Thinking About: Atheism

Looking at it from the inside I consider my Atheism not only to be reasonable but to be the only reasonable stand on the subject. Consequently I find other people’s religious beliefs to be frankly inexplicable. This may be because I have never actually been of the religious persuasion and so have no personal experiences to draw upon. Although I can understand that people believe in God (or variations thereof) I do not understand why they believe in God – despite friends and bloggers trying to explain it to me. What confounds me even further is why there are so few atheists in the world.

I don’t think it’s because we have evolved ‘religious brains’ either naturally or through the hand of God. I’m certainly unaware of any studies that show a difference in brain structure or function between those who believe and those who don’t. It certainly isn’t the strength of the religious arguments put forward for the existence of God which I personally find laughably inadequate. I think the proposal that beliefs are transmitted across the generations in such a way to guarantee an adherence to a particular religion has some merit but doesn’t explain why, later in life, more people don’t question the beliefs of their parents/sub-culture and reject them. I don’t believe that the vast majority of people are that deeply indoctrinated. I understand that studies have shown that religious communities are more stable, happier and longer lived than non-religious ones. There may be something to this though I suspect that things are never quite that simple. However, even if this is true would it or should it be enough for a reasonable person to adopt a belief system they suspect may be false just because it makes them happier? I would hope not, but then again I’m sure than many of us are aware that people generally want a comforting illusion rather than an inconvenient and uncomfortable truth.

Of course one possible reason why there are so few atheists is that we’re quite simply wrong. Or, as some theists attest, we are childishly rebelling against God so that we can sin with a clear conscience. Moving beyond the sheer offensiveness of comments such as those it does tend to presuppose that so-called sinful behaviour is much more prevalent in the non-theist community (does such a thing exist I wonder) than the theist one. I think that recent revelations within the Catholic Church in particular put paid to that tired assumption. Also such an attitude seems to be predicated on the belief that there are no real atheists and those who profess to be such actually secretly believe in God – indeed some of them are so secretive that they don’t even know they believe in God. Of course this so-called ‘argument’ could very easily be turned on its head and aimed right back at the theist who proposes it. Maybe, it could be said, the theist secretly believes that there is no God and simply practices their religion to cover up their secret atheism. Indeed, such doubt could be buried so deeply in their psyche that they are consciously unaware of it. No matter what their behaviour or protestations to the contrary they are in fact atheists – I mean, how could you possibly prove otherwise?

I guess that I’m lucky in that I had the good fortune to be born in a place and an age where religious belief is largely irrelevant. Feeling and believing as I do, I could not bring myself to live in large portions of the world without finding myself increasingly aggravated and saddened by the beliefs of people around me. No matter where I was accidently born I would have, I think, moved to Europe where my lack of belief goes largely unremarked. I have no idea what the future holds for atheism. I would hope that it increases both in geographical and numerical senses but if such a thing does occur I wager that it will be a long and painful process. But despite rumours to the contrary atheism is far from dead. Such thoughts represent the wishful thinking of those theists who smugly think that they are in possession of the answers to questions we atheists would barely acknowledge as being questions – never mind important ones. Despite the staggering number of people who think otherwise I think that my beliefs (or actually lack of belief) on the subject are substantially correct. Truth is not a numbers game. Common, and indeed learned, opinion on many subjects in the past – the plethora of early abandoned religions amongst them - have been understood by later generations to be spectacularly wrong and I suspect that, if such a thing is even possible, religion in its many forms will eventually be shown to be just another failed group of beliefs. If something like that does happen it’ll long after I and anyone reading this are dead and forgotten. It’s a nice thought though.