Monday 11 August 2008

Atheism - a new religion ashamed of being a religion

Remains of a tiny fraction of ~2,000,000 victims massacred by an atheist regime led by Pol Pot.
As most (if not all) of the Atheists I have met so far seem to have a real problem with semantics and accepting the fact that Atheism, like any other religion, is based on belief, I will follow Jesus's example and explain it using plain words (plus a pinch of elementary Logic).

Let us start...


When one asks a question "Does God exist?", one will get the following answers from the following different categories of people:

Theist: Yes.

Agnostic: I don't know.

Atheist: No.




Let p represent the statement "God does exist.". Here are the statements made by our actors:

Theist: p

Agnostic: p v ~p

Atheist: ~p

Agnostic's statement (p v ~p) is a tautology and, as such, is always true. The other two are not tautologies and, before any of them can become anything more than just a mere hypothesis, must be proven. Since neither Theist (p) or Atheist (~p) can prove their hypothesis, neither of them can be called a fact. Everyone who still maintains that one of these hypotheses is true, is nothing more, than a believer. This is an unquestionable fact and anyone who tries to fool you into thinking otherwise is denying the laws of Logic and, as such, should be called either a fool or a charlatan.

Q.E.D. ;)


Actually, let me share one more thing with you.  Here is a definition of religion by a titan of modern anthropology, professor Clifford Geertz, who studied religion and defined it as a "system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic.".  Atheism, Buddhism, Christianity, Communism, Islam, Judaism - they all have something in common: each of them is a religion.  Two of them are different from the others in one respect though - the followers of those two usually do not like to admit that they are part of a religion… probably because religion is just opium for the masses and nowadays everyone wants to be special ;).


3 comments:

  1. "I am a deeply religious nonbeliever - this is a somewhat new kind of religion." ~ Albert Einstein

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  2. Thanks. You inspired me to search for some more of Einstein's quotes on the subject of religion/agnosticism/atheism. Here they are:

    You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.
    - Albert Einstein, letter to Guy H. Raner Jr., Sept. 28, 1949

    The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.
    - Albert Einstein

    Few people are capable of expressing with equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social environment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.
    - Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (1954)

    "We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is."
    (interesting, the same child metaphor I recently used in our discussion with Mel)

    "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

    My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds.

    "That deep emotional conviction of the presence of a superior reasoning power, which is revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God."

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  3. Hehe...

    I have not come across some of them but thanks to Einstein I sense I am even more on the right track. :)

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