Why Atheism Is Active, Constructive, and Acceptable to the Religious Fundamentalist

Lordy...Babacaman's been overthinking things again. Still, I'd like to present, without apologies, a little nugget of personal philosophy which has recently calmed Babacaman's aching, overworked brain and make him a bolder, better Babacaman!

Babacaman accepts that some Atheists may object to their beliefs being defined in the way that his own Atheism is defined here, and that some Fundamentalists may be really angry with him because he thinks he's better than them. Babacaman doesn't care.

Haw-hem!

How do we - can we ever? - define 'sanity'?  The dictionary definitions are vague ('the state of having a normal, healthy mind').  Most people would accept that the ability to comprehend, process, understand and cope with the facts of life as they are presented is a solid beginning to a definition. Because there are facts of life, such as:

That we are all born through a coupling of two forces and we all die alone. 

That there is no certain way of being able to predict the course a life will take and when it will end. 

That there is no certain way of distinguishing a shaping pattern to individual lives, although there are ways of ascertaining what actions people are likely to perform under certain conditions and hence how the masses are likely to behave, since we generally operate under the same self-preservation/reproduction principles of all other species, 

That we are self-aware, and that this fact causes us suffering. 

That it is desirable to have this anomaly explained to us, made sense of. 

That all 'proof' of the existence of a God, or Gods, and of the prospects waiting for us in the 'afterlife', is based on the writings and teachings of people, people with the same potential and limits as the rest of us.  People who could have as existed at any point of the spectrum - there may be a better word - of sanity.

And that, as we have all learned from our childhood fear of darkness if nothing else, imagination will always fill in the gaps we cannot see (meant in the sense of the full sensory experience.)

Being as close, in our self-awareness, to ourselves as is possible; being in tune with what we are and what we know about life and the limits of our powers of perception; this, I contend, is sanity.  And as an extension to this definition, the ability to be the masters of our own imagination, which is a tool no one should misuse or wield as a weapon against others.  To use it for our own ends of contentment and enlightenment, so that we might be better connected with the rest of our species.

I am worried that a significant number of us are far from the centre of ourselves and have been possessed by the power of our imaginations.  I am worried that many of these people have positions of authority and/or significant designs to push for a world consisting of nothing but believers - or destroy humanity trying.

I do not hold with, will not live by, the teachings of any religion.  I am an Atheist.  I believe in the non-existence of God, or Gods.  I am an Atheist because I follow the facts of life as they are presented - by our awareness, and it is a possibility that mine is more limited than others, but we can only work with the tools we've got at the time - to us.  I believe Atheism is sanity.

It is sanity because it can be presented in a way that even the most religious, and therefore those as far from Atheism as it is possible to be, belief-wise, cannot discount. 

If God exists, - and I believe not - it is omnipotent, it's power is limitless.  The most religious amongst us, no matter what faith they prescribe to, have to admit that any God that is not omnipotent is not worth the imagination/faith it is inscribed upon.  This omnipotent God would therefore have the power to make people certain that it doesn't exist.  The power to make the existence of God necessary for some, unnecessary for others.  The power, indeed, to both exist and not exist at once.

The Atheist is the Religious Fundamentalist's best friend.  Both can happily agree that you cannot impose limits on omnipotence. They come at this from different angles - the Fundamentalist asserts that the God he believes in the existence of is, by nature, all-powerful. The Atheist refutes that there is neither the evidence or the necessity in nature for such a being; that such a being exists only in human imagination like any other supernatural being we are able to imagine; but that this particular being, by definition, would have to be omnipotent, much as a 'ghost' would have to exist in some hypothetical dimension outside of the dimension of life which we inhabit.

Both the Atheist and the Fundamentalist lives life without fear...or at least tries to.  Neither Atheism nor Fundamentalism preclude fear, although a strong-minded proponent of either should be able to limit and control that fear to near-zero, with different motivations and for different ends - the first for his/her species, the second for his/her 'God'. 

I hope I have so far succeeded to present both Atheism and Religious Fundamentalism to be both strong and compatible forms of belief. Although neither is immune from fear, and they both follow very different motivations, both beliefs are at the very least compatible with the act of living life like it has some purpose, which few argue is inferior to the alternative. And both are ridiculously dogmatic.

However, I would like to argue for the superiority of Atheism over Fundamentalism.

An Atheist, as a highly-evolved animal, fears one thing: the actions of other people, people who are decentred, who are insane.  Who might, for example, want to kill them because they believe there is a spiritual - or otherwise - justification for their deaths. A Fundamentalist fears one thing too: the consequences of their actions on their supposedly individually-eternal souls, acted out by their God, or Gods.  They allow their imaginations to fill in the gaps in their incomplete knowledge of what those consequences might be.  And they believe that certain actions humans perform are direct commands/interventions from "God" itself, or themselves (at the very least their God must have worked through human agency to produce the scriptures.) Now, whether or not they believe that their actions are ever directly manipulated by their God, or Gods, all Fundamentalists believe not only that other people have worked as "God's'' agent - hence there is a possibility that they could "be chosen" too -- but that the "correct" actions of their life are prescribed by that God and that by choosing to follow their prescribed paths in this life they are gaining some reward in the next one. By not taking responsibility for their own actions they show themselves to be at odds with themselves. 

