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Title: Godless! Author: Apio Ludd Date: February 2018 Language: en Topics: atheism, My Own, belief Source: My Own #22
Among the various "-ism"s that some (occasionally even I) may use to
name the ways that I encounter my worlds, there is one I chose to treat
by itself, and that is atheism. The label "atheist" most certainly
applies to me, since I don't believe in any god and, beyond this, have
no desire for any such being in the worlds I experience. But as Stirner
pointed out more than 170 years ago, so many atheists are such utterly
pious people, and it can be embarrassing to be associated with such
dogmatic true believers.
It's not hard to distinguish pious atheists; the signs are obvious: an
obsessive need to evangelize; endless attempts to show they are as moral
as...the instigators of crusades and inquisitions, the perpetrators of
jihads and witch-hunts; their references to Reason, or Science, or
Humanity, or (in the case of marxist pietists) History, the abstract
deities that they consider absolute and universal, that is, sacred. They
are, in fact, no more atheist than the christian who does not believe in
Allah, the moslem has no faith in Brahma, the hindu who rejects Ahura
Mazda, the zoroastrian who has no use for Yahweh, or the jew who denies
the Trinity. These pious atheists merely reject the gods of every
religion except their own: rationalism, positivism, humanism, marxism...
So if "atheist" is broad enough a term to include those who continue to
cling to some abstraction as universal or absolute, as provider of "the
answer" or "the truth", then perhaps I need a stronger term to express
my unbelief. If, like the righteous rationalist, I can rattle off the
brilliant reasons why there is no god, if, like like the pious
positivist, I can show no god is need to explain the worlds around me, I
also know bevies of bilious and bigoted believers will continue to cling
to their easy, empty, anesthetizing answer: faith. A thing I happily no
longer have at all.
Neither reason nor science led me to my unbelief. I'm glad that's the
case, since each too easily lead to another faith. I grew up with a god
("the god of my fathers" as the faithful say), and that god nearly
killed me. But in that very moment, I realized I had a choice. I could
choose to kill my god. I could choose to live my life, create myself and
my worlds without a god. And so I did and have continued to do for the
last forty years. And I've found a beauty and wonder in my life and in
the wild worlds I encounter that easy answers, benumbing belief, the
festering folly of faith could only suffocate. Having made this choice,
I can say I am proudly and joyfully godless. Not merely an atheist, like
those whose disbelief in God is merely a cover for their belief in some
other, abstract, impersonal Universal Absolute--some other deity to give
them their easy answers--, but a genuinely GODLESS, genuinely faithful
atheist.