New approaches to "curing" atheism

According to recent polls in the US, the single least-trusted group of people are atheists, which, when you come down to it, is kinda absurd. As Dawkins once put it: "I submit that we are both atheists, I simply believe in one less God than you do. When you can explain to me why you deny the existence of all the other Gods, perhaps you will be ready to understand why I deny the existence of yours."

And when you come down to it, atheism is probably one of the most innocuous of bellief systems. I mean, you don't often hear about atheists hijacking planes and flying them into buildings out of their devotion to a deity they don't think exists. Relatively few serial killers are atheists (although, like anything, there are a few in there). And, frankly, I think someone's beliefs in something that cannot be empirically proven, or lack thereof is probably the third stupidest thing to judge someone on; the first two being race and sexuality. I think it comes down, as so many things do these days, to simple ignorance. There's this blatantly false assumption that if you don't believe in God (or some version thereof), you must therefore have no morals.

I get asked often whether I believe in God, and to be honest, I'm never entirely sure how to answer, so my answer tends to change a little every time I'm asked. The best answer I can come up with is that I choose to live my life as if the existence or non-existence of God didn't matter. If God exists, then I hope that He, She, They or It will judge me for living my life on my own path. If not, then I'm no worse off than I am now. And on the off chance that God such a petty prick that I deserve to be damned for not choosing one religion (which kinda runs contrary to the idea of a benevolant God, don'tcha think?), well, then at least I'm gonna be damned for being who I really am. I guess all that makes me a de facto atheist.

Mind you, when people ask me if I believe in God, my first response is almost always "define the term." If they then go and point to a passage in the Bible or the Koran or the Talmud or whatever holy book they choose and say: "this is how I define God," the answer is almost definitely "no." But I believe that there's a unifying logic and mechanic to the universe. I believe that there are mysteries to life and the unvierse which we may never unfold. On occasion, more for convenience than anything else, I call that "God."

At the same time, I believe that I know what's right or wrong better than whoever it was who wrote the bible, and decided that taking the Lord's name in vain, or working on the sabbath mandated the death penalty; and certainly much better than some of the modern fundamentalists who see it as just and right that God demands belief, offers no proof, and inflicts eternal torture on otherwise good people for failing to guess correctly. I believe that regardless of what else is in the Bible, the fact that it endorses child and spousal abuse, slavery and murder of non-believers demolishes its credibility as a source for morals.

Speaking of which, I believe that morals come down to suffering, so I don't believe in inflicting it upon any creature with enough sense to know what suffering is. I believe that if an action is victimless, then by definition it is not a crime. Therefore, if I were a gay, pot-smoking atheist (which I'm not, for the record, but these seem to be pretty much the three things that seem to piss off the American variety of "conservative" more than anything else), it cannot by any logic be claimed that I am harming any other human being, therefore none of the three are even remotely unethical.

So let's talk about the video I embedded in this entry. Here we have psycho-mom going nuts over the possibility that (gasp) her son could be an atheist, as if that were a bad thing. She then says that he has to start going to church every Sunday, as if that were a good thing. Then she goes on to take away Christmas, as if the best way of making him believe is to threaten him into it (and don't even get me started on her, to be kind, erroneous claim that Christmas is all about Jesus Christ).

Now, I want to be very clear on this: I know nothing whatsoever about this family except what I've seen in this 46-second video. For all I know, they may have reconciled, or the son may have recanted his evil ways, or the mother may have come to understand her son's beliefs, or any one of a thousand possible outcomes that I can't even imagine. So I'm not going to say anything about the mother or the son as human beings (frankly, who can claim that they haven't been a complete asshole for 46 seconds at some point in their lives? I know I sure can't.). Instead, I'd like to talk about the violence of the mother's reaction to something which, at the end of the day is completely innocuous, will not affect her life remotely, and if nothing else, is a sign that her son is starting to think independently, to reason and to find his own path. I can't help but feel that had it been any issue other than his religious beliefs, she may very well have taken it in stride, or even found his insight laudable. For example, if the son had come home that day and said: "Mom, I don't like Peanut Butter anymore. Please stop putting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in my lunch," I find it somewhat unlikely that the mother's reaction would have been nearly that extreme.

I choose not to believe in any God who threatens us with eternal damnation for failing to believe one set of rules. Actually, I flat out refuse to worship any God who threatens us with eternal damnation, period. I choose to believe that at the end of this life, afterlife or no afterlife, there's no reward waiting. If there's something after this, I choose to believe that it's not a matter of dividing up the believers and the nonbelievers, the sinners and the virtuous. I believe that nothing we do really matters after we're dead.

If nothing we do matters, then the only thing that matters is what we do. If there's no reward at the end, if there's no payoff for doing good, then even the tiniest, most insignificant act of kindness can be the most amazing thing in the world.

That's what I believe.