A Post About My Atheism

Talking About My Atheism

Intro

Normally, I wouldn’t cover this topic as I’m not super interested in religion as a worldview or grounds for epistemology. However, I find the topic fascinating. I’ve decided to write out some ideas, so I have something to help explain myself when curiosity kills the cat and I end up in a discussion with someone who believes in a god.

First things first, my atheism is situational. Depending on someone’s god definition, I may be a hard atheist, an agnostic, or a theist. What I hold to is that I have yet to be presented with a god concept that is worthy of worship or even a passing glance. On top of this, I have no sufficient evidence to believe any one thing created the cosmos and/or is supernatural. Because of this, I will be using the term ‘nontheist’ as a label for my position. I’ve heard plenty of regurgitation of the history of atheism as an explanation as to why words don’t mean what they mean, therefore concepts should be dismissed. I don’t believe we should attack labels and instead participate with the beliefs that people choose to label.

Got it? Cool.

Part One: Preemptives

I’ll be laying out some positions for my beliefs. These will be rotated towards Christianity as that is the dominate religion around me. This doesn’t all apply to one specific religion or flavor of religion, so I apologize if your version of god doesn’t end up on the underside of my boot. There’s an infinite amount of god concepts and I’m too lazy to address them all. If this post seems long, it’s because it is. This is my one attempt at formally discussing my nontheism.

Also, I don’t mean any harm. This won’t be a case for my antitheism. Many people have touched on why religion is a bad idea. Many people have also shrugged and explained why some things just make them happy. Just know that my position isn’t one fueled by anger.

It’s been brought to my attention that the confidence in an opposing position comes across as ‘trolling’ and I want to make it clear that I’m serious in my position. I hope the reader of this supports equal rights/patience for all.

Finally, this will most likely be my one solidified piece on atheism anywhere online. I may narrate this for a video or mention it on livestream, but this is it. I’ll probably edit this in the future, which is something I can’t do with recorded statements. If I said something and it wasn’t in this post, I probably wised up and fixed the logical error.

Part Two: My Worldview

Let’s get the basics out of the way. I hold to the modern interpretation of logical reasoning. I believe in the bare necessities of presuppositions that support human reasoning capacity. Law of non contradiction, I exist (there’s probably better wording for that one idk), etc. I’m not a presuppositionalist for a god or not-god world. I don’t assume anything but myself and existence to exist.

Second, I don’t rely on anything but my own reasoning for morality or epistemology. Sure, outside sources have taught me things, but I don’t strictly adhere to labels I’ve come across. I believe in the well-being of highly intelligent creatures. I believe that skepticism is a great tool when used to a rational extent. The “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” saying is a decent motto, as long as, in the same breath, mundane claims require mundane evidence. I’m not breaking ground with these beliefs, as you may already recognize.

Not that this matters all that much, but I think it would help if I share my political beliefs. Religion, at least in America, has largely become invested in politics. As a Leftist (not a Democrat or Liberal, but a Leftist), I feel culturally and politically isolated from the Evangelical movement and any similar movement among the religious. I’ve been to church a good amount of times and the political difference is glaringly obvious. I’m not mad at political opponents, but to ignore other people’s heated political views would be to ignore the modern religious culture. I should also add that I don’t adhere to internet Leftism. There are many trolls and children on the internet that explain my side for me, and they do it poorly. I don’t think your child is a dragon, or whatever the new social media topic is.

Part Three: Words (blah)

I’ll start with my most unique position: God as a term is not defined well. I’ve spoken to a good amount of religious people, in person and in online spaces, and I’ve never once heard the same definition for ‘god’ twice. I’ve been told god is a feeling, a person, a spirit, the cause of existence, a thinking agent, yada yada. The issue is that each take on a god seems to be different enough to a point where they would work differently from a mechanical perspective.

So here’s my issue: if we all have a different understanding of something, but label it as the same thing, that label loses meaning. I can’t be bothered to believe in the thing-a-ma-jig if we can’t pinpoint what it is to begin with. This is probably the closest I get to hard atheism as I don’t believe something can exist if we can’t agree on what it is. I don’t think my brain could even handle the belief in something that refuses to be defined. It sounds like nonsense. Like… bullshit.

Part Three - B: Bullshit, the Path Away From Skepticism

Bullshit is defined as:

bull·shit

/ˈbo͝olˌSHit/

vulgar slang

noun

noun: bullshit

stupid or untrue talk or writing; nonsense.

verb

verb: bullshit; 3rd person present: bullshits; past tense: bullshitted; past participle: bullshitted; gerund or present participle: bullshitting

talk nonsense to (someone), typically to be misleading or deceptive.

