If any of you know Bill Maher, he's an outspoken atheist who actually did a movie about it in 2008 - Religulous. He's not quite Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, but he's close.
Anyways, his beef this week was people who call atheism "just another religion". He and I take offence.
"Just another religion" is like that long-standing debating rebuttal "I know you are but what am I?". It involves no thinking at all. Which is the problem.
Atheism (I'd prefer to call it non-theism) isn't equivalent to religion at all.
Religion is a belief in something you can't see, and can't prove. Atheism is believing only what you can prove, and in the absence of such proof, we prefer to say "I don't know". Our opinions are subject to change as new evidence is produced.
As Bill said in his commentary, if Jesus came down from heaven during the SuperBowl and changed everyone's beer into loaves of bread and fish, he'd believe in him. So would I. but the chances of that happening are zero. Not "almost zero". Zero.
Wanna bet?
1 comment:
There's religion, and then there's faith........I don't get the religion part, in fact it annoys me most of the time...but faith.....I don't know.....I'm just forever hopeful......wishy, washy I guess, but I just can't call myself an Atheist.
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