People change. I’m finished with the word and philosophy of the ‘Atheist.’ Its baggage no longer has much use beyond draining precious energy and confusing the situation.

The Latin word humanitas was coined by Roman philosopher Cicero as an equivalent of the Greek paideia. This entails a well-rounded, mature cultural education, and by no accident humanitas evolved to suit our modern colleges of Humanities. This is due in large part to the dangerous artistic rebellion of Renaissance thinkers against iron-handed medieval Christian schools.

History reveals that such repression can not last; we see the rise of the Freethinkers during the French Revolution as well. The thoughtful animal will not be suppressed, and we should not be stopped. The pumping blood of the human heart will always be the fountain of art, music, philosophy and literature in all forms, from escapism to realism. With its lineage in the classical era, the worry about the purpose and design of our existence lights a candle at the shadowy core of true education. The inward spiritual struggle is part of every human being, and it is what brings you and I together today.

We all seek after two things: what is good and what is right. This is our unsatisfied need, and it has led to a wealth of experimentation through the ages in many forms, all conjoined in the tormented bliss of experience. Our goal in studying our lives, and developing words to suit our philosophies, is to share with each other our private contributions to these questions. Should we choose to sever ourselves from conversation, we eliminate the value of our own precious contributions.

Our ideas procreate in a pool. Because we must labor our ideas through the work of others, the quality of our beliefs hardly matters as much as the quality of our communication. Words are used to anchor us, within and without, to who we are in a world of fighting ideas. Words have the most value when they bring us together into groups, defining our contributions to the big questions, and we can share our ideas effectively – we are the most symbiotic species.

Atheism, the word, has a fluid lineage as long as anything we know about Western civilization. As I hope we can agree, it entails “Denial of any gods.” Historically a pejorative for those who do not contribute anything to the aforementioned spiritual struggle, from the Greek Atheos to Atheism, the term has been used when in relation to a particular God…

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“The free, independent spirit who commits himself to no dogma and will not decide in favor of any party has no homestead on Earth.” – Stefan Zweig

Atheists are dogmatic, but not in the caricature we usually get.

Notice the name of the group. We have four different words that are trying to hint at the same thing, even without throwing in Agnostics. Why so much fuss and bother? Terms are ambiguous, and it causes us trouble.

We’ve all heard the argument. Atheism is only, “Not believing in gods.”

First, “gods” doesn’t tell us anything. Our first question, before even addressing dogma, is, “What do we mean by gods?”

Even naturalists can describe mere Nature as “God,” or physicists could describe the Big Bang as “God,” or meta-physicians could describe the underlying immaterial mathematical systems of our Universe as thoughts of “God,” or Eastern ideas about eternal change and suchness as “God.”

We shouldn’t split hairs about what it means to be an Atheist. With a bit of common sense, Atheism should be better known as the lack of believing in the world’s many mythic, supernatural religious characters drawn from sacred texts.

Atheism refers to this guy.

1. I am known through scriptures, prophets, prayers or revelations.
2. I am all-powerful and all-knowing, but also benevolent.
3. I am the source and judge of your Morality.
4. I can be loved, and love you back.
5. I require worship and faith.
6. I provide an immortal afterlife.
7. I take a direct hand in human affairs, such as superbowls and wars.

If God has any of these characteristics, I say, “No, thanks.” Because the world’s gods almost always do, it’s just easier to just say I’m an Atheist and go on with my life.

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So Life, as we see it, is Suffering.

Would we call it a Life without suffering? Why not let a Divine dictation despise the qualms given us by nature? Let it lead us as sheep into pastures of ultimate joy, forgiveness, calmness and Infinite Existence…

It appears at first glance that human history is nothing but suffering. Yes, I’ll play the pessimist tonight. The history of humanity is a dirty, forsaken, joyless fight against hardship. I relish and welcome the proof against!

Before the advance of enabling technology, before the domination of a so-called peaceful government, before the fortitude of a self-satisfactory cosmic order, did humans have any peace? This disguise was not donned so long ago; has it ever been?

Don’t feel too heartbroken, nor allow yourself to feel so sunk that you abandon the hope which I am trying to get to, when I say that life is – horrendous. If you deny this, you must stand and attest to the millions of years of struggling survival and bloody difficulty that led to your existence. Doubt the news, then! And look up at the stars and tell me you aren’t curious about your own deep difficulties.

These nameless years of struggling for survival – could this be the design of an omnipotent creator? Can we only hope? – It would appease our common instinct to think so. It would make everything so comfortable to release our pains and place them upon another. It would release these pains of hard reality to allow a supernatural vengeance upon them, to disguise the Human from what it is:

A good fight against its reality!

Life, living: can we do such a thing without the benefits of suffering?

Benefits of suffering – you must be insane, say the Buddhists. Suffering is the significance of the lacking of life. If you are suffering, you are doing it wrong. You must be insane, say the Christians, not to allow your suffering to lay itself on the shoulders of another. You must be insane, say the Hindus, not to let your actions be the designation of your beautiful reincarnation…

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With a massive spike in national curiosity, the Mormon leadership is rustling papers and trying to figure out how to deal with an equally massive spike in apostasy.

How does this small American culture shift fit into a bigger picture? Mormonism is a handy microcosm to see the future of secular humanism around the globe. My prediction is that, thanks to the Internet, it’s inevitably and unstoppably a great future. Religions face an ungodly predicament in the Information Age.

