Humanism

One of the most potent things about losing one’s religion is that we often feel a big gap left in our lives because our religion informed much of our life’s direction and purpose.  It’s very common for religious people to question how someone can live without religion, because they were raised in an environment which put religious belief at the center of existence.  The thought is that, if one loses their religion, then certainly they must also be losing their very purpose in life.  It’s a common reasoning behind why religious people often dismiss Atheists as misguided, confused, or just going through a phase.

We’re often born into circumstances where our entire community is of a particular religious affiliation, and through extreme peer pressure and social immersion, the community instills the idea in its people, and especially youth, that this is the only way of thinking.  Obviously, that is very far from truth, but isolation within a social structure that advocates only a single cultural viewpoint doesn’t leave much room for people to explore their own path.

But if someone takes the path of being Atheist, there’s usually a certain set of conditions that informed that choice.  Skepticism is often at the core of it.  If someone is highly skeptical, it’s because they care about proof or evidence before believing something.  If no religious claim can stand up to scrutiny, then the focus on how we should live our lives naturally shifts from caring mostly about what some deity might think, to caring about the lives of our fellow humans as the single-most important driver in our thought process.  This is called Humanism.

But there are many different kinds of Humanism, so it’s important to note which kind.  Most Atheists will say they are Secular Humanists.  According to americanhumanist.org (2015), “Secular Humanism is an outgrowth of eighteenth century enlightenment rationalism and nineteeth century freethought” (para. 8).  The primary focus is on people, and a rejection of all religious claims of supernatural belief.  Secular Humanism offers an ethical system to follow.  Atheism is nothing more than the rejection of the claim of a god or gods, and so it’s not a system of ethics in itself. 

There are many resources on the web to learn about Humanism.  It’s important to note that Humanism is NOT a religion.  It’s a system of ethical guidance that puts humans first.  As a Humanist, one would take the position that we should make the world into a place where people come first.

For a closer look into Humanism, you can search Google and find many different resources.  I recommend taking a look at:

https://www.secularhumanism.org

What's my label?

Humans have thrived because of knowledge.  Psychologically, the unknown can become a representative for instability, danger, and therefore fear.  It's no surprise that early humans came up with absurd stories in an effort to understand their environment and desperately sought to effect some control over it.  Keep in mind that these people didn't know why it rained, what the sun was, or what caused a bolt of lightning and clap of thunder.  Common everyday things we don't even think about were extremely mysterious to them.  Our ancestors were perpetually fearful, and therefore superstitious and made up stories to try to explain these natural things/events in their environment they didn't understand.  They didn't know what the sun was, so it became a God to many.  They didn't understand the ocean, so they thought it was the domain of a God.  Every single aspect of nature was tied directly to some kind of esoteric or supernatural explanation.  But the explanation wasn't enough.

If it rained enough for crops to prosper, God was pleased.  If it rained too much and flooded, it was God's anger.  The attempt to attribute natural experiences of life to constructs that people could reason and understand was the forefather to the now ubiquitous use of labels.  We label everything, because it lets us know where it fits in our worldview and how to react to it.  People themselves can have so many labels, Chevy lover, 49'ers fan, vegetarian, heavy metal lover, father, mother, white, black, short, tall, thin, fat, cute, ugly, young, old, and the list of labels could go on for many, many pages.  It's bidirectional, in that there are labels that people place on us, and labels that we decide for ourselves.  Unfortunately, there's a lot of confusion around labels of belief.  Maybe you're reading this and you're not sure if you qualify as an Atheist or something else.  What others think of us based on the labels they place on us can often be important to us, but it can be even more important for us to know our own labels that describe us accurately.  We need to know who we are and where we stand.

I'll take a shallow run-through of the primary labels that are the most common.  There are many, certainly, but generally speaking, we can narrow most down to six.  Four of these, the primary ones that I'll explain, have two parts to them.  What you believe, and what you claim to know.  Many people often refer to "agnostic" but this by itself means nothing.  I have no doubt you've heard plenty of "agnostic" jokes making light of the agnostic stance in order to belittle people.  After this, you should understand why such jokes are ridiculous.

