I’ve been thinking about writing this following a discussion on atheistmemes because it gave me a lot to think about.
The idea is quite simple. I acknowledge there are multiple visions of atheism but never really took the opportunity to discuss it with people.
So here are the main cornerstones of my vision of atheism. Do you share them or reject them ?
-Gods, as religions define it, do not exist. There might be some kind of metaphysical supreme entity, but it would be more akin to an abstraction.
-Spiritual beliefs, per se, are not a good or bad thing. I admire quite a lot of religious minded people. Abolitionist quakers, anarchist christians, muslim thinkers, poets, activists fighting for emancipation from colonial/theocratic rule, etc. That being said, I believe I’ll live and die as an atheist.
-Religious institutions are quasi-inherently evil. I write “quasi-” because I don’t know enough about all beliefs system. What about animist/pantheist institutions ? I don’t know. I come from a family of African immigrants and I hear mixed things about those.
-Being an atheist do not make you better or worse than being a believer, and, quite importantly, not “wiser”. Wisdom is earned from character and mind. That being said, being a fundamentalist and being wise are mutually incompatible imo.
-I deeply hate and resent all missionaries. Religious ones, especially fundamentalism of all shapes and forms, for sure, but also atheist ones. I believe there’s no god, I don’t need my friends to accept this. If they want to learn about atheism, I’ll tell them. I often question them about religion, because I sometimes have trouble understanding how they can be great people while believing in what are basically myths to me. But that’s all. That’s just me who don’t understand. I don’t think they would be “better” as atheists.
-I have an ambiguous relation to Islam. While I reject it as a set of institutions, like all other religions, and absolutely despise it’s fundamentalist current, I do understand that some large part of anti-Islam movements are actually ethnoracists in (a bad) disguise. I tend to favour alliances with muslim individuals/groups i’ll be able to talk with without it being infuriating. Tbh, the only fundamentalists I actually talked with irl were Christians and Jews. But that’s just my social position. If I was born in another context, another place, another family, it who would be different. I don’t doubt all religions produce fundamentalism in a somehow equal measure.
-I truly think reason is not a quality which is restricted to atheism. Even if, like wisdom, I think some conceptions of religion bar people from living according to reason. But I can’t respect people waving the “reason” flag like a title, an honor or an automatic consequence to being an atheist. Reason is a way of life, certainly not an authoritarian one, it’s hard earned and always fragile. And it’s certainly not restricted to “maths”. Although mathematics are a part of it. Understanding what’s good and bad for your own complexion is, for me, the beating heart of reason. Easier said than done.
-Despite all I said, I understand and won’t criticize a very strong stance against any religion from someone who’s been oppressed by them. Although, and take it with a grain of salt because it’s only my experience of those people, I don’t feel like they’re the first ones to wave atheist as the flag of a nation or a pride backed by a superiority complex.
To end this wall of text, here’s a summed up version of how I was raised. My parents are far from perfect, but this they did fine.
Both were religious. Jewish and Muslim, with various degrees of adhesion/rejection/deviation from their faiths (quite complicated for my mother). They had us participate in both religious rituals when we were young. We sang prayers (as we sang folk songs, we didn’t make a difference). But they didn’t give us any kind of religious education. When we were 14 or 15, they gathered my siblings and I and basically told us this :
“We are religious. But that’s just us. You’ve experienced what is religion. You should make a choice about it. Either now or later. There will be no consequence to your choice under this roof.”
There were three of us. We all choose to be atheists. They acknowledged our choice add we never once discussed that again.
That’s it. I’d like to hear your opinions about all this, if any. Thanks for reading !
Edits : typos
I mentioned this in another thread, but part of the problem is that people incorrectly separate atheism and agnostic. There is obviously more going on than that, but it helps to explain why people have such a difficult time discussing it with people.
Most people incorrectly assume agnostics are undecided if there is a god. But gnosticism is not about belief, it is about knowledge and there are four separate basic structures that people fall into
Agnostic/Gnostic deals with knowledge.
Atheist/Theist deals with belief.
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Gnostic Theists - There is a god, and I know it with certainty that God exists. This is the standard religious stance. Many people have a problem with the “know it with a certainty” not so much with the god part itself.
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Agnostic Theists - I believe a God exists, but I can’t know with certainty that they exist. Surprisingly some theists actually would place themselves in this category when pressed about their belief and proving it.
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Agnostic Atheist - I don’t believe a god exists, but I can’t know if one exists or not. This should be the default position of most atheists. There are certain philosophical positions that make it moot, but by and large this is the practically defendable position.
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Gnostic Atheist - I don’t believe a god exists, and I know with certainty no gods exist. The strawman that many people believe is the atheist position.
