For those of you who are unaware, I am an atheist. I went to church as a kid, went to Sunday school, the whole 9 yards, never really did anything for me. To quote one of my favorite authors:

I felt like Jesus was sex – or rather, I felt like I was from another world where sex did not exist and I arrived on Earth and everyone talked about how good sex felt, and showed me their pornography and built their lives around sex, and yet I was forever cut off from the true sexual experience. I did not deny that the existence of Jesus was real to these people – it was merely that I was cut off from their experience in a way that was never comfortable.” – Douglas Coupland, Life After God

I would never say I know for a fact that there is no god, I just think, based on my experiences, that its more likely that he doesn’t exist. It has nothing to do with religion or my distaste for it. Its a personal opinion the same as any other. Of course people don’t tell me I’m going to hell because I liked Sega more than NES but thats another story. I don’t think any less of people who do believe in god or are religious as long as they are rational people (god doesn’t hate gays/feminists/pagans/jews/catholics/whoever pisses off Jerry Falwell this week) and can accept my opinion as I accept theirs.

The reason I’m writing this is because on Sunday (coincidence) I was flipping channels and Joel Osteen was doing his mega church sermon. I stopped cuz usually they are all the same and good for a laugh or 2 (watching Benny Hinn knock people out is the funniest thing I have ever seen done in the name of religion). But this time I actually felt good about what he was saying. He was talking about how we need to focus on the short term if we want to accomplish something in the long term. He used the example of a swimmer who was 4 seconds slower than the Olympic gold medalist that year. He broke it down: He had 4 years to get 4 seconds faster. 1 second a year. If he trained 10 months a year, he only needed to get 1/10th of a second faster a month. He focused on each 1/10th second. By the time the next Olympics came around he ended up taking home 4 gold medals. I don’t swim but I know knocking 4 seconds of a professional athlete’s time is a big deal in any Olympic sport. And I bet if he just went with the mentality that every day he practiced he was shooting to improve by even 1 second he wouldn’t have had the same success as he did with a goal of 1/10th. By breaking it down into manageable short term goals he went above and beyond his long term goal.

And thats what I got out of the sermon. I changed the channel once he got into the whole praying and thanking god stuff. But it reminded me of what I thought sermons were suppose to be: speeches on how to improve your life, lessons to learn from and use in your day to day. If you strip the idea of god and the afterlife aways from the bible, all it is is a collection of fables. Stories with life lessons about being a better person and how to treat others. Even the most militant atheist doesn’t disagree with the whole “Thou shall not kill” part. I think anyone of any religion can agree on the basic tenants of love thy neighbor and do on to others as you would have done on to you. Every religion has their on thoughts on where it goes from there but I think they all intersect at the idea of love for one another, regardless of who created you or what you believe.

My favorite charge against being an atheist is “if everyone thought that there is no god and the is no heaven and hell they would go around killing and raping each other” and so on. What that means is that the person saying that only acts like a kind and decent person because they fear the repercussions of their behavior when they die. As much as I disagree with republicans on just about everything J.C. Watts put it best:

Character is doing the right thing when nobody’s looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that’s right is to get by, and the only thing that’s wrong is to get caught. ~J.C. Watts

I can honestly say I have never had the urge to rape or kill anyone. It’s never crossed my mind. Never been something I have been interested in. Could it be that some people are just bad people and the rest of us want nothing more than to live our lives in peace, regardless of whether we get punished or rewarded when its all over? To say that the only thing keeping people from destroying one another is fear of judgment day makes everyone kinda like the kids who act super nice and clean their rooms the 3 weeks before Christmas. If your only motivation to behave and be kind to your fellow man is the prospect of heaven or the fear of hell, can you honestly say you are a good person? Wouldn’t that make you nothing more than a suck up? Someone who just says what people want to hear to get ahead?

When I think of my religious beliefs, I think of them as freeing and eye opening. It forces me to be thankful for every day. It makes me thankful for every person. When you believe that once you die, thats it, it forces you to look at life as something with a beginning and an end. When some people are told they only have 6 months or so to live, it forces them to come to terms with their mortality. Some people in this situation use their remaining time to do all the things they always wanted to do like travel, sky dive, or finish a project they started but never finished. It makes them appreciate their family and every moment of their remaining time spent together. Death becomes a deadline for all the assignments you gave yourself. There is no more putting off the family trip to the grand canyon because you have too much work. You book the trip and go because it forces you to realize that you can get another job if you lose it but your family isn’t replaceable. I don’t think anyone should need to be given a death sentence to realize that their priorities are out of whack. When you come to terms with the idea of life being finite you can start thinking of things like money, materials, and social status in perspective. If you know it can all be over tomorrow, how concerned can you really be about keeping up with the Joneses? No one lays on their death bed and thinks “If I only had a nicer car…”.

There was an episode of Wife Swap or one of those shows where a devout evangelical christian and an atheist switch families. The most interesting part was watching the evangelical wife go to a discussion group of atheists and ask questions about what they believed. Maybe because it is still pretty taboo to announce being an atheist even in the secular society we live in, but to listen to her honestly question whether people, who were just like her besides their faith, felt things like murder, rape, child molestation and so on were wrong. I don’t think anything less of the woman for asking, in fact I thought it was great that she did because she seemed to honestly listen and think about their views. I think you could fill in atheist and evangelical with 2 other religions and it would have been the same show. It seems people would rather guess and assume what other people are thinking rather than engage them in an honest discussion and try and rectify your understand. (see Obama’s speech on race) .

The fact of the matter is, speaking for myself, I don’t think atheists view the world all that different that people with religious beliefs. I may think the concept of not eating meat on Fridays or growing the hair on your temples out are out dated and weird just as anyone who as ever watched me get excited/pissed while watching a sox/pats/celts game might think im off my rocker for caring about a sports team that much. Everyone has a different idea of what’s reasonable and what not. No 2 atheists agree on what it means to be an atheist just as no 2 people of any religion will 100% agree on how to practice their religion. I think if people openly talked about their beliefs more without taking offense to those who dissent we would find that there many more similarities between us all than the differences that created all the different religions and denominations. I hate to end on a cliché but seriously, we all bleed red. We are all humans. Stop trying to think of how you can be unique and start thinking about how you can embrace all of our similarities.