The propagandistic nature of many of the absurd claims we encounter here, and elsewhere, by many amusingly zealous, albeit wholly ignorant, fundamentalists, need to be addressed. And so they shall

“Atheists hate God”

I am utterly astonished by the number of faux “Christian charity” letters I read which recycle the same breathtaking stupidity, such as “Jesus loves you”, “I love you” etc. But what amuses me most is that such a tone is a virtual guarantor of the employment of an equally stupid and mendacious assertion. How many times have I, or you, or any of us seen such writing start off with “I know you hate God”. Even more troubling is how they start with this as axiomatic, “I know”. Surely anyone can see what an absurd proposition this is, it shoots itself in the foot. The problem at hand is the axiomatic belief held by many that you have to believe in God, and hence the idea that someone actually does not and hence it would be a logical absurdity to state that such a person “hates” such a being.

“Atheists know God exists but deny him for whatever reason”

A claim which is more or less identical to the one above. Yet it  is equally absurd. Again, it requires your interlocutor to start with their unshakeable, indubitable, axiomatic belief that everyone must believe in God. Otherwise, they would be shooting themselves in the foot by making this assertion. I, for one, most certainly do not “know God exists”, but I do deny him- precisely because I don’t believe in God. The problem at hand is that such people who make these assertions are simply suffering from a failure to abandon rather slipshod pre-conceived notions which can only be described as pure, distilled stupidity. It is little more than a mark of having never been exposed to different ideas, and the claim is absurd and propagandistic. If such claims as the two I just brought up are uttered, it is merely because of the utter failure of your interlocutor to imagine that there are people in the world who do not hold what they do (imagine that), hence, they must start, not from a ground-up construction of beliefs about the world, but from unshakeable axioms (when I say “axiom” here I mean something different than “axiom” in formal logic, which refers to statements which actually are indubitable and are defended via retortion such as the axiom of identity, the axiom of regularity and the axiom of sentience).

Moving on.

“Atheism is associated with hedonism, atheists are selfish, etc, and because atheists do not believe in God, they act in such a manner”. Also concomitant is that atheists do not “believe in hope, love, peace” etc. ad infinitum

While there are some who many act in such a manner (religion or lack thereof is hardly going to be a prophylactic on things which are utterly innate to the human condition such as selfishness), anyone who is familiar with the history of atheism, and its roots in Enlightenment, and the philosophical movements that sprang forth, know this is absurd. The existentialist Jean-Paul Sarte argued that man needed to reject God because the belief in such a being would restrict our the freedom of man and his ability to make choices in the world (Essays in Existentialism). The logical positivist AJ Ayer wrote that God is given as “universal blanket answer” to all of man’s questions (The Problem of Knowledge) and, as a concomitant, Maurice Ponty pointed out that because of this, the belief in such a being negates the human sense of wonder and is prophylactic to asking questions about how reality works. Albert Camus and Freidrich Nietzsche both argued for a movement of “heroic atheism” against the oppressive banality of religion. In The Stranger, this was a central theme to the novel itself, as Meursault was put on trial for not conforming to societal norms. The Christian magistrate in The Outsider was hence portrayed as a bigot who refused to believe anyone could believe someone different than he did (Camus, 1942). Sigmund Freud argued that shedding of religion was essentially a step in the “maturation of humanity”. Whilst its ethical injunctions may have previously been useful, in a world whose nature was being unfolded, man needed to cast it off as a yolk. It may be the only thing that he and I agree on. Nietzsche*too, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, had the allegory of the madman running through the streets, demanding to know where God has gone, and argued that man would eventually transcend his need to believe in God. Indeed, many of the atheists and deists of the Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment era placed their emphasis on man and hence humanism, and liberty against the oppressive institutions of God-belief, and argued the very opposite of the statements I am addressing that I put above. Namely, that man must abandon God-belief so he could focus his love and his energy towards his fellow man.

*To be fair, however, Nietzsche was so narcissistic that there were two chapters in his autobiography entitled “Why I am so Clever” and “Why I write such good books”.

