Atheists Versus Atheists

The recent Atheist meeting in Melbourne brought up quite a lot of conversation and controversy. Interestingly many articles in the opinion columns of newspapers weren't theists attacking atheists... but atheists attacking atheists.

Atheist attacking atheists? This usually happens very often but is, perhap surprisingly, not as complex an issue as it might appear.

On the surface it is quite straight forward, there are two camps of atheists: militant atheists and hippy atheists. Of course neither group would approve of being called either of those terms because those are the names the oposing group calls the other. Which I use here because it actually tells you exactly where the disagreement is coming from:

Militant atheists consider the threat from theists to be so serious that one should guard against them and work to actively thwart their expansion at every opportunity otherwise they could seize control of the country and unleash a reign of terror.

Hippy atheists consider theists to be generally very little threat and believe that that through better education the theists will disappear like an aspirin in water.

In other words: the argument is about "how dangerous are religious people?"

This is a very interesting question... when I think of all of the theists I know I am forced to say well... most of them are really harmless. Even the ones in the clergy are hardly extreme or authoritarian.

When I think of the theists in Iran, a country I know a great deal about, I'm forced to say that they are extremely dangerous to human wellbeing, dignity and world peace.

When I think about the theists in history I'm just going to repeat what I said about Iran.

So... I would consider myself in the militant atheist group because even though I know dozens, if not hundreds of theists who are gentle, wise, kind and just... those are all people from my culture. A culture that emphasises equality, respect, kindness, compassion, fairness and freedom of speech ahead of religious dogma. Theists from outside my culture are just pure destruction (spiritually, academically and physically) in human form.

So... I'm actually also quite sympathetic with the hippy atheists as well because all they have to do is say, "Look around you, do you see any evil theists?" well, while there are lots of annoying and bad theists in Australia, the evil theists are nonetheless so rare I can see why they wouldn't consider them a threat.

But here's the thing... I used to be a hippy atheist...

September 11, End of Faith and the events in Iran over the last 31 years have all convinced me to go militant.

But at the end of that day, this whole disagreement between two groups of atheists doesn't upset me at all. Simply because atheists don't kill, maim, rape or destroy in the name of atheism and these two groups of atheists are never going to exchange more then heated words with each other and well... that is the society we want after all: where everyone is free to voice their opinion without fear of being brutally silenced.

I believe that if a theist group attempted to seize power in Australia then all of the hippy atheists would jump to the militant atheist camp. I also believe that once theism is routed the militant theists will start pouring into the hippy theist camp en masse.

Discogia and Becoming an Atheist

When asked why I became an atheist I usually answer with a stock standard answer like, "There just isn't any imperical evidence for the existence of god and there are far more likely explanations that fit the facts and evidence that is available and these explanations do not require the existence of god to work,"

This statement might well be true but it doesn't actually convey any of my personal or emotional experience with coming to terms with living in a universe without a god in it. In truth my loss of faith was driven not my intellectual needs at all, but by emotional forces at work within me.

To understand why it felt so unbearable being a Catholic one first needs to understand the concept of cognitive dissonance. Notice that the feeling doesn't have a specific name, instead they just refer to it as involving a mixture of secondary emotions like: anxiety, guilt, shame, anger, embarrassment and stress. However, none of these secondary emotions adequately describes the primary feeling. I have adapted the term 'discogia' to describe this feeling.

As a young Catholic I spent a great deal of time worrying about whether or not I would go to hell if I died. See, although many people say that I was a quiet well behaved child I nonetheless knew better. I had frequently lied to, stolen from, harmed and decieved many people (including my own family), albeit these were petty crimes typical of a child in retrospect. However, it was very clear to me that I had committed serious crimes and injustices to other people. God was very clear on this and he watched everything that I did and he knew my thoughts so I couldn't lie to him. I had no explanation for my actions except that I was evil. Therefore I was going to hell. When I confessed my sins to the priest he assured me that my sins were not that important and I would be forgiven.

This is where I started to feel discogia creeping into my life in a big way.

See, god hates sin, god is perfect, god created man, god created hell to punish sinners and god loves us. Why then would got create man in such a way that his natural tendancy is to sin? Then after he has sinned throw him into a lake of fire to burn in torment for all eternity... but still love him?

Also, if god created man why make him capable of sinning so easily? If he was perfect and all powerful surely he could have at least done a better job? As for free will this puzzled me the most because I was in love with science at the time and science could predict the future, albeit in limited ways, but the fact that science works at all implies that free will can't actually be free.

I remember being in grades 5 and 6 worrying frantically about this problem. I tried over and over again to write stories that were original... but everything was copied from something I'd seen, read or heard before... all I was doing was reproducing somebody else's ideas and mixing them with another persons. The creativity needed to produce truly free will didn't exist. In retrospect the knowledge and power needed to achieve free will is on a scale well beyond human capability. The conclusion was stark... I was just a machine. Worse than that, a sinful machine doomed to hell... because apparently a loving god had created me this way just for this purpose.

