Radical Atheist

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There are those people who fall asleep as soon as the plane is in the air and sleep through the entire flight.

These are believers. They ignore the process in favor of the results. They propose a conclusion, even proclaim it to be the only conclusion that’s acceptable, before submitting that conclusion to the same critical thought process most people apply to other aspects of their lives.

Then there are those of us who stay awake the entire flight, staring out the windows and watching the other passengers.

We are those to whom the process is the most fascinating part of reality. The end game, being inevitable, is uninteresting. It will unfold in its own way and time. No one knows for certain which philosophy will win out after we die. So we see little value on placing too much importance on that. Since we are alive now, in this time and place, in the body we inhabit, we might as well focus on the here-and-now. The present moment is the ultimate reality. We are only truly alive at the point in space-time when the future becomes the past. We can’t even measure that period of time it’s so short. We can only experience it. That’s what non-believers can enjoy, the experience of the moment. We find it because we are looking for it. When your focus is 500 feet down the trail you miss the universe under your feet.

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Did we need religion to get to where we are today? Was religious belief a primary factor in humanity being what it is today, the world being in the condition it’s in today? Wouldn’t humanity have been worse off without religion?

Humans have evolved a brain that is capable of abstract thought. Being thinking animals, we ask questions that often have no absolute answer in nature. We also evolved a need to be sure of things. We dislike uncertainty. When we have a question for which there appears to be no explanation we impatiently invent one.

Thousands of years ago people questioned their existence. They invented answers to their questions that both satisfied their curiosity and managed to avoid debunking by being posed as outside our everyday reality. In the years since the industrial revolution we’ve had more and more “free time” during which to ponder our existence. We still don’t have any absolutely sure answers for some of our thorniest questions, so there’s still room for fantastic thinking. Some people become so comfortable with their superstitious beliefs they’ll hold onto them even after a reasonably natural explanation can be provided for some “miraculous” or “foreseen” event. Hope and wishful thinking are more comforting than a seemingly sterile, materialistic, atheistic view of life.

I consider religious belief to be a form of superstition. I see no practical, core difference between believing in a god, believing a rabbit’s foot can bring luck, lucky numbers or crystal power. They are just a few of the personally significant superstitions that are accepted as valid and real despite having no credible evidence of their efficacy. We employ them to explain the unexplained. We use them as filler for the gaps in our understanding. They have, no doubt, contributed to our success as a species in some manner. But we shouldn’t get too egotistical about our place in the history of the planet. Our species hasn’t even been around as long as the dinosaurs were. Still, we can relieve our feelings of insignificance by inventing gods and fates that favor us, guide us, even love us.

I suspect it’s our ability to construct superstitions, being abstract thinkers, to explain the mysteries we encounter that has an evolutionary advantage. We aren’t stressed out by doubt. Superstitions gave us a way to avoid asking questions for which we knew there were no answers. Unfortunately it turned out that superstitious people were easy to manipulate. Many priests and con-men have lived lives of luxury and influence thanks to the human propensity to need an absolute answer for every question, the human willingness to suspend all skepticism and incredulity in the quest for assurance and certainty.

Atheists truly are ignorant. We are willing to admit that to many of the really big questions in life we have no answers. We are too young a species, we have only had the tools to examine reality at ever smaller and smaller scales for the last hundred years or so. We are at the point where most of what we’re discovering is showing us how poorly we understand reality at its core, how much there is yet to learn. We accept our ignorance, it’s what motivates us to always be pushing the limits of knowledge and always willing to learn. As we learn more and understand better, we incorporate new knowledge into our world view. Nothing is certain, nothing can yet be said to be absolutely this or that. There’s too much we just don’t know yet.

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