As I said at the outset I'm reluctant to use the word 'atheist' to describe my own unshakable disbelief and that's not because I'm ashamed, afraid or even embarrassed, but simply because it seems so self evidently true to me that there is no God that giving that conviction a special title, somehow dignifies what it denies. After all, we don't have a special word for people who don't believe in ghosts or witches.
- Jonathan Miller, Director & Author,
"A Brief History of Disbelief", 2007
God dammit!! In a feeble attempt to boost my readership levels (from the current zero readers who read this blog, to something even resembling half a reader), I have signed up to Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll and the OUT Campaign Blogroll, both of which is a conglomeration of blogs written by atheists, secularist, brights, agnostics, skeptics, non-theists, humanists, anti-theists and so on.
In the process, I guess I am now "outing" myself as an "atheist", whatever that means.
So what is an atheist anyway? How do we begin to define a group of people who lack the imaginative powers to believe in any form of supernatural agents, playing checkers using our arses as the pieces.
I can't really begin to fathom the idea of atheism, because it is much too broad and varying of a term. Similarly, theistic beliefs are very hard to nail down as well, since no two Christians (or two Muslims, two Jews, two Buddhists, two FSM-ists) of the same denomination would ever believe in exactly the same bucket of religious ideas.
So it is pretty meaningless to say that I am an atheist, not because I am not an atheist, but the labeling of myself as one is pretty pointless to say the least. It doesn't say that anything about me as a person at all.
Still anything and everything to pander for some readership, eh? ;-)
PS. Please have a look at the some of the other blogs on Mojoey's Atheist Blogroll, some of them are quite good.
8 comments:
Thanks for plugging the blogroll!
My pleasure Joe... if only there was somebody to plug to :-)
Harle was here~! *Wave*
Good read. I was reading your blogs for the whole duration of my 30 minutes bus ride home from gym, not including a good 10 minutes bus-waiting time trying to recall your blog URL. I ended up going to your fb profile page to grab it.
Keep blogging~!
thanks for your continued support, Harle ;-)
Thanks for visiting my blog: Visit my other blog at
http://www.workswithoutfaith.org/
If you lot are what this country has to look forward to then god help us.
Surely your'e worth more than the rubbish you're all spouting,somebody take the lead, raise the standard,and the rest will follow.
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