thermophile kenny: The Atheist Church

: The Atheist Church - B. Harmon

Atheists have always challenged prevailing religious teachings, so much so that modern atheists seem to have a problem with the very word "religion."

Ask an atheist if he is religious, and he will almost certainly answer that he is not. In fact, a lot of modern atheists take offense at the very suggestion that atheism resembles a religious model. Atheism, at its basest definition, is genuinely not religious. It is simply the belief that no god exists, or, etymologically speaking, can refer to the belief that specific gods do not exist.

The God Fearing First Atheists

The word theist has its roots in Latin, words like pantheist, monotheist, etc. During the first centuries CE, in the Roman empire anyone who did not believe in the gods of the Roman pantheon, like Christians, were referred to as atheotes, meaning "godless." The word was used as a pejorative, and is the equivalent of the modern term, atheist.

So the first atheists did not believe that no god exists, but that no more than their one God exists. Viewed historically, atheism is not, necessarily, a belief in the absence of deities, but a gradual reduction of deities, presumably to zero.

The First Self-Identified Atheists

The end of the Renaissance saw the emergence of some of the first proudly self-identified atheists. The domineering hand of the Church had pushed people to the brink, and mankind's natural desire for autonomy had manifested in a variety of philosophies which challenged the Church's traditional ideas of God. These philosophies drew, largely, from ideas first introduced by Greek sophists, and their followers, drawing from those same Greek origins, began to call themselves atheists, or godless, just as the Romans called the godless atheotes.

People did not simply stop believing in God, just because they disagreed with the Church's authority, though. Scientific breakthroughs and studies of the heavens demonstrated that for centuries, what the Church had taught about our Universe was wrong, dramatically so, in some cases. These doubts cast on the classical teachings of the Church led, in some cases to atheism, and in many cases to Humanism.

Humanism was a philosophy that emphasized the importance of mankind and beauty of the natural world, but did not refute the existence of God, at least at first. During the Enlightenment, secular Humanism developed, and in our modern age has become almost synonymous with atheism, owing mostly to their nearly parallel doctrines.

The Doctrine of Modern Atheism

Again, ask an atheist what doctrines he follows, and he will almost certainly reply that he does not follow any doctrine, because he is not religious. But most people, whether they believe in the supernatural or not, do follow some kind of ethical or philosophical teaching. Most atheists, of course, really don't have any strong feelings about the beliefs of others, which is something that can be said of moderates of any philosophical or religious system. What defines the doctrine of any movement, though, is not the declarations of the movement's mass of moderate followers, but those of the movement's leaders. For instance, the only real doctrine for most Christians is to try to be Christ-like, just as the only requirement to be atheist is that one should not believe in any god of any sort.

Leaders of what is often called the New Atheist movement, like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris do propose certain, definitive arguments and beliefs that are then repeated by their followers. For instance, to summarize one of Dawkins's arguments, God is impossible, because anything that created life would have to be more complex than life, and would have to have evolved, somehow or have been created by something even more complex.

Rites of Atheism

For years The First Church of Atheism has been ordaining ministers to perform religious ceremonies for atheists. The annual Texas Freethought convention offers workshops on secular parenting techniques. The Reason Rally, which promises to be the largest atheist gathering in history, according to Richard Dawkins, will feature performances and presentations from some of the world's most famous atheists, and Skepticon is held annually in Springfield, Missouri, the home of Assemblies of God headquarters with the specific intention of promoting atheist ideas over those of other religions. They promote these ideas both through intelligent discussion of the downfalls of organized religion and by openly belittling Christians on their ritual trip to the Creation Museum, which they make in a flock of hundreds, passing out tracts in the parking lot.

So what separates atheism from any other religion? Nothing really. Sensible, moderate atheists don't like to be lumped in with their more extreme counterparts any more than moderate Christians like being associated with the Spanish Inquisition or moderate Muslims like being called Al Qaeda. Oh, and a lot of them really don't like being called religious.