(**) A great many atheists find the notions so far presented for the term "God" to be vacuous or nonsensical or incomprehensible or all of the above. As a consequence, they cannot have any belief for or against it. This is quite distinct from fence-sitting, on the one hand, and agnosticism on the other.

17 September 2002: I have just reviewed NPR's audio archive of the actual broadcast from Winifred Gallagher, and it's even more inflamatory than I had remembered it when I penned that letter to NPR. Along the way, it also claims for religion the role historically played by that countercurrent that started off within religion and broke off from it as religion rejected it, namely secular humanism, that emphasis on what is important in the real world in the hands of real people.

The education continues. Contrary to the claims of ideologues like Jed Smock, atheists do not worship money. Worshipping money involves elevating money to the status of a god, and atheists do not have beliefs in any gods.

"Don't be sacrilegious," a friend told me recently. But every breath I take, every slightest wiggle of my finger is a sacrilege against some religion somewhere. So I am utterly unable to comply with this request. Further suggestions, requests, or demands that I only avoid the sacrileges of The True Religion will be ignored, since every religion claims to be The True Religion.

No, Atheism is not a religion. Religion is the binding into place (in Latin: religer) of the mind to a set of fixed beliefs. Atheism is just characterized by the lack of a category of beliefs; there's no way you can conclude anything about what an atheist actually believes based on their atheism. So atheism doesn't have the characteristic required for a religion.

Theism, atheism, agnosticism. I repeatedly hear from folks, mostly quoting dictionaries written by Anglicans and Evangelicals, who claim that I've got the meaning of "atheism" all wrong, and "atheism" really means (in their view) militant resistance of Jesus. They're certainly free to play that game, much as lawyers may try to insist that oral sex is not sex, etc. but that's really a waste of time. The words are quite simple and easy to follow.

1. Theism is the belief in a god or gods, and a theist is a person who believes in at least one god.
2. Atheism is the lack of theism, and an atheist is anybody who does not believe in at least one god.
3. Agnosticism is the stance that a god or gods, however firmly believed in, is/are unknowable. This is the meaning of the word which Huxley gave when he coined it. The majority of agnostics today are theists.

A little bit about this document and arguments. I do not consider this document to contain any arguments--merely statements of readily observable facts. Please see this document for more on what constitutes an argument--and what does not.

"Thank God for getting my friend through her transplant!" This gem, with minor variations, appears quite regularly. It must be a rather weak or un-ethical god then; a powerful and good god would have prevented the friend from needing a transplant. "Oh, but the experience was needed for my friend to learn a lesson." Oh, malarky--nothing valueable is learned by having the teacher beat the student senseless. This sort of thinking just reinforces bad parenting and bad teaching practices. Usually the people who say this sort of thing are against corporal punishment but don't see the irony in that.

"I'm glad there's a god, so when I die, I'll be performing in J. S. Bach's orchestra." This is a real quote from my in-box. I am appalled by it. The person uttering it was a musical amateur who feels she deserves a place in an imagined ensemble led by a particular composer of the past. When he lived, J.S. Bach never worked with a musical ensemble larger than about 25 players--all of them excellent. The author of this statement in my inbox is so excited about a composer who died 200 years before she was born, and the imaginary prospect of meeting him after she dies, that she barely notices composers who are living right here and now in the real world. This is a very sad demonstration of how religious beliefs cause people to focus on death---to do absolutely anything BUT pursue their highest ideals right here and now. What's the point in pursuing ideals now, when the imagined "golden age" of the past will be reunited with them in the future? And so they carry on promoting mediocrity and suffering in real life, in hopes of a post-life reward.
     It's remarkably difficult to get such people to appreciate real efforts by living people to make real life better. Afterlife doctrine says that only people who believe in an afterlife do good, and only for a reward in the afterlife--a bribe--and to avoid a punishment in the afterlife--extortion. The extortion/bribe pair of afterlife doctrine can be used to induce people to do just about anything, good or bad, including deliberately crashing an airplane into a skyscraper. Afterlife doctrine infantilizes adults and deprives them of their rightful dignity. Dignified adults do good here and now because it is the right thing to do, because it contributes to the wellness of civilization in the here and now. Dignified adults don't need the threat of eternal spanking to do good.

