Logic linking, rational thinking, socratic speaking, skeptical sleuths seeking out truths clouded in conditioned youths determined by causality to seek out the details of debris, part of some ultimate reality, following evidence with each sense condensed through perspectives fence of relativity realized through free inquiry, following leads, pulling out weeds, recognizing breeds thanks to evolution, an elegant solution to the diversity of life, knifed by supernatural beliefs, arrogant chiefs, and meme perplexing thieves thieving the minds of men to condition them, to control the den, when what men really need is a good dose of actuality because factually they have no choice without free-will, that illusion when thought about causes confusion within our ego that wants so desperately to control ironically determined by cause and effects roll documented in the fiery secret pages of an atheist diary.

Heathens, aren’t we all?
Respects are no longer paid
to all other gods.

Kill the last Buddha!
Bury him with the other
lords you’ve rejected.

When theists say that an atheist cannot be motivated or cannot have “hope,” they are sadly mistaken. Their claim is that atheism doesn’t offer mankind the hope, comfort, happiness, and benefits that theism does. Of course it doesn’t! Atheism doesn’t offer hope via believing in a supernatural deity because a-theism is an absence of theism, it is a lack of belief in a god or gods. Of course it isn’t a stance that “offers” something. If theists want to make such a claim and actually make some argumentative headway, they should at least compare to a stance that is “for” something, something that atheists DO believe.

But atheism doesn’t define what a person DOES believe. Not all atheists are going to believe in the same things just because they happen to share a lack of belief in a god or gods. Conversely, atheists also often happen to be secularists, humanists, naturalists, materialists, etc… stances that do profess and/or offer something. These stances are separate from atheism. They are just stances that happen to portray what some people that may also happen to be atheists do believe in. So if theists must insist on appealing to consequences, what they should be comparing to are those stances that portray what a person “does” believe in, not what a person lacks belief in. Also, this “appeal to consequences” theists use is a logical fallacy, that “you should believe in god because it gives you hope,” when used in an argument to conclude that we should believe a god exist because they consider the consequences of such a belief to be desirable. These consequences still attest nothing the verity of that in which one believes or disbelieves.

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Does atheism define you?

Absolutely not. Atheism doesn’t reflect something you are, it reflects something you are not. It is of no substance by itself. Not believing in something doesn’t define who you are, just like not believing in fairies doesn’t define who you are. Most people are “afairiest,“ in that they don’t believe in fairies. Does your afairiesm define you? Of course not. Have you even heard of the term? Probably not, because it is as meaningless as the term atheism. We can have an individual term for every individual thing we don’t believe exist. The list would be endless. Is this list of things we don’t believe in what defines us? Of course not.

You may also happen to be a secularist, humanist, naturalist, materialist, skeptic, scientist, environmentalist, logician, universalist, pantheist, etc.. these things contribute to defining you, not atheism. Theists attempt to generalize atheists as being materialistic evolutionists and go so far as to confuse the two as being synonymous. This is as much of a blanket stereotype as saying all theists are fundamentalists. While many atheists accept evolution as being true given the overwhelming evidence, the term “atheist” does not necessitate that one take a stance FOR anything, it simply means that one doesn’t believe there is a god or gods. The other stances I listed are expressions that could be considered FOR something, stances that actually do contribute to defining us.

So I wish people would stop using the term, “atheism,” as being a position FOR something. If you want to talk about evolution, science, the environment, logic, reason, the universe, nature, moral values, etc… and a persons position FOR these things, use the correct terms, not atheism.

Name: Travis Morgan
Location: Roscoe, Illinois
Age: 31

Biography:
Born and raised in Rockford IL, I was enlisted in the U.S. Marines from 1996-2000, I am a father or four, husband, poet, philosopher, music artist, graphic and web designer, and truth seeker.

