Rachel asked “let me ask you a weird question…how long have you been an athiest? when and how did you know? well, i guess, two weird questions..”

Atheism – Hmm how long is tricky I guess I knew for a long time, I mean I remember at school when I was about 11 thinking ‘this is just bollocks there is no such thing’ and that was when I first started to question those tenets that you are taught that you don’t question because it is what everyone tells you so ‘it must be right’.

After a year or so being defiant in school assembly and such like I wanted so much to believe because I started to feel a bit too isolated and as time went on I realised that being an atheist is pretty nihilistic and I never wanted to be a nihilist. I tried to convince myself that so many people couldn’t be wrong but my heart was never really in it and I knew that deep down. I did not at this stage know about Marx but when I did it all started to make a great deal more sense.

The fact that so many people believe is fine for them, it gives them some happy answers to the questions of justice and fairness and ultimately the belief in a happy ending, it would be churlish of me to wish that everyone was like me and saw that life isn’t fair or just and there is no happy ending because it isn’t exactly fun information to pass on, but it’s what I believe.

I think the problem for atheists is we miss out on the spiritualism aspect, humans may need a degree of mysticism in their lives which I guess is how the whole God thing started in the first place. I believe that it was established with this in mind first and only thereafter used as a method for social control.

My problems with religion are purely political, if my children grow up to be religious then fair enough for them as long as they don’t try to get me out of bed on a Sunday morning that’s fine. They will be religiously educated so that they may make up their own mind, I don’t believe you can ever indoctrinate somebody religiously thru’ normal education because eventually they will leave that education system and have to think for themselves, if there’s nothing there they will sense it, if they have personal experience that makes them think otherwise then that alone will be singularly more powerful than any bible classes. Of course I don’t believe this personal experience is what they think it is but then what would I know it isn’t my experience. I’ve lived in a house with a Ghost and I’m still a sceptic so I’m going to take some convincing.

What irritates me the most is the social control, not just the “Opium fuer das Volk” arguement, altho’ that is persuasive enough, but the way this dogmatic idealism is foisted on other people who are quite happy with their own beliefs. It’s called converting the heathen/pagan/heretic. It has led to some of the most barbaric conflicts our species has ever perpetrated. Pogroms, Holocaust, Crusades the list is long and the casualities many millions. It all stems from this human belief in the fact that if you believe in something people who believe in something different must be wrong and must be made to admit they are wrong by force if ness.

The social control problem is very serious, we are peddled this view that this life may be shite but it will all be better in the next, well hey that’s mighty convenient for those doing well and they seem to forget the “first shall be last and last shall be first” paragraph almost as easily as the forgiving your neighbour ’77×7′ times. Funny that! It always pissed me off enormously that the teachings of a humanist who lived 2000 years ago whose political slant nowadays would be described as fairly staunchly left-wing was hijacked by these conservative zealots who choose to take so little of what is actually said. The problem is too many people buy it, is it the fear of being branded a heretic even now that stops people speaking up?

I journeyed back to Valhalla last night just for a fly past nothing more and found that the writer was laying into some commentator who had warned of the dangers of canonising Reagan, the comment valhalla had received from a visitor was not to get so worried becuase people like this commentator would not be ‘making it over to the other side’ anyway. Now this is the sort of idiocy that really hammers home the merits of atheism and secular states to me what a ludicrous comment but endemic particularly of the ‘religious’ right. I can’t improve on Bill Hicks’ arguements on this one so best listen to him.

Song Of The Day – Franz Ferdinand ~ Take Me Out

Original Comments:


Rachel made this comment,
thank you. your perspective let me think of a few things. i don’t know how long i haven’t believed in god, and i haven’t actually researched “athiest”. all i know, is that i have trouble believing in god. everyone i know is trying to get me to go to their churches and read all this shit. but then if i think up a theory, or want to research something in particular, that doesn’t work. it’s like it’s god. one god. or nothing. and i hate that. but thanx!
Visit me @ http://palmysinfullbloom.blog-city.com

comment added :: 27th June 2004, 04:29 GMT+01
john made this comment,
I was educated at a C of E school back in the 1950’s and that was enough of an experience to turn anyone into an atheist.
Visit me @ http://bigjohn.blog-city.com/

[Redbaron responds – Yeah many in Ireland say the same about the dreaded Christian Brothers – a sort of David Cronenberg Monk sceneario!]

comment added :: 28th June 2004, 16:51 GMT+01
Julia Marshall made this comment,
If you say you are an athiest then you claim to belive in nothing… or at least nothing religious. But by claiming this, you are beliving something. And every human being is religious. Everyone had a core of assumptions or beliefs that determine the way they live. The difference is whether you live by your own laws or by God’s.
[Redbaron responds -Thanks for your comment Julia. I would disagree with the atheist believing something, the whole tenet is not believing anything there is a difference is believing something and not believing in something atheists are the latter but that does not make them necessarily the former. Every human being has a conscience and a set of moral values but this does not have anything to do with God, this is partially an inherited set of natural beliefs and partially to do with what we are taught. I’m afraid God only comes into it as a mechanism with which to pass on these beliefs, no different to Aesop’s fables and such like.]

comment added :: 1st July 2004, 00:41 GMT+01