“Atheists believe in nothing”

From what does this bizarre claim come from? Again, it starts with a presupposed axiom that is found in the minds of many believers. The idea that someone doesn’t believe in God is difficult for them to imagine. In Maslowian Hierarchies, Maslow stated that “transcendent beliefs” of cosmic significance were an innate need and belief of humanity, and that anyone who claimed not to have this need, which Sartre called the God-shaped hole, was lying to others and himself. It isn’t even Maslow that I wish to attack, but the idea that to believe anything at all, one must believe in God, or t hey believe in nothing, ie, that such people are nihilists. As I said before, many believers do treat “God exists” and, perhaps, a cynic would say “It is necessary to believe God exists” as if such propositions were axioms. As long as such a mindset exists, sane discourse becomes rather difficult.

So, let us take this claim apart. The sentence “God exists” is merely one of an infinite number of propositions about the world which may or may not be true. Again, it starts with an axiomatic proposition which many simply cannot shed. Since theism embraces the notion that such a being, the “God” entity in question, is the all-encompassing sustaining entity without which nothing would be possible. I suppose if I actually believed that then I could swallow the idea that you must believe in God or nothing at all. But I don’t, and those who do treat it as if it were an axiomatic claim. That’s the point. The claim can be immediately smashed by pointing out that there are still infinitely many true propositions one can utter regardless of God’s existence, such as the statement “this banana is yellow”. This constitutes a “belief” about the world, whether true or not. The claim “you believe in God, or in nothing” is so absurd it does not require vast intellectual capacity to take it apart. “God exists” is not the only possible belief about anything that can be held, and if your interlocutor holds the belief that it is a necessary axiom without which you cannot believe anything else, then they must shed that axiom, because their opposite number might not believe that. I don’t, because that belief is absurd.

“Atheists deny innate value of humanity, and that man is merely a clever animal”

A curious claim, first made, I believe, by the German theologian Rahner. It’s not an actually meaningful claim, since “animals” encompass a taxonomical group, a kingdom which humans belong to by definition, since they have a nervous system and a blood supply. Yet the term “animal” seems to be derogatory,  you can imagine the profound irritation I haveover such “speciesist” chauvinism. I try to remind people that the notion of “species” is an arbitrary taxonomical classification based on the ability for two gametes of two organisms to form a zygote together, and that biology is better imagined as a continuum of different morphologies and phenotypes, than a strict and rigid set of “kinds”. Even with God belief, it would be necessary to accept precisely that claim, man is a clever animal, because evolutionary biology specifically overturned religious and eschatological notions about human nature. Hitherto, it was held across the whole Western world the notion of a “Great chain of being”, an implicit teleology, with God at the apex (The Christian God, naturally). Rene Descartes believed that man had an immaterial soul which separated him from other animals. The idea of man as innately superior is understandable from an intuitive standpoint. Perhaps one of the reasons for hostility against evolution is that it destroys the delusion that man sits atop a natural apex, or is “separate” from the other animals. In Christian doctrine, this has been promulgated first with the Adam and Eve story as the notion of “stewardship”. In one crushing blow, all of these notions were destroyed simultaneously, and this would still hold whether God existed or did not.

“Atheists engage in self-worship, or man-worship, etc”

Again, the claim presumes that without worshipping God, presumably we would worship something, perhaps ourselves (this is called autodeification). Again, this claim starts from the axiom that man needs to worship something. As previously mentioned, anyone with a basic familiarity of the atheist philosophers, and how they have influenced many modern atheists. Another false dichotomy is the culprit here, for the axiom being held is that worship is a necessary human endeavour. It is not.

I’m now going to discuss several of these beliefs, their antecedents, cultural, social and political factors associated. The first thing we can see is that many of them simply stem from a set of unshakeable beliefs treated as axiomatic, yet with no grounds. If I treated the statement “everyone must believe in God” as an axiomatic one, then it would be inconceivable to me that such another person could hold a belief in negation to that, and so, I would revert to an escape of cognitive dissonance by assuming that the person actually “hates” God. Yet the statement I brought up as an example is not axiomatic. It is as far from axiomatic as it is possible to be far from axiomatic. It is absurd.

