“I don’t believe in atheists,” a friend
recently told me.
I asked her to clarify. The charge, in essence, was overcompensation.
Like that guy with the muscle-car who feels the need to stress at all times how
very very straight he is, what is she supposed to make of people who spend a lot of time and energy shouting about
something they claim not to believe in. Consequently, she seemed to say, they
must give the concept greater credence than they claim.
And…I tend to
agree with her.
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Never
mind that this also true of those religious persons who feel the need to stress
how their god can kick the ass (or lack of such) of my god (or lack of such).
I think if someone is convinced and comfortable with their position they can
fight its corner in an adult and eloquent way, and probably don’t need to shout
and rant. There is a big difference between principled and determined
opposition, and pouty contrarianism.
And,
yet – I’d probably still call myself an atheist. I think the issue is in the
name – it’s still got connotations derived from its previous status as an
insult, as well as being a philosophical position as being a cultural movement.
As far as I’m concerned, despite the etymology of the name, it isn’t just a
exception taken to a temporally and culturally narrow idea of the divine but a
‘positive’, active outlook that has its own things to say about the world and
the people in it. I made reference in an
earlier post to a quote, probably apocryphal, popularly attributed to Laplace: “I had no
need of that hypothesis”. This is the sense in which I meant ‘positive’ a few
sentences ago; the perspective I’m referring to when I describe myself as an
atheist is a hypothesis with its own postulates, not merely a rejection of
somebody else’s metaphysical position.
Some
have tried to emphasise this ‘positive’ aspect and de-emphasise the anti- element. The ‘Brights’ is one such example – a Bright is a person who ‘has a naturalistic worldview’
and whose outlook is ‘free of supernatural and mystical elements’. The
originator of the term apparently modelled the term on the appropriation by homosexuals of the word ‘gay’, in
the sense of looking for a word with positive connotations. However, it doesn’t
work for me – I can’t see myself being comfortable describing myself as a
‘bright’ without it seeming to be implicit – whatever the intention of the term
– without that those that disagree with me are rather ‘dim’. It’s the result
rather than the intention I have an issue with here though, so maybe there are
better labels out there – suggestion on the back of a postcard, please.
So, for
now I still think ‘atheist’ best describes the broad elements that make up my
idea of the world and how I fit into it. In fact, it strikes me that the hastily
invented tagline to this blog serves as a decent summary of both the position I
feel most affinity for, while retaining the right to my idiosyncratic caveats.
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