This is where the fun begins. There are things to be skeptical about in life. Some topics are worth reason. Other topics are masked attempts at getting us to do harmful things to one another. A god concept that has yet to be properly defined, but is used to tell people what to do, is by definition, bullshit.

What I’m getting at is I don’t need support for opinions. If something irks me but isn’t immoral, I can still call it weird and move on with my day. If something is clearly harmful and stems from nothing of substance, I can’t disregard the claims supporting the harmful behavior, but I can call it how I see it. If its’s bullshit, I’m fine with announcing that opinion. Don’t worry, this isn’t a big god defeater. It’s more of an argument for antifacism than anything else.

You may not find truth by refusing to challenge your beliefs, but you'll make a short life longer by avoiding obvious bullshit.

Part Three - C: Ill Defined

With my case for bullshit aside, I’m hoping to shed more light on the definition issue in order to push the point home.

Let’s say I ask if you believe that something exists. I’ll call it Jod (gif mispronouncers unite). Jod is a thing. Well no, Jod is a person. Actually, Jod isn’t a person but I give it personhood.

You say “Okay. So what is it?”

I tell you that Jod is a great number of things and he has his own lore where he tells you how to live life. You inquire further. I explain Jod to you and invite you to the Jod Appreciation Club. The issue is that after speaking with the club, no one seems to know exactly what Jod is. Everyone has a different take on Jod and no one has a good reason as to why their Jod is the Jod.

Do you believe in Jod? Whose Jod is the right Jod?

There’s a problem here. Someone maybe has it right and everyone else has it wrong, but it all feels like bullshit. On top of this, this is just one Jod club. There are thousands on the planet and some believe in totally different forms of Jod. Let’s stick to the one club. Hell, let’s call that club a church and call Jod ‘God’ instead.

I have a hard time knowing a god to be true as no one has the same definition. Because of this, I’m under the impression that god is a stand in for personalized spirituality. It’s kinda like gender: if everyone has their own gender, that’s fine. It’s personal to every person. Just don’t ask me to define it in monolithic terms. This isn’t a great comparison, as many people don’t claim that gender is a unanimous thing that needs evidence. It’s feelings, brain patterns that can be solidified with scans. God doesn’t work this way for its followers. If god is meant to be a real thing that isn’t just feelings, I’ll need a definition to work with. That would require god believers to come together and form a definition that they adhere to and can apply their religion’s lore to. Until that point, god would need to be addressed on a case by case basis and the term itself is nonsensical until someone tells me their own definition.

So let’s address some definitions.

Part Four: Wrong

Now this one is cheating, and I’ll explain why in a sec:

Someone given god status is obviously not a god if they do things that we’d expect a god not to do.

Gods generally live forever (or a long time), or exist in some capacity forever. ‘Eternal’ is on the resume of most gods if you pry hard enough with the religious.

The Kims of North Korea have died despite being ‘gods’ and were mourned in death as though they no longer exist. One Kim dies, the next takes their place and takes over the Steam gaming account. All the dead Kims must not be very god-like by traditional definition.

If the common idea was that the Kims somehow live past death, I’d retract my statement about them, but I haven’t heard of a North Korean afterlife.

This is cheating because I’m assuming a skeletal definition for a god. I’ll have to keep doing this to address the starving decrepit definitions I’ve been given. It is what it is.

One definition down. I’m a hard atheist against non gods. Who could have guessed.

Part Five: Right

This one is also cheating, but in a new, super-duper, fun way that hurts the atheist position:

Some god concepts are just characters in stories.

There seems to be a growing number of progressive Jews that believe that their god is more or less a narrator for their religious lore and is less of a real thing.

If your god is admittedly not real in actuality, but exists as a character in a book, I agree. Every character is real in concept, at least in their lore.

I’m a theist when it comes to the existence of characters in stories who are defined as gods in their lore. This doesn’t mean the stories necessarily represent a great way to live one’s life, but that’s not the point, now is it?

Part Six: Six Six

I’m giving you the brief claims up front. It helps hold the attention, or my nuts. You decide.

Rituals largely work due to placebo, and I don’t feel the need to argue against them. This is why my online profiles are usually named “NerdyOccultist”. I find rituals fascinating.

Yes, going to church and singing feels good. Expressing emotion or passionately seeking a positive mental state should bring you euphoria. If this event/feeling is your god, and you don’t concern yourself with applying personhood to it, I give you the pass.

This works with mainstream rituals like prayer and church events. It also works with bloodletting and demonic séance. Is it a god? Not really (imo). Is it a real supernatural event? I’m hard-pressed to think so, aka no.

Prayer proves time and time again to not work in studies. This seems to ring true for all rituals that are meant to do more than heal one’s upsetting thoughts.