STORY:
I don’t believe there is a god or gods to believe in or to disbelieve in. It is because, for the most part, just the plain lack of evidence. I know, a lack of evidence doesn’t prove there isn’t a god, but it certainly does not provide a foundation to suggest that there is a god either, especially with the evidence we have for the formation of the universe reflects natural causes. It wasn’t until my late 20’s that I started even caring to question the existence of gods. Up until then, I had accepted what my family, friends, and the people around me had told me. They didn’t say, “believe in god.” No, they had just always acted and talked as though they “knew” god existed, as though it were self-evident, and I, like a child that trusts his parents because he does not have the experience to know such things, trusted the confidence of my elders. But then it all changed. When I suddenly acquired a passion for the pursuit of truth. It must have crept up without me realizing it over the years, as I had studied philosophy on my own starting at a very young age. Of course that, and other experiences, I think must have conditioned me, and ultimately determined me towards the pursuit of truth.

That is when it all started, with this passion for pursuing truth, and with it came learning the methods to uncover truths. I understood over time, that what it usually boils down to come closer to the truth is following the evidence, gathering information, using reason and logic, testing and double testing the results, being aware of and avoiding bias, feelings, ego, logical fallacies, etc… It is with these utensils, that one is guided to come closer to discovering the truth. When re-presented with the god topic, it didn’t take long to realize that the evidence suggested that the god concept is manmade, and simply does not exist.

With this realization, the pieces of life suddenly fell so perfectly in place, it all made sense now. No wonder god didn’t answer my prayers as a child, there wasn’t one, I was talking to the ceiling. And yes, I still hold this belief because I started participating in forums, conversations, debates, rhetoric’s of many sorts, I researched the topic thoroughly, and my position has only been reinforced by the results of my investigations. If anything I have been left with an overwhelming abundance of evidence that suggest the god concept was created by man, mostly to fill in the gaps, the unknowns of life, thus providing a temporary comfort to primitive man and his relative ignorance of the universe. Now that those gaps are being filled by the answers provided by improved scientific research, the god concept seems to have evolved into a meme in order to survive the times overwhelming evidence that suggest better alternatives to explain the origins of the universe and life.

This is “my story” submitted to: http://www.thereprobablyisnt.com/
Submit your 500 words or less story too!

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My “Russell’s Teapot” design. I hadn’t seen any real good-looking, clean, accurate, designs for Russell’s Teapot so I created my own. The teapot is zoomed in for you so you can see it, otherwise it would be too small to see as it is supposed to be, it is in an elliptical orbit around the sun and lies between earth and Mars.

Sometimes also called the “Celestial Teapot.” It is a term coined by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. It is an analogy to show the fallacy of an “argument from ignorance,” and to point out where the burden of proof lies. Here you have a china teapot revolving around the sun in an elliptical orbit between Earth and Mars and is too small to be revealed by even our most powerful telescopes. The flaw in the logic this analogy represents is - if you can’t prove this teapot doesn’t exist, then I can conclude that it does. It is often used to point out the fallacious logic of a creationist when they say, “since you can’t prove god doesn’t exist, then he does.”

1. They find the idea of being a descendant of an ape highly unfashionable and degrading. Their ego has grown since the days of their ancestors, and therefore they believe they are far too superior to have evolved from these ancestral apes. They would rather believe something that was written to sell to their senses, that they are independent from causality and were created by an all powerful supernatural deity that allows them a chance to live past death in a blissful perfect place called heaven.

2. They are ignorant to what evolution means and how the process of natural selection works. They only know and care about the ancestral ape point.

3. They are ignorant to the evidence (transitional fossils, genetics, dna research, ect…) that indicates and supports evolution. Sometimes they are even willfully ignorant.

4. They misunderstand evolution to mean that we evolved from the modern ape rather then that we and the modern ape evolved from a common ancestor.

5. Because evolution is classified as a theory, they ignore all the evidence that support the theory’s verity.

6. They are too lazy to care or think about it, It’s so much easier to just say, “god did it.”

Additional reading - 24 myths and misconceptions about Evolution

I see it time and time again, after a non-believer has explained away creationists arguments, the creationist will often end their argument with the question, “What if you are wrong?”

