WARNING: The content on
this website is governed by an understanding of atheist premises.
We
have a lot of experience at explaining the simple, elegant and undeniable facts
about atheism, but there has never been a comprehensive list of the premises of
atheism because atheism is not a doctrine, but a random set of facts about the
universe and refutations of false depictions of it.
Typical
premises of atheism include 1) materialist and evidence-based universe knowledge,
2) dismantling of religious lies and fraud, and 3) criticisms of religious dominionism,
designs and/or interference with the quality of life of mankind.
Most
Americans are NOT prepared for the degree of complexity in their thinking that
atheists like us employ on a daily basis, so if you find it difficult, you're
not alone. A more simplified list is needed, and should be forthcoming.
It is crucial to bear in mind that many of the issues we confront are disturbing
when a person first tries to sincerely deal with them on an adult level. If you
have to resist and outright deny any portion of this list, that's normal. But
also bear in mind that this list has been compiled after years of questioning
and testing things that are well outside the boundaries of popular culture and
common sense.
The following list of premises will help you understand
where atheists are coming from. Please note, also, that these are only premises,
not proofs or facts, which you may find yourself wanting as well. This list is
too long to consume in one shot as it is, so you may have to wait, or rely upon
yourself if you're simply not convinced and need more data. Understand that there
is an infinite number of unmentioned approaches, justifications, catalysts and
applications of atheism. And yet, they all totally neglect the fact that atheism
is ALSO: irrelevant, personal, secret, emerging, and ultimately nothing more than
the absence of belief in "god".
| The Premises of Atheism Background This portion is the context of atheism. The premises follow. I. Atheism is not complicated. Atheism is the absence of god. This applies both to the universe which has no god, and our human depiction of the universe which has no god. It does NOT imply that no god exists in the imagination of human beings, which is a perfectly well known fact. It is said (every day by religious frauds) that atheists "deny God", but the concept of "denying God" under the presupposition that there is a God is a logical fallacy employed ENTIRELY to scare people out of atheism, and to marginalize those who are not scared. Since we are all born without a belief in god, and none exists, we must be convinced through language to believe in one. So it is true that anyone calling themselves an atheist denies that any god exists, but no denial of God is required to be an atheist, as no god has ever been brought forth to be denied. When an atheist "denies" a god, his rejection is not of a god, but of the fraudulent reports of believers in attempts to create a god in our fertile minds where none exists in reality. Typically, believers expect a lot of leeway to lie about god, so they call it mysterious. But belief in God is not at all mysterious. It is a common psychological device in our society and is fully recognized and discussed, all the time. If the smallest child can grasp and become brainwashed by the concept of God, then it is totally absurd to insist that adults cannot (or should not dare to) fathom it. The
premises atheists stand on are many, and most often represent a clearer, more
accurate, and more effective view of the known universe than believers are willing
or able to recognize. Atheists take the imaginary into full account but know better
than to try defeating the real universe. Atheism itself does not make one single
affirmative claim! Atheists employ critical thinking techniques to address
common religious violations of humanity through deliberate ignorance, irresponsible
brainwashing, and the global manifestation of absurd belief systems. Believers
may pursue all available corners of the conscious mind, but the inherently absent
god of a believer's imagining does nothing real, and serves no real purpose. The
insidious truth about gods is that they are always invented to become a tool for
indirectly facilitating human desire, usually without the consent or knowledge
of its adherents. That is precisely why atheists are not content to merely be
atheists, but take pains to directly deny and dislodge all gods from mainstream
society. It is important to note that every religious believer takes the atheist
position on 99.99% of the gods invented by men. Atheists are different from others
only in the sense that, after discovering that all of man's great pantheon of
gods are mythological, they do not then invent one and call it "real". Most atheists fully understand that religious literature probably does deserve appreciation by society, as much as any writing, including Shakespeare and the story of Santa Claus, and perhaps it ought never be censored, nor disparaged as a category of human thought, experience, and psychology. The tools of imagination and literature and even false hope often assist our true nature, and we cannot responsibly destroy them. But when our imagination fails to be true, we cannot responsibly deny its failure. And even then, we shouldn't call our wrong beliefs "dead", nor ourselves "cured", because we are certain to be wrong again, and again. We are simply to bear in mind the difference between fact and fiction, and to keep human knowledge and human fantasy in their proper place. The Premises of Atheism The
premises an atheist stands on, when facing fellow atheists, believers, adherents,
or the incoherent masses, are as follows... The reason why the list of questions about God is so long is because there are no satisfying universal answers. If there were answers to these questions, very few people would bother with God. So God is constantly resurrected as a "catch-all" set of answers to comfort, satisfy, and motivate the believer to do things he would not naturally do. There is nothing wrong with using your imagination to help you get through life. The ancient Greeks - some of the most intelligent and inspired human beings to ever walk the earth - formed a vast library of myths and Gods to help them explain and relate to the universe. However, people who do not understand that myths are fictitious use myths to form foregone conclusions about "the will of God". Not suprisingly, they do it because it benefits them personally. Then they form groups of people who conspire against others using these conclusions, and they quickly discover that, with an imaginary God on your side, it is very easy to lie. Faith that isn't justified in reality is stupid. Investing in things you do not understand, or that simply don't exist, is as effective as throwing fire at the sun. It is either a pointless waste of one's effort, or it is a failure to be responsible to things that exist.
