Atheist or Anti-Theist?

I have posted a number of blogs on religion and I thought it time I came clean about my personal position, in detail. That I do not believe is apparent in every blog but there is more. I usually strive not to be too strident or vehement in my assessment of God and religion but this time I will be brutally honest.

Let me begin with a definition and an explanation.

Despite countless attempts by religious apologists to assert otherwise, atheism is neither a religion nor a word view. It is simply the absence of a belief in any god. Atheists come in varying degrees of certainty but at the core rests a refusal, or perhaps an inability, to believe in supernatural creators and overlords without sufficient evidence. And it should be pointed out that, regardless of sophistry and clever or tortuous argument, absolutely no evidence exists.

From being a casual Christian, due to childhood education, in my teens I discovered my Jewish heritage and, perhaps in a search for identity, became an ardent Jew. Some years later, for reasons that had nothing to do with disillusion caused by any personal trauma, but rather a gradual awakening through reading and learning, I became an atheist. This is not the place for a full account of that journey, suffice it to say that at the end I was as vehement in my condemnation of religion as I had been in support of Judaism. But that was not actually the end.

Through the passing years and with what passed in my mind as maturity, I eased away from a desire to prove every believer was deluded and religion was an evil mechanism of social control. I never changed from that assessment but I did become more mellow and a little more respectful of individuals, if not their beliefs. I also came to understand that using the label atheist was to describe myself with a negative. Whilst it was true that I did not believe in gods, neither did I believe in Faeries, unicorns or superheroes and saying I was an atheist told people nothing about me.

I am a humanist. Because I do not believe in gods, I accept that I must take personal responsibility. I must take the blame for things I do wrong and take credit for those I do well. I must join fellow Humanists in caring for people, animals and the planet and I do not have the comfort, or the excuse, of supernatural interference.

All of the above being true, I have not lost my conviction that the existence of gods is, at the very least, extremely unlikely. It is usually said that there can be no proof that God does not exist, but there are some very clever arguments to demonstrate that the existence of the Abrahamic God is logically impossible. Here is one that relates to the claim of omnipotence.. It is not my own.

Can God make a stone so heavy that he cannot move it?

If he cannot make absolutely anything, he is not omnipotent.

If he makes the stone and then cannot move it, he is not omnipotent.

Therefore, the idea of an omnipotent god is false.

This is clever and convincing but, for now, I will simply stick to the accepted position that there is no reason to believe in a God without evidence. But what do we mean by God?

Other than a loss of popularity, there is no real difference between the single Abrahamic God of the Jews, Christians and Muslims and the old pantheons of the Romans, Greeks and others. In fact, because the old gods were clearly just ‘man writ large’, I would suggest that they are more credible, in that they do not struggle under the burden of being perfect, and easier to explain. But there is little point in arguing against the existence of a Zeus or Odin, largely consigned to obscurity except for history and fantasy. The later monotheistic god, be it called Yahweh, God or Allah, is a very different matter. In analysing and defining this deity we can only refer to the religions and their supporting holy books for our knowledge. And what we find is deeply unpleasant.

In the most effective and long running public relations campaign of all time, the three religions have tried to convince mankind that their God is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent and, above all, that he loves us. A critical study of the holy books, not to mention the horrors committed in his name, demonstrates this to be a lie. There are far too many examples to list, but here are a handful:

· Allowing other tribes to populate the promised land and then commanding his followers to commit genocide

· Condoning slavery and even providing rules for how it should be run

· Personally wiping out all life because of a grievance with humans

· Being party to the torment and torture of an individual in order to win a bet with Satan

· Causing and/or failing to prevent natural disasters and disease that have claimed billions of lives

· Being so unclear about what he wants that men have destroyed each other for centuries in disagreements over his intent.

· Revealing himself and his desires in such a limited way that the majority of mankind were unaware of him and then decreeing that anyone who doesn’t love him, or who doesn’t obey his laws, should be killed and suffer eternal torture.

“Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate?”

North Korea …. “is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!”

Christopher Hitchens

The late great Hitch was a master at combing erudition with vehemence, but I think his description is accurate.

