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Are Atheists Real?

I sometimes imagine I have escaped my past.

Since moving to Florida from fundamentalist South Carolina, I have been an armchair agnostic. However, on occasion I see something that jolts me back to my childhood. This time it came from Facebook.

A relative from South Carolina had posted a photograph of a cute tow-headed toddler, his back turned toward the camera so that the viewer could see, over his shoulder, a message: “Dear Atheist, If you do not believe in God, why do you care that I pray to him?”

Usually I do not call myself an atheist; many assume that if you say you are an atheist you are claiming that you know, for sure, that God does not exist. I am a fan of owning my uncertainty. Besides, the truth, whatever it is, is unaffected by my subjective feelings about it. The idea that everyone should “make up their minds” about God comes from believers who think that beliefs determine eternal fate.

But I doubt the Biblical God exists as much as I doubt ghosts exist, although no one ever questions me about my level of certainty about ghosts. At one time in my life, I would not have predicted I would ever say that. I was taught that atheists were cruel and desperately unhappy people who sought to rob happiness from others and were dedicated to persecuting Christians.

Cruelty aside, they had made a decision not to believe; that is, they actually did believe and were just rebelling for other reasons, like hating to follow rules or loving to sin. Many pastors had drilled this idea into my head with stories of their personal encounters with atheists. “And he told me, pastor, I would believe in God, but I just hate having to follow so many rules.”

I remember another preacher saying something more liberal: that God respects honest doubt. At that time I was going through an adolescent depression and having many honest doubts. I liked to imagine that God would see how honest they were and respect them enough to make me not depressed. But the fact that the pastor would say there were “honest doubts” suggested that there could be dishonest doubts. How could a doubt not be honest?

Though I never verbalized it at that time, it was clear that many of my preachers did not believe atheists exist, at least not as the dictionary defines them. According to the preachers, it was not that atheists had real doubts, not that they noticed contradictions in the Bible or that empirical evidence was more effective than faith in predicting natural phenomena.

Instead, atheists were always painted as people who angrily shook their fists and said, “God, I do not like you and your rules. Therefore, I refuse to believe in you!”

From my personal transition from my belief to non-belief, I know that this characterization was false. My non-belief began with full religious immersion. As an adolescent, I prayed constantly and read the Bible all the way through. The Bible disturbed me deeply and fueled my existing depression. When my doubts began, I fought them with everything I had.

In the end, I was glad when they won. My transition from belief to non-belief was not a loss; it was a change from painful confusion to a love for life. Before, I had taken my life for granted, thinking that if I was going to have an eternal after-life full of bliss, who cared about the first? I just had to endure the inferior, short, mortal one in order to reach the next.

Now, suddenly, I became fascinated with the world around me. Without prepackaged answers to the questions of existence, I discovered a universe more mysterious, intricate, and beautiful than I had imagined. (See previous post \”The Beauty of Uncertainty\”)

Decades later, I found myself staring at a message that seemed plucked from my childhood, the old assumption of \”dishonest doubt\” embodied in the image of a little boy and his letter to all atheists everywhere. The post seemed to say, “See? You are trying to stop me from praying to God. Therefore, atheists, you must really believe he exists. Gotcha!”

The post got scores of Facebook likes, and I am sure the cute toddler did not hurt, perhaps evoking the response. “Look! This is so obvious  a toddler could figure it out.” I wonder if the child did write it; if so, it was not with the pencil he is holding. The letters, black and thick, indicate that the message was written with a felt-tipped marker.

Besides, the “premise” is untrue. It assumes that atheists are uniformly devoted to stripping Christians of their personal right to pray. I have no problem with Christians praying. At any rate the photograph called up a host of unpleasant childhood memories and felt personal. Even though I consider myself agnostic, on some days I am more atheist than agnostic; I could honestly call myself either and be telling the truth.

Atheism does not necessarily mean certainty. It means “not a theist.” It is the default position. Even Richard Dawkins has said he will change his mind if empirical evidence ever comes to light that proves his position wrong. On the other hand, Carl Sagan, who called himself an agnostic, wrote that the idea of a personal God who counts the fall of every sparrow is absurd. Although unwilling to deny there is a God, Sagan apparently did not find the Biblical version of God plausible.

I am explaining why, even though I consider myself agnostic, I took to heart a propaganda effort directed against atheists and why I am identifying myself with them. The accusation that nonbelievers are dishonest doubters concerns both agnostics and atheists. Why are some believers unable to to accept that atheists and agnostics have genuine doubts?

Maybe it is because the threat of hell and the promise of heaven rest of the premise that thoughts are decisions; if beliefs were not willed, then it would be unfair for God to punish or reward people for them

But belief is ultimately not a decision. In order to convert, a person has to already believe a God that requires belief exists, else there would be no basis for the decision to convert – or to embrace the taboo against doubting.

I could not believe through faith by choosing to because, for me, the basis for doing that, the idea that faith is a virtue required by God, was thoroughly debunked years ago. But am I sure? I spend all day with myself seven days a week; if my non-belief in a need for faith was false, I would surely know it by now. But in the end, I cannot prove it to anyone. Fortunately, there is no need to. Skeptical inquiry is not an immoral act, but a power for understanding reality that I treasure.

Of that, at least, I am certain.

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