The National Atheist Party Is Born

Before I start on my rant, I do want to say that I admire and respect those who took the initiative to take on such a major venture that is, in my opinion, a historic turning point.

It is a necessary and important step.

Kudos to them, even if I don’t agree with the name of the party.

Now, I expect that the name of this new American Political Party (not the creation of it) may be controversial amongst atheists for various reasons.

As soon as I read the email announcing this new development at least one of those reasons crossed my mind as well.

Why call oneself an “atheist” party? I don’t get it.

Atheism is nothing more or less than a lack of belief in gods. There is no doctrine or belief system associated with atheism.

Not that I haven’t had numerous spats with atheists who would claim otherwise, but frankly their claims are easily refuted because they fly in the face of reality and sometimes include a rather narrow minded and bigoted approach to what they consider to be an atheist.

Sorry folks, New Agers who don’t hold god beliefs are atheists whether we like it or not or whether we agree with them or not. Certain forms of the Buddhist religion are also atheistic. So, even religions can be atheistic.

There are, on the other hand, atheistic belief systems which currently exist and which are advocated and supported by many (not all) atheists.

Belief systems like the FreeThinkers and the Humanists.

So, why not call themselves the FreeThinkers and Humanist Party or the Secularist Party?

Here’s their explanation:

We are the “atheist” party for several reasons.

The founders of the party (Troy Boyle and Mark Smith) are atheists.

We know that there is a bad connotation to the word, and we want to reclaim the word and make it a positive connotation. Much like the African-American activists of the 50s did with “negro.” They don’t use it now, but it was a necessary first step.

Humanist and Secularist are terms that the public doesn’t understand very well.

Religious people do not call secularists, secularists. They call secularists “atheists.” So you are one whether you want to claim the label or not. When 80% of the population calls you an atheist, you should own up to it and depower them, not scurry to find some other less castigated term, in the hopes of escaping the stigma. As far as Christianity and all other Abrahamic faiths are concerned, Atheists, Humanists, Secularists, Pantheists and Pagans are all going to Hell.

Now, while I understand the sentiment, I disagree that these are good reasons to attribute a political philosophy to the term atheism.

And here’s why.

Just because theists don’t understand what a Secularist, FreeThinker, or Humanist is and just because theists think that all Secularists, FreeThinkers and Humanists are atheists doesn’t mean that we should pander to their ignorance. This would be the perfect opportunity to educate them.

Presumably, since they’re the National Atheist Party they are then going to include and represent all atheists including New Agers and those Buddhist and other religions which are atheistic as well as atheists who are politically in the left, right, middle, libertarian, etc.

Yes?

Apparently not. (And I agree that it would be impossible to do)

From their web site:

The National Atheist Party is open to people of all races, sexes and sexual orientations, and cultures. We are committed to a government free of superstition and bias and are guided by principles of equal opportunity, recognition of merit, and economic responsibility.

So, since they want a government free of superstition, the New Agers, Buddhists and Jains are on the outs here.

Not a problem for me since I also want a government free of superstition. However, it does mean that they aren’t representing all atheists.

From their web site:

The National Atheist Party is a diverse, all inclusive, progressive, secular political movement and a response to the lack of representation for all free thinking people who are legal, law abiding citizens of the United States.

Here, they identify themselves as representing “free thinking” people, so now we have another exclusion. Atheists who are not FreeThinkers are apparently not included. Are FreeThinker theists included? (Yes they exist).

Again, not a problem for me since I’m a FreeThinker and an atheist. However, as I stated before, it does mean that they aren’t representing all atheists or all FreeThinkers.

The National Atheist Party is only representing the political viewpoints of the current members of the NAP and their existing policy is based on their political viewpoints. This, of course, effectively excludes those atheists who hold different viewpoints.

While I agree with most of what they say and while a democratically based policy is (or should be) standard practice in any political party and a good thing generally speaking, it does mean that they are not representing all atheists and may not even be representing the majority of atheists.

