The Atheist Blogger

In the comments section to my article “Atheism is not a religion“, a reader named “ed” asked me to answer three questions surrounding atheism:

Who is the quintessential atheist, in your opinion? Who has (if anyone) fully represented Atheism both in beliefs and actions?

Well, as “The Atheist Jew” pointed out already, an atheist is simply someone who has no belief in God. There are no “beliefs” in atheism, and I had already explained how atheism is not a religion since it has no belief system. Yesterday I was watching the “Atheist Experience” show on the internet, and they had a caller who talked for about 10 minutes on the subject of belief, before insulting the hosts and being cut off. He did however, start a discussion on whether it takes the same amount of faith the disbelieve in a God than it does to believe in him. Of course, the atheist hosts answered the question with a well explained “no”. They mentioned believing in “pixies”, and the fact that nobody would seriously argue that you need to take a leap of faith to say you didn’t believe in pixies. The evidence is overwhelming that these creatures only exist in legends and stories, and that no accurate sighting have ever been made or verified. Nobody can know for sure whether God exists of course, and so there is a leap of “faith” in the same way that there is with any scientific theory, but the leap only comes through supporting evidence (or lack thereof). If anything, it requires less of a leap to disbelieve in God than it does to believe, certainly not more.

Now to the whole concept of “acting atheist” which I can’t really wrap my head around. If we have already come to the obvious conclusion that there are no beliefs structures in atheism, and therefore the only thing lumping atheists together in a group is the fact that they say “I don’t believe in God”, how can that define any possible actions? Christians and Muslims pray because their belief system supports it as an action, but the only actions supported by atheism are the ones that come naturally to humans anyway. So to answer the second part of your question rather simply, every single living (and indeed non-living) human “acts” like an atheist. Now, if you are talking about whether atheists should act in a different way then you are covering an entirely different subject, and one I would possibly like to save for an entire blog post. I personally don’t support the way Richard Dawkins is going about waging a war with theists, but that is his decision, not the decision of atheists in general.

How does an Atheist deal with Evil?

This question gets me into one of my favourite subjects when debating many religious people…morality. A lot of Christians like to claim that the Bible came up with morality, in fact, Kent Hovind used to make a load of money each year by saying it repeatedly at his lectures (until he was arrested for tax evasion that is). He claimed that he once asked an atheist student where his morals come from. The student replied “my morals come from me, they are what I think are correct”, so Kent said to the guy “Ok, well then I think it’s fine to shoot you in 5 minutes, so watch out!”. For once, Hovind had got it right, but it was really the students fault for his appalling answer. Morality comes from a majority decision on what is right and wrong. It forms out of the protective instinct we have for our own families, and the proof for this exists in history.

If the Bible invented morality, then how were there any people left to write the Bible in the first place? In a world without morals, humankind would be murderous and savage. It wouldn’t be our fault of course, we just wouldn’t know any different. It would be a think-do world, one in which consequences are never considered. This world (thankfully) has never existed, because as far as we can tell, cavemen were moral people. They lived in groups of families, and attacked anyone who attacked or threatened one of their own. Their behaviour is reflected in almost every single branch of the animal kingdom, and it doesn’t matter if you are a grizzly bear or an ant, you will protect yourself and your family from harm.

So it is fair to say that our common instinct developed into the idea of morality, long before the Bible started advocating slavery and homophobia, which of course are excellent morals for a modern society…

Evil then, must be an overriding factor in our moral judgements. Not much is known about what drives a human to commit acts of “evil” (defined by the majority again), but some reports suggest abuse as a child (when the brain is open to new ideas), and certainly people like Charles Manson can be attributed to this. Human beings are not perfect in any shape or form, and the fact that we can override our sense of instinctual morality is one of these flaws. Evil will exist as long as human beings exist in this form.

Is it possible to be an Atheist without being a Humanist or a Doctor of Biology?

I would answer this question simply with a “yes” since I know plenty of people who aren’t Biology students and Humanists, yet who are atheists. I am sure a student of Biology understands the process of evolution and how the body works better than I, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a good understanding of it. Neither does it mean that all Biology students are atheists, and I am sure that there are a vast number who are theist, and simply believe that God used the process of evolution to shape life.

To be an atheist, all you need to do is to not believe in God, it’s that simple. Every single human is born atheist, because no newborn baby can comprehend or understand a God. They only start believing in God in later life, if at all.

Now to address the humanist issue, which can be proven wrong with a simple example. One can hardly call the likes of Joseph Stalin a “humanist”, and yet he was an atheist. The fact that he was an “evil” dictator and an atheist is pure coincidence, and he certainly never ordered the deaths of anyone “in the name of atheism” as some theists like to claim.

So, I hope that answers your questions ed. Please feel free to comment / debate the points I have made.