The internet is filled with bickering, and semantic wars. The angry theists hate angry atheists, and angry atheists hate the angry theists. Some agnostics try to step above the fray and they proclaim that both sides are overly confident. Deists try to re-frame God to be more palatable and believable, while still rejecting the big-man-in-the-sky that interjects with human happenings, and the pantheists want to make love on beds of moss.
The problem is that religious belief or lack thereof is way to complex to slap on a label and call it described, so then we create the group that tries to split hairs. They come up with terms like agnostic-atheist, agnostic-theist, and on and on and on. It gets tiring, but I understand the sentiment of those who come up with fancier and fancier Greek terms to try and describe their religious or areligious outlook. People want to be understood. They want to scream to the world, “Hey! I have really thought about this shit and this is the most valid conclusion.”
My own personal journey has brought brought me through times of teenage rebellion, intense born-again fervor, Mormon orthodoxy, progressive Mormonism, and atheism. For all intents and purposes, I am an atheist. I do not have a belief in a sentient being that involves himself/itself/herself in human affairs; but does atheism do my world view justice? I do not think so; and its not because my atheistic world view is any superior to others’ worldview, but its because all world views are much more rich than a simple term can communicate. By calling someone an atheist, agnostic, theist or deist, I am doing them a disservice in that I am simplifying their life experience.
So who am I? I am secularist. I believe that public policy should be based on secular reasoning and testable hypotheses. I am an atheist. I am not anti-theist or anti-religious. In fact, I look back on my days as a devout believer, and I think that religion benefited me greatly during portions of my life. I also look back on my days of religiosity and cringe in embarrassment about certain things that I said, did and did not do. I have no beef with religion per se, as long as they do not push purely religious ideals into public policy! The problem is that many religiously minded people do push their religiosity onto others. They try to limit science in the school system, and they try to justify bigotry in legislation. Unlike some, I do not take the stance of Dawkins and say that religious upbringing is child abuse. The problem that I have with Dawkins, is that I am not sure if he has ever really experienced the viscosity and beauty of religion. Is religion ugly? Sometimes. Is religion beautiful? Sometimes. Lets try to reduce the ugly portions and treasure the beautiful portions. Even though I no longer find religious involvement useful to me, I still can appreciate the beauty in ritual, parable, service, and the idea of the unknown. Much of my family is still very religious, and I find no need to stress these relationships with my atheism. In order to participate with family, I often find myself re-framing the definition of God in order to make my participation in certain familial settings more comfortable. When I do this, I re-frame God as a symbol of the universal whole, not as a sentient being, but as an immense complexity that exceeds all of our current understanding and invokes awe within us. This may be a cop-out, and some atheists may scoff at what they see as a lack of back bone. However, I find no reason to abolish religion itself. I only see a need to keep it out of public policy, and when religion collides with public policy, I am vocal about it with anyone that I dialogue with. Also, it should be noted that I have been through enough paradigm shifts that I am anticipating that my current world view will shift and metamorphose as my life continues. I do not think that I will ever believe in God again, but I am confident that my philosophy will be very different in twenty years. If it is not different, that probably means that I am not opening my eyes to the world around me.
Let’s stop bickering. Let’s stop seeing religious belief as silly and stupid, and let’s start trying to understand the complexity of one another. There is a huge spectrum of belief and disbelief, and let’s try to appreciate that. I think that there are battles that need to be fought when it comes to the collision of religious belief and public policy, but let’s fight those battles intelligently and try to open doors of communication.
