I know this is slightly old news now, but Alex Stewart, that guy who smoked the Bible and Koran last week, has got me thinking a lot about my own absence of belief and a trend I'm seeing in a lot of our more prominent atheists.
I have discussed a little in my other blog, but that was more about me and my beliefs (i.e. lack thereof) than about the broader behaviour of atheists and atheists groups in the community.
Alex Stewart is clearly an intelligent person - unfortunately, it doesn't seem that this has prevent him from understanding what is to me the whole idea behind atheism.
Perhaps I'm more word-conscious than most, but every time you see the word atheism, you have all the information that is really needed. 'A' conveys an absence, a space where something you might expect to find something, yet it is profoundly not there. Hence its use in words like asexual and amoral. Theism is easy - it means religion. So in the most literal terms, atheism means having no religion.
I know that may have seemed like a lesson, and a tedious one at that, but this is what a lot of atheists, at least the ones who make their way into the media, or who are part of groups, seem unable to appreciate. I mean, I have no right to tell others how to relate to their atheism, not at all. It's not a movement, a creed or a cause. But I think it is fair to point out to these people who rail loudly about the farcical nature of religion or burn 'sacred' texts that they are not, in the strictest sense, atheists.
As much I love those UK billboards inscribed with 'There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life', the second anyone, anywhere, starts to preach atheism, they cease to be atheists. Lack of belief has turned to antibelief. In the same sense that negative numbers are still numbers, so too is negative belief.
And I guess it irritates me to see so many atheists fall into this trap. Don't get me wrong - it is incredibly easy to forget that it's meant to be a void and not a substance. But if atheism is treated as belief, then it is prey to all the things that atheism essentially rejects - i.e. preaching, attempting to spread the word, hierarchical structure (arising from atheist groups), and the one that I find hardest to swallow, lack of respect for the beliefs of others.
That's what Alex Stewart showed. For me it was not so much the act, though I find the burning of any books abhorrent in itself, but the disrespect to Muslims and Christians it implied. It disgusts me somewhat that so many fellow atheists and intelligent human beings have failed to notice they have come full circle, straight back to 'My (no) god is better than your god', which solves nothing and defies atheism itself.
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with discussing atheism amongst other atheists, or with agnostics and people of faith. In my estimation, that's more than fine. Intelligent dialogue among people of similar or conflicting views is always a good thing. It's the way some atheists have essentially inverted the whole idea without batting an eye which bothers me.
Again, I won't attempt to dictate what others believe. That's the whole point. But people like Alex Stewart, in my humble opinion, probably need a whole other category for their view of the universe. Put simply, that kind of atheism is lack of belief taken to an extreme, at which point is ceases to be absence and becomes an often quite vehement presence instead. It seems that it is more about being against religion than not having one. In all honesty, there isn't actually anything wrong with believing that, if that's what's right for you. But identifying it as atheism isn't really accurate.
I used the word antitheism the last time I mentioned this whole idea. Though I think in the view of the intolerant among the religious, the word would carry even more unpleasant connotations than those already associated with the word atheism, it would be a proper representation of what these people actually believe.
In sum, I think atheism has, much like other concepts of faith and lack thereof throughout the ages, has evolved into two fairly distinct views of the world. Though I know it's partly my own desire to not be tarred with same brush as people like Alex Stewart, I would like to propose a split. The people henceforth known as antitheists can go on believing what they believe, and act to further its influence, and the individuals who consider themselves atheists can go on not being part of an organised belief system. Theoretically, everybody's happy.
It's not that simple, of course, but with people like Richard Dawkins becoming more offensively vocal all the time, I think the need for a change in the way we define absence of belief/non-belief is becoming imperative.
For myself, I don't want any part of this disrespectful, purposely inflammatory monster some people are making atheism into. For the concept in general, I think it need to be rescued from being made into a group of angry, godless crusaders. It's atheism. There is no group. There is no creed. It is is the absence of these things. It's that simple, and needs nothing more.
