Radical Atheist

Perhaps the most pernicious religious belief. It’s the initial assumption from which all the rest of religious belief flows.

The attitude assumes the outcome of the quest to learn and wonder. “No matter what, the answer is going to be God”. I see no need to presume an end-game, it’s the journey that’s important. It’s OK to say “I don’t know”. Beliefs are rest-stops along the way, they shouldn’t be used as permanent residences for the mind. All knowledge is inadequate, but religious belief, for many of us, is more than inadequate. It’s unnecessary. It attempts to nail down and codify the human propensity to wonder and inquire, to ask and not be satisfied with the answer. If you think you already know something so absolutely that you prefer to ignore and even disparage any information you encounter that challenges those beliefs and if you’ve already reached an unassailable conclusion in advance of hearing all the evidence then you have followed the wrong path and have encountered a dead-end, an intellectual infinite loop. Your knowledge cannot grow as it has nowhere to go. The limitations of belief create a boundary layer, a point beyond which faith cannot go.
I contend that anyone who proposes that they already know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what the end of the journey of knowledge is; anyone who claims a special knowledge of the final answer without having asked all the questions; anyone who contends that they have completed the journey, that they’ve travelled clear to the end of knowledge and have come back to let a few of us in on the secret; are liars. They aren’t lying to me, I don’t believe them. They’re lying to themselves. They’ve convinced themselves that they possess all the answers, that there’s nothing know beyond this or that god. They’ve put their intellect on hold, they’ve created an answer that excuses them from asking any questions that are difficult or outside the bounds of faith.

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“I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it’s a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‘oh my god, its all going down the tubes’, like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It’s also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They’re to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious.”
Brian Eno in an interview with The Guardian

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