Atheism

We're nobody, living nowhere--stuck on a rocky little planet orbiting a not terribly large or prepossessing star in the boondocks of just one of the billions of galaxies out there.

Setanta said: We're nobody, living nowhere--stuck on a rocky little planet orbiting a not terribly large or prepossessing star

Unbelief is a move in a game whose rules are set by believers. To deny the existence of God is to accept the categories of monotheism. As these categories fall into disuse, unbelief becomes uninteresting and soon it is meaningless. Atheists say they want a secular world, but a world defined by the absence of the Christian's God is still a Christian world. Secularism is like chastity, a condition defined by what it denies. If atheism has a future, it can only be in a Christian revival; but in fact Christianity and atheism are declining together.

Atheism is a late bloom of a Christian passion for truth. No pagan is ready to sacrifice the pleasure of life for the sake of mere truth. It is artful illusion, not unadorned reality, that they prize. Among the Greeks, the goal of philosophy was happiness and salvation, not truth. The worship of truth is Christian cult.

The old pagans were right to shudder at the earnestness of the early Christians. None of the mystery religions in which the ancient world abounded claimed what Christians claimed--that all other faiths were in error. For that very reason, none of their followers could ever become an atheist. When Christians insisted that they alone possessed the truth they condemned the lush profusion of the pagan world with a damning finality.

In a world of many gods, unbelief can never be total. It can only be rejection of one god and acceptance of another, or else--as in Epicurus and his followers--the conviction that the gods do not matter since they have long ceased to bother about human affairs.

Christianity struck at the root of pagan tolerance of illusion. In claiming that there is only one true faith, it gave truth a supreme value it had not had before. It also made disbelief in the divine possible for the first time. The long-delayed consequence of Christian faith was an idolatry of truth that found its most complete expression in atheism. If we live in a world without gods, we have Christianity to thank for it.

It is beyond the purpose of this article to elaborate the ethics of rational egoism. But those who see the glaring need for a rational (i.e., non-mystical), life-serving (i.e., non-sacrificial) morality—a morality for living and achieving happiness on Earth—will find it elaborated in the works of Ayn Rand.42

Are atheists conservatives?

but it's ridiculous to consider them a homogenous group.

Quote:

but it's ridiculous to consider them a homogenous group.

Thanks Captain Obvious, that was a question not a statement.

And that's an answer, Captain Comprehension.

Dismal definition.

I love the well organised evidence to support your argument, Brainiac.