The rest of your discussion is better served discussing specific philosophical positions. I think you maybe interested in materialism (not the buy stuff one) and physicalism. Both of them present interesting philosophical positions beyond the question of god or metaphysical beings/existence.
It sounds like, for the most part, your entire family are agnostic, your parents theist and your siblings atheist. It is extremely rare to find gnostic theists who acknowledge that a differing viewpoint on a god character can be valid. Most interfaith relationships require that both partners be agnostic, otherwise compromise on beliefs is difficult to impossible.
Great post, very informative and clear, thank you ! Although I suppose, under certain circumstances… it could get a bit more complex ? I’m thinking about… hmm… where would you classify branches of animism ? There’s a lot of that in a certain branch of my African family. A set of beliefs involving what is, for me, supernatural forces. But for them, it’s nothing divine or magic, it’s just part of how world works, and as far as I can understand, there’s not really a concept of supreme divine being. Another case would be quite common in xvii-xviii century philosophies. A kind of… abstract god, reflecting a kind of absolutization of reason, but which existence is strongly stated, without room for ‘reasonable doubt’. Edge cases, perhaps, yet interesting ones, don’t you think?
They are interesting. Deism is a theistic belief, and while the statement “unknowable” is thrown around sometimes when discussing deism, it is not the unknowable of if the entity exists, it is the unknowable will of god kind of unknowable. This, many were still gnostic theists. There is some evidence to suggest that some deists were actually agnostic atheists and that it was a way of hiding without being killed for their beliefs… But we should assume that many if not most of them were actually theists.
Animism can be either theistic or atheistic depending on if they believe there are gods or not. Some sects of animism are undoubtedly theistic. Some of these were spiritual belief structures infected by Christian missionaries while others developed their own polytheistic god structures. It sounds like the people you know are potentially atheistic. It only appears to be difficult to reconcile until you realize that dualism is a very common belief and many people take it for granted. Apart from modern neurobiology and neuroscience it might actually be impossible to make adequate arguments against dualism that even begin to ‘feel’ right.
Descartes is the European philosopher best known for codifying the same philosophy. Cogito, ergo sum. I think therefore I am. Descartes philosophy is steeped in western theistic religious dogma, but the basic premise exists without it. Mind and matter are two separate entities. The qualitative experience of cognition is so seemingly distinct from the physical body that they must be unique and independent. Most, if not all, theists believe in dualism. Many atheists also believe in dualism, quite a few of them without even thinking about it.
Viewing animism in this light it is much easier to see how their philosophy is not significantly different than many western philosophies. It is perhaps easier to dismiss “because plants aren’t conscious” or “plants don’t have a brain” but a dualist who says such things is perhaps being a bit hypocritical since one of the key points of dualism is that the conscious experience is independent of the physical body and if dualism is right, who is to say that plants don’t have a rich mental experience.
Modern philosophy has leaned much heavier into monism (as opposed to dualism) which is where it appears your quandary with animism actually stems. A monism vs dualism debate more so than a theism vs atheism debate if you will.
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I am religious, in the sense that I am a member of a religion. The difference is that my religion is not a theist one. I’m an atheist and therefore, as I explained elsewhere, I adhere to the root meaning of the word ‘religion’, to be egotistical enough to quote myself (in turn quoting others):
The word ‘religions’ Latin root word is religiō which means an individual virtue of worship in mundane contexts; never as doctrine, practice, or actual source of knowledge. The ancient Roman’s used it not in the context of a relationship towards gods, but as a range of general emotions which arose from heightened attention
So, my religion is similar to Bhuddism or Jainism in that gods are not a requirement. I don’t believe in or practice the same things as them I’m just saying the ‘no gods required’ model is similar.
All of which is to say I have no real issue with religion as an idea. If someone wants to believe in a supernatural being that’s entirely up to them. My issue with it starts when it starts to seep in to laws and regulations and government and state practices and when adherents to these religions feel it’s fine to start evangelising their opinions and morals on the rest of us in ways that inevitably end up oppressing people who want nothing to do with them, don’t believe in them and don’t follow them. I don’t see why any theist feels that it’s acceptable to practice their religion outside of their own homes and places of worship.
I also find their insistence that morality can only come from a belief in not just a god, but their particular god to be breathtakingly arrogant and I do believe that theist religion in this aspect, as well as some others, is holding back human development.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the etymology of the word religion was a complex and debated one.
For the rest, I do agree even if I’d draw a distinction between religious rules and practices at an individual level (charity, fasting, prohibitions, etc.) based on their convictions, which is fine, and evangelizing, which is absolutely not.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I thought the etymology of the word religion was a complex and debated one.
