Atheist has somehow managed, in certain circles, to become a dirty word. In fact, in situations where I suspect I may be amongst believers I prefer to keep the term non-believer in my back pocket in case somebody should ever ask me where my spiritual allegiances lie. Not that this happens all too often, but on occasions in the past where it was sprung on me all of a sudden I was finding it difficult to call myself an atheist withour following it up with, “But I’m not against other people believing in whatever they want . . . “.
There have certainly been more publications and prominent voices in recent years willing to challenge the notion that personal and religious belief should not be called into question. Voices such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins ask people to consider that religion can actually be harmful and should be challenged when possible. The atheist conversation dubbed The Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on youtube and the genre of New Atheism sees books in this field sell consistently well.
There are those that would have you believe there is a growing army of militant atheists, not content with living their own meaningless existences, but devoted to destroying religion for everyone else, everywhere. The extremist voices on the topic seem to generate the most headlines, just as they do in religious communities.
Your evangelical Christians like the delightful folk from the Westboro Baptist Church in America do not appear to represent the views of the Christians that I know, or indeed the views I held when I would have called myself a Christian. That’s not to say my Church did not condemn homosexuality and other types of behaviour, I guess they just didn’t condemn it quite as much or persecute people to this extreme. The only thing I respect about these people is their ability to quote Bible passages to back up their crappy behaviour; most Christians from my childhood cherry picked a handful of Bible quotations they liked to remember but didn’t delve much deeper.
Your evangelical atheists are somewhat similar in my eyes as someone who fits into the same category. The people who hold Richard Dawkins or Charles Darwin in such high esteem it’s tantamount to worship. I might enjoy reading the same books and watching the same documentaries on religion as the militant crew but I found it to be a problem when I was reading or watching too much on the same topic.
I tended to get more than a little angry about the existence of religion and it’s intrusion into my family in even the smallest of ways. When religion and it’s downsides became the most important thing in my thinking I could see it everywhere and I would feel angry a lot of the time and desperate for the world around me to change. A part of me wanted to fit in and do what I was brought up to belive was right, and another part of me wanted to tell everyone spouting this crap that they were wrong. Look at the evidence! Think about what we’re all saying and doing here!
The main problem is that living life feeling pissed off most of the time is just not a fun way to exist. If a person is unable to shift their opinions on religion one way or the other, is it ever worth choosing to feel angry all of the time about anything? Maybe if the Westboro Baptist people took just a few days off to mentally relax and just do something fun for the hell of it without thinking about The Lord they might not be so completely consumed by saving their own souls and condemning others.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy a good atheist/believer debate and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins will always be close to my heart as a book I really needed to read at the time I came across it. My vote will always go towards secular policies and I would like to see the influence and grip that religion has on most societies around the world greatly reduced.
Does that mean I’m trying to deconvert people? Nope. Believe what you want but don’t discriminate against others or set up any aspect of the state that would put pressure on peoople to choose to miss out on access to services if they don’t believe (i.e. weddings/faith schools/political parties etc.).
So I’m pasasionately atheist and in many ways I am absolutely anti-religion. So, considering the fact I know religion is not going to disappear from my society in my lifetime, no matter what I do, and as an atheist I think this life is all I have, how can I justify spending all my time alive sulking about it?
I remebered something that happened several years ago on a night out with some University friends in Manchester. Back in those days I was a chain smoker and for many reasons I wasn’t planning to quit any time soon (primarily I believed, and still do, that smoking had helped me control my tendency to abuse alcohol and at least I knew I would end up safely in my own bed at night). I was unconcerned about the health implications because I figured I’d just quit when I was older and I enjoyed the social side of it. When the ban on smoking indoors was introduced in the UK it had the surprisingly pleasent effect of creating smoking areas just outside every pub and bar.
