On former atheists
Jun 09, 2009 in Video
By Jim Gardner
Sadly, freelance religion has had a very long time to weave into the public consciousness such an elaborate distortion of this simple definition, into one which actually has very little to do with reality, that in many parts of the world atheists are ranked well below every other minority in terms of public trust.
They also describe us as having lost our faith, when in reality we have gained so much more; some kind of first glimpse into critical thinking–or at least some kind of impression of what the world should be like, were mere human animals truly capable of honest self governance.
At this point words often begin to take on more flexible meanings, than they do in ordinary dialogue. Ostensibly secular friends and family suddenly have an armchair opinion on metaphysics, which although well meaning are often vent out-loud rote, rather than that which can be corroborated by facts. We’ve all heard the one about there being, “some kind of energy or spirit out there” and that “atheists believe everything was created by nothing“. How far this is from the truth is as spectacularly insulting to us as perhaps anything can be. And there’s that word again, truth: that which is, given all the evidence, as unambiguously described as can be.
For some, the vocabulary we use to express this aspect of our humanist conviction isn’t found in the written word, it’s in the way we make music or art or that which motivates us to act with passion and true faith. This is just as strongly felt in the irreligious as it is felt by many within a religious faith, but it is a different much calmer, less anxious energy which gets the irreligious out of bed, than that which inspires Christian missionaries and aid workers.
It’s these people who I personally draw the line at criticising. If a near destitute nun in Somalia is looking after a mud hut full of AIDS orphans, you can bet your life she cares less about what happens to herself when she dies, than she cares about what those in her care will do without her. Who am I to criticise her? Many people find the energy to continue in this kind of work from the pages of a book we just so happen to be able to prove is so full of contradictions that it could not have been divinely authored. So be it.
Not that this acknowledgement of the good people do lets every Christian altruist off the hook. Mother Teresa of Calcutta, for example, certainly raised a great deal of awareness in the western world to the plight of the destitute in India. That and a Nobel Prize for peace still doesn’t excuse the fact that she knowingly received donations from Charles Keating of other people’s money, which she then refused to hand back, once Keating found himself in jail.
As sentient, emotion driven creatures of pattern and habit, we turn to literature and the words of those who came before us to understand our place in the scheme of things. The irreligious are no different to the religious in this regard.
In Africa, for example, as within many sects of Christianity, ancestral spirits are worshipped on a par with Yahweh and Jesus. There is an understanding in remembering the dead from whom we are directly descended and observing the traditions they stood for, which transcends the labels which have been placed upon these numinous aspects of our id by centuries of organised religion.
The lazy Christian, who allows herself to behave as irresponsibly at the ballot box as she does in her private life, is as ignorant of the past as she demands a share in the illusion of capitalist choice and no more chosen or saved because her lip-service adhearance to Christianity than she is capable of forming a rational opinion on herself or anyone else, much less the true motivations of her Pastor or Priest. It is her opinion of the irreligious which defines the word atheist in much of America and Europe today.
That is why, without fail, the single most popular kind of fan fiction in every bible believing, Palin voting, Obama hating Christian bookshelf, is the obligatory “When I was an atheist” semi-autobiographical sob story.
The names Lee Strobel and Antony Flew crop up most often, in this genre. The latter having penned “There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind” and the former having arrived at a life in commercial religion as an investigative journalist, with books such as “The Case for a Creator”.
In the light of such erroneous definitions of the word atheist, as those which are propagated by the very people who stand to gain the most from doing so, Flew and Strobel reveal their true intentions.
Strobel, far from presenting evidence which undermines any of the solid scientific principals which outline a naturalistic world-view, relies instead on a style of writing which appears to reveal an unknown, almost conspiratorial conflict between various scientific disciplines and individual scientists. These rifts, which invariably take place at the bleeding edge of any endeavour into unknown territory are, in fact, exactly the kind of values in the logic of discovery which are required if you want to be sure of your evidence.
Strobel knows this and ignores it, specifically when he misrepresents the anthropic principal, which “is the collective name for several ways of asserting that physical and chemical theories, especially astrophysics and cosmology, need to take into account that there is life on Earth, and that one form of that life, Homo sapiens, have attained sapience.” – wikipedia
Flew, on the other hand, is an apologist of convenience on an entirely different level of intellectual dishonesty. Most Christians read the title of his book and assume that there are people out there who, overnight, “get saved” despite years of being irreligious. This is not what happened to Flew.
In October 2004 he stated that he was a deist, saying “I think we need here a fundamental distinction between the God of Aristotle or Spinoza and the Gods of the Christian and the Islamic Revelations.”, adding, “My one and only piece of relevant evidence [for an Aristotelian God] is the apparent impossibility of providing a naturalistic theory of the origin from DNA of the first reproducing species.”
This is an order of magnitude more sophisticated an argument than claiming to have “seen the light” or had a personal experience he can’t explain. But to read the hype on Flew, you’d be forgiven for assuming his road to Damascus moment was one of a profound arrival at a new set of truths so compelling they assuaged him of a great evil.
This artificial line of demarkation between thinking outside of biblical literalism and thinking which assumes a prime mover to be the de-facto explanation for the unexplained, is tantamount to asserting that because you can’t explain something by natural means you can therefore explain it by postulating supernatural causation inductive of unfalsifiable conjecture.
This is an extremely disingenuous way of insisting upon your audience that because it may well be many hundreds of years before we can definitively answer some of the most important questions in the philosophy of science, until then it is better the devil you know to assign to words like God and faith, entirely different meanings than that which they are generally understood to mean by the vast majority of Jeudeo Christian believers.
Regardless of the somewhat academic difference between an agnostic and an atheist, the assumption among the vast majority of evangelicals is that if a self-espoused atheist can change his mind, why can’t Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or Christopher Hitchens, or even you, reading this article now? And so, out there, we perfectly awake free thinkers, continue to encounter the same religiously founded, wilful non-thinking which underscores so much of society.
The trick, if that is an appropriate name for staying alert, is to deliberately practise open-mindedness. I find this animation by QualiaSoup to be effective in outlining how this might be done.