"You don't know everything!" This refrain has been yelled at me repeatedly by a detractor ever since I mentioned that forcing children to recite "One nation under God" in the U.S.A. public schools is a blatant violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States of America. Let's review the logic of this argument: I don't know everything (of course not); therefore God exists and the Constitution doesn't...? This is an argument from ignorance. By the same method we can "prove" that Zeus exists, Allah exists, Amaterasu no omiKami exists, invisible pink unicorns exist, gremlins that cause disease exist, Sherlock Holmes exists, Santa Claus exists, The Tooth Fairy exists, etc.: there is not enough information to rule out their existence somewhere in the universe. Most ordinary people agree that it is reasonable to not believe in the existence of at least one of these characters. Why? Because the real question is why we should believe in them. In addition to a shortage of evidence for their non-existence, there's a real shortage of evidence for their existence.
    And then: this god is supposed to be king of the nation which was founded by deists as an innovative non-monarchical democratic republic? And thus the rule of law is invalid when it limits the power of a religious majority to coerce others? The overrunning of rule of law by sovereignty of ideological figureheads has occurred in other nations--some living people will recall this happening spectacularly in 1938 in Germany and in 1979 in Iran. Isn't it time for us to learn lessons from these events?
    When somebody tells me I should believe in one of these supernatural characters--God, Allah, Jehovah, Amaterasu, Athena, etc.--I am perfectly justified in pointing out that no matter how open my heart is to them, I need evidence of their existence. Most people agree with this approach for all such beliefs except for belief in the particular god of their religion. Atheists just don't make any exceptions.
    My detractor insists that the U.S.A. is a Christian nation, founded by Christians for Christians. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, generations of Adams's, Madison, Monroe, Jackson, etc...--a sizable portion of the founders of the nation including the first six presidents were vocal deists, who say God is the universe, and God's word is the universe, and books like the Bible are just human creations which confuse people. The founders wrote the First Amendment as part of a system of checks and balances for a nation governed by law, embracing its Puritans, Deists, Catholics, and many other peoples. They deliberately established not just a democracy but a counterbalancing republic--a system under which intense lobbying for the votes of 51% of the public does not guarantee a prospective dictator the ability to wipe out all prior law and seize power. The constitution, with the First Amendment, is a powerful system for preventing the kinds of abuses the founders knew of elsewhere in Europe, in which a simple majority of the people could arbitrarily criminalize a minority for having different beliefs or different ethnic origins. If some politician somewhere convinces 51% of America that no matter what you do you and everybody like you should be killed or penalized, our legal system says that's wrong, and our court system is obligated to turn back that law. If some politician somewhere succeeds in convincing 51% of Americans that a particular religious belief is correct and must be imposed upon all citizens, our legal system says that's wrong, and our court system is obligated to turn back that law. This, more than the prominence of religious pieties among our politicians, is the strength of our system: it is a system of, by, and for all our people, not just 51%. This is what distinguishes it from Bolshevik systems, including modern China. This is what distinguishes it from theocracies, like those of latter-day Europe or the modern Middle East. This is an important component of why the USA is a superpower in the world today: the limits we put on government coercion enable us to act as one, with an unprecedentedly low level of internal dissent.
    Consider government coercion of religion in the form of the "under God" clause and the "In God We Trust" motto. What does that say about the credibility of those beliefs? Do we need to stamp our money with the phrase "Air is lighter than water"? Or what about the phrase "If you are reading this right now, you exist"? As political commentators the world over, for millenia, have observed: any time the force of might is used to reinforce a belief, this is a strong indication that the belief is not obvious, is not observable, is not grounded in the natural world. Belief that "Humans need food" and "humans can work together" do not require an advertising campaign to reach human consciousness the way such beliefs as "Coke Adds Life" do. If "under God" is a notion so worthy of our belief, why should it need a public advertising campaign-- pitched at little children, at making little children repeat it daily? Shouldn't it be able to stand on its own as a credible concept without such propaganda?
    We Americans are at a crossroads where we can return to our roots as a pluralistic society with rule of law ensuring our liberty. Or we can regiment ourselves further and further into a theocracy, and watch our society fragment into a religious coalition of 51%, vs. everybody else. Examples of what that's like can be seen in the world today: peoples perpetually at civil war, with little or no freedom. Is that what we wish to become? I, and people of many minority religious views, heartily dissent with that vision of our future!

Other "Gods". Occasionally, I hear utter atheists deny their atheism by invoking the "God of Spinoza", the "God of Nature", or even the "God of Einstein and Hawking."
    One such confused writer even opined that "science itself can at best describe and predict phenomena, but does not address or even care about why there is any such thing as phenomena in the first place", and: "The rejection of the concept of the Nietschean ubermensch, who is free to do whatever he pleases so long as he can get away with it, necessarily involves the belief in some sort of transcendent order, even though such order may be relative and innate instead of absolute and imposed from without."
     Dude! Get with astrophysics, which is continuously rolling back the bounds of the knowable and the explainable at exactly the "why is there a universe" level. And get with anthropology and biology, which at least since the early work of Jane Goodall has been showing that the ethical impulse is not at all inscrutable but is built into us from the genes and earliest cultural teachings on up, the result of the natural filter of survival. Your ignorance of these fields is not an argument.
    The basic argument of theism through vague transcendentalism or philosophical incredulity about reality is an equivocation fallacy. A god is, at the very least, always a supernatural animate being with thinking and action processes analogous to an especially powerful person. If you don't believe in such a person, you're an atheist. Deal with it. If, at the same time, you wish to align with others who support doing good in the world, guess what--not only are you an atheist, but you're a humanist.

Ten Commandments movements have been springing up again around the country, demanding to post religious doctrines on and in government buildings. Why not post the Ten Original Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, the Bill of Rights of which we are so proud, instead?

A potpourri of interesting quotes related to this topic.

Related link:
"I was an Atheist in a Foxhole", Copyr. 1989 Philip K Paulson, a Vietnam War recollection.

Related link:
"Why I Deny Religion, How Silly and Fantastic It Is, and Why I'm a Dedicated and Vociferous Bright", Copyr. 25 July 2003 James Randi.

I have not found a primary source for the following quote:

The cliche "No atheists in foxholes" comes from the same source as the cliches "Nigger-rigged", "Gerry-rigged", "Jew down the price", "Jews killed Jesus", "Stupid women drivers", and "stupid Pollack". It's time for it to be discarded as the ugly lie that it is.