Note To The Faithful

Having lost friends over my current position on religion, I feel the need to clarify it and express it clearly. Many of you on my friend list are devout worshippers of some kind or another and, even though this won't be a giant news flash to anyone who's been paying much attention, I do want to get it quite out in the open.

I am an atheist in the sense Richard Dawkins means when he says that term. To this extent, I am not saying I know for an indisputable and certain fact that there is no god or gods, just that I very much doubt it for a variety of good reasons. You might say that makes me an agnostic, but what use is that term when I'm equally agnostic about Thor, Zeus, The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Gandalf the White, the Bajoran prophets, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Your typical Christian is not agnostic in relation to these gods and are, in fact, atheists regarding them. So you can consider me wrong when I call myself an atheist and more properly refer to me as an agnostic if it makes you feel better, but honestly what's the difference past a certain point of nitpicking?

Dawkins, who I have been studying and finding myself agreeing with, seems to argue against religion primarily becuase it demands belief with lack of evidence. For instance, compare science's insistance upon keeping everything a theory, including tetonic plates, gravity, the spherical nature of the Earth, and so on no matter how well they prove them to religion's insistance on everything it says about the world being unquestionably factual even after disproven rather conclusively or, in many cases, the religion in question just changes its mind about the rules. My concurance with Dawkins on these points certainly reinforces my position but does not form its core.

Fundamentally, I am unable to worship or believe in a God who denies me my individual liberty. The Christian God in particular does this constantly. Constantly throughout years of church and association with Christian friends being told to subvert my will to God's will. You know what? No. If God did not want me to have my will, why in the heck did he give it to me, and if he didn't give it to me, who outdid his omnipotence, and if it was Adam and Eve and the serpent's apple, what in that equation was more powerful than God? If you're omnipotent, you either are omnipotent or you aren't and if you leave apples that can nullify your omnipotence lying around and then act surprised when it gets nullified, especially with the influence of a serpent whom, by definition of being the creator of everything ever, you had to create yourself, you're pretty irresponsible and irrational. So Dawkins is right, I think, the more general question, but if you want to know why I rejected the Abrahamic God, then look no further than this. I will determine my own destiny and I won't believe that my ability to do so is supposed to only exist because an omnipotent perfect being got overpowered and planned imperfectly.

-Frank