Obviously, we know what Theist and Atheist are.  The "A" simply means "not".  In the same way that asymmetric means "not symmetric".  Obviously, Theist is someone who believes in the existence of a god or gods.  Atheist simply means, "not Theist".  It doesn't mean anything more than that.  People often attempt to attach extra labels to Atheist, and most of them are absurd such as "deviant" and "anarchist".  Atheism itself is nothing more than the rejection of the positive assertion that a god or gods exist.  That's all there is to it.  But what you will also have likely heard often are people who say they are "agnostic".  Agnosticism, like Atheism, is nothing more than a rejection of the positive assertion of knowledge (or gnosticsm).  Saying one is "agnostic" is as useless as saying one is "gnostic".  It means absolutely nothing by itself.  It must be paired with the appropriate term to have any purpose or meaning as a label.

So, Theist or Atheist is what you believe, and Gnostic or Agnostic is what you claim to know.  This means we have 4 possible variants in a spectrum.

• Gnostic Theist - Believes in God(s) and claims to KNOW it undoubtedly.
• Agnostic Theist - Believes in God(s) but does NOT claim to KNOW for sure.
• Agnostic Atheist - Does not believe in God(s) but does NOT claim to KNOW for sure.
• Gnostic Atheist - Does not believe in God(s) and claims to KNOW it undoubtedly.

I find that most of the time when someone claims to be "agnostic" what they are really saying is that they aren't sure what they believe, or that they haven't found a belief system yet that matches what they think they believe.  There are a few other positions, but they are more rare, and I'll also explain an often misunderstood contrast:

• Anti-Theist - An Atheist who is strongly opposed to theism and wants it wiped out.
• Anti-Atheism - A Theist who is strongly opposed to atheism and wants it wiped out.

Often misunderstood is the difference between an Unbeliever and Nonbeliever:

• Unbeliever - A Theist who does not worship the same god(s) as another Theist.
• Nonbeliever - Synonym for Atheist.

Atheism is much more simple for labels, because it really doesn't have any sublabels.  Theism can have several sublabels, which includes not only the primary religion, but the denomination, and sometimes, that denomination is broken into subgroups.  Thankfully, for Atheists, it's really just a matter of gnostic or agnostic, and the vast majority that I've ever interacted with are agnostic, and this is what you're likely to hear them say:

"Sure, we don't know 100% for sure that there's no God or Gods, but that's only because you can't disprove a negative and absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.  Regardless, I'm 99.999% sure, which is good enough for me."

That's typically because Atheists care about what can be proven, and one of the reasons they are Atheist is because pretty much nothing in the Bible, or any other religion's holy book for that matter, can be proven.  The mindset is one of caring about proof and evidence that is reasonable according to the scientific method, meaning it's observable, testable, and the outcome is predictable and repeatable.  By contrast, in the 25+ years I spent as a Christian, I've very rarely ever come across an agnostic Theist.  Typically, you'll hear something similar to:

"God is 100% real.  He exists, and His proof is everywhere.  I know for a FACT that God is real, because (insert anecdotal evidence / circular logic here)."

So, generally, people most likely fall within the categories of - Gnostic Theist, and Agnostic Atheist.  The other two are much less common, and that's because Atheists typically are able to admit they can't know an unknown, and Theists typically are too scared to publicly admit their doubts in a religious world that frowns on such things.

I hope that helps you to understand the common labels and their PROPER use.  Some Atheists often choose another label completely to tell other people, and that's "Humanist", but I'll save the blog about that for next week.  Also, don't feel too pressured by labels as an Atheist.  If you're not comfortable talking about it, you can always just say, "That's none of your business", or "That's very personal and I'd rather not talk about it."  