At the time my solution was clear, become a priest so that I could get on god's good side and it would all be ok. Although... god wasn't exactly someone I felt comfortable trusting either. I had been very disturbed by the angel of death killing all of egypt's first born. In mass I had heard that god asked Abraham to kill his only son as a sign of faith, true, he stopped him but later on God would actually kill his only son and I never could understand why he did that. God was actually scaring me quite a lot. Could my father kill me like god did? Just to make a point about how far he could go? Or what really confused me at the time was why would god deliberately forced his son to get himself killed (it is mentioned in the gospels that Jesus had the option of escape but god pushed him into it) then get angry with humanity for killing his son?

The feelings of discogia just got worse and worse as I grew older. But I didn't want to give up on god. So I started off by deciding that the old testament was garbage and focussed only on the new testament... then I started to get bothered by inconsistencies between the gospels which could only be explained if the writers weren't perfect/inspired by the holy spirit but just ordinary men. In which case they could have got it wrong. I also remember being bothered by Jesus' complete lack of a comprehensive schema or world view. His message was devoid of detail and practical advice. By my teenage years I had come to realise how childishly simplistic the words and messages of the bible were compared to the sophistication of later authors. I had to wonder if these were learned men at all writing it.

So eventually I turned to deism. God existed, but it was not for me a mere mortal to interpret his will. Then gradually the importance and role of god in the world grew less and less as I dealt with each remaining instance of discogia by putting in place scientific and rational ideas that dealt with the facts better than the religious one - although by this stage I was in university studying philosophy. When I started philosophy that's when I started gaining serious ground on the overwhelming sense of discogia that I had been ensared in. But that's still too simple an explanation for an emotional level.

It hurt.

Losing god in my life hurt me a great deal... it must have taken me 1,000 steps to get from Catholic to atheist. I was a wiccan in between and a pagan between that. For each step I removed one unpleasant feeling of discogia and replaced it with a sharper more painful realisation of my limitations, mortality, ordinariness and insignificance.

To become an atheist I had to give up these things:

That I was special and unique because I was part of a brilliant plan.
That my body was a work of art, not a randomly arranged set of genetic instructions.
That I would live after death.
That I would eventually see my friends and loved ones again.
That I could achieve anything because god doesn't make junk.
That there was justice in the universe.
That I would always be rewarded if I did the right thing.
That there was such a concept as a 'right' thing.
That I was loved no matter what I did.
That humanity was being looked after and cared for from above so it would all work out in the end whatever happened.
That good things will just come to me if I wait for god to deliver them.

^ That's an awful lot to lose. It hurt. It hurt so much one month I just couldn't sleep at all from fear of death. It hurt because religion had been my iron shield against insecurity in my life. Once I lost that shield I felt tiny, helpless and small. Becoming an atheist was not a quick, easy or effortless task. In this short passage I cannot describe how painful it was. I wasn't suicidal, rather the opposite... I was scared of stepping outside my door in case a car hit me on the foot path and it was all over.

Life after god was only painful to reach because I had had my hopes raised to outrageously high levels by religious education beforehand. If the feeling of discogia hadn't been so awkward (it wasn't painful, just awkward) I never would have given up on religion because those defences against uncertainty were wonderful.

So, for me, I became an atheist not because I thought more clearly than others... but because I felt more strongly than others. I find it awkward telling people that's there's no god or religious dogma is bad. Not because I don't believe it... but I know that every time I say it I'm pushing someone down another of those 1,000 steps that eventually leads to peace of mind... but every step hurts a great deal too and unlike god, I wouldn't wish that pain on anyone.

Them Versus Us

I was at a dinner the other night with friends, mostly theists, and the topic of Prof. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris came up. This lead to some comments from my friends suggesting that there was only two sides to the God debate: Those who believe in god and those who do not.

This very simplistic viewpoint on the subject often comes up. I call it simplistic because right now in the world we have religious people killing other religious people, not because they don't believe in god, but because they don't believe enough in god. Yet conversely, we have people who do believe in god working very closely with people who don't believe in god to build secular societies. If the current clash of cultures is a 'them' versus 'us' situation then this hostility between theists and friendship amongst theists and atheists just doesn't make any sense. I personally use a 6 category system to make sense of this confusing situation, although keep in mind some other people use 7, 8 and even more categories in their systems than I do.



I've arranged the 6 groups in the order of their relative belief in a god. However, don't think that the further apart the groups are the harder it is for them to understand each other. Quite to the contrary there are lots of surprising interactions between these 6 groups.

First, just a brief description, in my own words, of the 6 different categories:

Fundamentalist: God is as real as the computer you're reading this off. God communicates his message to people directly, in miracles or through infallible intermediaries. Anything that contradicts the holy texts is a lie. Science is dangerous.