All religions have histories and philosophies that are troublesome when researched deeply. Non-violent Buddhists are at war as we speak, one presidential candidate prays for rain, another slips on his spiritually protective super-stockings, a horde of former molested children accuse their Catholic priests, Hindus sacrifice hundreds of thousands of endangered turtles to a fire-god, and anyone with access to a computer can Google the names of Brigham Young’s young, younger and youngest wives.

Young interest in Brigham Young, as it were, is on the down-turn.

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You’ll find recently posted on the Facebook page a link to a legitimate and frequent Mormon event in which young girls, some below the age of 10, are dressed up in wedding gowns and led to sing a song entitled, “I Love to See the Temple.”

They are encouraged to imagine the shining husband and family they will have in less than a decade who will, of course, cheat biology and survive well beyond the grave. A few parents performed a delightfully weird musical number called, “The Men in my Little Girl’s Life,” which I assume originated with Helen Mar Kimball, who was 14 when her life got its first man, among the flock of pubescent children wrapped in prophet’s sheets. Full stop.

Needless to say, non-Mormons might differ on what’s wrong with this picture, but the  reason it’s important to mention is that it addresses a very crucial bigger issue: the moral rights and wrongs about educating children on things like marriage.

If children are being educated wrongfully, is it the business of society?

I can already hear mumbling and grumbling about who gets to say what’s “Right or Wrong,” in a situation involving another person’s children’s education. (Secularists hold a belief in the separation of church and state – that everyone has the freedom to think for themselves about such things. My opinion, however, that child-brides and pedophiles are vile and hard to look at will remain the same.)

So why do we educate children about marriage, or anything else?

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How often we forget that we are all free.

We forget that the essence of humanism is to allow and appreciate the freedom of others, while expecting the same in return. It is an exciting aspect of naturalism, provided in the constraints of certain moral theories, to be able to allow our inventive, creative, wonderful nature its full blossoming.

It is easy to be willing, out of fear for scorn, whether personal or (more despicably) politically, to put a cage around our minds and hearts in the name of some standard of conduct, or out of some respect for an invisible punisher. We do this by disguising our emotions – our brilliance, our love, our passion, especially our most human trait, sexuality – under acceptable clothing, mannerisms: How you doing and thank you very much.

Do we walk in within these boundaries because it is good to do so? Or is it true that we walk in line because someone has told us, “Behave, or else.”

We look upon ideals of conduct as valuable maps for our lives – schematics for robotic behavior that ensures we will be accepted by the bigger machine. But why? Given you are not causing any suffering, are there not untold riches to be found when you have elbow room to express yourself naturally? I believe this healthy rebellion and freedom is what gives us all the humanities – what reveals that we truly are fascinating, talented creatures rather than quiet, efficient automatons.

We are a suppressed creature, and naturalism can give us the key to health by establishing a moral standard like this:

The human being is only rightfully constrained by ability and material nature, and that there is no such thing as a victimless crime – there is no act, which when it has caused no suffering nor loss, that can be reasonably described as wrong.

This freedom is in contrast to the whims of the omnipotent and supernatural beings, who would have us appreciate a poisoned freedom from within their regulations – Gods who would make themselves exceptions to the Golden Rule so often preached by their devout by placing others within a caged and non-free system while they remain at large.

Any restraints against the freedom of victimless human expression, experimentation, cognition, opinion, art or activity go against the values of the humanist.

But some would have us believe that you can be religious and also stand up against these wrongs – but I don’t believe that’s true.

They would have us actually consider the freedom of those who crouch under an otherworldly dictator (whose government is conditional love), those who are seeking warmth in a supernatural source of validation and acceptance of their miserable state, seeking to be owned as a form of currency or loved conditionally or within a system or rebirth in which our future is deliberated – can these people, who so desire to be controlled and systematized  that they imagine supernatural beings to do it, say anything at all about what it means to be free?

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“He that humbleth himself wishes to be exalted.” Friedrich Nietzsche

I recently heard a student in a Religious Studies class declare that Atheism was, “A pretty bleak way of looking at things – kind of a sad life to live.”

The only interesting thing about this sentence is who’s talking.

I’m willing to play along, though. Atheism has some kind of cultural tinge of being angry and nihilistic (in fact, to try to fit the horrifying ideal of Atheism I am currently crying tears of pain while reading Nietzche in a shower of razor blades and black vinyl while listening to the Cure and hating my parents). We have no reason to give any value to anything, because it is all atomic machinery whose deterministic status renders human life’s value describable in one meaningless word: Poopsack.

So, let’s be open-minded and pretend we’re religious for a moment. Let’s give a good ear to the Buddhas, the Prophets, the Gurus and the Imams and the Priests (and their wive(s), slaves, concubines, boys and other unmentionables) telling us to look beyond this life for answers.

So life is just absolutely stinking skidmark filthy – life is a wretched damned march toward hellfire, life is an illusion filled with suffering, life is a challenge to be met, life is a punishment. Life is a critique of our behavior, life is a period of failed awakening, life is a stretch toward re-incarnation, life is a scapegoat, life is a discarded empty atomic corpse from which blooms the beautiful fiery deadly flower of faith.

In appreciation of our upcoming event (SHAFT presents “Celebrate Your Mind”) your feedback is absolutely crucial:

What is positive about your secular humanist, atheist or free-thinking attitude toward life?