Atheism and Religion

Nobody rebukes me and gets away with it...

I walked into a pub near Dublin a few years ago, and found myself in the middle of a religious debate waging between the Catholics and Protestants of the town that had gathered there that evening. Not wanting to involve myself in something I had no interest in, I shuffled to the bar and ordered a Guinness, extra cold. Hearing my voice, the Mick on the stool next to mine exclaimed "You're an American!"

Within seconds, I had a crowd around me, and my hopes of finding a quiet corner to drink and philosophize over some Oscar Wilde suddenly evaporated like the wisps of a lovely dream when you just come out of slumber. Everyone began assaulting me with their arguments and evidence to support their corresponding religious leanings, and demanded that I weigh in on the subject.

"Please, everyone, please" I temporized, "I really have no business interjecting my views here. I'm an Atheist. I don't believe in God."

You could have heard a placenta drop. Not a believer? In the very heart of Ireland, no less! There was muttering and shaking of heads all around, when a voice piped up from the back; "Aye...But is it the God of the Protestants or the God of the Catholics ye dinna believe in?"

On the heels of my last post, I wanted to say something that's been on my mind for a while. Witnessing, attempts at conversion, door-to-door salesmen for Christ...This is nothing more than a religious "property acquisition" game instigated by whatever church to insure membership - Not concern for eternal salvation.

See, if you were simply concerned about me roasting for all eternity, you would ask WHAT I believed first, and then turn the spiel off if I answered something like "I'm a Lutheran" or "I follow the teachings of the Prophet Mohammad". When you continue through with your so-called "mission", you're saying that it's not enough that someone believes, but that they believe in your dogma as well.

As an Atheist (from the Greek "Atheos", meaning "without Gods"), I'm often caught in a metaphysical crossfire between believers of different faiths. I find that such people often use the same facts, coupled with mythology and hearsay, to argue the validity of their "single truth", while simultaneously obliterating the beliefs of those who are drawing from the same source as the first.

As an intellectual, I tend to disdain taking anything as fact on faith. You can't simply walk up and argue that your God is so awesomely powerful that he created the sun, and then offer the existence of the sun as proof of existence of your God. However, I'm not so pedantic as to dismiss out of hand any natural occurrence due to a lack of immediate evidence. If a phenomena occurs then something must have caused it, regardless if I understand the process. But I can't in good conscience posit any speculation on the instance of the phenomena until I have a modicum of evidence to direct and support my suspicions. (Aside note to all of you who remember it: That last sentence is the CORRECT use of Occam's Razor. No charge.)

Fundamentally, a religious believer isn't concerned with how or why a thing works (such topics clearly marked as Taboo & filed away under "Burn in Hell for all eternity if you read this") only that they can continue to make it work. Thomas Edison, for example. One of the most loathsome gangsters who ever went deaf, had no idea - NONE! - of what electricity was or what it could do, but he practically invented electrical engineering, because his lightbulb had no way of working without it.

Or take my Pleistocene ancestor Ook-Grog Edmonds, of the buttscratcher tribe in what is now known as Kenya. He didn't know that fire was simply a self-sustaining rapid chain reaction of oxidation with carbonaceous material, nor did he need to; He simply found a way of starting one and keeping it going. (That bastard Thag Mortog stole the idea from him, which is why he gets credit for inventing fire nowadays).

These are examples of existing phenomena that were later validated through science. Well and all, but that doesn't mean the process works in favor of an all-powerful deity being the reason the sun shines every day. On dogmatism, let me say this: Anyone is likely to piss on something they think is an example of crass ignorance, especially if they feel it insults their intelligence. Taking a dogma on faith alone isn't enough to provoke this level of vehemence from me, but trying to convince me that it's a sound, logical process and that I, too, should join up WILL. Especially when you throw that carrot-or-the-stick motivational of heaven and hell at the end of it.

Personally speaking, if there really was a God, would he need such petty devices to stimulate our beliefs? Religious crusaders often take the idea of someone being an Atheist as a kind of challenge, like a mountain that no one has climbed before. Being an Atheist doesn't mean "My beliefs are up for grabs, feel free to inundate me with your attempts at conversion". A person who doesn't believe in a Prime Mover can (and often does) feel just as strongly about their beliefs as the most devout Catholic does about the virgin Mary. It's no less an insult to listen to someone tell you that the punishment for non-belief is everlasting damnation than it is to hear a nonbeliever scoff at the concept of an all-knowing magic invisible being that sometimes grants wishes if you pray hard enough.

Like that creepy guy with animal issues once said; "There's more than one way to skin a cat".