Theist: God is real, but he doesn't necessarily speak to humans directly. He is concerned about morality and wants to limit our freedoms to keep us behaving properly to each other. Only religious people are able to interpret his will through accurate interpretation of holy works. Science is generally beneficial but sometimes scientists go too far with their questioning.

Deist: God is real, but considering how magnificent and huge the universe is it is kind of hard to believe he worries about things like our sex lives or what time we eat our meals. Holy texts about god are written by ordinary people and interpretted by ordinary people. They might contain some valuable insights into the nature of god but ultimately we're very limited in what we can comprehend so claiming certain knowledge about god and what he thinks is actually quite arrogant if not outright heresy. Science is ultimately the study of god since god created the universe therefore scientists cannot ask questions too daring to threaten god.

Pantheist: God is only real in the minds of those who believe in him. But just believing in god is enough to make him real and so we should respect that.

Atheist: There is no scientific evidence that god exists and believing in something without evidence is delusional. If evidence that god exists is presented and passes scientifically rigorous examination then our viewpoint will change to accept that god in fact exists. All religious people and texts should be treated with the utmost scrutiny lest we be decieved by charletons and liars. An atheist is a person who lacks a belief in god. An agnostic is a person who also lacks a belief in god. Therefore I categorise all agnostics as atheists automatically - even though they will probably get annoyed with me for doing so.

Antitheist: It is a fact, god does not exist. Anyone who says that god exists must by definition be suffering from a delusion.

I just feel like highlighting a few interesting interactions that tend to happen between these groups because they don't all pick sides against each other in predicable ways:

Fundamentalists versus atheists: Strangely, atheists often respect fundamentalists because although they do not agree with most of what they say they do appreciate that they are consistent with what they believe in. If they believe the bible is literally true then they will insist that the world was created in 6 days about 6,000 years ago. They won't try to say it was created in 6 days in one context and then try to say it happened over billions of years in another like theists often do.

Fundamentalist versus theists: very often conflict with each other because they see theists as religious in name only. Pretenders trying to cheat their way into heaven. Fundamentalists will sometimes say that theists aren't even religious at all and will specifically target them for suicide bombings and as the first to be thrown into the lake of eternal fire in the after life.

Theists versus deists: deists sometimes see theists as arrogant and intrusive in affairs, such as their sex life, that have nothing to do with god or spirituality. While theists see deists like the fundamentalists see them: not religious enough. However, generally speaking, deists and theists don't have any major issues with each other.

Theists versus atheists: theists often confuse atheists with antitheists.

Theists versus pantheists: surprisingly, theists also have a tendancy to confuse pantheists with deists.

Deists versus atheists: historically these two groups have always got along with each other. They after all created secularism together. Atheists tend to have a lot more respect for deists than theists. This is perhaps the most surprising interaction of all.

Pantheists versus atheists: pantheists very often don't like atheists (or antitheists for that matter). They find atheists to be rude, annoying and often consider them to be as fundamentalist about no god as fundamentalists are about god. While atheists often think pantheists are naive but harmless, yet curiously, although they are closer to atheists than deists they are very often respected less by atheists.

Atheists versus antitheists: Sit across the dinner table from each other and often agree on everything religious... yet sometimes there's that strange sense of awkwardness. I mean, isn't just a bit extreme to be certain god doesn't exists? What if the deists are right and he simply doesn't care or has completely forgotten about the Earth and moved onto bigger more challenging projects elsewhere billions of years ago? :)

Secular Sprituality

Since my adventures at the Parliament of the World's Religions I've actually developed a narcissitic fascination in my own spirituality: atheism. In my last meeting with Rabbi Irwin Kula he told me that one Isreali Rabbi had postulated that atheism was the purest form of spirituality because it sort to strip away all dogma and idolatry to reach the true essence of spiritualism.

While I agree that that's what I seek to do... I nonetheless believe that does not accurately describe every atheist I know. Although I suspect many strong atheists wouldn't disagree either.

During the interview with the Rabbi I realised what his telos was in life. He was an expert on human experience and empathy. This allows him to be charismatic, also he sees the purpose of his charismatic talent to inspire people to resist their insecurities and fears with courage and wisdom. A noble endeavour in my opinion because the death of baseless fears would end the destructive influence of reactionary and conservative elements on our political system, while for the individual allow positive personal development to occur because once they are free from feeling fear, they are free to feel different emotions.

So I too seek what Kula seeks, however, to date I've only been seeking it within myself. But since I believe in his cause I've decided in my own small way to share my insights, the sights of a secular spirituality. That is spirituality apart from religion.

Because we atheists have a deep and rich cultural life it would also be my pleasure to share this with the world to help other people learn and understand that we're not so different after all. One thing we all have in common is a need to defend ourselves against the deluge of uncertainty life pours down on us throughout our lives.

We atheists have the same worries and anxieties as every other human being, and while speaking on behalf of all other atheists is beyond my capabilities. I will speak for the atheists I do know and about how we deal with these uncertainities in life from the beginning to the end of our days.