Atheism

The word "atheist" has traditionally been used as a smear word—or "bugaboo epithet," as the historian Preserved Smith once described it. To call someone an atheist was more often an accusation than a description, an invective hurled by orthodox Christians against any and all dissenters, including other Christians. Derived from the Greek atheos (meaning: "godless, not believing in the existence of gods"), an "atheist" is "one who does not believe in the existence of a deity." Atheism, or the absence of theistic belief, is therefore a perspective, not a philosophy.

Mencken's atheism is, again, well-known, but for him passionate hostility was reserved for those religious groups which persisted in imposing their moral codes by coercion upon the rest of the population. In Mencken's day, the prime example was Prohibition: and therefore Mencken's hostility was directed chiefly toward the Methodists and Baptists. In contrast, [He] had no particular animus against the Roman Catholics (especially the non-Irish sections): "Catholics are not Prohibitionists, they have more humor than the Methodists," he is supposed to have said once ...

You say belief in God is not an answer to a human need ... Belief in a deity affords great comfort to the many people vexed by the cruel realities of human existence. Accepting that there is no God forces you to look to your own mind for moral answers, and not everyone feels adequate to the task. It also means coming to grips with the bleak fact of death. Most religions, particularly Christianity, provide an appealing alternative. And, of course, they carry a threat: Denial of God can lead to an eternity of suffering, not to mention widespread disapproval in this world.

Atheism is not a denial of God; it is a disbelief in God ... There are three ways of accounting for existence. One premises an eternal and conscious entity, idle and solitary until he or she or it created the universe, which is not eternal, since it had a beginning. A second premises an eternal and conscious universe ... A third premises an eternal, blind, unconscious universe, in perpetual activity ... The first is ludicrous, preposterous, and cruel ... I believe in the third, because the first and second are to me incredible, and because I can see no fourth.

In metaphysics, Rand affirmed the primacy of existence—that existence is ... It follows from the Objectivist metaphysics that God, as understood by Western monotheistic religions, does not exist. Atheism is the only rationally defensible attitude toward the question of God's existence ... Some people think that if there is no God, then life has no meaning or that there is no reason for a person to be moral. Rand dealt crushing blows to both objections. The best way to see how morality without God could be possible is to enter the world of Ayn Rand's fictional characters ...

Paine suffered then, as now he suffers not so much because of what he wrote as from the misinterpretations of others. He has been called an atheist, but atheist he was not. Paine believed in a supreme intelligence, as representing the idea which other men often express by the name of deity. His Bible was the open face of nature, the broad skies, the green hills. He disbelieved the ancient myths and miracles taught by established creeds. But the attacks on those creeds–or on persons devoted to them–have served to darken his memory, casting a shadow across the closing years of his life.

To refer to the etymology of "atheism," mine is a belief "without God." I am not certain that no personal God exists. I have changed my view on the issue once, and further information and reasoning could conceivably make me change it again ... A great mystery remains—the universe itself—but saying that God created it is no solution. Who then created God? Are we not verging on an infinite regress? If something as wonderful as a creator God could have existed before he set to work, why could not something just as wonderful, the universe, have existed without a creator distinct from itself?

Chapman writes "What I no longer understand ... is the capacity to believe in something so outlandish as the existence of an Almighty God—much less one who created us all one by one ... and holds a place for his faithful in an everlasting paradise ... Our scientists can see stars ...; they can document microscopic bacteria ... But of God we have no trace, except for the testimony of scribes writing of events neither they nor those around them ever witnessed—and the faith of millions of people who have managed to convince themselves that he lives and reigns somewhere in the sky."

Today, those who know about freethought at all usually associate it with organized atheism, with Robert G. Ingersoll as the Madalyn Murray O'Hair of the 19th century. But in fact there was much more to freethought than that. As ... Eugenia DeLamotte, has pointed out, freethought was

an eclectic movement that included atheists, agnostics, and deists as well as religious thinkers ... who shared a scorn for religious dogma as a source of truth or authority; a rejection of biblical miracles ...; and an insistence that human progress depends on the exercise of each individual's reason ...

"Battered Woman Syndrome" is common in abusive relationships ... What if the battered woman was the Bride of Christ? The Church. "It's my fault." "I have a sin[ful] nature." "I'm unworthy." "The punishment is death." "Forgive me." "Eternal Hell" "Love God" "Fear God" "He is everywhere." "He knows everything." "He loves me." "He punishes me." "He condemns me." "He saves me." "I just can't leave him."
Free Your Mind
Break the chains of Superstition
And Be Free