With the religious threads lately and I think there should be a counterbalance. I don’t want to step on any toes, so I’m not suggesting the religious posts stop, but I think there needs to be posts here for those of us with no faith at all, and that’s what this is. Let me say that I am an atheist, not an anti-theist. If you believe that there is a god and you are bound for heaven (or whatever), good for you and I sincerely hope that makes you happy. I simply don’t agree.
This column is intended as a positive space for atheists, agnostics and freethinkers.
So now, without further ado, I present the first semi-regular (as in I will do it when I feel like it, but others are welcome to step up to the plate) atheist affirmation.
I’m going to start with each of these affirmations with a quote from Positive Atheism’s big list of quotations and I can think of no better person to start with than the late, great Douglas Adams:
A man didn’t understand how televisions work, and was convinced that there must be lots of little men inside the box, manipulating images at high speed. An engineer explained to him about high frequency modulations of the electromagnetic spectrum, about transmitters and receivers, about amplifiers and cathode ray tubes, about scan lines moving across and down a phosphorescent screen. The man listened to the engineer with careful attention, nodding his head at every step of the argument. At the end he pronounced himself satisfied. He really did now understand how televisions work. “But I expect there are just a few little men in there, aren’t there?”
And then I will feature a famous atheist or agnostic. We’ll start off with the (sometimes) world’s wealthiest man, Bill Gates.
From a 1996 issue of Time Magazine:
“Isn’t there something special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul?” interviewer Walter Isaacson asks Gates “His face suddenly becomes expressionless,” writes Isaacson, “his squeaky voice turns toneless, and he folds his arms across his belly and vigorously rocks back and forth in a mannerism that has become so mimicked at MICROSOFT that a meeting there can resemble a round table of ecstatic rabbis.”
“I don’t have any evidence on that,” answers Gates. “I don’t have any evidence of that.”
He later states, “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”
And finally, something to think about and discuss- A lot of people say they want to believe because they don’t think a universe so complex could have come about by chance. To me, that the universe in all of its vastness and complexity does indeed work without anyone at the wheel is what makes it so amazing.