Could well be, I’m just going by the particular books I’ve read which I admit could be wrong. Here’s wikipedia’s take:
The term religion comes from both Old French and Anglo-Norman (1200s AD) and means respect for sense of right, moral obligation, sanctity, what is sacred, reverence for the gods.[15][16] It is ultimately derived from the Latin word religiō. According to Roman philosopher Cicero, religiō comes from relegere: re (meaning “again”) + lego (meaning “read”), where lego is in the sense of “go over”, “choose”, or “consider carefully”. Contrarily, some modern scholars such as Tom Harpur and Joseph Campbell have argued that religiō is derived from religare: re (meaning “again”) + ligare (“bind” or “connect”), which was made prominent by St. Augustine following the interpretation given by Lactantius in Divinae institutiones, IV, 28.[17][18] The medieval usage alternates with order in designating bonded communities like those of monastic orders: “we hear of the ‘religion’ of the Golden Fleece, of a knight ‘of the religion of Avys’”.[19]
I would suggest that there’s is a tipping point for any faith as it grows, where it inherently becomes problematic.
It isn’t the size or number of adherents, per se, rather how centralized it becomes. This would include the state-atheism of Stalin and Soviet Russia, as an example.
The issue as i see it is the corruption of power, the kind of people who are ambitious enough to command and lead an organization as large as a regional faith… are not the kind of people I would trust to lead said faith.
It’s entirely possible that the whole reason Stalin embraced atheism- and was so hostile to religions- was as a means of ensuring his own power. The major religious organizations in the Soviet sphere had old money, and the ear of the people, after all.
Alternately, for example Mohamed converted most of his tribe (the Quraysh) under the threat of siege and military assault. This, after spending quite some time leading extensive military campaigns to consolidate his power at Medina (and including raiding the heck out of Mecca’s- his tribes home city- commerce)
You also see similar in Buddhism, with Ashoka. And Christianity… well… with pretty much everyone who lead it except maybe Christ…
People believing things isn’t the issue. The issue is how centralized is it, and how is it controlled. As a faith progresses from a couple people bullshiting around a campfire or whatever, into an organized religion… you reach a point where that centralization becomes … problematic. And that’s when the wars start.
As for what “atheism” is… the central defining feature is a distinct belief that there is no god. And this includes supreme beings that chose not to call themselves gods. “Oh they’re not a god, theyre a fodkeakcjdjd. It’s okay you can still worship me and be atheist” doesn’t really work.
As for beliefs bejng good or evil… kinda depends on the belief, and how you define good and evil. Let’s just leave it at that, while adding an observation that the people you listed, you don’t necessarily respect because of their faith- their faith is not really relevant, except to say it’s part of who they are.
You admire them because of the things they’ve done or are doing. Some- or even all- of that motivation may have come from their beliefs, or none at all. Probably “some”
Indeed, I think you’re right. Probably “some”. Even if in some cases, both within lui friends and people I read/studied, they explicitly linked their religious beliefs to their political commitments.
And also, my issue is not so much with religion as it is with centralised power. A combination of evangelising tendencies and central power is… quite dystopian.
I mean whatever particular faith you were raised in absolutely shapes who you are today. even if you reject that faith (as I did,) there were things that carry over. Like, the whole “don’t be an asshole” core of Christianity (which, incidentally is why I walked away from the church. They were all assholes. Queue the slow slide through agnosticism to atheism for me.) (yeah. I might still struggle with being an asshole, but I’m much less of one as not-a-christian than I was as a christian.)
It’s literally one thing, the lack of belief in deities. Just because we got one thing probably right doesn’t mean we got everything else right, you are thinking skepticism.
“We are religious. But that’s just us. You’ve experienced what is religion. You should make a choice about it. Either now or later. There will be no consequence to your choice under this roof.”
That’s very interesting to me because it’s very similar to what we told our daughter as atheists (although she was a lot younger, but we wanted to make sure she understood it early), which was something like-
“We do not believe there is a god, but your grandmother believes there is and she really believes it. It’s up to you to decide what you believe.”
She’s 13 now and has always been an atheist. For a while, she was more anti-theistic than I was and we had to shush her when we were in public and something religious was going on or religious conversation was overheard or she would start audibly complaining about it.
I believe there’s hardly a better way to do it. I’ve seen one of the worst, on the contrary. I was traveling and was hosted by a Christian family. They were very nice at first. Then on Sunday morning they went to the church. Their 5yo didn’t want to go and the mother told her, and I remember her exact words: “honey, if you don’t come to the church, mommy won’t be able to love you anymore”.
Poor child…
