Of course, the use of the word “atheist” (and therefore the need to “out” oneself) has been stirred up recently by Sam Harris at an Atheist Alliance conference in Washington² – there are no “non-racists”, so “why are we defining ourselves by something that should simply be the case”³?

Every political or social group have certain beliefs and/or interests in common. A football team shares a love of sports, and possibly a belief that football is a worthwhile pursuit. A political group might share certain values and beliefs about how a society should function. A religion, well, they often share beliefs about a great many things: politics, sexuality, family values, etc. But more importantly – they share a belief in a supernatural being (or spirit, or afterlife, etc.).

What do atheists share? Nothing. Many of us can’t even agree on a definition of Atheism! I don’t mean to say that there’s nothing that we share, but what we do share is, quite literally, “nothing” – we share a nonexistent thing⁴: a lack of a belief in God. While this probably gives us a more common understanding of God than most religious people (even within the same religion or denomination, it seems every person has their own understanding of exactly what or who God is), this doesn’t seem to be a great foundation for an alliance.

Am I going to “come out”, well – yes, and no. I am without religion. I am, therefore, an atheist. I am also without racism, and am therefore non-racist. I have never killed anyone, and am therefore a non-murderer. I further have no love for chocolate⁵, no love of ABBA or the Spice Girls and most certainly no belief in fairies or celestial teapots. If you wish to define me by any of these “labels”, feel free – but I certainly don’t.

1. Harris explains it much better than I could on his website
2. Partial transcript available at Washington Post
3. Hemant Mehta (Oct 1, 2007) Atheist Alliance International Convention 2007 (Recap)
4. Nothing (n) A nonexistent thing
5. I wonder if coming out as an atheist, or an non-chocoholic would create more of a stir?

Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer. They had been going at it for days, and frankly God was tired of hearing all the bickering.

Finally fed up, God said, “THAT’S IT! I have had enough. I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job.”

So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away.

They moused.

They faxed.

They e-mailed.

They e-mailed with attachments.

They downloaded.

They did spreadsheets!

They wrote reports.

They created labels and cards.

They created charts and graphs.

They did some genealogy reports.

They did every job known to man.

Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell

Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off.

Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.

Jesus just sighed.

Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their computers. Satan started searching frantically, screaming:

“It’s gone! It’s all GONE! “I lost everything when the power went out!”

Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work.

Satan observed this and became irate.

“Wait!” he screamed. “That’s not fair! He cheated! How come he has all his work and I don’t have any?”

God just shrugged and said,

JESUS SAVES

Anybody see the correlation?

(Via The Consumerist)

1. Google is the closest thing to an Omniscient (all-knowing) entity in existence, which can be scientifically verified.
2. Google is everywhere at once (Omnipresent).
3. Google answers prayers.
4. Google is potentially immortal.
5. Google is infinite.
6. Google remembers all.
7. Google can “do no evil” (Omnibenevolent).
8. According to Google trends, the term “Google” is searched for more than the terms “God”, “Jesus”, “Allah”, “Buddha”, “Christianity”, “Islam”, “Buddhism” and “Judaism” combined.
9. Evidence of Google’s existence is abundant.

Although, now I’m confused – is Google God, is is it the Flying Spaghetti Monster? Oh noodley/googley one, please give me a sign, so that I may know who to worship!

(via Williamely)

I think that all the “prophets” and religious leaders believed in the message they preached, but they didn’t expect (or want) their messages to be accepted as divine and unquestionable truth – they wanted people to think for themselves. I believe that Jesus, if he was a real man and if his message hadn’t been distorted by religion, would still be revered today without needing needing to claim that he was “God”¹.

Christians often ask themselves, “What Would Jesus Do?”, and I think if Jesus lived today, he’d be amazed by the magic all around us, and might even “find God” in a similar way to Einstein:

Sometimes he was really using God as just a sort of convenient metaphor. But he did have, I think, a genuine cosmic religious feeling, a sense of admiration at the intellectual ingenuity of the universe. Not just its majesty, but its extraordinary subtlety and beauty and mathematical elegance.²

I think Jesus, today, would be more like a modern Buddhist or perhaps a “hippy” (jokes are often made about Jesus being the first hippy, but I think all jokes aside there’s a lot of truth to that).

If we ask ourselves the question, “What Would Jesus Believe?”, whatever the answer is, I definitely don’t believe he’d be a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim, for that matter. It makes me think of the Cat’s religion in Red Dwarf…

1. As far as I’m aware, there’s not a lot of evidence that he actually claimed that he was God, but even if he did, perhaps he meant it in an entirely different way.
2. Davies, Paul (2007) Einstein’s God

• 7 Proofs That We Live in a Computer Simulation – or Why Proofs of Gods Existance Are Unconvicing
• Why I took so long to accept evolution – a.k.a. Why every christian should read their own bible. “part of what helped me along was actually reading the Bible in high school, being horrified by much of it”
• denialism blog : I can has souls? – There is a god, and it’s a cat.
• Religion and Sexual Ethics – A nice summary of the moral position of various religions. Interesting to compare catholicism and buddhism side by side! (I think I’m with the Buddhists, here)
• LOL cat Bible – Personally, I hate this pathetic LOLspeak crap, although this picture is funny… “In teh beginning, Invisible Man make univerz. Invisible Man say, I can has light. Gots light.”

Perhaps there are more, but I think they boil down to the following:

1. Few, if any, atheists claim to be 100% sure that God does not exist. (99.99999% IS good enough)
2. Pascal’s Wager (which Adams’ post is based on – although perhaps not knowingly) doesn’t account for the multitude of beings which claim punishment for non-belief. Of course the other fallacies of Pascal’s wager are equally present in Adams’ post.

