I was a law abiding atheist, just like my parents. I thought atheism was sexy.
I saw life through their eyes and agreed with them that intelligent people don’t believe in a father figure sitting on a cloud that rewards you when you’re good, and who punishes you at Christmas time and all through eternity if you’ve been bad.
Growing up, I stopped calling myself an atheist, or an agnostic, or a Buddhist, or a Christian Mystic. All of these labels fit for a time, and then i grew out of them. Presently, I just don’t like calling myself any names.
God bless my parents! I respect them for having challenged the religious ideologies and mythologies they were raised with.
I deeply appreciate people like Sam Harris, who calls himself an atheist, and also teaches meditation, and uses his inspired intelligence to serve others. I see him as a highly evolved soul.
So here are some thoughts about atheism that come to my mind, and I’d love for you to add to the list, express your disagreements with the ideas that don’t float your boat, and applaud the ones that resonate with you the most.
An atheist is someone who has the courage to reject the myths they were brought up on and realize there is no Supreme Being authority figure handing out treats to the ‘worthy’, and withdrawing treats to those who are not ‘deserving’.
An atheist is anyone who believes that all we are are these vulnerable human bodies, that fear is valid, practical and real, and that there is an opposing force in the universe that threatens to destroy or obliterate the force of love.
I also believe that no matter how spiritual or faith based you consider yourself to be, that there are moments in all of our lives where we are practicing atheism. Each time we worry for our safety, worry about a loved one, fear scarcity, believe in lack, or don’t trust that all is well… in those moments, we are all atheists.
Also, an atheist is someone who has probed deeply into questions like, “If there is a God of love, how could He let the Holocaust happen, why do children die of starvation and cancer, how come the greedy abuse power, and why would He let so many live in suffering and poverty?”
Perhaps the atheist is right on in asking these questions and rejecting the idea of a God who would allow such things.
For me, those questions eventually led me away from bitterness, and deep into spiritual practices, a lifetime of them.
I too, reject the idea of a God outside of me that lets shit happen.
And, like Eckhart Tolle suggests, the word ‘God’ is so loaded with baggage, I mostly don’t use it at all.
So maybe I’m still an atheist, if so, certainly a sexy one, but one who knows that my body is just a temporary earth spacesuit on loan, and that there is never anything to fear, that only love is real, and all is well all of the time.
Let’s let my altered-ego, my Rhyming Higher Self I label as the Spiritual Dr. Seuss, take it from here, delivering the glorious news deep into our bones through this radically uplifting performance of, “The Story of Fear and its Grand Departure!”
