The Atheist Blogger

So The Atheist Jew reckons he can tag me eh? Fair play, fair play. Here are my answers to the 10 questions:

Q1. How would you define “atheism”?

Atheism is the philosophical view that there are no gods. Whether you class this view as a belief or disbelief is up to semantics. I personally refer to it as both.

Q2. Was your upbringing religious? If so, what tradition?

I was brought up in a Christian family with my father, mother, sister, and grandmother. I went to two Church of England primary schools as a child, although I don’t remember visiting church much at all. One humourous story is that when I was 3 my grandfather died, and I asked my mother why he wasn’t coming back from hospital. She told me “he’s gone up to heaven”. I apparently remarked “Well can’t we just get a really long ladder and visit?”. The first stages of rationalism or a cute response? You decide.

At age 11 I went to a grammar school that is situated outside the tallest cathedral in the country. It was there that I shook free the chains of religion.

Out of the remaining family (my gran died 3 years ago), my mother is still theist and she works at the cathedral in the education centre. My sister could be described as agnostic / apatheist, and my father has only just revealed to me that he is also an atheist / agnostic.

That was a rather long answer wasn’t it.

Read more…

Make of this what you will, whether it is just my over-analytical mind working overtime, or evidence of secularization in action.

The UK is thought of as a very secular place, which historically is quite odd, as unlike America there are no direct laws that separate church and state. Also, the country has always been quite religious, although this was disrupted massively when King Henry VIII created the Church of England. Nevertheless, in recent years there have been polls showing the increase in atheism, and a poll last year which revealed 42% of a 2,200 person survey thought that “religion caused more harm than good”.

What I noticed the other day was on a more personal scale. I was visiting hospital, and as usual had to confirm my details on the system. They did a few updates, change of address, phone number etc. Then they got to the question of religion.

In a non-secular country the question one would pose is “What is your religion?”. In a secular one you would expect a more neutral approach, perhaps “Do you have a religion?”. However the receptionist asked neither of these questions.

In fact she took the latter and added two words, which to me made a massive difference. The question she posed was:

Do you have a religion at all?

It may not seem like much, but these two simple words impose a certain level of doubt or expectancy on a question. It’s the type of question you ask when you don’t expect the answer to be positive, but you ask anyway in the hope that it will be. In this scenario, the receptionist phrased the question as if she didn’t expect me to be religious at all.

Of course, my answer was the usual “No, I’m an atheist” since I am not concerned with what people think of my particular beliefs, especially those concerning the non-existence of gods. As far as I can make out, this event proves either:

1) Secularization is on the increase, and more people are aware of the separation of church and state, but moreover the general lack of interest and support religion gets in the modern world.

2) Students are considered to be apathetic about absolutely everything and she really didn’t expect me to go into details about any of my personal beliefs.

I hope hypothesis 1 is correct though, because if you believe for one second that students are “apathetic” about anything you have never been to a modern student rally. If anything, students are more fundamental about their beliefs than anyone. We have no money, no possessions, so our beliefs and what we stand for are all we really have to work with.

My apologies. This article seems to have turned into a defense of student activism, which really does prove that my mind is simply too overactive for it to stay on one subject for very long. I’d better cut off now, before I start talking about something I find more interesting than religion, and that’s coming from a guy who finds assembly language and logic gates “interesting”.

As I said at the start, make of it what you will…