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Agnostics: Mental Couch Potatoes?

The Future's Bright

A Rationalist Pleas

Is Humanism The Answer?

Selling my Soul

Agnostics

This is probably the most scientifically respectable branch of the mother church. Agnostics DON'T KNOW.

“I am too much of a sceptic to deny the possibility of anything.” T H Huxley

T. H. Huxley, Darwin's Bulldog, was the first to use this label. Gnostics were a sect that knew God in some special airey-fairy way, Huxley said that he didn't know God. Agnosticism for many is keeping your options open. Agnostics come in all shapes and sizes, some believe that they cannot know about God, some don't know whether they believe in God, some don't care. It is a label that has too many definitions to be precise.

Some agnostics don't know what they believe, some choose agnosticism as the label that them because they think God is unknowable. For some agnosticism is about their beliefs and doubts, for others it is about the limits of knowledge, belief and doubt.

Some people use the term agnostic to mean the same as “I am sort of an atheist, but don't pester me or ask me to justify it.”

Pure Atheists

I am a pure atheist. I am against any form of dalliance with believers of any kind. Atheism cannot be reconciled in my mind with any weird beliefs in any form of the supernatural.

My creed is simple:

I don't believe in God

I don't believe in Gods

I don't believe in Goddesses

I don't believe in a human soul

I don't believe in disembodied spirits

I don't believe in reincarnation or any afterlife

I don't believe that man is anything other than an animal with a high degree of self awareness

I don't believe in fate

I don't believe in destiny

I don't believe there is a meaning of life

I don't believe that irrational beliefs are ever right

I don't believe that religion and superstition should go unchallenged

As a pure atheist I want to keep my creed pure. I have no time for any form of superstition, I will not refrain from mocking it whenever I come across it. Apart from that my mind is open! You may have noticed that mine is a reverse credo, I don't believe, my beliefs are defined by the absence of wrong beliefs. Only the last two points of my creed can be expressed without a negative. I have no problem with that, I define my ideas as reasonable and reasoned, I differ from those people who have unreasonable and unreasoned beliefs.

Rationalists

Thanks to the suggestion of my friend Mark I have now decided that I prefer to call myself a rationalist. This is not to deny my atheism, but to take it further and to make it a positive virtue rather than a denial of a presumed belief. In the days when the vast majority of people in Christendom were faithful believers in God the term atheist had a clear meaning. Most people believed in God, most believed in a particular idea of God. To say that you were an atheist was to say that you rejected this widespread idea. Now things are very different. People believe in all sorts of things. The waters are very muddy. By calling myself a rationalist I am making a bigger statement. I am cutting through the argument about strong or weak atheism, my belief system is rational, if a belief in God were rational I would have it. In my opinion such a belief is not rational and not justified. I don't need to explain whether I know there is no God, it is not a sensible question. My understanding of the issues leads me to conclude that a belief

in God is not rational.

I am a rationalist with a tendency to pure atheism. Recently I begun to distance myself from the generic term of atheist. It both says too much and too little. To some it equates to evil and Satanism, to others it means I must be some form of anarchist revolutionary. Neither caricature is remotely true. Neither is the idea that by calling myself an atheist I am proclaiming a faith and upholding a religion. This too I reject. By saying I am an atheist I am not proclaiming that I know there is no God or that I could know such a thing. To me atheism is only ever a working hypothesis, a temporary (26 consecutive years so far) working assumption about an important issue that I cannot ever be totally convinced about. That is why I now prefer to call myself a rationalist, it is a term that most people are unsure of, it does not pigeonhole me, it allows me to be who I am and not what they want me to be.

Brights

Now there is an even better label than rationalist, which means pretty much the same thing: Bright. I think Bright is the best label now for my way of thinking, a worldview free of beliefs in the supernatural.

Weirdoes

Weirdoes believe anything except Christianity. The Bible is total nonsense but every other culture has beliefs that must be respected. There is a grain of truth in everything. Weirdoes believe in fate, UFOs, the Loch Ness Monster, astrology (western and Chinese), witchcraft and Feng Shui. They are proud of their open minds, their minds are as open as the prairies, open and vacant. I would rather debate with the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition that one of these buffoons. I am not anti-Christian, I am against any superstitious nonsense, wherever it comes from. There is nothing in any of it.

Forteans

Forteans are a sub sect of weirdo. They too are prepared to read and listen to any old rubbish although they reserve judgement. They know thousands of theories and crackpot ideas but tell themselves that they are just keeping an open mind. I keep weird nonsense at a discrete distance. I used to live near a very large mental hospital and I had contact with the staff, only the fact that the staff wore uniforms and didn't drool quite as much distinguished them from the patients. For Forteans an open mind is the ultimate virtue. For me truth is the ultimate virtue.