It is said without prejudice or malice that a purely faithful person is either
stupid or insane. This is not a glib opinion. And it is not to say that a particular
faith is false just because faith is involved. A faith may very well be applicable
and useful, and it may even be well-invested. But faith alone is intentionally
inconducive to all quality of judgement, which easily explains the common appearance
of bad judgement among those who invest only in the most arcane conceptualization
of faith. While it appears to a believer in God that he fears atheism, that fear is not of atheism. It's a fear that the god he believes in is judging him; it's a fear of the consequences of being stupid, arrogant, or insane; of believing the wrong thing; or suffering the loss of one's prior, deeply held and well-intended investments. Subsequent to the visceral discovery that human beings are self-aware and nobody else is, the consciousness of mankind has sought the most useful fears on which to test the assurance of his security. In civilized environments, fears are spelled out and enforced legally in standards of common sense, morality and self-governing. But the results are exactly the same whether we pay tribute to an incomprehensible designer and controller of the universe, or not. Mankind is able to go about his worshipping and usurping of higher and higher forms of order and power unquestioned but by other men, and then not because some are more or less in the favor of a divine being, but because there is power here on earth, and no overlord whose favor we are able to fall from. We may choose to worship many gods or one god or no gods at all, and no special harm nor providence nor interference has come to us as a result of making a choice about god's existence, or changing our minds.
Love is not supernatural. Many things are attributed to God, which have
other names, such as love. ("God is love.") Why confuse the issue? When
it's love, it's called love. And many things are attributed to the word Love which
are clearly not supernatural. Food is love. Energy is love. Thinking good thoughts
about something is love. Having a good sexual partnership is love. Being secure
in one's genetic makeup is love. Love actually comes from a biological certainty
whereby cells and organisms neither remain stagnant nor flee in fear, rather they
advance upon and embrace what causes them to grow and sustain themselves. Unfortunately
there is no existing god, so even if one tries to love God, there is nothing for
believers to approach. Why waste the love? It may bring them to church and it
may cause them to recognize a fellow believer, but the god need not exist for
this phenomena to occur. In fact, it is this phenomena of love and recognition
that inspires atheism: atheists wish to exercise the full potential of love without
being expected to lie about it or waste it. - Pliny the Younger * ("Multi famam, conscientiam pauci verentur.") Where does morality come from? Secular Wholeness by D. Cortesi* lists the reasons most people have morals, and none requires a fear of God: -You have a list of don't-do items deeply internalized during your childhood. -Your natural empathy with other humans: if you do this thing, it will cause pain, and that distresses you. -Self-image: people [including you] would think poorly of you if it were known you did this thing. -An adult's foresight: experience tells you that actions like this one have bad outcomes, or hidden costs. -Your philosophy of life: you feel that nobody ought to do certain things, so you can't do them without feeling they are wrong. -There are legal penalties for being caught doing this. " In nature there are growth (positive) moralities and protection (negative) moralities, but most clear-cut moral judgements are fear-based because there is always a limited amount of resources that must be shared. The FEAR of God is a big complicated negative morality. It is derived from societies dependent on agricultural consistencies who feared any lack of provision from nature, for example in terms of drought, FLOOD, disease, plagues, insects or other forms of water and crop failure. It's all in the bible. It is a systematic fear of economic failure, where bad behavior is punished by the pissed-off Provider of produce. A justification for positive moral growth is empathy and altruistic order, for example, believing that one's family or community's stability depends on causing no harm to others, particularly because that invites cooperation rather than conflict and retribution. It can be shown that interspecies tolerance in nature represents the cooperative habits from which our morals are derived. This is also one of the strongest cases for the necessity of a God (even if he doesn't exist), because without the agreement of an artificial authority, there is no artificial justification for our supernatural