I am an atheist.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There, I said it.\u00a0 It is public knowledge.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Actually, I said it yesterday.\u00a0 I was on the way to work, and I stopped at 7-11.\u00a0 This is part of my workday routine; I stop at 7-11 and get a bottle of Minute Maid pineapple orange juice.\u00a0 As I got out of my borrowed vehicle, somebody else was getting out of theirs.\u00a0 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?\u00a0 I am a Christian woman…”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Personally, I always get mental shudders when somebody says this.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.”\u00a0 This earned me a look of scorn.\u00a0 This from a woman who was likely drunk or high just before noon on a Monday.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Taking a step back, though, I want to refine the statement I started this post with:\u00a0 I believe no deity exists.\u00a0 There is nothing out there which is omniscient and omnipotent and omni-whatever-else you want to attribute to a god.\u00a0 I think there are supernatural forces out there, but a god is not among them.\u00a0 If a god does<\/em> exist, there is no way we humans can possibly have any understanding of he \/ she \/ it \/ them.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 Some might even say something like, “You’re going to burn in hell if you don’t believe in God.”\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It’s like telling me you’re going to shoot me while pointing your finger at me.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, I am an atheist.\u00a0 I have a theology of nothing.\u00a0 Does that even count as a theology?\u00a0 Sure it does.\u00a0 As the rock band Rush<\/em> put it in a song, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.<\/em>”\u00a0 I belong to a religion–Unitarian Universalism–and my own personal theology states no god or goddess or other deity exists.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This doesn’t make me immoral or unethical; I still have a strong set of morals which dictate my behavior.\u00a0 I don’t rob or steal or murder or generally hurt anyone in any way.\u00a0 Contrary to what some believe, it is possible to be a good person without believing in God.\u00a0 My mother–more agnostic than atheist–puts it another way.\u00a0 She says that being without a god gives more<\/em> reason to be a good person.\u00a0 This life is all we have, there is no afterlife, so it’s best to make the best of it.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I have made my statement.\u00a0 I hope others will, too.\u00a0 It’s not easy being openly atheist, but, starting yesterday, I am.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am an atheist. There, I said it.\u00a0 It is public knowledge.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=678"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":679,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678\/revisions\/679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.shadowkatmandu.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}