The religion of atheism

[fpb]

There is one tremendous and widespread mistake about atheism: that is, that it is not a religion - that it somehow even opposes religion. Many of us, including many Christians, accept this claim implicitly, using the nouns "atheism" and "religion" as opposites.

Comments

[cerebresque]

I would reply that this privileges not believing in the existence of deity over not believing in anything else

[fpb]

I was about to go to sleep after a particularly heavy day when I read this comment. The result was to shoot enough adrenalin into my veins to probably keep me up all night

[theswordmaiden]

I was afraid of this.

[fpb]

A most useful response. [/sarcastic/]

[theswordmaiden]

Do you mean you want me to clarify? I was afraid of being misunderstood and attacked.

[fpb]

What am I supposed to have misunderstood?

[nicked_metal]

(I've been linked here from nonfluffypagans.)

It seems to me that theswordmaiden was trying to agree with your original post, and to disagree with cerebesque. However, in the process of trying to agree with you theswordmaiden made some comments about evidence that appear to disagree with the research you've talked about doing. Your response suggests that you took offence to those comments about evidence, and your comment about "trashing a lifetime's work" seems unfair to me.

I suspect that theswordmaiden's fear of being misunderstood and attacked is stimulated by comments like this one:

The unbelievable amount of nonsense you manage to discharge in the rest of a rather short comment would give me work till tomorrow merely to ridicule it properly.

Comments like that suggest that your objective is not the exchange of ideas, but victory.

[theswordmaiden]

Or to expand, I've seen this happen a lot of times in this journal. I've seen you talk like that to many people, judging or abusing or calling them names, whether they deserved it or not. I've defended your behavior before and your posts were always thought-provoking so I told myself it's okay, you've said that you know you have a bad temper and you know me well enough that my questions are honest challenges or just things I wonder about, so surely you won't talk to me like that too. But still, I've treaded very carefully because I was always afraid I'd be next. Now, it feels worse than I thought it would. Too bad. It didn't have to end this way.

[fpb]

This is all about what I am supposed to have done to you. You do not seem even concerned to notice that I found your original intervention highly offensive to myself. I did not start this - you did. Evidently that is all right to you. And if that is the case - I stress, if - then it really did have to end like this.

[fpb]

My mind, as you are aware, is naturally pessimistic, and I find materialism easier to believe than the Christian doctrine. However, once I realized as a historian that the Christian documents were first-class historical documents with the same claim on our belief as, say, Caesar's accounts of his own wars, then the story they told imposed itself to my mind. I knew enough of the literary culture of the time to know that to write fiction in those terms was simply impossible; this was not an invented story in the sense in which the Hellenistic novels or the book of Jonah are invented stories. This was something told and believed as fact, like Caesar or Cicero told their own experiences as facts. And moving from that, I ended up finding so many ways in which the Christian doctrine fitted the human experience like, as Chesterton puts it, a key fits a lock. (Take, for instance, the matter of gratitude, mentioned above; or the centrality of love.) It is, to me, a matter of intellectual honesty to believe in the Christian message, even

[theswordmaiden]

Oh, I forgot to say, you sound like you do not believe either way, you just say there is no evidence. So to me you sound agnostic, not atheist. You don't say "there is no God," you say "I can't say one way or the other because I haven't seen any evidence." Sorry if I twisted your words or something, that's just how I read you.