Still Thinking – Atheism

“The enlightenment is under threat. So is reason. So is truth. So is science … We have to devote a significant proportion of our time and resources to defending it from deliberate attack from organized ignorance …" Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion. 

"The number of churchgoers in Australia is about 9% and dwindling, the diversity of spiritual belief is flourishing and atheism is going off like a frog in a sock." Catherine Deveny The Age, Melbourne February 18, 2009.

The Atheists are coming!  In fact, they are already here.  Last Friday the Global Atheist Convention 2012 began in Melbourne with keynote speakers Richard Dawkins, Peter Singer, Catherine Deveny, AC Grayling and Geoffrey Robinson just to name a few.  These are probably household names to those who have rejected religion and are seeking some sense of community among the “disbelievers.” Atheism has a long and colourful history.  It is a philosophical approach to life that is born in the rejection of religious faith and religious belief.  Atheists are the more militant wing of the Agnostic movement – those who don’t know or don’t care for discussion about God and belief.  Atheists are willing to engage the enemy – we religionists and the new Atheist take no prisoners.

I think Atheists are both right and wrong.  First, why they are wrong. Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delusion spends most of his argument attacking all religious people regardless of their theological persuasions.  Fundamentalist and social reformers are all in the same basket.  If one is motivated by a religious impulse beyond one’s self, then that is to be condemned.  Sorry, but that doesn’t make sense.  Religion, like any human activity can be healthy or unhealthy.  Beliefs can be destructive or creative.  People can kill each other in the name of their God or they can bring the hope and healing through their love of God and all people. In the quest for absolutism many atheists walk the same pathway as religious fundamentalists.  They take a straw figure of what the religious person should be like and then blow it over.  Human beings are far more complex than these easy caricatures.

But the atheists also have it right.  Atheists often accuse religious people of having an “invisible or imaginary friend,” and that God is just an illusion or delusion to make life easier.  This can be true.  It has taken us sometime to unshackle ourselves from images of God that are at best unhelpful and at worst, dangerous.  Marcus Borg in his book Reading the Bible Again for the First Time, tells the story of a young student who says to him, “I don’t believe in God!”  To which Marcus replies, “Tell me the God you don’t believe in and I probably don’t believe in him either!”  The atheists have helped us see that it is not just believing in God that counts, but rather it is the God we believe it that really counts.

While religion is constructed from our human experience it is also a response to the very source of life itself.  We know that not everything in this magnificent universe is constructed in the mind of human beings.  It is equally possible that we are constructed in the mind of God within the universe and that God, like the human mind is much bigger that we originally thought.

Christopher