I read an email today from a fellow who saw my personal atheist manifesto on my website. He said that I am the only other person he’d admitted his atheism to–he hasn’t even told his wife about it. He described himself as deep in the closet, saying that homosexuality was more accepted in his community than atheism is.
I was really touched by his email. It made me realize how lucky I am that I am free to admit that I’m an atheist, not to feel that I should hide that fact from my family or my coworkers, to have a community like SDMB (and others online) where atheists are a vocal and supportive faction.
I’m glad that he found my atheism page–I’d considered taking it down because most of the feedback I’d recieved was pretty lame and ignorant, but I guess I’ll keep it up. I know it’s not going to convince anyone to become an atheist, but it’s worth having it around if it touches someone who’s feeling alone.
C’mon. You know you can’t do this. You can’t tell us about your website and then not give the URL! You leave people like me itching with excitement wondering what you have on this magical page to draw such feedback. Fess up!
Er, uh, I kinda like to keep a certain level of anonymity here, so I’m not comfortable linking to my personal website. Sorry! Didn’t mean to be a tease!
I’ll try to paraphrase my manifesto, though. I really don’t think that it’s particularly brilliant. It’s heavily soft-pedalled–I don’t have the answers, and I might be wrong, but it seems to me that a god worth believing in wouldn’t just want me to pick a religion, without any evidence, and believe in it. I think it’s fine for people to believe whatever religion they want, as long as they don’t push their beliefs on other people. Don’t assume an atheist is a bad person because he doesn’t believe in your god; an atheist can still be an ethical person.
Pretty tame. I guess it just resonated with this guy.
I know there’s some force guiding me that’s both inside me and also outside of myself. I’ve come to the conclusion that if this force is a god, that they don’t want to show themselves in the most full extent, but are showing me themself/ves nonetheless in small bits. It guides me and helps me find my strength, and also my inner peace, which I seemed to have lost a couple of times this past week.
I agree with your point about forcing religion on others or judging people because of their religion. It’s not right to try to make someone believe something, especially when they’re still forming their own beliefs and thoughts about everything. Most of my friends are nonconventional thinkers and all have different religious backgrounds, and I respect their POV even though I don’t always share it. Love is a universal idea, and sometimes it’s all you need as long as that love encompasses the idea of understanding.
I am agnostic but don’t make an issue of it. Few people in my life know and it’s not as if I feel the need to shout it from the rooftops. It’s simply how I believe. At the same time I respect the right of others to make up their own minds about spiritual issues. Oddly enough on those few occasions when my agnosticism was divulged during the course of conversation I was immediately labeled by “true believers” as evil. Huh? If I don’t the existence of a god doesn’t it follow that I am equally uncertain about the existence of satan? Why does it seem that those who claim to follow the teachings of the Christian religions are the most intolerant people on the planet?
I’m an atheist. I was raised by agnostics, but after much studying I have arrived at a definite conclusion. Chaos theory is my “god,” if I can be flippant about that.
My wife got me into the whole New Age, post-modernist philosophy for awhile, which I found very valuable. It got me interested in other viewpoints, and I’ve been interested in people’s religious beliefs ever since.
I used to have the JW’s over to my house all the time. I found out a bit about them, but they challenged my own beliefs (believing in scientific theories without learning the background and basis for them is as much a religion as any other). As a result, I got more skeptical and less lazy about my atheism, so that today I’m more convinced and better prepared to defend my views.
I still respect the separation of objective and subjective realities, but it is clear to me that the subjective is subject to the objective (say that five times fast), thus the latter is the ultimate truth. The notion of subjective reality still has its uses, however, and as a result I find Buddhism fascinating. (The references to Buddhist / post-modernist philosophy in The Matrix blew me away, which is partly why I love that movie).
We need good atheist websites, Podkayne, not just to express our views, but to fight our own complacency. Keep it up!
Interestingly enough, this is something we mentioned in email–don’t avoid your doubts, and don’t shrug off the hard questions. Better to confront them and think about them honestly. Atheism can be a religion–if you devote yourself to it irrationally.