Many of these same people, in addition to holding aforementioned axiomatic beliefs, would then perhaps find it difficult not merely to believe that there are those who don’t hold to what they believe, but even those who have a wholly different conception of what God is. For numerous philosophers who were not atheists, God had the characteristic called apathiea. Their God was the deistic one, and they were, in their own time, likely to be demonized as “atheists”.

In the United States, these unpleasant notions converge with McCarthyism. All of us, those who subscribe, and those who do not, are familiar with the modern American “political religion”, with its roots in the Age of Affluence. Emphasis on strong nationalism, American exceptionalism, and the whole notion of “All-Americanism”, is concomitant with a deep religious tradition and a reaction to the Communist era. The most flagrant example of this which still exists today is the BSA, whose members have to be heterosexuals who believe in God. Evidently the demonized notion of “Godless communists” still persists. At least, the “Godless” part still does. The American political religion has a curious tendency to make very strange juxtapositions of beliefs, to the extent that in the concomitant theology, today, many Americans are unembarrassed to say, openly, that they believe that the Creator of the Universe is concerned about which nation wins a war, or gives them personally good luck and blessing, or, even more pathetically, when sports stars believe they are guided by God’s hand. A concomitant to this social climate is the bizarre political theology which, as previously mentioned, has roots in McCarthyism. Hence, when someone says they believe in God, for many, (and we return to the problem of axioms) it is automatically assumed that they believe in the bizarre effigy that constitutes a central piece in the American political religion. Yet the philosophical deists, to take an example, with their Dei apathiea, would find more in common with the atheists, Spinoza, Nietzsche, Ayer, Sartre, Camus, and Hume . Creationism, too, has its roots in this twisted political theology. They spend half their time arguing that if taught evolution, children will become drug-addicted sexual deviants and that to believe in evolution, you must be an atheist. The BSA’s holding that a necessary condition for being an ethically responsible citizen is God-belief seems utter absurdity in light of that I took that belief to pieces in the link I have provided below, demonstrating that it is absurd to derive such beliefs from God-belief.

Yet in the aforementioned American political religion, as famously epitomized by George Bush Senior, it is presumed that the word “God” might refer axiomatically only to the God that the American political religion subscribes to. And if I did believe in God, and I don’t, I would still declare that this God, concomitant with the political religion started by McCarthyism, is an utterly ridiculous God. The sort of God, the creator of the universe, who cares what people do while naked, or whether you win a football game, or which country is better. Against such a backdrop of sheer lunacy, if I were a deist, I’d move in with the atheists. Indeed, one of the reasons that atheism has been so successful is because atheist philosophers have all but destroyed the aforementioned notion of God. For that, I suppose, I must thank the rise of authoritarianism in monotheism for cementing the belief that “God” means precisely the sort of God many Americans and others believe in today, to put it bluntly: The sort of God who cares about the gender of the person you are fucking.

False dichotomies abound here, of course. As previously mentioned, it is taken as axiomatic that the utterance “I believe in God” should somehow imply that you believe in this quasi-religious American political religion, with all the notions they have been free to hang and anchor to an exceptionally bizarre Protestant theology. Unfortunately, for many people, it does. Yet, I already established the absurdity of this dichotomy here:

Confusion Regarding What it Means to Be an Atheist

What I also established in that link is that the dichotomy is indicative not so much of a stance but of a word, and that word is “atheist”. Since the argument I put together is in the link, I won’t waste time going over it here.

Ultimately, the simplest rectification of the problem at hand is simply to shed unwarranted axioms. I stress all the time, to everyone I meet, that they must build their worldview from the ground up, the way Descartes did, or Hume. Start with no assumptions, certainly not those which pertain to the political preferences of the creator of the universe, lest you find yourself trapped believing utter absurdity.