And, lastly from their web site:

We support the separation of church and state, and seek to ensure its strictest interpretation.

This last point is probably the only point that I can see all atheists (and many theists) agreeing on so if this was the only plank in the platform the argument could be made that they are representing all atheists who believe in secularism. In this case, the name National Atheist Party might work.

Now, just to be clear. I’m not saying that atheists shouldn’t organize. Atheist Nexus represents such an organization and I support them wholeheartedly.

I am saying that a political party can’t represent all atheists because we come from way too broad a spectrum of belief systems and the name, National Atheist Party, implies such representation.

What we could really use, and not just in the US, are Political Action Committee Lobby groups around the world which defend the rights of all atheists everywhere. Particularly in countries where atheists are oppressed and threatened with death or imprisonment for their beliefs like Islamic Theocracies.

All of this said, I do actually understand why the Americans would come up with such a political party given the religious extremism that is thrown in their face daily.

So, I’m not unsympathetic to this move. I just think it would have been better to do it differently or at least give the party a different name.

Call the party, The American Secularist Party or The Secularist FreeThinkers Party and start an AAPAC (American Atheist Political Action Committee).

The AAPAC would accomplish everything the founders of the National Atheist Party want including taking back the word atheist and giving it a positive connotation.

The name of the political party would be more representative of what it actually is.

Just some thoughts.

I still wish them well though and they’ll certainly get my public support despite my disagreement with their name. And if I was an American I'd probably join.

National Atheist Party web site

Best wishes to them.

To Question God by Steve of AvC

Theists all too often claim that atheists and freethinkers are driven by some innate and mindless hatred of religion, and revel in the collective denigration of peoples’ superstitious beliefs.  Still others believe that some traumatic psychological event, lurking in the basement of the atheist subconscious turned them away from a belief in religion.  And a few clutch at the idea that atheists reject god simply because they are afraid – of what I cannot imagine. Without question some atheists can be extremely confrontational and intolerant and I have been there myself.  However, I don't believe it is a question of hate or derision.  It is more an overwhelming sense of frustration from constantly being pummeled by the most inane and fatuous arguments that attempt to support a wholly untenable position.

Here we are at the close of the first decade of the 21st century and it is truly breathtaking – perhaps mind boggling would be a better word - the number of people who embrace a misogynistic, death-religion from over 2 millennia ago. Despite an overwhelming and ever-growing mountain of scientific research and evidence, millions still desperately cling to the fantasies concocted by desert nomads and embellished by religious zealots and power-hunger political despots.

If there is some semblance of fear, then it is fear of the escalating anti-scientific mindset and the raucous demand by all too many to embrace a theocracy that answers not to the law but to some imaginary deity.  The fear that reason will be continually kicked to the road side to accommodate the cacophonous hoards of religious camp followers who flaunt their supposed piety in the face of rational thought and believe it is better to burn a book than to actually read it.  And if that doesn't quash the voices of dissent then burn the author.  In part, there is the fear of an ever-diminishing sphere of rational discourse and logic in favor of close-minded religious cant and intolerance.

Science and reason have always illuminated the trail through ignorance and as such will always remain the mortal enemy of superstition, and hence religion.  The mystics profess knowledge they cannot possibly possess, and embolden their position and socio-political power base with endless doom-sayings of Armageddon, eternal damnation and hell fire.

For me, personally, that is what I find most distasteful of religion -the arrogant claim of divine revelation which can never be substantiated coupled with the threat of eternal destruction if even the most outlandish claim is remotely questioned.  Of course, it is always beneficial to the religious ring leaders if they can enlist the cooperation of the secular leadership. They can back up their spiritual demands of unquestioned obedience, and the incessant harangue of damnation and self- denigration with the imprimatur of the rack, the branding iron and the thumb screw.

