One of the reasons I wanted to start blogging again is that I’ve increasingly come out publicly as an atheist and explaining that to people is like trying to feed them a gallon of milk all at once. There are a multitudes of reasons I self-identify as “atheist,” and there are an equal number of reasons that I think it’s important that I make that public information.
Now, I don’t think saying, “Here, read this blog,” is going to be a great solution, either. But it’s something.
atheist – n. – a person who has not accepted nor made a claim of an existent god.
That’s how I define atheist. It’s not necessary to say, “There is no god.” For an atheist, “I don’t believe in any of the gods anyone has told me about,” is good enough.
In fact, “There is no god” isn’t a very important or meaningful statement. Surely most of us agree that there is no god if “god” means “a bleu cheese monster from space who created us all in his image.” All of us have a multitude of gods we don’t believe in, it’s just that a number of people have one or more that they do believe in.
believe – v. – to accept a claim as true and factual.
I have never heard a person define a god that I thought was true and factual (and met my requirements for being a god). That is why I’m an atheist.
I slipped “my requirements for being a god” right into that parenthetical statement. It turns out I’m pretty strict about how I define a god.
god (as defined by me) - n. – a being of absolute awareness (a la omniscience) and absolute moral authority with enough personal power to create, destroy and control any other being or object.
Maybe you caught the rub there, and maybe you didn’t. The real killer for a god concept, in my estimation, is the possession of absolute moral authority. To be a god, a being would not only know all the rights and wrongs of any situation, but the being could also change them. He could make right into wrong and wrong into right.
Some of you might be familiar with the dilemma of pious Euthyphro – Socrates asks him, basically, “Do the gods want what is right because it is right, or is it right because the gods want it?”
In the Bible, Yahweh, the god of the Hebrews, orders war and murder as well as rape. Now, by my estimation, rape is always wrong. It is a violation of basic human rights. But the Bible clearly indicates that Yahweh can make rape into a right action by desiring it.
I just don’t buy into that, metaphysically. Ethics may not be existent entities – they may be imagined and mutable constructs. Still, such constructs are built on years of social and philosophical interaction, experimentation and discovery. A being, no matter how powerful, cannot come along and make right what we believe is wrong. Certainly, anyone can tell me that murder is okay when it’s the wrong kind of Canaanite, but that does not make it a fact.
deity – n. - a being of immense personal power who is capable of acts of will that would be impossible (or nearly so) for a normal human being.
I’ve got a lot to say on the subject of deities and gods and why I think we can use those two words to categorize the various beliefs of religious people. I don’t want to spoil it all right now.
Let it suffice to say that I don’t believe in any gods, and while I might acknowledge certain deities are possible, I don’t see any reason to worship them.