A Fortean sees a light in the sky and thinks first that it is a flying saucer, perhaps an angel, a phoenix, or maybe a dragon... I think it is more likely to be a Boeing 747. I make no apology for having such a "closed mind." If I did see a flying fire breathing lizard in the sky I would stand up and say so quite clearly. I have no problem with not being believed, but I will not believe without reasonable evidence.

Humanists

Humanists reject God but want religion. Humanists deify the human species. Man is their God. Humanists seek a meaning to life, and expect to find one, but they don't know where to look. I think religion is more dangerous than belief in God.

A lot of humanists are high church atheists, they would love to dress in robes and burn incense and talk in the special voices that only priests and preachers use. Humanists seem very strange to me, like the kind of vegetarians who constantly eat meat substitutes, they have thrown out the baby but want to keep the holy bathwater.

I suppose I am far too misanthropic to consider being a humanist.

Weak and Strong Atheists

Weak atheists don't believe in God, they do not know about God, God has not touched them. Weak atheists do not deny the possibility that their might be a God, but they do not know God themselves. Strong atheists deny God. To a strong atheist the non-existence of God is much more than simply a working hypothesis. Strong atheists know that not only is there no God but there could not be a God.

I used to consider myself a strong atheist, now I prefer to be a rationalist, strong atheism is irrational. Weak atheist is such a naff term isn't it? “Hi, I'm a weak atheist...” That is why I won't wear it as a badge of pride. Perhaps it would be better if the dichotomy was renamed as fundamentalist and liberal, or hardline and progressive. Or perhaps not. I have now (as of 6 April 2001) decided that to proclaim that I know there is no God is to be as dogmatic as any other kind of fundamentalist. I am pretty certain that there is no god and see no good reason to act as though there is, but at the same time it would be the height of arrogance to state that as a fact. I'll leave arrogance to the religious. They are so good at it.

God Haters

These are the mad, bad and dangerous to know crowd. They do not deny that there might be a God, they quite like the idea, they would love the opportunity to spit in his all-seeing eye. Mad, bad and infinitely sad. Subsets of the God Haters are the Antichrist worshipers and the Satanists. These losers have watched too many late night films. Their theologies are a mixture of recycled Catholic dogmas, half remembered film plots and bad acid trip flashbacks. They should be pitied rather than feared.

There are a number of cod-churches around that give lip service to the concept of worshiping Satan. They have their own peculiar slant on theology and mysticism. I cannot respect people who reject one religion and steal a few of its minor characters to invent a new one.

Unfortunately the God hating/defying agenda can help promote careers in rock music, film making and fiction writing. Most works on the occult, black magic, Satanism and so on are pure exploitation of the gullible, very few of the key promoters believe their own hype. It is just business. Some practitioners are taken in and seriously expect to be able to find incantations in old Latin tomes that will allow them to converse with Lucifer. They have as much chance of talking with Peter Rabbit.

The world wide web is full of sites that are inspired by the God-hating agenda. You are only four or five clicks away from them now. Many of them are dedicated to Marilyn Manson and similar characters, he has made a career out of painting moustaches on the icons of the modern world. That is a game that does not rely on talent. Marilyn Manson is a lightweight. He has made a career out of being "outrageous" but he knows just how to do it, just how far to go, just which targets to attack. He does not need to take any risks, he can follow a familiar road. He has made his style out of a synthesis of Alice Cooper, The Sex Pistols, Mick Jagger, Ozzy Osbourne and late night horror films. The only original twists he has put on the familiar career path come from the availability of MTV and his active courting of the ugly duckling 13 year old white middle-class Middle-American female market rather than the 17 year old male as the primary target. Smart move, catch them when they are too young to drive, that way they have more money left to buy your merchandise.

Atheism doesn't sell records, he has to piss on crucifixes to do that.

Many of the various species of God Hater are simply confusing the difference between atheism as the opposite of theism with Satan Bullshit being the opposite of Yahweh Bullshit.

Click here to view The Satanic Verses, the feedback generated by this ungodly page.

Amendment: July 2008

No, I do not respect the truly religious any more. Screw that, believing in absurdities should never command respect no matter how sincere, well-meant or traditional it may be. I respect the right of people to believe absurdities but I do not respect absurd beliefs or believers in the absurd as a class of people above other people.

© 1999 - 2008 by Martin Willett.

mwillett.org: Debate Unlimited