Your life has no meaning

As theists, we were taught that our lives were ordained by God himself and the sole purpose of our lives is to serve God so that we can have everlasting life in paradise after we die.  It can be difficult when we're indoctrinated to think outside of that thought process that has been laid out for us since we were children.  The root of the problem is that it's very difficult to think outside of that indoctrination because we're also taught to never question it.  If we do question it, we find some very interesting points to think about.

Theists will often propose that the lives of Atheists have no meaning because after we die we believe there is no further existence for us.  Therefore, whatever we do here on earth while alive is pointless and meaningless.  Actually, the opposite can be true from the perspective of the Atheist.  For example, if our lives are just a blink in the eye of God and we'll end up living an eternity in heaven afterward, then this life really doesn't have any meaning at all.

Of course, the same reply from both perspectives applies.  Our lives have  plenty of meaning no matter what our theological standpoint is.  We all love, share, enjoy our lives, and we hurt and suffer together, giving and receiving comfort in turn from those we care about and who care about us.  I actually propose that the opposite of the theistic perspective is true, that because we don't know what will happen after we die, every second of our lives is that much more precious and meaningful.

The truth that theists simply refuse to acknowledge is that nobody knows what will happen to us after we die.  They claim to know, but a book and a host of logical fallacies do not constitute proof.  Is it possible that there could be some kind of transcendent realm in which our consciousness can survive and carry on?  Sure, it's possible, but there's no proof of that, so there's no reason to believe that it will happen.  Just as there is no proof that we will go to heaven after we die, just because some anonymous writer wrote that it would happen in a letter thousands of years ago.

Theists don't get to decide whose life has meaning and whose doesn't simply because some don't choose to partake in their particular religion.  Each one of us has to find the meaning in our lives, and there's an incredible meaning in our existence from a scientific standpoint.  For example, the heavy metals found in our bodies can only come from one place - a star.  When stars die and explode, they eventually create new stars and planets.  That means that the molecules in our very bodies were once part of a brilliant burning sun, or the in the earth of a planet that once inhabited this space long ago.  We are made up of the universe, and the universe is made from the same stuff that makes us.

The natural processes of the universe, many of which we still have yet to understand, have created us and we are now capable of understanding how connected we are to the universe and to each other.  We live, we feel, we share, we suffer, we laugh, we cry...  everything we are is so much more than just us, and all of that has incredible meaning, and in my opinion, far greater meaning than simply "I exist because God wanted me to serve him."  I would much rather think of myself as a participant in this incredible and amazing thing called life in the universe, than simply have been born a slave to a Gods' will.

Some say that the greatest question is, "What is the meaning of life?" but I say that the answer is quite simple - "To live."  Everything we experience gives us meaning.  Every choice we make has meaning.  Even if we die and never have any kind of consciousness again, it will be no less than everyone else who has gone before us and will go after us.  They're our lives and we are the ones who get to decide the meaning.  Nobody has the right to say what the meaning of your life is or isn't, because they claim to know something that can't be proven.

Atheism and Morality

One of the first questions that people often ask of Atheists is, "If you don't believe in God, where do you get your morals?"  It's easy to think like this as a theist because many Christians are taught that all morals extend from God.  Some preachers may even go as far as to explicitly claim that Atheists are anti-moral, which opens a whole other subject up for discussion that I will cover later.  But for right now, let's simply examine morality.  It's very important to a logical and critical thinker to be very clear about definitions before proceeding with any particular discussion.  Theists are often fast and loose with definitions, sometimes even presenting definitions of words that don't fit at all.  If we're to make any sense of things, we have to agree on standardized definitions and be sure we know what we are talking about before we try to think about it in depth and analyze it.

Morality is defined as, "principles concerning the distinction between right and wrong or good and bad behavior."  As a theist, we would tend to want to place our understanding of what is moral and what isn't on the Bible.  Calvinism is the idea within many Christian circles that God is completely good and incapable of evil.  Therefore, God himself can be considered the whole of morality.  But, is that really true?  How can we test that and how can we figure out where morality fits in when we no longer believe in religion?

