Recently, a Colombian news media published an article about Famous, Colombian and Atheist personalities. It turned out very few of them were actually Atheists, and none of them was so on rational grounds, so I wrote a post about it.
One of the responses I got, was that I wanted every Atheist to be so for the same reasons (Reason), and that this is beginning to sound like an “atheistic religion”. It’s time to address this argument.
First, atheism, the complete lack of religion, is not a religion. This does not change by the fact that all atheists are atheists for the same reason or for different reasons.
Analogy-time: if every bald person in the world were exactly equally bald to one another, that wouldn’t make baldness suddenly become a hair color.
And of course it is desirable that all atheists are so on the most rational grounds: there is no evidence for the existence of god. Allowing the facts to mold one’s beliefs is a moral obligation to other human beings.
Time for another analogy: Unicorns do not exist and there could be many reasons why people do not believe in them; but I would certainly question the mental health of any person who does not believe in unicorns for any reason other than the lack of evidence.
Someone could come and tell me that there are no unicorns because aliens came to Earth, brought Unicorns, experimented on them, the latter couldn’t take it and committed collective suicide, shooting quantum rays which bounced off mirrors and ended the species. Certainly the conclusion that unicorns do not exist would be accurate but the ‘logical’ path to get to it would be a blunder as big as the existence of any god.
And no, I don’t think this ‘diversity’ of opinions and reasons is either healthy nor worthy of being celebrated. People reaching accurate conclusions through faulty reasoning processes raises several issues, starting with the obvious one of mental health.
We live in a world where one’s actions necessarily affect what happens to everyone else. Now, as always, people would do best to base their beliefs on science, reliable knowledge. And none of this can be achieved if we are celebrating those random moments when faulty reasoning processes lead to accurate conclusions.
I’m sorry if this comes off as arrogant, but it is better to be an atheist because there is no evidence to believe in god, than for any other reason, whether this one is legitimate, like the repressiveness of religions or having issues with authority; or whether they’re questionable like being godless out of fashion, or because you’re a rebel without a cause, or because it comes in the ideological kit or because you despise the Illuminati and reptilians (!).
That only results in people not knowing clearly why they are atheists and that, as a result of faulty cognitive processes, will eventually return to the flock. So thanks, but I’ll pass.
