hey Martin, my name is Ali Awad and i'm 22 years old. i've lived in lebanon (arab country in the middle east .. just in case uv never cum across this country) my entire life .. my parents are both muslims and i've been raised in a muslim community according to the 'islam' way .. despite all this i'm athiest .. and i had been the only athiest i knew for a couple of years before i came along ur site .. thats when i first realized that i wasnt alone .. so i just wanted to say thanks for ur help in suppporting me to become more confident of my strong athiesm .. and i would really wish to point out from my example the fact that it takes years of indoctrinating people as children to have dogmatic faith in a certain religion but it only takes a person simple logic and minimal willingness to doubt to realize that faith in fairytales doesnt cause fairytales to exist. i also have a personal concern that i would really like to share with you. i have a problem that has really been of great concern to me .. i seem to be unable to enjoy life and that's NOT because i know theres no afterlife or that theres no such thing as 'soul' or something of that sort .. it's the fact that i realize i'm only a being that serves the indoctinations of my genes and memes so in a way i really have no choice .. nothing i do is random .. every single thought or act i perform is predetermined .. so this kind of makes me depressed .. i really would appreciate it if you have any response to what concerns me. thanks and Best Regards,
Ali Awad |
Ali,
Of course I know about Lebanon. Or even The Lebanon as it is sometimes called. Squashed in between Syria, Israel and the sea, fought over for centuries by empires, warlords and terrorists. The land of the mighty cedars where olives and pistachios come from. In the sixties it was civilized and free, if more than a little sleazy. Then the fighting took hold again between various factions whose divisions lay ultimately in religion. There are few parts of the world more in need of secularism and atheism than Lebanon. Your physical climate is like that of Northern California, if the intellectual climate was as free you would be living in paradise, like America but with more beautiful women, culture, history and hashish.
You will definitely feel less isolated when you learn how to spell atheist. There are lots of atheists about and in the last few years we have stopped hiding our light under a bushel. That bit about lights under a bushel is a Biblical reference, you can't get away from Hebrew mythology no matter what you do, the trick is to use it the same way the Europeans have used Greek mythology and more lately Scooby Doo and The Simpsons cartoons, shared cultural reference points, not anything of great cosmic significance.
I have decided that in future my site will offer many more opportunities for people to become engaged with other atheists. There is my debate forum which is a good place to start but I will also be adding other links that offer other opportunities to see that you are not alone.
As for a meaning to your life you are free to choose one, nobody is telling you what it should be, you can make that decision yourself. Of course in a way you can argue that free will is an illusion and that there isn't really any such thing as choice but that does not apply to you and your decisions to any greater effect than it applies to those of anybody else. You are just as free as the freest man there has ever been. If freedom has any meaning at all you can have it, if it doesn't then what does? Nothing. Living life as if nothing matters is a waste of a life. You can set yourself some goals. Aim to make things better. As one man among 6.75 billion you are not going to have a huge impact but you can aim to make a disproportionately large and positive effect on the future.
Personally I aim to change the world for the better by changing minds, by helping people come to the correct conclusions about religion. I see freeing men's minds from superstition and irrational fear as being as good as curing the sick, and something my talents can manage. I also look to offer help to those who have already taken that first step, people who have freed themselves, I look to give them the support they need to consolidate those ideas and to protect them from corrosive concepts such as the idea that atheists should be amoral, nihilistic hedonists or else they are somehow being hypocritical. Nothing automatically follows on from being an atheist.
There has to be something that you can do which will make the world better, even if that is just to live a happy life without causing as much pain to other people as you might have done if you didn't care or followed the rules of a self-proclaimed prophet who thought desert piracy and having sex with a child was something the creator of everything would regard as good and moral and eating a ham sandwich or drinking a glass of wine was abhorrent.
--
Martin Willett
http://mwillett.org/
hey Martin, WOW! you do know a lot about lebanon .. i'm really impressed! i recall reading a text you've written on whether we should tolerate religion or not .. and i can indeed say from experience from living here and living the disastrous effect religion has on people and most importantly on groups of people that we SHOULDN'T .. hundreds of thousands of innocent lebanese people died during the civil war .. some of those were christians being murdered by muslims for the sole reason that they held christian names and vice versa .. what really pisses me off the most is that despite all this .. people around here have this strange incapability that i really dont understand to point out at religion and say 'this is our problem' .. and thanks for the response to my concern .. it really helped .. to be truthful i didnt expect ud mail me back .. imagined ur like a celebrity or sthg over there who has somebody hired to deal with his mail :) .. nways .. i just wonna tell you that i think that what you're doing is great .. goodluck nd keep it up .. Best Regards, Ali |
I used my normal writing technique of just write what I think then do a last minute search to check I'm not totally wrong. I didn't have to change much.
There is only me to answer my mail. At least at the moment, but I live
in hope of getting a bigger exposure at some time in the future.
--
Martin Willett
http://mwillett.org/
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