By BJ Bjornson
Neil MacDonald has an interesting column up regarding the rise of those without any religious affiliation. It starts off quite well.
I have no belief as to whether intelligent life exists on other planets. Furthermore, I don't care. I don't bother reflecting on the matter. It's utterly irrelevant to me.
Similarly, I have no religious beliefs. None. When Homer said "all men need the gods," he was wrong. Like roughly 34 million other people in this country (more than the population of Canada), I don't.
Why do I feel the need to go into this here? Because I live in, and write about, the United States. In this most religious of countries, I have learned to keep my lack of belief to myself.
There are signs now that attitudes here are slowly changing and I'll get to these in a moment. But think about it: holding no religious opinion at all, and saying so, has for many, many years been considered something of an antisocial act in this country.
While my neighbours might be amused by a discussion about the possibility of extraterrestrial life, the sudden unveiling of an atheist at their table would likely provoke an uncomfortable silence.
Discomfort over the fact someone's an atheist doesn't apparently stop at the unveiling. People who've known I'm an atheist for years still get uncomfortable around me whenever the topic of faith comes up. MacDonald does go a bit off track in his next section.
The thing is, though, I'm not even much of an atheist. That would require a belief of some sort.
Atheists are people like Christopher Hitchens, the author of God Is Not Great, or Richard Dawkins, who wrote The God Delusion. They go around attacking the very notion of God, and they have at least something in common with the religious fundamentalists they attack: great faith that they are right.
This is a common if incorrect reading of what atheism is. I had the same argument with my sister recently. Saying somebody is wrong is not the same as saying you are right. Hitchens certainly has a big enough ego that he may well believe he has all the answers, and Dawkins is starting to act in a similar vein, but their egotism doesn't define atheism.
Atheism doesn't have a belief structure. Belief is the acceptance of something you have no evidence for. Atheists aren't content with such things and dismiss any such claims as unsubstantiated, which generally speaking covers all supernatural phenomena. It doesn't pretend to have the "Right" answers, since its basis tends to be science, and part of being science is the ability to be disproved. Finding answers in this manner isn't about being "Right", but rather the ability to say you're less wrong.
In any case, because MacDonald doesn't want to be lumped in with Hitchens and Dawkins, (and I can certainly sympathize with the former), he came up with a new term to describe himself.
There's a better word for what I am: an apatheist.
It's a neologism that fuses "apathy" and "theism." It means someone who has absolutely no interest in the question of a god's (or gods') existence, and is just as uninterested in telling anyone else what to believe.
I do like the term, but I think it is being misapplied. Given the rather overwhelming religiousity of North American culture, the non-religious are going to have to give some thought to the existence of gods, particularly if you're going to reject such. The same goes for any of those holding beliefs outside the mainstream religions. Holding a nonconformist belief requires considerable personal conviction, which implies considerable thought on the matter.
No, most of the apatheists I know fall into the category of religious believers. They've accepted whatever religion they were born into, but rarely participate in its rituals, follow its precepts, or give much thought to what belonging to such a group means. Its background noise so far as their everyday life is concerned. They are the ones who've always given me the most trouble, intellectually speaking. As in, how can you say you believe in something when you do absolutely nothing that conforms to that belief?
Not that I'm complaining. Apathy regarding religious belief certainly beats the religious right trying to beat everybody over the head with it. If we're all lucky, religion will fade into being a private matter rather than one being fought over in the public sphere, or causing acts like this.
I think that atheism is a belief form - you believe in something that can't be proved, the non existence of a God. I don't think we need a new term for the alternative however. I am comfortable with agnostic. Like those who can't prove the existence of a God I can't prove the non existence but I don't see any reason for a God.
ReplyDeleteAll of that does not mean I can't be hostile to the evils or organized religion.
�The absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence�?
ReplyDeleteRon, it is basically impossible to prove the non-existence of something. It doesn�t mean I believe something doesn�t exist, just that until I�m given some evidence to the contrary, I put the possibility that it does exist at extremely unlikely. Refusing to accept an unfounded belief shouldn�t count as a belief in own right.
For a real world example, if Saddam Hussein were still alive, you could ask him about trying to prove the non-existence of his WMD�s, which is precisely why the Bush administration phrased it that way. No matter how much evidence was provided and piled up showing the lack of weapons and programs to produce them, it could never prove complete non-existence. Flip the question around, on the other hand, and upon close examination the evidence for their existence was a pretty bare shelf. Defenders of the Iraq War, Hitchens included, even use the same argument in defense of it when pressed about the lack of real evidence for Saddam�s WMDs. �He failed to provide conclusive evidence that they didn�t exist! Were we supposed to take the word of a madman that they weren�t really there?� Which do you think is the right way to look at it?
The border between atheists and agnostics has always been a little blurry for me. I like Dawkins idea of a sliding scale from the strong atheist, who puts the possibility of gods� existence at infinitesimally small, all the way to a weak agnostic, who gives the probability at something much closer to the 50-50 mark. Where the border is between the two seems to be a bit of personal perference.