excesses. Some atheists call themselves "naturalists" and prefer nature's laws to the manmade god stuff. In nature, a protective moral "sense" is present in the fear an organism may have of retribution by or exposure to opportunistic organisms. While a particular organism may be strong and have effective defenses and little to fear from others, one can seldom expect to be well-fed, free from sickness and stronger than all others at all times. Selfishness (or the lack of responsibility to all others) is known to cause an organism to be viewed by other organisms as parasitic, undefended by peers, ignorant of ecosystemic balances, myopic in design, and deservedly susceptible to organized attack or being banned from group resources. Relief from this protective mode assures itself when there is no competitive stress, because when protection is not an issue, tolerance saves a lot of energy. Synthetic morality, on the other hand, exists among us conscious organisms because there are so many ways we have discovered to exit well-balanced ecosystems, bypassing limitations in natural resources and retribution from nature. We are able to fear things privately that may not threaten any natural balances, and we are capable of hungering for infinitely more than is necessary, so we manufacture intolerance and uncooperativeness. But the same fears crop up in human societies as the ones in nature: intolerance and lack of modesty threaten the things we need and the security to grow, and we are always susceptible to other people's agenda. So we invent ideals for everyone to respect and fear, and our society grows around them. In this inventiveness, atheists tend to find religious principles of morality to be valid, especially where they represent the original conventions that helped human society map out the tolerances we live by today. However, artificial premises of morality can also be subject to vast (often deliberate) misinterpretations and false judgements. Manipulation of morality is found very commonly in the language of believers seeking to accommodate their personal beliefs. Of course, atheists are equally culpable, secure in the knowledge that morality is not efficiently enforced by nature or "from above". Atheists are aware of the fundamentalist's problem. If anyone questions God, all conspiracies surrounding God become exposed and lose credibility. Because the inherent reality of atheism plagues all gods, and since all awarenesses of a doctrine's falsehood are consciously guarded against, the only people who can distinguish the truth of a god-based doctrine from the artistic licenses are those who engage in some form of atheism. Only under the principles of pure atheism can any thoughts about God begin to entertain validity because only then are you able to accept the terms upon which God was created. Because of this little conundrum, there is a significant disconnect between believers and nonbelievers, compelling each to choose sides and make a conviction. That is not to say that believers cannot maintain beliefs while submitting to inherently atheist premises, because they can and do. And atheists are fully capable of believing in things that don't exist. Also, while atheism is often confused with other secular truths as well as Satanism and dissociation and many other things which atheists in their wisdom often embrace and acknowledge the validity of, atheism itself is confined only to the lack and purification against inappropriate god beliefs. There is no alternative agenda. A belief requires a subconscious agreement within an individual or group, but atheism is the lack of such a thing (therefore only affirms itself in nature and in deductive reasoning). The two atheisms are (1) nature itself and (2) the inherent availability of evidence within nature of a deeper reality than, and totally independent of, all manufactured god-based religions and beliefs, and states essentially that the valid religiosity and belief component with respect to God existing is always, in reality, void, null-set {} or zero (0). In order for an atheist premise to transform itself into a belief or a religion with respect to God, it need only waver on the number zero (hence "agnostics" are not liberated from belief in gods, having reserved in their mind the possibility of a number of gods greater than zero). Similarly, and in keeping with the geometric purity of atheism, dissenting religious principals under the premises of antithesizing beliefs (e.g. substituting indulgences), such as in the case of Satanism, whether manufactured by the god believers or their antitheses, are premised upon negative roots which, atheists find, invariably rest on the imaginary plane, as surely as do positive religions. While atheism may be considered primitive, dependent or ill-conceived, actual atheism cannot be falsified, indoctrinated or contrived, and therefore is