They are therefore insane.  I am not suggesting that a belief in the existence of God, or Gods, proves you are insane, but that believing this God, or Gods, directs your actions, or the fear of God, or Gods, is a greater motivation for your actions than love and respect for your fellow humans, does.

The Atheist and the Fundamentalist may be best friends, but the Atheist is the better.  An Atheist's ability to both fear that which is truly, for the sake of the survival of the species, to be feared and to control that fear through the strength of his or her own individuality and respect for the individual lives of others, rather than through a submission of self to an unknowable force, makes the Atheist the One to the Fundamentalist's Zero.  It is possible that both are necessary and natural forces. But humanity needs more ones.

Without the fear of the unknown centre to plague him/her, the Atheist is the friend of all humanity - provided s/he can keep imagination under his/her control.  An Atheist must never take sanity for granted. Nihilism, belief in nothing, is another form of insanity as it chooses to ignore the clear evidence available to us that human development has taken us on a journey to higher states of awareness and that the act of being human therefore has a purpose we can believe in. A belief in the non-existence of God, or Gods, is a belief in humanity's primacy, born of the understanding that by dispensing with the need for belief in a higher power we are better able to focus our growing awareness on the responsibilities humanity has and may yet have.

An Atheist's only concern should be with the development of humanity to a stage where each and every living individual lives under the conditions that allow him or her to be centred, to live without manipulation and prejudice and be allowed to fully explore the potential of true collective conciousnessness, of which s/he is a unique encapsulation of.

A final thought: those fundamental believers in an omnipotent God, or Gods, know that their understanding of such a concept is incomplete, so use the tool of Faith (AKA 'imagination') to smooth over this gap.  To quote one often-used utterance of a particular faith, they are content with the idea that 'God moves in mysterious ways'.

What could be more mysterious than encouraging its creation not to believe in it?

Reporting the Sad Death of Jim Junior

Well, people, it finally happened. My adventures are over. The ego has landed.

I'm dead.

Or, at least, reports would have you believe. Here is my favourite, translated from the original article in the third-most popular state-run rag, Ministracao de Minas.

"British Diplomat Jim 'Mewang' Junior, AKA, 'Little' Jimmy Wang, AKA locally as Jiminho, is dead. He died in the Brazilian city of Beagast of psychic exhaustion while attempting to drill his way through the doors of a local dentist's domestic residence, where the sons and daughters of local dignitaries were dining, on the 20th August, 2009. Although there have been numerous reports of foul play and even international psychic conspiracy involved in his death (as well as rumours of hints of unconfirmed reports of heightened military security that day around the surrounding area, surrounding the identity of the mystery guest scheduled to address the assembled diners as an after-dinner speaker) the verdict of the local coroner, Mano Wancomonki, was of a natural death, a result of the subject's over-avid imagination leading to complete, irreversible, cerebral meltdown.

Thiago Turbando, the Chief of the Civil Police, confirmed civilly, if not cordially, that the spinal cord had been conveying communications of conspiracy to the cerebral cortex at the centre of the subject's spinning vortex at the exact moment of death. He continued conspiratorially that he couldn't completely dismiss concerns of conspiracy connected to the subject being bound to uncover the coordinates of a retired tyrant but that he was bound to add that addled minds handled binds badly, and that the subject's object of enquiry had been objected to but never prevented by a local coterie of mining interests 'whose interests in laying the case to rest were as deep as mine.'

Reports of a man fitting the exact physical description of the subject except for 'a kind of renewed spark in his eyes' leaving the scene of the death moments later were being dismissed by top-ranking officials as 'the gayest kind of fake-ass analysis this side of Serra Bundagrande' (a reference to the local mountain range, widely-supposed depository for a batch of clinically-rejected anal suppositories, which separate the state of Minas Demais with the neighbouring state of Santa Paula.) "

In truth, reports of my death have not been greatly exaggerated. I am not the person I was.

I will never again think, talk, act or walk like the lowly Junior Minister I was before my rise from the catacombs of all-corrupting power-hunger allowed me to achieve my new-found state of primacy - inheriting some prime reality-estate, if you will! - although I will continue to use the addendum of 'Junior' after my new ID as a mark of my concurrent collaboration with the musical combo of the same name.

Something was lost to the world forever on that fateful late-afternoon, but it more a pop of the cherry than the cork. Not that corks, champagne corks, were not popped, metaphorically, by myself.

Because I had something to celebrate that day.

My awakening; no more, no less, no nonsense.
The death of the inner dunce, the idiots' dance deftly ended. (Take a bow-legged bow!)
The child's cries falling on deaf ears as the earth gave birth to a man.
A newborn soldier, dwarfed but not cowed by the calves of the giants he has just swung off the shoulders of.
Born of the Babaca: sexless, ageless, cross-eyed creator of Chaos and little else of worth.
A man for the moment. Not simply a man, nor a woman, but something more than human.

A Babacaman. Dismissing his creator and shedding his before-skin.

It's just me from now on.

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