Because of this, I assume it to be false. Some may say that a supernatural force/entity doesn’t like to be tested and won’t help testers, but I’m not sure why we assume the ego of someone/something we’ve never met and can’t define (see how that works?).

Rituals can work. The supernatural aspect of them seems to be nonexistent. God structly defined as a feeling is fine.

Part Seven: Seven Seven (Sisterhood of the Blessed Pants)

If applied to an object with no personhood, a god can be proven by presenting said object.

If god is the universe or a water bottle, that can be proven to be true. Backing the god definition up until it’s simply a word you apply to things you like, makes a cheap win, but a win nonetheless.

I’ll take the fall and claim to be a theist for mundane gods. Just don’t expect me to worship your deck of Uno cards or picnic blanket. I sure as hell won’t go to a church to hear about how your stuffed animal made the universe either.

Part Eight: God’s a Business, Man

The main event for some, I’d figure I’d tackle the Abrahamic god before this post runs stale.

This is the self-proclaimed “Big G” God. He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake. God is not well-defined, as stated many times now, but I’ll be ignoring that.

Here we go: God is an everlasting, all knowing, all powerful, all present, thinking agent, who exists outside of reality for the most part. God has directly impacted the physical by creating existence and interacting with it afterwards. This has resulted in the Old Testament and other tales. Super sick nasty. Love to see it. I should add that the listed qualities feel more like qualifiers than a working definition for something, but I'll ignore that. Tackling this concept allows me to breeze through a whole bunch of the common qualifiers.

Let’s go down the list:

Everlasting: I don’t know how this works. I can’t comprehend infinity, and I’m hard-pressed to make any comment on it. How does something exist and experience cause and effect before timespace exists? If time didn't pass at one point, I don’t know how god managed to do anything. This seems to be impossible unless we break logical presuppositions.

All knowing: God is able to be surprised in his own lore book. To feel surprise is to receive new information. It should be impossible to surprise this God. Why didn’t God know where Adam was? Why erupt with anger at someone breaking the rules when you created them to do so? This makes no sense.

Also, to know everything may include the knowledge of things you don't know, which doesn't sound right.

All powerful: This is a weird one. I don’t know how you could prove this. God didn’t prove it in the Old Testament with his actions. Anything you could show me would need to be limited in order for me to process the information. I don’t know how this could be proven at all. …Next?

Like "all knowing", being "all powerful" assumes you are capable of doing what you cannot. Could God create a baddie he couldn't even get with? Damn, shorty.

All present: This shouldn’t be in the definition. God didn’t exist in the existence he hadn’t created yet, so this isn’t a normal state for God. Does he exist in all pockets of existence he has yet to create? Or is this a lie? How can something exist in two places at once if not just incredibly large?

Thinking agent: This may have some validity. You could theoretically prove something to be sentient and sapient. I’d just need to see it in action. I don’t know of reactions to stimuli being anything but biological, so this would require support for a nonbiological disembodied entity then a further case for a particular one named ‘God’. Good luck with that.

Outside of existence: Existing is being within existence. Not being within so is not only irrational, but is defined as nonexistent. Easy peasy.

The final verdict on God:

God seems to be impossible on many levels. I’m struggling to believe in this definition, as it would require throwing out the presuppositions of logic, which is the only set of tools I have for navigating the world I perceive. Approaching with any other presuppositions seem to create broken epistemologies and I’m forced to play it safe when I only experience what I seem to experience. You could make the case for this god, but you’d be using a standard of reasoning that would make explaining the point a very strange process. I don’t think this is a stance for hard atheism to apply to, but more of a knot of beliefs with no single thread sticking out. I just don't get the idea at all, which makes it hard to form an opinion on the defintion.

Part Nine: Pull!

I’ve gone ahead and dedicated this part to tackling smaller god/supernatural concepts. This chapter surely will expand over time.

The Soul: Nonsense. The idea that our biological events such as movements/actions or brain function exist without a physical makeup seems to have no grounds to stand on. Why would my not-brain do what my brain does? What good would my brain be? I evolved to have a brain. Surely I did better with one than without. I don’t know why I’d believe there’s an ethereal hamster chugging me along when every emotion I feel and action I perform can be physically tracked in a brain scanner. If the engine runs on its own, and I can watch it do so, why explain it away as the car fairy? On top of this, much like a god I have no clue as to what a soul is definitionally or mechanically.

