Antinomy of the Atheist: An Open Letter to Anyone and Everyone

Here's the thing.

Atheism for the sake of atheism is rather absurd.

In fact, there is no good reason to repeatedly bring up that which one does not believe in.

Do you believe in flaggermaroos and kaliwag snicker-poodles? If not, does it bother you that you haven't immediately informed me and everyone else on the planet of it?

Probably not. 

Then why do atheists, especially these so-called "New Atheists," seem to revel in reminding everybody that they don't believe in God?!

Well, needless to say there are historical reasons for why atheists feel hard pressed to explain themselves. Mainly because the religious won't stop pigeonholing us into uncomfortable definitions of what it means to be an atheist.

How do I know this? Because everybody and their dog has an opinion on atheists!

As if they knew better than I do about what I don't believe! Ha!

It's god-awful presumptuous, if you think about it.

It is a lot like me, a Caucasian male trying to define what it means to be an African American female. Really, how would I know what it's like to be one when I'm not? But this is how religion has typically treated atheists over the centuries. 

Yeah. Atheism is a strange word. I'll be the first to admit it. It explains one, and only one, sort-of-belief a person has. 

In this case, it explains what they don't believe to be the case. 

God? Not so much. 

We atheists, for whatever reasons we may have, just can't bring ourselves to believe that one proposition. But that's all the term atheism or atheist denotes. Nothing more, nothing less. Atheism = 0 God(s).

Simple. To the point.

I hope you realized, that as people, atheists have so many more beliefs than the simple and unassuming belief that there is no God. It's strange that this doesn't get brought up. 

Why should religion have such a hard-on for what we atheists don't believe?

It's like the moment a religious person hears you're an atheist they want to strap on a dildo and fuck you in the ass with it to teach you a lesson. 

You see, religion has developed a bad taste for atheism.

Atheism is the antithetical position who what most believers feel to be a sacred truth. Therefore, atheists must be bad, right?

Over the centuries atheism has been vilified by the religious. After all, atheists certainly haven't been going around claiming they eat babies or worship the devil. These are specifically religious hang-ups.

Religion often brings up atheism in negative ways, and tries ever so hard to diminish the value of atheistic belief by attacking the individual, saying things like those who don't believe in God are somehow morally depraved. 

Religion is in the habit of highlight atheism and putting it in a negative light. The religious will often try to make it seem like anyone who is an atheist is also corrupted or deficient in some way.

In fact, they will go as far to suggest that if you're an atheist, something very traumatic must have happened to you when you were young--maybe your parents divorced, or you were molested by your priest. They always try to take away from the rational or intellectual reasons one may have for being an atheist by raising non-sequiturs or distracting us with wild absurdities.

This maltreatment of atheism, and atheists in general, is a historical occurrence. It's sad, but true. It's been going on for thousands of years and continues to this day.

That's the thing that bothers me the most.

It continues to this day.

Famous news anchors go on national television and call atheists pin-heads simply because they are atheists. 

I mean, what if the same famous news anchor went on and called all Jews pin-heads simply because they are Jews?

What if, for that matter, he went on and announced all women are pin-heads because they are women?

It's called oppression. Women and minorities have valiantly fought to get out from under such oppression, and now atheists are pushing back too.

Which is why I miss Christopher Hitchens so goddamn much. He always was able to land a much needed Hitch-slap to such odious, obnoxious, and deserving news anchors.

But it's this very oppressive attitude taken by the mainstream religious, and religions historically, that gives the "New Atheists" cause to correct the misconceptions of what atheism is and, in doing so, help to counter the blatant and often spiteful misrepresentations of it. 

Of us.

I doubt the religious realize the irony when they ask why us atheists can't stop talking about a God we don't believe in. 

The answer is, we wouldn't, if you religious folks would only stop cramming God down everyone's throats while actively slandering those who think differently in the process.

Learn to agree to disagree, for Christ's sake. 

Granted, not all religious people are this dense. But the level headed ones often seem to get drown out by the obnoxious noise of zealot believers trying to silence the atheist anyway they know how, whether it is burning them at the stake, hunting them and jailing them, making up absurd laws that means any atheist who professes to be an atheist will be considered a terrorist of the state and arrested and given an automatic 20 prison sentence such as in Saudi Arabia, or whether it is simply religious apologists like Randal Rauser blocking atheists like me because he didn't like the fact that I called him out on his rude behavior towards, you guessed it, other atheists.

So we still have a long ways to go before we can publicly announce that we don't believe in flaggermaroos and kaliwag snicker-poodles, but I suppose that's why I created this blog, The Advocatus Atheist.

To help bring awareness to these issues.

I probably wouldn't have had to either, but the moment I became an atheist everyone seemed to either turn their backs on me or turn on me.

This blog was my defense--not only of what I don't believe--but what I DO believe.

And that, perhaps, is the more important part.

If you don't want to believe in something, more power to you. I won't stop you, and I certainly won't expect you to not believe in all the things I don't believe in either (if that makes any sense). But to you religious folk out there who may be reading this, if you ask me why I don't believe in God, well, I'll be more than happy to tell you. In fact, I invite you to do so.

Just don't expect that you know better than I do as to what I don't believe in.

Sincerely,

The Advocatus Atheist