I Am An Atheist

To the god-believers in the house:

Being an atheist simply means a lack of belief in deities and the supernatural - nothing more, nothing less.  I was born an atheist (as we all are), and after a brief period of belief as a child I shed what I felt was an unneccessary and hypocritical dogma for a life of intellectual honesty. 

I did not come to this conclusion lightly, or painlessly.  I soul-searched, I studied, I researched.  I even practiced Buddhism for awhile.  It's not always easy to be honest, even with yourself, but in the end there was only one possibility:  All of it, aside from some city names, is pure unabashed bullshit.

Let me make a few things clear before I go on...

1) I am not angry at your god.  Gods are an invention of the imaginative human mind, they are not real. It would be a waste of perfectly good energy to be pissed off at a fictional character, including gods.  I'm not upset with Santa or the Tooth Fairy either (although the Tooth Fairy never made good on that last I.O.U - that's my mom for ya).

2) I do not worship an evil deity.   An atheist, by definition, does not believe in any gods and this includes the naughty ones (they're fictional too, btw).

3) I did not reject religion so I could be immoral.  Quite the contrary actually.  One of the reasons (there were many) that I left my Christian beliefs behind was because of the profound immorality it espouses, from both its' ancient writings to its' modern practices.   I subsequently explored a few religions - like Buddhism - that walk a much higher moral ground than the religion of my youth.  Although I do not practice any religion today, I learned more about peace and love from Buddha than I ever did from Jesus.

Religion is one thing, gods are another, and in the end there was only ONE reason I stopped believing in them.

There aren't any.  There is no evidence supporting the notion that any all-powerful entities, invisible or otherwise, exist (none, nada, zilch).  And by "evidence", I mean real evidence - not "flowers are so pretty there must be a god" evidence.  The natural world reveals and explains itself without the need for divine intervention.  To answer "God did it" when we don't know how something works is intellectually lazy and dishonest. 

The ancient Greeks didn't understand how planets revolved around the sun so they invented Zeus with his horse-drawn chariot, charging across the sky with our star in tow.  Seems ridiculous, right?  Except there is no fundamental difference between the beliefs of those ancient people and the beliefs of modern day theists, only the names have changed. 

Humans are a relatively new species in the grand scheme of things and it seems to me that our abilities have out-paced our maturity - much like adolescents.  We are developed enough to do grown-up things, but do not yet possess the experience or judgement to shed our childish thinking.  We are the careless, reckless, self-centered children of the Universe who believe everything revolves around us, and when we find trouble we cry to Daddy to make it all better instead of taking responsibility for ourselves.

The growing pains of humanity are the death throes of religion.  And it's time to grow up people.  It's time for humanity to embrace our natural world for what it is - natural. And to care for it, and ourselves, like it's the only thing we have.   It's time to shed our childish fantasy that magical beings will save us from ourselves.  Our lives and our world depend on it.