immune to the criticism of those who oppose it. There is no atheist doctrine, and all existing premises can be adjusted to ensure that all the numbers of Gods equal zero. It must be stated that, unfortunately, we are all subject to the same psychological weaknesses and sociological bonds as dishonest believers are. Many discover that those proclaiming atheism are doing no more than proclaiming their dissent of other people's belief or practice of a religion. While that fact may be rampant, it speaks nothing to atheism, which is only the inherent lack of gods present in anyone's physical, spiritual or intellectual reality. God is purely psychological, whether privately or publicly, limited completely to literary and oral tradition. Atheism denies nothing that exists, nor shall atheists be ignorant to the significance of mankind's most profound mythology. God is OUR myth. The assumption that any of the premises of atheism constitutes a belief is contrasted by the facts we know. Society knows and proves historical facts to be true, at least to the best of its ability. Belief is not required in atheist premises until you supercede them and open God and religion up to speculative thoughts, such as "well could He exist anyway?" "what if you're wrong?" and "I think religion is just a tool to control the masses." While it is true that atheists are known to be anti-religion or destructive towards mythologies, lies and indoctrinations, atheism itself does not put energy into not believing any which way. Atheism is the void and purity of every last deity and belief. Atheists may spend an exorbitant amount of time discussing theology and philosophy and other aspects of scripture, myth and religion, but it is not their lack of God that provides a cause for them to do so, rather many private pursuits can lead one to the theistic discussion, such as having an interest in literature, mythology, religion, sociology, psychology, politics, identity, brainwashing, spirituality, etc. Understandably, certain secular organizations (such as the U.S. judicial system and scientists) adopt agnosticism [non-knowledge] as the proper stance on religious and god-based issues concerning morality. Many individuals adopt this stance as well, in order to avoid the conflict and the bearing of false witness of taking a stand on a specified religious premise or belief that has no specific correspondence in evidence. Self-professed agnostics often say they believe nothing (sort of a policy of atheism applied liberally), but interviews with professed agnostics reveal that a justifiable measure of intolerance and a supposedly "justifiable" superiority complex appear to lend gravity to the agnostic belief node, in the event that it is expressed or seeking confirmation and not simply adhered to. Since agnostics are required to speak for other people on a preconceived faith (at least in their heads), and to judge wholly and soundly what others can and cannot know, a tremendous amount of self-importance and accuracy is borrowed, against everyone who isn't agnostic, by each agnostic. The assertion that agnosticism is not a belief is well-intended, but precipitously false. It may be a simple, reductionist and myopic single belief or statement of personal identity, but it is still a controlling and polarizing thought process that requires agreement on the part of the individual that believes it, and inherently expects agreement in fellows and their actions (as atheists are expected to fall short of legitimacy in their lack of gods, and religious believers are expected to fall short at justifying their religious belief). Agnosticism is commonly useful (to all persons) in expediting self-governing conclusions in civil justice, applied science, applied philosophy, psychiatry & psychoanalysis, secular community, and various technical disciplines which naturally incorporate subjective opinion and seek to withdraw from irresponsible judgement. Agnosticism is an artificial safe zone from intellectual conflict, and to the extent that that is desirable by circumstances, then it is the wise option. However, agnosticism indulges in faiths of permanent, deliberate ignorance, and will never, ever assist in the understanding or improvement of mankind. Conclusions Inherent to the Premises Because (a) a lack of belief is inherent to the universe, and (b) belief is inherent to existence, then (c) beliefs, and the annihilation of beliefs, must co-exist. Secular realities are accepted and utilized by all organisms inadvertently and regardless of belief. Atheists are equally permissive to the advent of belief as it inspires and manifests in nature. However, if a belief should require the annihilation of life-sustaining elements which are needed and valued by all, then the belief is parasitic, and therefore unacceptable, not only to atheists, but to the entire community of living things. |