The Afterlife: Understandable nonsense. Hey, I don’t wanna die either. Claiming that I’ll live forever sounds cool on the surface. In actuality, that sounds terrible, but I get the idea. I die and my body rots. My brain dies too and that is my only known way to be conscious. I wouldn’t want to live as a decomposing brain anyway. There’s some hard lyrics in this blog post. Anyway, without a soul-like thing going on, it’s hard to say what an afterlife would be if I can’t do anything but think about stuff with my non-brain. I'm also not sure I would "go" anywhere either. Some people seem to think I magically become capable of world walking or dimension phasing simply because I got stabbed outside a Chuck-E-Cheese and bled out on the pavement. I don't know any dimensions or pocket existences to exist, and I sure as hell don't know how I'd travel to them.

Morals: A quick fun one. I don’t think a proper moral system is one that worries about its root cause, but more about the systems put in place from its existence. Morals, as far as I can tell, are directly connected to how we make others feel. I extend that security to nonhumans that are capable of advanced thought like dogs, cats, dolphins, squid, pigs, etc. I’m nearing vegan morals, but I’m not quite there when it comes to acting on those beliefs. I do what I can to not kill, torture, or support companies that kill/torture intelligent creatures, but I’d be lying if I said I never went to the zoo or had some pork ribs. Sue me (or don’t please).

As for morality from a god, almost every god seems to really hate one group of people. I don’t support ignorance, so I have to put my foot down on racist, sexist, and speciesist (to an extent (hate on ants all you want but leave intelligent creatures alone)) beliefs. Besides, I don’t understand something that promotes violence to be a moral system, so there may be room for calling it a category error, seeing as though a god and I may be talking about two different things when it comes to morality.

Added note: I don't know why a supernatural being's personal morality would be objective in any way. It seems odd to decide someone can't be wrong and/or stupid just because they are special in some way.

Free Will: This one will need touching up and expanding. The existence of free will in a world that is/was actively being affected by a god makes not a great deal of sense. Free will assumes we have “the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion.” If a supernatural force/entity comes in contact with us, that seems like something completely out of our control. Doubling down on this, humans interacting with the physical seems to break the notion of total free will. My emotions and actions seem to exist in a meta that my ancestors and fellow humans have created. For example, I can’t really do anything I want, seeing as though I’m being forced into a capitalist lifestyle. Although being a free tribal people would come with its share of things I can’t do either. Whatever. Friendly commune goers reach out. I’m tired of income games.

Tangent aside, if a god knows what will happen, this implies fate. If I have the ‘choice’ to do what I want, but will do the same thing in each iteration of my life you play, as that is what I was going to do in the future anyway, I don’t have much of a ‘choice’ now do I? I don’t think ‘choice’ is even the right word to use in this hypothetical.

Part X: Your Thoughts

I’ll address good points/questions that come up and explain my thoughts on them (and maybe even explain how they changed my mind and/or viewpoint). I’ll answer a couple easy ones to start (shouts out to my memory and the website geekychristian). Ask away!

You’re a believer, and you know it!

Google, show me this guy’s balls, please. 

Are you afraid of hell?

Nope. The idea is freaky, but I’m not afraid of things that I don’t believe in. I’m more inclined to be afraid of the boogeyman.

Would you agree that intelligently designed things call for an intelligent designer of them?

I don’t know what design has to do with me or the universe. I don’t seem designed. The change in allele frequencies throughout generations seem to explain why I’m a lot like other things and really only good at a couple things. To answer the question more closely, yes. Intelligently designed things are by definition intelligently designed.

Would you agree that nothing cannot produce something?

I have no clue. A philosophical nothing where there is no potential for anything seems to be nonexistent, both literally and figuratively. This isn’t the gotcha that some people think it is. I don’t know if there was ever a state of nothingness and have no clue how said state would behave.

Would you also agree that just because we cannot see God with our eyes does not necessarily mean He doesn’t exist?

I don’t know what a god is.

In the light of the big bang evidence for the origin of the universe, is it more reasonable to believe that no one created something out of nothing or someone created something out of nothing?

Couldn’t tell ya’. The Big Bang isn’t an origin theory. 

If an effect cannot be greater than its cause (since you can’t give what you do not have to give), then does it not make more sense that mind produced matter than that matter produced mind, as atheists say?

I’ve never said this. Also, it doesn’t follow that the mind produced anything based on the claim that an effect can’t be greater than its cause.

If there is a cause beyond the whole finite (limited) universe, would not this cause have to be beyond the finite, namely, non-finite or infinite?

Don’t know if the whole is finite. Don’t know if there’s a cause to existence. I’d think the infinite would incorporate the finite and no longer be able to expand in any way, seeing as though its existence definitionally relies on all that is finite and more. Defining a god as infinite just hurts the theist position.

Do you agree that an open-minded person should be willing to look at all the evidence? If so, then are you willing to look at the evidence for God’s existence?

Yes. Present sufficient evidence. Don’t just tell me, though. Go tell the world and get that big bank.