Smoking areas were a place to get away from the music and actually talk to another human being. It felt cool to be there, with all the other cool peoole who were unconcerned with health statistics and wasting money. On this particualr night out I had gone outside to smoke with a close friend and one of her friends from back home, with a particularly judgemental and outspoken personality, joined us and spent the entire time telling me how bad smoking was for me. Did you know it’s bad for your health? Non smokers tend to absolutley hate the smell and they can smell it instantly on someone’s clothes or breath. Cigarettes are expensive! Why would you spend so much? It causes cancer you know. It’s really addictive and the sooner you quit, the better.
As a non-smoker these days I actually agree with all this, and I feel much healthier and wheeze a lot less during exercise than I used to. But, funnily enough her speech was not the thing that made me change. The fact is I already knew all of this when this girl gave her unsolicited advice and I had my own reasons why I wanted to continue smoking anyway. If anything, I mentally flipped her the finger and decided I would never be as boring and sactimonious as that. She may have had good intentions but people using that technique of lecturing others about things they already know and chose to ignore rarely win people round in a conversation.
I thought of that girl when I started getting the urge to point out how silly it was for a friend to baptise their child or when I wanted to point out moral issues I have with the story of the ten plagues to an enthusiactic Church playgroup volunteer. I was conflicted all the time about being preachy versus feeling like I should be honest with what I really thought. Constantly biting your tongue can leave you feeling like you want to scream.
I think I’m on a better path now. I’ve been trying for a while now to find more positive ways to engage with Atheism. I don’t want to switch off from caring but I don’t want to transfer my feelings on religion onto every individual I come across who has had different experiences to my own.
Postitve ways to engage with Atheism
1) Help others in your community just because, well, it’s nice to. And be honest about your lack of faith if it ever crops up in conversation. One of the most important ideas we have to challenge is that atheists are lacking morality or the desire to help others because they haven’y got a book telling them to do so.
2) Humanism. I like to describe myself as a humanist because it clarifies that I am not an atheist who hates all religious people out there or thinks they are stupid. Humanists are all about not harming others and encourage people to think for themselves rather than trying to tell them what they should or shouldn’t think.
3) Sunday Assembly. This organisation is growing fast and has a simple mission:
- We are a godless congregation that celebrates of life.
- We have an awesome motto: Live Better, Help Often and Wonder More.
- A super mission: to try to help everyone find and fulfil their full potential.
- An awesome vision: a godless congregation in every town city, or village that wants one.
This is as far as I’ve got with positive atheism but I’m far happier than when I was just angry and having a lot more fun in life with lots of different people. So does anyone else have any ideas or organisations to add to my list? How can we make atheism a positive life choice that doesn’t require us to fight the believers?
humanistmum 
“You have to deal with the consequences, whatever they may be.”
I’m sorry, I don’t know you, but I think it’s unlikely you’ve had to deal with the reality of balancing parenthood and a career/job that pays the bills.
From the sounds of things we in the UK are a long way ahead of the American system when it comes to pregnancy and maternity rights, although from personal experience I can assure you that there is still a long way to go.
Businesses in a capitalist system may need to prioritise making money, but surely in a civilised society you would not accept that it is acceptable for this to be through exploitation of their workforce. I personally think it is a good thing that employers in this country have to pay minimum wage and holiday pay and ensure their workers are as safe as possible when they’re making money for the business leaders at the top.
When it comes to pregnany you seem to be in favour of going back to the 1970s where it was legally acceptable for employers and interviewers to ask about a woman’s future pregnancy or marriage plans and it was fully expected if she did fall pregnant she would leave to raise her litter and perhaps go back part time in a few years to a position she was massively over-qualified for to earn a bit of pin money.
When you say it is a failure on the woman’s part who gets herself pregnant unplanned I will not bore you with the thousands of scenarios where a woman can find herself pregnant and it is not simply a case that she is irresponsible. You seem intelligent enough that if you use your imagination you can probably come up with some examples yourself.
In any society we need businessees and business leaders, but we also need to raise the next generation and hopefully improve on past mistakes. Just because many businesses are set up to deal best with the traditional system doesn’t mean it’s OK. The system where gay people aren’t really gay they’re just confused. The system where a woman is just waiting for a man to show interest and take her off the market so she can start popping out his kids.The system where you stay in an unhappy marriage because divorce is bad and children need a mother and a father in the same house and any other set-up, no matter how happy, is judged to be just quite as good as doing things the “proper way”. A system where women sacrifice everything else they want in life to fulfil their one true goal of motherhood so that the father of the children doesn’t have to have any disruption to his career.
