You may notice a "Scarlet A" over to the right. I have decided to out myself as an atheist. I suppose a cursory glance at my posts in re: earthquakes caused by gay people, teddy bears named Muhammed, and persecution of witches, might tend to suggest I take a pretty dim view of religious foolishness impacting on the lives of anyone. And my Blogroll is pretty atheist-positive. But I think, in the midst of my fooling around and posting music videos and sf book reviews and such, I want to let people know that this blog has a person of the godless persuasion behind it.
To me, "letting go of God", as Julia Sweeney put it, has been a journey of good intentions. I wasn't raised in any particular religious tradition, wasn't baptised, but instead was raised to simply be ethical, and taught to love learning. I sat in lots of different churches, and read lots of books about religion, but when I think about the vastness of the universe we experience, the possibility of multiple universes, the extraordinary story of evolution--the amazing variety of species developing over time, and resulting in sentient beings who reach out to comprehend it all--and don't, entirely, but want to try--I am more bowled over by the naturalistic evidence. I do not have a need for the God hypothesis to make my experience of this remarkable world I inhabit astonishing, beautiful, lovable, and meaningful.
It simply is. Every dumb stink bug coming in out of the cold and crawling on my lace curtains. Every ingenious person expressing their own uniqueness by creating--whatever they create--music, poetry, novels, etc. Even politicians, so help me, are an everlasting astonishment to me because they try to create order and make sense of things. They mean to advance our humankind--for good or ill.
I guess this is my anti-apologia, because I don't really feel like I need to apologize for the faith I lack, or defend the religion I don't subscribe to. Because, after all, my irreligion is just that--I do not serve a specific creed, and I would not impose any such on another. Although some sayings I have learned to really admire, so I'll put them here, by way of explaining how I feel:
From Thomas Jefferson: "I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."
I do not swear upon the altar of God, because I don't have any reason to suppose there is or is not such an entity; but let me rephrase: "Because of the astonishing vastness and compexity of the cosmos, the absence of definite proof of any specific deity and the great unlikelihood that we finite beings have any reason to assume otherwise, I am forever opposed during this lifetime to every form of tyranny over the mind of humanity." (Although I know it does not have the same ring.)
And also this, from Rabbi Hillel: "That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn it." To me, the whole of morality is summed up by simply not doing dirt to your fellow human being--this is so apt, that though it comes from a religious person, it needs no arbitrary authority of a deity to make it so. It simply reflects righteousness.
And finally, I subscribe to secular humanism, which is not a religion, but a philosophy, because in the absence of faith, I have knowledge of the frailties and of the potential of human kind--and this is what I respect.
So, this is where I stand. And I don't mind saying so.
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