ATHEISM

To you, I’m an atheist. To God, I’m the loyal opposition. – Woody Allen

Belief in Gods and Goddesses is ancient in humanity’s history. Indifference to Gods, explicit rejection of Gods, and hostile opposition to Gods have also been there all through history.

Atheism is the emphatic affirmation of the non-existence of God of any kind and of any religion. This tenet is not the hearty proclamation of something positive, but the explicit, and often angry denial of what it regards as an imagined entity. From earlier than Anaxagoras of ancient Greece to a good many people in free societies in the modern world there have been countless atheists in all cultures and nations.

Atheism is the erasing in adulthood of a belief that was inculcated (like love of parents, respect for elders, and good manners) at a pre-reasoning stage. When we are born, we are neither theists nor atheists, but ignorotheists, i.e. crying creatures who have never even heard of God. Our distant ancestors some 50,000 and more years ago were also ignorotheists: Nothing to be proud or ashamed of. There are probably pristine ignorotheist cultures still in the world.

Epicurus was one of the first to say that gods were not anthropic, allegedly possessing qualities like joy, anger and other passions generally attributed to traditional Greek (and many modern) Gods. Repudiating supernaturalism, he theorized Freud-like that religions arise from an innate fear of death and post-mortem punishment.

In the Indic tradition atheists are called nástikas: people who deny the Vedas as the supreme spiritual authority. S. Radhakrishnan interpreted this to mean rejection of the belief that “spiritual experience is a greater light in these matters than intellectual reason.” Traditionally, nástikas referred to Buddhists and the Chárvákas. But today there are a great many Hindus who are nástikas.

Philosophical atheists are generally humanists. They tend to be intellectually honest and meticulously rational. Nevertheless, now and again atheists can become as rabid in their non-belief as some religious fanatics. Some atheist extremists are not only unbending in their denial of God, often they have the same kind of passion for converting believers into their fold. This in itself may not be bad, but in this context some of them speak with con-tempt about theists. More seriously, when atheists come to wield political power (as with Stalin and Mao), they can become as intolerant of believers as medieval religionists who engaged in the Inquisition and Sharia stoning.

Between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries the vast majority of scientists were theists. Things have changed dramatically in our own times. Credit or blame for this goes to some bold eighteenth century thinkers who are not as universally known. They include Denis Diderot who was thrown into the Bastille in 1751 for his atheistic writings, from where he completed the first volume of Encyclopédie. Then there was Baron d’Holbach whose Christianisme dévoilé (Christianity unveiled, 1761) was so blatantly atheistic that it offended even the free-thinker Voltaire. He was disgusted with the religious wars then plaguing Europe and  he wrote that there can never be peace in the world until atheism becomes universal. His Système de la Nature is more eloquent than Christopher Hitchens’ God is not Great.

Julien Offray de La Mettrie, who wrote L’homme machine (Man Machine) regarded humans as robots, brains secreting thoughts as the liver secretes bile. He had to take refuge in the Netherlands for writing that book.

There are at least three reasons why people may become atheists. First, they see so much nature-inflicted suffering and pain they feel that if a powerful and merciful God existed He would not allow these to occur. Secondly, they are appalled and offended by what people have been doing to one another in the name of God and religion. Thirdly, they see no need for a God to explain and understand the natural world.

Since religion has often been a competitor to science in explaining origins and ends, some modern scientists tend to have a negative impression of all religious people. This is like saying that musicians are misguided because they don’t understand that musical notes can be Fourier-analyzed. It must be noted that though individual scientists may be atheists, science as an enterprise is not atheist: it is simply non-theist. That is to say, it does not invoke God in any of its theories or equations because it finds no need for that. This is why atheism is allied to modern science, just as theism is allied to cultural comfort. This has also prompted atheists to invoke science to the point of declaring, “In science we trust.” This naïve substitution of science for God confuses the role of both science and God in human culture.

Confucianism has no God concept, only the Changing Dao. Its mission is to teach people to live in harmony. Jainism, which speaks of immortal souls, does not believe in a personal God. Buddhism is sometimes described as atheistic. But these two Indic religions are non-theistic rather than atheistic.

For many decades a large number of people in the Soviet Union had (or were forced to have) no belief in God. In our own times millions of people in Europe and America, though descended from God-fearing Christians and Jews, are atheists. When Christians turn into atheists they cease to be Christians. Jewish atheists continue to be Jewish because Judaism is an ethnic religion more than an orthodox one. Hindus who become atheists are still Hindus, because there is no central authority to excommunicate them. Muslim atheists risk their lives if they speak out.

Traditional theists are only proprius-theists: believers in their own God; at the same time, they are also alli-atheists: they reject the gods of other religions.

It is interesting that while atheists don’t believe in the existence of God, God (if He exists) must believe in the existence of humans, even if all too often He seems to be indifferent to their plight.

What is not always recognized is that one can be good or bad, kind or cruel, compassionate or callous, irrespective of whether one is a theist or an atheist. Significant virtues and vices are independent of belief or disbelief in God of whatever description.