Do you really want to go to an interview where the person sat across from you is half listening, but primarily weighing up whether they think you’re the type to get maternal urges any time soon?
Do you really want a system when the fact that you are of child-bearing age might mean the company are better off going with the slightly less qualifed guy “just in case”?
Do you really want to have to choose between having a career and having a family? You might be lucky and pull it off in a way that works for you but what if you leave it too late and realise that shitty fertility window has been closed?
If you do have children even after establishing a career do you think you should have to give it all up?
Do you not think that fathers should also play a part in a child’s life? I mean is it enough that he provides the sperm and the money or would you not prefer it if he actually shared a little bit of the responsibilty and sacrifice that women are expected to make in order to reap all the joys of parenthood?
Do you want anybody who is not wealthy enough to either stay at home on their partner’s wage or earning enough to afford a nanny to just stop breeding? Or maybe you think all those irresponsible women should just accept a life living on the state because they might be just a bit too disruptive in the workplace?
Do you find it acceptable that if a child is sick in daycare the woman is the one expected to leave work, piss off her boss and stay home until the child is accepted back? (If they’re sick it’s 48 hours from the last time they puked). Is it acceptable that most UK employers would roll their eyes and have a moan that they shouldn’t be inconvenienced that she chose to reproduce without even beginning to consider that the fathers they have working for them should perhaps actually be sharing the load? Because sometimes children, like people, just happen to get sick and need looking after.
If I were to start up a business I thinkit would be wholly reasonable that I should pay my workforce a fair wage in return for their hard work, that I don’t endanger their health or lives in order to maximise profits and that I accept that anyone working for me will also need some sort of work-life balance. It also seems reasonable to me to expect that some of those people may have familes, children, grandchildren, sick relatives, funerals, weddings, times of grief, mental or physical illnesses to contend with, places they want to travel to . . . you get the picture.
My point is that there is this pressure people put on themselves at work to pretend that there is absolutely nothing in their personal lives that could ever distract them from their jobs and in extreme cases this leads to mental breakdowns and time off dur to stress when people burn out. When companies acknowledge their employees have personal lives and they are not just robots they will reap the benefits of a motivated, dedicated and loyal workforce who want to keep their jobs.
When companies begin to acknowledge that a massive percentage of their workforce (be they gay, straight, married, single, old, young, living in sin) are going to want to have children at some point in their lives, because that’s just human nature for you, they can begin to make policies that deal with this reality and adapt the business to accomodate it.
And if you personally don’t want your life and body turned upside down by having a baby then great for you. I may be a mother but I am also a feminist and believe you are more than capable of living a fulfilled worthwhile life by making different choices to me. Maybe you have other passions in life? Maybe you have your dream job and you want to dedicate as much of your free time as possible to getting ahead. I hope you are able to balance it all and feel content and happy overall.
It’s just a shame that if you have any success I probably won’t ever be working alongside you because I don’t have that option now I made the choice to have two kids before my eggs dried up like they told me on the news. But if I was working alongside you I can promise you that I am one of the most dedicated, hard-working people who will stay late or take work home to make sure the job gets done. And if, as my colleague, something happened in your personal life (say someone close to you passed away) I would be the person there supporting you, making sure I picked up the slack at work so you didn’t need to worry and telling you to take the time you needed to get yourself back on track. It wouldn’t be my problem that you chose to care about someone outside of work enough that their death might upset you and distract you from your duties but I would try to empathise! I get it that everyone has a personal life and sometimes we all need to remember we’re human and sometimes people need support and understanding, whilst balancing that with getting things done.
Sorry for the rant, it is not until I faced indirect and direct discrimination after going back to work following the birth of my first child that I realised how there is still a hell of a fight on for women to get equality in the UK workplace!