Tolerance: A View on Atheism

I touched on the issue of Atheism in my blog, “Life After Death?” then I read this piece by Austin Cline in About.com called, “Why Not Believe?  Reasons Why Atheists Don’t Believe in Gods.”  He was not arguing a case for or against.  He was just giving the reasons.  It seems to me that the reasoning used against believing in God, are good arguments for. 

Let us take the argument of multiple gods and religious traditions.  Who is right?  They can’t all be right, yet they can’t all be wrong.  Immediately there is admission of someone being right.  Here the argument isn’t whether God exists, but rather who to believe.  I firmly believe the question is moot.  Develop your own personal relationship with God through creative, lively, discussion and study.  Find your own path and the love and understanding you feel will be more real to you than if some pious preacher told you how to feel.  Your heart can’t be told how to love, that is inside you.  It is who you are.  To love someone else’s way is doing yourself and God a disservice.

Gods have contradictory characteristics.  Really?  I’ve never seen one, and neither has the person describing these gods.  If they had, they still would be able to find the words to accurately relate what they had seen.  I have always thought of God as I have heard of the Tao described in Asian philosophy.  I quote from the Tao Ching, Chapter 1:

 

The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao

The name that can be named is not the eternal name
The nameless is the origin of Heaven and Earth
The named is the mother of myriad things
Thus, constantly without desire, one observes its essence
Constantly with desire, one observes its manifestations
These two emerge together but differ in name
The unity is said to be the mystery
Mystery of mysteries, the door to all wonders

 

God is all of this, and more.  God is the origin of Heaven and Earth, and of the universe and beyond.  The only contradictions are those that man creates in a failed attempt to describe that which is beyond description and comprehension.

Religions are self-contradictory and inconsistent in doctrines, ideas and history.  Mr. Cline lists, “the state of religion in the world today is more consistent with the premise that they are man-made institutions.”  I heartily agree, but only because they are man-made.  I find it ill-conceived that God intended man to interpret that which God gave.  Would that not constitute heresy? 

Again we see that these are contradictions which man has created in a failed attempt to clarify God.  Can we agree that it takes a pair of solid gold ones to even think of saying, “What God really meant to say was…”  I would offer that God is all knowing.  I think God knew perfectly well the intent behind the words. 

We were not supposed to read into them, or correct them, or outright change them.  Yet, we base our faith in a Bible written by men from stories of a time controlled by men, passed down through centuries by men, written down without original text by men, and compiled into a selected collection chosen by men to be put into a Bible which men have used to excuse a multitude of sins.  I’m sorry, was there a pattern here?  Contradictions multiply the more you re-write history to suit an agenda.

“God’s share so many characteristics with humans that it has been argued that gods were made in the image of man.”  Again, I’ve never seen one and neither had they.  If they had, refer back to the issue of contradictory characteristics above.  Man loves to embellish a good yarn.

Why should the existence or desires of gods matter to us?  My goodness!  Where to begin?  Let’s keep this short and to the point.  Music, art, architecture, philosophy, government, love, peace, understanding and tolerance are all benefits of human desire for a relationship with the Almighty .  One can argue that war, death and destruction are the antithesis of this, and it is.  Man can screw up anything good.  He can make the most beautiful things ugly.  But when you gaze upon the beauty mankind has created in God’s name, the Blue Mosque, the countless Madonna and Child, the Pieta, the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, The Creation of Adam.  The last few were just a taster Michelangelo’s works.  How many more artist and craftsmen throughout the history of all religions, not just Christian, that dedicated their works to the greater glory of their deity?  Doesn’t this speak to the need that god’s matter to us?

God’s and those that believe in them behave immorally!  I keep saying it.  I’ve never seen a god.  I can’t attest to the validity of that part of the statement.  Humans, however, can excuse any immoral behavior if they can make out that their god did it first.  I suppose it would depend on the human agenda, but let’s not jump to the conclusion that God did it first just because man says so.  Not to be indelicate, but God gave man a penis and the tools to use it, it’s just taking man an inordinate amount of time to learn to control it.

And, along with the immorality, how do we justify the evil in the world?  I have to far back on eastern philosophy again with these excerpts from Wikipedia on “Yin and Yang.” 

“Yin and yang is used to describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces are interconnected and interdependent in the natural world; and, how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another.  Many natural dualities (such as male and female, light and dark, high and low, hot and cold, water and fire, life and death, and so on) are thought of as physical manifestations of the yin-yang concept. Yin and yang are actually complementary, not opposing, forces, interacting to form a whole greater than either separate part; in effect, a dynamic system. Everything has both yin and yang aspects, (for instance shadow cannot exist without light). Either of the two major aspects may manifest more strongly in a particular object, depending on the criterion of the observation.  In Taoist metaphysics, good-bad distinctions and other dichotomous moral judgments are perceptual, not real; so, yin-yang is an indivisible whole.”

Good and evil then are part of an indivisible whole.  God gave us the tools to make the “moral judgments” based on our perceptions of good and evil.  If there were no evil in the world for us to perceive, would it cease to exist?  Does the tree falling make a sound if you aren’t there to hear?  Does God cease to exist because you don’t believe?  There will always be evil, and you can’t save the poor from themselves.

Faith is an unreliable guide to reality or means for acquiring knowledge.  I would offer that this statement is proves itself in the fact that if we had a reliable guide or a means for acquiring the truth (knowledge), we wouldn’t need faith!  But, unfortunately we don’t.  Faith is at best a gamble.  It is a gamble that we are capable of using the tools that God gave us.  At times we must rely solely on our ability to use those tools, that faith, to guide us on our path to the truth.

All evidence points to life being a material, natural phenomenon, not supernatural.  There is heavenly realm to strive for.  So, we are just ants plodding our way through this existence?  I think, therefore I am!  I hate to use it but…Oh ye of little faith! 

As Agent K said in the movie Men in Black, “1500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody knew that the Earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you knew that people were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.”  For you ants out there, go gentle into that good night, dust to dust.  For you there will be nothing else, not because there might not be, but because it is what you want.  I for one want to be fully awake when I die so I can know the answer to the great mystery.

And, finally, there is really no good reason to bother believing.  I can think of no better reasons that the ones the atheists have given us.  Their reasons do not deny the existence of God, rather they act as proof there is a God!  Everything they say is true.  God made it so.  He gave us the tools to see it, to perceive it, even in the absence of proof.  The tree does make a sound in the absence of witnesses.  Just because we don’t perceive it doesn’t make it silent any more than not perceiving God is proof of non-existence. 

Faith is a reason to bother believing.  The faith that things will get better, and faith that we have been given the tools to make it so.  Faith in mankind not to push a button ending life on this planet.  Faith that we will fix what we break.  Faith that we will right what is wrong.  Sometimes faith is all there is to get us through. 

If that’s all there is, I’ll take it!  It’s better than the alternative. 

In conclusion I would say this:  If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?  God exists because man believes.  For the believer there will be a God and an afterlife.  For the non-believer, he will go into oblivion because that is where he believes he will go.  God doesn’t care how you believe, as long as it is righteous, as long as you believe.  For the most part, I don’t find these acceptable reasons not to believe.  I find these very good reasons to back away from organized religion and… find one’s own path.