From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest.

But for us it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there, on the mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Thick of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species can migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

(click for full size image)

Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” This is all too true, and it’s partly the reason for my non-contribution as of late. The earnest truth is that my real life is not too exciting, and I therefore need time for the ideas in my head to ferment. I try to live before I write. With that out of the way and me cleanly off the hook, let’s proceed! (Phew!)

I’ll attempt to describe my atheism in negative terms. That is, I will list some non-reasons for why I’m an atheist; reasons that some people think I have for being an atheist but which are actually not the reasons at all (these are all accusations I’ve met in real life, by the way). This essay could be about refuting common misconceptions about atheists, but honestly, I’m only one person and can therefore only speak for myself. (Although in the back of my mind there’s a nagging feeling that these misconceptions apply to other atheists.) First, let’s tackle the term “atheist” itself. What does it mean? It comes from the Greek word “theos,” which means “god.” The a- prefix negates it, and thus the word means “without God.” I must admit right away that I don’t feel any particular connection to atheism (the philosophy, if such it be) itself. Many other labels exist to describe me. I’m a human, I’m male, I have black hair and blue eyes, two feet, etc. And this is exactly how I feel with regard to atheism. It simply correctly describes my views about the existence of gods (as it turns out, I don’t believe gods exist). Now, since an atheist is someone without a god, that should technically mean that there could well be a god, and the atheist could well believe that God exists, and yet walk “without God” (think about it). But of course, I go with the consensus definition, which is, “one who does not believe in gods.” Now, on to the non-reasons themselves, which I’ve labeled rebellion, nihilism, joylessness, and arrogance. Let’s tackle these in order:

Rebellion

This is the contention that deep down inside I know there is a God, and that I’m therefore in a state of rebellion by obstinately refusing to acknowledge His existence. This accusation is perhaps best disposed of on its face. I honestly don’t believe in any gods.

Nihilism

This is the notion that an atheist must necessarily be a nihilist, meaning someone who thinks life is without meaning (from the Latin nihil, meaning “nothing”). Of course, an atheist may be a nihilist, but for myself (and I suspect, for most atheists) this is simply not true. I find lots of meaning in my personal life (books, good company, poetry, nature, a clear evening sky where one can lie in the grass and “look up in perfect silence at the stars,” as Whitman put it). There are also those rare, precious moments when I become enraptured in the beauty of it all and feel, on a visceral level, the awesomeness of the cosmos. These things are entirely unrelated to atheism.

Joylessness

This is the idea that because one is an atheist, one must therefore feel no joy in life. “How can you bear living if you think there’s no ultimate supervision of things?” My own simple answer to this question is “I don’t know! I just bear it.” In truth, whether one finds joy in life or not shouldn’t hinge on such an academic point as whether or not one believes in God. (At least, I think it’s an academic point. For many people it’s an emotional point.)

Arrogance

Perhaps mislabeled (I couldn’t find a better word for this non-reason), the arrogance charge is one that says, “How unbelievably arrogant of you to assert that there is no God!” First of all, no rationalist worth his salt would insist on the non-existence of anything (excluding, perhaps, logically inconsistent things like triangular squares and male females and so on), and I certainly don’t insist there is no God. I simply don’t believe in Him, and I would hate to waste my precious time in worship to something which, it might turn out, doesn’t exist. Second of all, if we amend the charge to say, “How unbelievably arrogant of you to assert the probability that there is no God!” we’re closer to what I actually think, and I can then properly refute the accusation (it’s strange how often one assumes the other person has perfect conviction in what he says he believes, when it might turn out, as in my case, that he is not expressing perfect conviction at all, but is merely uttering a probabilistic statement). To my mind there is a huge distinction between what one believes and the conviction with which one believes it. As a trivial example, I am as close to 100% as I can be that I am, in fact, writing this essay right now, and that I’m writing it on my computer with a keyboard. I am about 80% sure that tomorrow I will finish the book I’m currently reading. I am about 70% sure that my friend Kai is in the city of Bergen right now (I haven’t heard otherwise, and I live pretty far away from Bergen, so I can’t know for sure). I believe all these three things, but to varying degrees of certainty.

In short, I can’t do much more than to deny these accusations and provide explanations of them, which I hope I’ve done.

There is a writer at Examiner.com who is also a member of the AtheistForums.org web site, Jacqueline Lavache (Eilonnwy), who frequently draws attention to the articles she writes as the Boston Atheism Examiner. (Since the web site compensates its writers in a fashion similar to that of Helium and Associated Content, I certainly do not begrudge her frequent solicitations.) There is a particular article she wrote about three months ago that she has made some references to in recent conversations, so I decided to give it a look and review what she had to say. The article is entitled “Standards of Evidence: Why the Bible is not proof of God.” Click on the link and give it a read, helping her earn a buck, and then switch back to here for my review.

Read the rest of this entry

Ace (2 Oct 2009) AtheistForums.org

All gods from all religions are the same … All that is different is the name and definition.

Umm, if they are different by definition, then they are not the same! Perhaps this atheist is not aware that x and y are identicals only if x has all the same properties as y and vice-versa. If x has some property different from y or vice-versa, then they are in fact two different things. (The God of Christianity is a trinitarian union of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, whereas the Allah of Islam most definitely is not trinitarian. Same deity? Hardly. Q.E.D.)

So what I’m wondering is, how do you ever have any idea whether or not your prayers are ever answered?

Quite honestly? At first you have no idea. You pray for things and look for the answer to it, hoping he bends to your will, but you never really know for sure. Sometimes you’ll experience a result that corresponds positively in some way to your prayer and you take that to mean God answered you. But in that quiet corner of the mind you don’t want to admit or talk about, there lies the festering doubt produced by your inability to distinguish between an answered prayer and a weird coincidence—a fire that gets fueled by the infuriating ratio between positive corresponding results and the far more frequent absence of discernible results. It’s a dissonance that cannot be tolerated long. You eventually reach a schism in your conscience and you can go one of two ways.

Most people call the positive results weird coincidences, shake their fist at what they consider divine silence, and eventually lose their faith. But some people find themselves struck by the epiphany that they are not infallible, that among the things possible for them to be wrong about, prayer might be included. So, questioning some of their basic assumptions, they decide to look up what God has to say about the nature of prayer. They might examine the template Jesus Christ provided, not only by what his own prayers looked like but also the nature of The Lord’s Prayer, which he described as "how you should pray" (see Matt. 6:5-15). They may even notice that he said, "This is how you should pray," and not, "This is what you should say." After a while they begin to realize that they had been treating God like some cosmic Santa Claus, going to him with a list of their wishes along with promises that, if he answers, they will be good little boys and girls. As they learn what authentic and genuine prayer looks like, they are struck by how absolutely backwards they had it. They finally understand that prayer is not a shopping cart or wish list. That God is not their butler waiting to do their bidding, nor sitting around waiting for someone to pray him into awareness of what he already knows. And perhaps most important of all, that prayer is not about seeking their will but God’s will. That he already has their best interest in mind. And that informing an omniscient being about something is sort of contradictory. Ultimately they begin to understand that authentic and genuine prayer is not a wish list but, rather, an act of worship, an intimate nexus of communion between them and their Father in heaven.

They know such authentic prayers are answered… because in that act of worship they experience the faithful presence of God.