When a creationist asks a non-believer, “What if you are wrong?,” what they are really suggesting is that if a non-believer is wrong about god not existing, then the non-believer may go to hell for not believing in god. With this question they are proposing that these “operant conditions,” heaven and hell, be ones motivation to believe in god, that if you believe, you have nothing to lose, if you don’t believe in god then you put yourself at risk of going to hell. This train of thought is commonly known as Pascal’s wager or Pascal’s Gambit. It does not try to prove that a god exist, It only proposes that one believe that god exist even without proof.

There are several problems with this reasoning mostly due to it assuming way too much:

Additional resources on the problems with Pascal’s Wager –
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/
http://www.abarnett.demon.co.uk/atheism/wager.html
http://atheism.about.com/od/argumentsforgod/a/pascalswager.htm
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_carrier/heaven.html
http://www.religioustolerance.org/pascal_w.htm
http://www.philosophyofreligion.info/pascalswager.html
http://www.freethoughtfirefighters.org/a_refutation_of_pascals_wager_Massimo_Pigliucci.htm
http://godisimaginary.com/i46.htm

I find that many of the characteristics that creationists frequently apply to their god (I’ll be referring to the god, Yahweh) are contradictory and self cancelling. Creationists assert that their god has no beginning, no end, is an uncaused cause, and cannot be scientifically identified or examined as it exist outside of scientific observation because of it’s supernatural properties. They claim to know specific characteristics of Yahweh, to talk to Yahweh, to hear Yahweh speak to them, to know what Yahweh approves and disapproves of, etc… Each one of these claims raises a red flag which I cannot allow myself not to question and address.

1. God’s (Yahweh’s) infiniteness?

If Yahweh has no beginning, no end, is within everything, is infinite, and has no boundaries, then Yahweh must be without edges, without contrast, and without edges to outline it, without contrast to distinguish it, Yahweh must be formless, and if Yahweh is formless then how can it be recognized, characterized, personified, and “known” at any extent at all? It cannot. This characteristic of infiniteness that creationists apply to Yahweh actually cancels out Yahweh’s existence. We can just as easily say that everything is as it is without being possessed by this supernatural deity. Which leads me to the next questionable characteristic of Yahweh, its curious exemption from scientific observation through its “supernaturalness.”

2. God’s (Yahweh’s) supernaturalness?

As I explained above, god’s (Yahweh’s) infiniteness attribute cancels itself out, but not only does this infiniteness attribute cancel itself out but it also conflicts and contradicts with another characteristic assigned to god, it’s so called freedom from scientific examination. If god is supernatural and exist outside of what we understand as natural, and therefore cannot be observed by science, then how is it that Yahweh can be called infinite? Such infiniteness must also include that which is natural and therefore should be examinable by science. If Yahweh is claimed to intervene, participate, and embody the universe, planets, life, people, etc… then Yahweh must also be natural. Also, if Yahweh existed along with it’s supernaturalness, then it’s supernaturalness would not be supernatural, it would just be natural, and if it is natural then it must be subject to scientific examination. One cannot claim that Yahweh is supernatural and then also claim to observe Yahweh in our natural environment and to “know” Yahweh exist. Any supernatural being that can be observed cannot actually be described as supernatural, so were there supernatural beings, one would not be able to know about them.

3. God (Yahweh), an uncaused cause?

Following the contradiction of god’s infiniteness with how one could possibly “know” any specific characteristics of god , how is it that anyone could “know” that god is an uncaused cause? This characteristic often pops up when a creationist is debating how the universe came to be. Creationists of course say that god (Yahweh) created the universe, and the opposition may cite the big bang as to how the universe came to be. Both arguments eventually come down to how could have “something” of came from “nothing.” In which case I am currently researching zero point energy or vacuum energy as a potential contributor to the big bang. Creationists state that god created the universe, in which the next natural question of the opposition is, “then what created god?” In which case the creationist will cite that god is an “uncaused caused,” always been there, always will be, has no beginning nor end. And here you see the argument is circular as it goes back to god’s characteristic of infiniteness where as I explained earlier that this characteristic actually cancels god completely out of the picture.