I don’t go around calling myself an “a-redhead” or an “a-woman”, or saying that I have “a-green” eyes, I’m not “a-artistic” or “a-Swahili-speaking” (feel free to translate these words into Greek for the proper effect). Similarly, a Deaf person wouldn’t go around calling themselves “a-hearing”¹. Why, then, do atheists insist on using a commonly misunderstood negative label² to describe their lack of belief in God? Aren’t we just “not theistic”?

What other positive words or terms could we use to describe ourselves?

1. Although “hearing impaired” is a commonly used term, a “culturally Deaf” person who uses sign language and associates with the Deaf community would never use this term to describe themselves.
2. “a-theism” means, “without a belief in God”, which, one would assume should be the default position.

While I was watching a documentary on the history of religion recently, my sister said to me “but aren’t you an Atheist?”¹ At the time I replied, “no, I’m Agnostic”. It has made me think, however, about the nature of Atheism and Agnosticism.

While I generally describe myself as “agnostic”, and avoid describing myself as “atheist”, I could be viewed as both, depending on your definitions. As there seem to be many different views on what Atheism and Agnosticism entails, let me be very clear about what I take the meaning of these words to be.

Belief

Definitions for both Atheism and Agnosticism rely on the notion of “belief”, which itself can be contentious at times. For my purposes, when I say “belief”, I refer “to the attitude we have, roughly, whenever we take something to be the case or regard it as true”² Belief, here, does not imply any lack of certainty – even though it might sometimes in common usage.

Atheism

Atheism, it seems, can mean many things – but broadly it seems to fit one of two definitions:

1. the doctrine or belief that there is no God³, or
2. a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods⁴

The first definition is the one which I had always taken (I’ll call this “hard” Atheism), and it is why I have never described myself as an “Atheist”. To me, to hold a belief that these is no god is just as illogical as a belief that there is a God – possibly even more so. While it may (hypothetically) be possible one day to prove that there is a God (perhaps he shows himself in some incontestable way, or we find a scientific method for exploring “heaven”) proving the universal non-existence of something is impossible (we can prove something doesn’t exist in one place – say, a box that’s empty – but proving universal non-existence is very different).

The second (“soft”) definition of Atheism, however, is one I’d not been aware of until the last year or so. It seems this definition is common among Atheists, but in my experience it is certainly not the generally understood definition of Atheism. In this definition, Atheism is not the opposite to theism or religion, but an absence of it. It is in this sense that I am an Atheist, although without qualification, I still feel the word “atheist” misrepresents my views.

Agnosticism

This is where we get to Agnosticism. Agnostic means, literally, “without knowledge” and as such an Agnostic holds they they have no knowledge about the existence of God. This is not necessarily a “fence sitting” position, however, as Agnosticism (like Atheism) can be viewed in two subtly different ways:

1. a religious orientation of doubt⁵, or
2. a denial of ultimate knowledge of the existence of God⁶

Certainly using this first definition (“soft” agnosticism), one could argue that the holder of this world-view is “fence sitting” – possibly still exploring or reasoning to discover the truth, or perhaps unable or unwilling to. But again, the second definition offers an entirely different position. A “hard” agnostic does not simply doubt the existence of God (and may, in fact, have faith that there is a God) but makes the claim that it is impossible to ever know if God does or does not exist.

When I describe myself as “Agnostic”, I make the claim that it is impossible to know if any of the Gods described by traditional religions exist. I am also, however, open to the idea that perhaps “God” (if he exists) is nothing like that described by traditional religion, and therefore may one day be provable. For me, the problem with the traditional notions of God are that proponents of these Gods leave no way to ever truly prove his existence – as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy joke goes:

“I refuse to prove that I exist,” says God, “for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.”
“But,” says Man, “The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn’t it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don’t. QED.”
“Oh dear,” says God, “I hadn’t thought of that,” and promptly disappears in a puff of logic.

The Christian God, therefore, will always be out of the reach of science because as soon as it becomes answerable by science (no matter what the outcome), God will be relegated (by some, at least) to an even further “far away place ” so as to ensure the existence of God can never be proven.

So in this sense, I am a “hard” agnostic when it comes to Gods like that of Christianity (only because no one is willing to say exactly where this God might exist) but a “soft” agnostic when it comes to other possible higher powers. Either way, the existence of any such higher power seems unlikely (but certainly not impossible).

1. I’ll ignore the obvious issue with the suggestion that Atheists aren’t allowed to have an interest in religion… for now.
2. Schwitzgebel, Eric, “Belief“, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.).
3. WordNet Definition: Atheism
4. WordNet Definition: Atheism
5. WordNet Definition: Agnosticism
6. WordNet Definition: Agnosticism

• Letter to the Editor: Kick the Atheists out of America – “I don’t care if they have never committed a crime, atheists are the reason crime is rampant.”
• Philosophy and the proof of God’s existence by Roger Jones – A nice summary of many of the traditional “proofs” of God’s existance, including the argument from design, pascals wager, and the philosophies of Kant, Hegal and others.
• What Evolution Left Behind On Humans – “I?ve always been fascinated with human evolution. To me, the most fascinating part of human evolution is learning about what was ?left behind? on our bodies from our ancestors and from our prenatal development.”
• Wife Beating – It?s therapeutic – I’m glad someone’s cleared this up. Wife beating is not a rule, it’s just therapeutic. Oh, but there are limits!
• Pharyngula: They’re running out of virgins! – Nice tasteless video about terrorists debating how many virgins they get in paradise