I am an atheist.

 

There, I said it.  It is public knowledge.  It’s taken me over forty-eight years to come to the conclusion there is no deity strongly enough that I can say it aloud, in a very public place, but I have managed to do so.

 

Actually, I said it yesterday.  I was on the way to work, and I stopped at 7-11.  This is part of my workday routine; I stop at 7-11 and get a bottle of Minute Maid pineapple orange juice.  As I got out of my borrowed vehicle, somebody else was getting out of theirs.  Leaning up against the wall was a woman who said to the two of us who were just arriving, “Can I ask you a question?  I am a Christian woman…”

 

Personally, I always get mental shudders when somebody says this.  I feel as if somebody is about to start a sermon, and–particularly when I am in the middle of doing something else, like being on my way to work–I usually don’t want to hear it.  Most of the time I ignore it and politely decline to hear anything they have to say, but in this case I took an extra step and said, “I am an atheist.”  This earned me a look of scorn.  This from a woman who was likely drunk or high just before noon on a Monday.

 

Taking a step back, though, I want to refine the statement I started this post with:  I believe no deity exists.  There is nothing out there which is omniscient and omnipotent and omni-whatever-else you want to attribute to a god.  I think there are supernatural forces out there, but a god is not among them.  If a god does exist, there is no way we humans can possibly have any understanding of he / she / it / them.  Some have tried to make analogies, like comparing a human to an ant and trying to get the ant to understand human concepts, but I believe it goes way beyond that.  Put another way, we humans can’t even understand each other most of the time, how the hell (no pun intended) can we possibly have a viable concept of a deity?

 

The funny thing about this, to me, is that many people of other religions would say I am going to some form of hell for not believing in God.  Some might even say something like, “You’re going to burn in hell if you don’t believe in God.”  They would make it sound like a threat, but if I don’t believe in God, well, belief in a place like hell is absent, too, so there’s no weight to the argument.  It’s like telling me you’re going to shoot me while pointing your finger at me.

 

So, I am an atheist.  I have a theology of nothing.  Does that even count as a theology?  Sure it does.  As the rock band Rush put it in a song, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”  I belong to a religion–Unitarian Universalism–and my own personal theology states no god or goddess or other deity exists.

 

This doesn’t make me immoral or unethical; I still have a strong set of morals which dictate my behavior.  I don’t rob or steal or murder or generally hurt anyone in any way.  Contrary to what some believe, it is possible to be a good person without believing in God.  My mother–more agnostic than atheist–puts it another way.  She says that being without a god gives more reason to be a good person.  This life is all we have, there is no afterlife, so it’s best to make the best of it.  That means being kind and loving to the world around us so that for the most part the world is kind and loving to us.

 

I have made my statement.  I hope others will, too.  It’s not easy being openly atheist, but, starting yesterday, I am.