I believe that being an atheist defines an important facet of my existence. Atheism is not just a concept that sounds good on your orkut profile. It's a system of belief that if you've put in enough effort thinking about, is an extremely bold step to take. God, no offense to any of you believers out there, is a safety net. So is destiny. Atheism does not give you that luxury.
God, as Ayn Rand puts it in 'Atlas Shrugged' is a perfect being that man cannot be. Her position is that without God it is up to man alone to pursue his own happiness and create his own values. That on any day is a difficult thing to do because it's like opening Pandora's box. Everything that you have implicitly taken to be right can now be questioned. And that is What i believe defines the source of atheism - To question instead of implicit judgement based on past conditioning.
I did not just wake up one day and said,'I've tried believing in God.Lets see what the other side is like!'. I had no issues believing in God when i explored the concept of atheism. That is what i believe gives me the credentials to ask any believer to try this out. Just imagine for a second that God does not exist. And by God i am referring to a conscious all-powerful being. I am not even talking about an ever-monitoring God that dictates terms because the premise of that falls flat when you consider that God is a supreme being. Should a supreme being be subject to the trivial vagaries of human nature?
So if there isn't an extremely powerful being with a conscious, what we are left with is pure energy. Something that we know exists and something we know can be directed in certain manners. For certain laws to exist without explanation does not require the existence of God. For prehistoric man, fire was an act of God. Today we accept and dismiss it as a physical phenomenon. Science seems to be at loggerheads with theology. But science is just the understanding of laws that theology accepts and yet does not strive to unravel.
In my experience, some practices like Reiki work and i have come across people with the ability to see the past,present and the future,most notably, my own father. There isn't an exact scientific explanation for a lot of these and yet they work. That, as i mentioned before, does not prove anything or disprove anything. It merely indicated that there are ways to manipulate the unconscious energy within certain boundaries.
Lets look at the world from a tinted glass of an atheist for a moment now. Our universe came into existence with the big-bang which spewed out a seemingly infinite array of things. That gives you seemingly infinite ways in which things can combine. Is it strange to expect life to arise from one of these insanely large number of combinations? Life on earth was gradual and we have proof of that beyond doubt. There were prophets and messiahs and a number of religions in the history of man. We can believe religious writings and accept that God, sometime in the past was there on earth. Or we can look at the fact that irrespective of anything written, there hasn't been a single event or sign that proved the existence of God without doubt during our lifetimes or during that of those we can accept beyond reasonable doubt.
If you are with me so far, look at the world around you forgetting the fact that God ever existed. It's a complex maze that looks so intricate in it's design and yet could've just arisen out of pure chaos. Look at everything you've ever done and seen and you'll see that at every juncture you've made a decision that has defined you and the decisions you will make in the future and everything that has happened to you is a combination of that and the conditioning of people you've come in contact with.
Chaos too has a precision of it's own which is often mistaken as destiny. The reason why lightening strikes a particular tree can be because lightening had to strike something and the tree on that fateful day was something. Or if you look at it in a way that gives someone control, it was the tree's destiny. Out of the million outcomes that can come out of a random experiment, the one that does come out seems to have a purpose magnified by the enormity of the sample set. The catch is that we forget that there has to be one outcome that come out.
And the best thing about atheism is that it's not a religion. So i am not bound by what others accept on this matter. My views are my own and a work in progress. I have the freedom to question myself at every juncture and when i disagree with those at any point, i have the freedom to change that and grow.
That is my take on atheism.....