If we are speaking of the God of the three Abrahamic religions, he/she/it seems too cruel, too capricious and too uncaring to ever be worthy of worship. Consider; we are created with flaws, then punished for them. Given free will, we are punished if we exercise it in a way God dislikes. Commanded to love a God who clearly doesn't give a damn, we are condemned to eternal torture if we don't love and obey.

When asked what he would say to God if, when he dies, he found he had been wrong, Stephen Fry said he would ask

"Bone cancer in children, what's that about?"

Stephen Fry is a decent and gentle soul. I would not be so polite.

There is a reason why so much killing and horror has been enacted in the name of God and religion and it is not, as apologists would have us believe, down to human failings or free will. It is because the bible provides so much justification for it in its terrible legends and because the Quran, written as an instruction manual, actually commands it.

The only reason that Jews, Christians and Muslims do not all behave as barbarians is that they cherry pick what they will adhere to and carefully ignore the more outrageous passages such as killing disrespectful children or killing the infidel wherever you may find him. Indeed, in the modern world we may take some solace in the truth that so much of what is found in these ‘holy’ books is so patently false, or so sickeningly disgusting that most people cannot believe it.

We abhor Islamic fundamentalists who are prepared to oppress and kill for Allah. We see them as violent fanatics and we are told that they are not ‘true’ Muslims. But this is a deliberate falsehood, specifically designed to hide the truth. When these individuals commit their acts of terror, undertake an honour killing or oppress non-Muslims, they are not misinterpreting their holy scripture, they are simply being completely true its words. But before Christians, or anyone raised in a nominally Christian country, are tempted to feel a sense of superiority, we must consider that Islam is 1400 years younger than Christianity. We must look back over the history of Christianity and keep our eyes and our minds open to the countless examples of genocide, persecution, oppression and casual violence committed in the name of Jesus meek and mild.

We should also admit two things. That were it not for Martin Luther, the Catholic church would probably still be more intent on abusing the gullibility of believers to amass wealth and power than in matters spiritual. And that were it not for the Enlightenment, Europe and the Americas would still be under the oppressive heel of a church comfortable with any form of atrocity in support of spreading the faith and maintaining power.

“My concern with religion is that it allows us by the millions to believe what only lunatics or idiots could believe on their own”.

Sam Harris

I would add to Sam Harris’ words to say that religion urges us, by the millions, to judge our fellow man, harbour ugly and violent thoughts and to commit crimes against humanity that only a lunatic would do alone. When a holy book, which fails to condemn slavery, makes women into an underclass and promotes violence as a solution, is viewed as either the inerrant or the inspired word of God, we can hardly be surprised at any horror committed in the name of that god, no matter how vile.

It is for this reason that, although I now prefer to call myself a humanist, I remain atheistic. More than that, I see the monotheistic God of the three Abrahamic faiths as evil.

As the opening paragraph of his book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins wrote;

"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving, control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sado-masochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Richard Dawkins

This caused controversy at the time and still does but it is entirely accurate. But I would go further.

There is nothing in the New Testament to change Dawkins’ view. God may be presented as loving, but that obscures things like the fresh introduction of eternal torture in hell, Jesus’ injunction to abandon your family and give no thought to tomorrow and the idea that not only is he the only route to salvation but that not to love him carries a harsh penalty.

On the other hand, Islam was given to the world some six hundred years after Jesus and in the Quran, the idea of an all-loving God is once again replaced with a deity much more like that of the Old Testament. Oppressively authoritarian and commanding his followers to lie and kill and do anything in order to ensure he is obeyed, to point of forcible conversion or enslavement of the whole world.

Christians and Jews, quite rightly, scoff at claims that Islam is a religion of peace but they refuse to acknowledge the truth of their own history and, at least in the case of the Catholic church, continue the promotion of dogma at the expense of human dignity and well-being. Apologists of all three faiths would have us believe that we are all better off with God and that, as mysterious as it may be, God’s plan is for our benefit. I think the facts suggest the opposite.

I am appalled at the idea that an omniscient, omnipotent, omni-present God loves us and that all the horror in the world could be stopped by him, except that he has a plan for our benefit that we are not allowed to know. I think Hitchens had it right, that to believe in this is to choose slavery.

In conclusion. I am not only an atheist; I am an anti-theist. Even if it were proven that God existed, I would refuse to bow down to such a malevolent creature.