Being An Atheist

I'm surprised at the amount of people I talk to who misunderstand what I mean when I tell them I'm an atheist. It doesn't mean I worship the devil (I don't even believe in him); it doesn't mean I am a Pagan, Wiccan, Buddhist, or anything of the sort; it doesn't necessarily mean that I am part of a rising tide of youths who are sick of the religious controlling our every thoughts and actions and restricting our freedoms.

But I am.

But that's a story for another post. Today I discuss why atheism is, as a great atheist once said, not a denial of Theism but instead a close, personal relationship with reality. The great Christopher Hitchens is given credit for saying, "That which can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." This is certainly applicable in the case of every major religion whose creeds involved accepting some sort of higher power, or "God" but refused to grant any evidence beyond, "Well the Earth is kinda nice to live on, so a god must have designed it!"

Today we know this is due to millions of years' worth of mutation, adaptation, and evolution. We also know now that less than one millionth of one percent of the universe is habitable to humans. Turns out that all-powerful and all-knowing magic man in the sky was pretty inept after all.

God has hidden in many places beyond man's ability to perceive. In pagan days, God(s) was/were used to explain the rotation of the sun around the earth. Once Galileo came along, God was then used to explain natural phenomena such as earthquakes and hurricanes. But then once plate tectonics and meteorology came along, God began hiding before the creation of the Universe. What happened? Apparently in Old Testament times God was a fairly common visitor to the human race. Nowadays we'd have to cross dimensions just to catch a glimpse of the guy.

But soon those dimensions will be crossed. And God will run out of places to hide. The younger generation is largely waking up to this fact. But, as I said, that is a post for another day.