Friday, August 20, 2010

What is an Athiest?

Athiest is a label thrust upon you for being consistent. Hear me out! There is no real belief system in atheism apart from this: you don't accept an assumption that explains phenomena when the only (unreal) evidence to support the assumption is the existence of the phenomena it attempts to explain.

Confused? You see a puddle of water on a table, basically an athiest can't say 'I assume there was an icecube there but hours ago' because there are other concievable and perhaps more likely explanations for how that puddle came to be. A leak in the ceiling, a spill from a glass of water.
Sure you could run a bunch of tests to shorten the odds, but an athiest can't/won't say 'there must have been an icecube there' because they can't prove it.

An athiest doesn't stress too much about where puddles come from in the same way that generally they won't stress about how gravity works. An athiest doesn't need to understand gravity to live in a world characterised by gravity. Gravity reinforces itself day in and day out and aside from taking up a profession as a physicist, an athiest doesn't feel any particular desire to inject energy into understanding and revearing the mysteries of gravity.

By contrast a deist can look at a puddle and say 'god put it there' and without knowing the slightest thing about gravity can attribute it's mysterious functioning to a design by the 'cosmic architect' or whatever.

That's all an athiest is and isn't they have a consistent mind set where they approach the mysteries of life all the same and assume no knowledge. They can question everything as a result of this non partitioning of their rational process. What's really most amazing is deists that are perfectly capable of studying physics and biology yet have partitioned off a corner of their brains dedicated to religion where they apply the exact opposite rational process of assuming knowledge and rejecting evidence that contradicts it.

But this is important, one of the key differences between athiests and deists is that athiests don't really exist, as I said it's just a label foisted upon you for being consistent, thus there's no real unity or bond of belief that holds together an athiest community and this is just how I like it. Two people that hate eachother may be thrust together by their shared spiritual belief but not so with athiests. To each their own.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting but you lost me in the last couple of paragraphs. I really liked the ice cube analogy.