite story attributed to the Buddha tells of a young man who asked whether or not god existed. The Buddha replied, “God exists, god does not exist. The matter of your enlightenment remains the same.” If god is beyond our ability to reason it seems pointless to speculate about his or her existence. Furthermore the inability to reason god into existence suggests the high probability that god does not exist at all. The Buddha has been said to have discouraged his followers from such idle metaphysical speculation. It serves no useful purpose and can drag us away from reality.
My present grasp of the natural world suggests to me that it works just as well without a supreme deity or supernatural forces at play. It is mind boggling to consider the big bang as the start of the universe which implies that all matter and energy that exists now has always existed in some form or other. But, this imponderable reality is no less absurd and, perhaps less so, then the notion of an ineffable and eternal being who created everything ex nihlio or out of nothing. That kind of reasoning seems more like a form of mental retardation than anything else. Where did god come from?
After years of being steeped in religion, first as a Roman Catholic, and later in a variety of New Thought and non-Christian faiths I reached the conclusion that religion has served no functional or useful purpose in my life. I have not found any productive element to attending Mass, praying, eating unleavened wafers, going to confession and fasting or any other religious practice. In fact religion played a huge role in my being afflicted by depression and anxiety. Giving me the permission to discard the yoke of faith my mental health has greatly improved. However, this is me and I am just one of many atheists or nonbelievers. I don’t speak for all atheists or freethinkers.
I suppose if you asked a hundred different atheists to describe what it means to be an atheist or what their atheism meant to them personally you would get nearly a hundred different answers. That is one of the defining characteristics of free thinking non-theists as a group. We are quite independent in our thinking and don’t rely on the improvable and always improbable notions of the theist. We think for ourselves. When we don’t know we say, “I don’t know.” We don’t play subjective reasoning games trying to shove imaginary spiritual beings into the gaps created by our lack of knowledge or understanding.
Atheists don’t have a centralized creed or a set of universal principals that we are all bound to by agreement. This is the biggest stumbling block for many theists or supernatural enthusiasts who try to understand atheism from a religious or spiritual perspective. Atheists can’t be understood this way. We don’t have a set group of principals that define us as a whole like Roman Catholics or Orthodox Jews have. Atheists are just as likely to disagree with each other as any religionist. In fact, as a whole, we can be quite irascible, especially if we disagree with you. However, we are not all nasty militants like Christopher Hitchens.
That being stated it doesn’t mean that I am unprincipled. I have a very sharp sense of ethics and ethical conduct. But, it’s not a creed that I must swear by to gain entrance to the eternal bliss of an afterlife.
Despite my mother’s concerns I didn’t suddenly become an immoral criminal and sexual deviant. Rather I live by a code of personal enlightened self interest, which takes into account the effects of my actions on those around me. I find it personally important to consider both my intended and any potential unintended consequence to my actions. I don’t need a god’s approval or fear of his punishment to do the “right thing.” My ability to make emotional connections to other human beings and even animals helps me do so and behave in a fair and just manner.
But, this is not religious practice. My ethics and subsequent conduct will change as my information changes. It changes through open interaction with others. But, ethics is not religion although most religions concern themselves with a sort of “ethics light” called morality. Morality prescribes certain approved behaviors and sanctions for unapproved ones. Secular society does this as well, but it doesn’t make the practice of democracy a religion.
Perhaps this sounds like a set of principals to you. In some ways you are correct. Any thoughtful person could be said to have a set of beliefs or principals that we live by. But, that is not the same thing as a dogmatic religious creed, which so many try to suggest that atheism has. Some of the confusion may result that there are atheistic religions such as Buddhism, which has no central beliefs in god or gods. But, Buddhism is a religion that happens to have an atheistic or agnostic, at the very least, worldview.
Buddhism is another spectrum on the world religion tree with its own set of principals or creeds and prescribed rituals and behaviors. It is a religion that simply has no gods just as some aboriginal groups in Australia have no gods, but have religious practices. Atheism is not this way. Not all religions are centered around any god or gods and despite our monotheistic biases a religious spectrum such as Christianity is actually a rarity in comparison to the many forms of religious expression. So while there exist, non theistic religions that does not equate to atheism, having a creed of itself.
Over the years I have heard some fantastic and amusing misunderstandings of this. One friend recently suggested that to be an atheist means you reject only the Christian god. Not really - if you reject one god, but accept others you are still a theist. You may not be Christian, but you don’t qualify as an atheist. The only exception might be someone such as the fictional fantasy character Conan the Barbarian, whose deity Crom disregards Conan’s prayers to the point where the warrior simply chooses to disregard the worship of Crom as not useful to him. Conan lives without god or gods, but his otherwise acceptance of the general reality of Crom or in other supernatural events eliminates him form the category of the true atheist.
Another amusing statement was that an atheist is someone “who thought that you have to believe that everything in the bible is true to be a Christian” or believer. That is patently ridiculous. That statement describes a type of fundamentalist literalism that is not shared by all believers. Many post modern Christians view the bible as an ad hoc mixture of history, myth, poetry and prophetic uttering that is not always reliable.
Personally, as an atheist my studies have suggested that even the so-called history in the bible is rather revisionist if not downright crackpot. Tradition gets confused with actual fact based history all the time. Despite more than a century of archeology there is little evidence to support much of what is written in the texts of Exodus and Joshua. Even Jesus is little more than a quasi historical figure whose real existence is confused by the mythical imagery of the risen Christ of Pauline Christianity.
My being atheist has nothing to do with how I personally view the bible or what I think of other people’s views of holy writ. These views are as much a spectrum as Christianity is a spectrum and will vary, sometimes greatly. The biggest mistake our culture makes with Christianity is to consider it one religion. It is not. You may think that your Christian beliefs are the true form of the religion, but that is a matter of personal opinion. Christianity is a branch of monotheism off the world religion tree. You can start making distinctions such as Orthodox, Roman Catholicism, Catholicism and Protestantism. Each of these categories has sub categories making Christianity a very diverse type of monotheism that shares a few characteristics.
Atheists need to help non-theists make clearer distinctions. It will help when we stop using the language of Christianity in our discussions. The fact is debating Christianity, while entertaining, is non-productive because Atheism and Christianity are not apples and apples. One is a religion based on supernatural premises; the other is the absence of gods and the supernatural. It is not a religion at all. Now there are atheistic philosophies such as Secular Humanism and non-theist religions such as Buddhism, but these are not the core of atheism, which is, as our definition suggests, is to be or to live without gods. That is all.
When I say I am an atheist all I am saying to you is that I don’t believe in any gods or supernatural things. There is nothing more to it.