Recently, and I mentioned this in a previous post, I heard a famous atheist (agnostic?) mention the rise of atheism, especially in America, What was his proof? The number of people responding as non-religious to a poll about the same. It caught me immediately because, as I written before, non-religiousosity and atheism are two different categories of belief. One is not holding to any specific denominational dogma, where one might still believe there is a god or gods, while the other, atheism, is just a non-belief in gods.
How does anyone confuse the two because if this famous atheist had actually read the poll, the knowledge of the difference between the two would’ve been apparent. What am I getting at? This is the problem talking about atheism to non-atheists. If you can’t even understand the differences between being religious or not and belief in god(s) or not, then you shouldn’t be addressing crowds in auditoriums about anything that has to do with either religion or belief. For too long atheists have been plagued with carnival barkers and not people of gravitas that can speak to everyday people (that’s pretty much everyone) about a subject that is on one hand taboo, and the other, far more interesting to those everyday people than we might understand.
We once, a decade or so ago, had some of those who could represent their non-belief in a way that would draw large crowds of believers to their debates to just to watch the verbal jousting and walk away with more than questions about their once and past faith. I think that we aheists began to depend of a couple of these people too much o make our case for us and now that at least one of them is no longer around, the enterprise has mostly fallen apart. Atheists also discovered that, gee, these people were not super-human and were as fallible as the rest of us and therefore became disenchanted with the entire idea that there could be those with voices of greater magnitude that would adequately represent the atheist ideology – that simple belief that no gods exist.
Atheism also became imbued with politics. It’s been well known that most atheists, for some reason, are more toward the left-wing than centrist or right-wing. Why is this? Maybe it’s because most that identify openly as atheists are younger, which s to say, more liberal than their counterparts. If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty-five, you have no heart. If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re thirty-five, you have no brain has been attributed to Winston Churchill. When I looked that quote up to make sure I quoted the quote correctly, I was politely informed that this probably came from some (unknown?) French guy named Batbie in the nineteenth century. Everything old somehow becomes new.
It’s not that we, atheists, require a spokesperson, or even a committee, to decide for us how we should be in public, how we should discuss atheism, or whom we should vote for in upcoming elections.. It was just nice to find smart, interesting, people that could defend the possibility that there are no gods with grace and humor. I don’t think those people are once in a generation . all of us have the capacity to represent what we believe to others, no matter what that might be. Hopefully, the next famous atheist will know the difference between religiosity and atheism.