The Religious Atheist
March 20, 2013 at 2:17 pm
(This post was last modified: March 20, 2013 at 2:33 pm by barbend.)
I am a religious atheist:
On the most simplistic level, life is beautiful. Our existence, the moment in which we presently reside, and all that we perceive to exist is all unfathomably unlikely. The culmination of all the random events, chemical reactions, solar formations, planetary formations, evolution and human choices all converging into the current moment is incredible. This is what makes atheism beautiful.
It is argued that god and all of his creations are beautiful as they are made in his name and in his planned image. I fear that this ignores the complexity and coincidences that have been definitively proven to create our world; it undermines how special our present existence is.
In many of the mainstream religions the fear of emptiness after death is comforted, I also reason that this detracts from our human experience. With the creation of an afterlife or reincarnation we remove ourselves from the immediate moment. We minimize the importance of a single instant as we envision the eternity of existence left to come. However, within atheism, there is nothing to do but relish the present and bathe within the richness of our current instant. The vividness of our experiences made possible by miniscule subcellular interactions and billions of years of evolution creating our perceived existence.
Atheism is stereotypically viewed as cold, scientific and unemotional, but I contest that rather it is the pinnacle of self-enlightenment and spirituality. It is the acceptance that we cannot always explain everything and the realization that we need not create a theistic figure to simplify what we cannot comprehend. You surrender yourself to the majestic, complex, unfathomable universe in which we are merely microscopic cogs. Our planet and all the life upon it are part of a small oasis of entropic structure, fueled by the sun, within the vast expanse of chaos that dominates our universe.
As humans we are blessed to be partaking in something so amazingly unlikely and to simplify the wonders of our existence with a vague theistic simplification is a tragedy.
On the most simplistic level, life is beautiful. Our existence, the moment in which we presently reside, and all that we perceive to exist is all unfathomably unlikely. The culmination of all the random events, chemical reactions, solar formations, planetary formations, evolution and human choices all converging into the current moment is incredible. This is what makes atheism beautiful.
It is argued that god and all of his creations are beautiful as they are made in his name and in his planned image. I fear that this ignores the complexity and coincidences that have been definitively proven to create our world; it undermines how special our present existence is.
In many of the mainstream religions the fear of emptiness after death is comforted, I also reason that this detracts from our human experience. With the creation of an afterlife or reincarnation we remove ourselves from the immediate moment. We minimize the importance of a single instant as we envision the eternity of existence left to come. However, within atheism, there is nothing to do but relish the present and bathe within the richness of our current instant. The vividness of our experiences made possible by miniscule subcellular interactions and billions of years of evolution creating our perceived existence.
Atheism is stereotypically viewed as cold, scientific and unemotional, but I contest that rather it is the pinnacle of self-enlightenment and spirituality. It is the acceptance that we cannot always explain everything and the realization that we need not create a theistic figure to simplify what we cannot comprehend. You surrender yourself to the majestic, complex, unfathomable universe in which we are merely microscopic cogs. Our planet and all the life upon it are part of a small oasis of entropic structure, fueled by the sun, within the vast expanse of chaos that dominates our universe.
As humans we are blessed to be partaking in something so amazingly unlikely and to simplify the wonders of our existence with a vague theistic simplification is a tragedy.