It's a multi-layered problem, actually.  There are quite a number of issues with Theism that allow people to arrive at the idea that the Christian god is essentially the origin of everything moral.  The problem is that, as Theists, we often didn't realize that we were actually looking at it backward.  The claim is that we got morality from our religion, but in fact, we were using our own societal understandings of morality to validate what we found to be moral from the Bible.  This is easy enough to test and demonstrate.  No Theist will challenge the idea that God is eternal, the alpha and the  omega, the beginning and the end.  If God is morality, then anything moral to God should be moral to people.  Yet that simply isn't true.  

For example, if a parent murdered their child because the child talked back to them, they would be put in prison, possibly for life, and society at large would consider it a very heinous act.  Yet, God commanded his followers to stone unruly children to death.  Obviously,the apologist in us all immediately tries to make the excuse, "But that's Old Testament", but it doesn't really matter.  What was moral to God in the OT had to have been moral to God in the NT.  If God is morality, then what was moral must still be moral.  What was moral 2,000 years ago will be moral in another 2,000 years from now.  Yet, in the OT, God provides Moses with the 10 primary commandments and nobody would argue that it is moral to say, "Thou shalt not steal".  So, why the contradiction?  How can we only consider some of what God says to be moral if all our morals come from God?

That's because we are using our morals to judge what is moral in the Bible, then looking at it backward and saying that those morals CAME from the Bible when, in fact, it was us making the moral determination all along.  There was never a requirement of religion to be moral or to understand morality in the first place.  Atheists have no regard for what a priest has to say about their religion, yet the Bible states that such people are to be executed.  That is directly at odds morally with our modern sense of equality, fairness, and our constitutional right to free speech.  So, really, we've had morality misrepresented to us our entire lives and this is just one of the many aspects that has often been viewed by Atheists as betrayals of religion.  

So, as an Atheist then, where DO we get our morals from?  The same place other people get them from.  We get them from an evaluation of what is good and bad.  While there can be many differing opinions about "harm", that really is the founding basis upon which we have to determine if something is moral.  It's obviously quite complex, but to strip it down to the lowest level, we can say that we can define something as immoral if it brings actual harm to a person in some fashion, and something is moral if it helps them or is good for them.  For example, if I were to walk up to you and punch you in the mouth, it would actually harm you.  That means it's a very immoral thing to do.  It's immoral not only because it causes harm, but because of what we understand from the most basic rule - the Golden Rule.  If you don't want someone to punch you in the mouth, you should not do it to someone else.  Nobody requires a religious book to tell them this very basic concept and we as Atheists do not require religion to be able to understand this.  

What is moral does change and it's based on societal rules.  For example, in many ancient societies, voluntary ritual human sacrifice was commendable and honorable, a very moral thing.  But this isn't just limited to ancient vs. modern times.  There are still antiquated beliefs in present day which modern society deems immoral.  While a discussion of societal structures is beyond the scope of this blog, it's important to note that the scope of what we're discussing is modern-day U.S.A. which is 76% Christian.

So, to leave you with a final thought about morality, consider that morality has nothing to do with our previous lives as Christians in the sense that the religion itself is not moral.  Christianity's system is "If you believe and are baptized, you are saved.  Otherwise, you're damned."  That is not a moral system.  It's a system of favoritism.  Adolf Hitler could repent and be baptized on his deathbed and go to heaven, and Ghandi would be sent to hell for eternity because he didn't believe in the Christian god.  There is no morality or fairness in that.

In conclusion, our morality as Atheists stems from our understanding that we live on a planet with billions of other people and our actions have an effect on each other.  The moral thing to do is to behave in a way which brings about good things and doesn't harm ourselves or others.  It's obviously a very complex thing because we are very complex beings, but moral Atheists exist just as much as immoral Christians exist.  It's not the belief, or lack of belief, in God that makes one moral.