[Serious] Atheist Dogma

[The Grand Nudger]

The belief in an animating force that connects all life would be typical of spiritual beliefs that proceed in the absence of gods. Fairly common in indigenous traditions, and probably representative of a long period in the development of religious beliefs. Burials and symbolic representations of natural objects with use and connection to man predate any evidence of god beliefs by quite some time. Tens of thousands of years.

Believing in spirit, or spirits, is not equivalent to believing in gods. Probably wouldn't be hard to find an atheist who believes in ghosts. Spiritualism, in this context, is probably our oldest religious tradition. We're still burying our dead, still feeling the sense of the numinous, still yearning for and even seeing our dearly departed. That's part of how full modernity is dated. We see recognizable behaviors, 50k years between us and looking at a burial site you learn not just about the person in the grave, but how the people who went to all that trouble were feeling putting them there.

Then we have more complex forms, woodland spirits, river spirits, personifications of natural or cultural forces. Each stuck somewhere between a ghost and a god. There are atheists who believe in these as well. Likely to be a transitional form of belief between animism and ancestor worship, and yet more elaborate notions like deism or theism.