As for a denial of god...well he has done that himself - so to speak. With each step away from superstitious ignorance the evidence for god dwindles.  Disease is not divine retribution; the universe despite its vastness is ultimately knowable.  The secrets of nature that once terrified our ancestors are taught in grade school textbooks. A high school student of today, having completed a basic First Aid or EMT course possess more legitimate medical knowledge than all the doctors combined of the great 15th century universities of Europe.  We can look up into the night sky with electronic eyes and glimpse the beginnings of the cosmos.  We peer into the shadows and find there is only the absence of light, not demons. It is the absolutist rejection of reason, science and the hard won gains of the unfettered human intellect that is most disturbing. 

Benjamin Franking once stated that ..."To see by faith is to shut the eyes of reason". 

And I could not agree more.

Steve in Virginia

Why We Won Draw Mohammed Day by Thunderfoot

Thunderfoot: "Free Speech is non-negotiable."

Thunderfoot's Why We Won Draw Mohammed Day video

Thunderfoot's South Park vs Islam video

Why You Should Be An Antitheist

As an antitheist, I believe that faith in God is a poisonous and contagious disease that threatens the well-being and continued existence of the planet and the human race. This is not an extremist position, but simply the logical conclusion one comes to when theism is evaluated critically instead of given an undeserved exemption from reason, evidence and common sense. While thousands upon thousands of pages could be (and have been) written proving this to be the only logical and moral conclusion, for purposes of brevity I will confront the short list of easily refuted counterpositions provided by people who do not consider themselves antitheists.

(1) THERE’S A GOD.

The most common argument against antitheism is, unsurprisingly, the least substantiated. Simply put, it couldn’t be any less substantiated because it isn’t substantiated at all—not by evidence, reasoning or anything else. You need not have any faith that there is no God any more than you need faith to not believe in Harry Potter or Darth Vader. If something cannot be differentiated from fiction in any way, it is—until otherwise substantiated—fiction precisely. This standard is a time-proven method for adults to tell the difference from real life and cartoons. To believe Jesus was the son of God and not believe in, say, Spongebob Squarepants is to take a child’s cartoon more seriously than a text that million of people believe is true—a very dangerous double-standard.

Evaluated from a strictly rational position, nobody of normal adult intelligence would make the mistake of thinking a religious text about God was fact. The claims of these books are more outrageous than those of most fictional texts, and they are riddled with more logical inconsistencies than most Hollywood movies. People do not generally believe in these texts because they are asking hundreds of logical questions and getting the wrong answer every time—it is much more likely that they are simply deceiving themselves. Many theists claim “personal experience” with God, but illogically rule out the most obvious and only substantiated explanation: that they are delusional. Followers of conflicting faiths also share similar but contradictory experiences, from which you can deduce that it would be impossible for every one of these experiences to be a product of divine revelation. Since, aside from being incompatible, these experiences are not particularly unique there is nothing to differentiate one perceived instance of revelation from others that couldn’t possibly all be true. All legitimate scientific studies of prayer have shown that it has no apparent external effects, and the perceived results of prayer are easily explained by the human ability to attribute causation to any correlation. Theists are only capable of citing “personal experience” as an evidence of God if they subscribe to the idea that they have particular immunities to self-deception that humans of other faiths don’t have. This is an arrogant and untrue assumption that no doubt carries the potential for unnecessary conflict.

The idea that believing in God is a “safer” position, through Pascal’s Wager, is also fallacious because it assumes that God could only reward people for having blind faith. Since a God that rewards people for being skeptical as opposed to believing out of fear is equally unsubstantiated, this is not mathematically sound. Also, considering the countless existing conceptions of God the odds of you picking the right one are literally millions to one—and that’s operating on the unsubstantiated assumption that God exists at all.

(2) IT IS BAD TO CRITICIZE THE BELIEFS OF OTHERS.

There is a school of thought that the problem is not religion, it is intolerance. This perspective usually manifests itself in blatantly hypocritical statements like “believing that other people’s beliefs are bad is bad”. Clearly, the characters who fall in this camp are incapable of self-evaluation. This school of thought ignores the fact that most religions include beliefs that are inherently intolerant to both other faiths and a lack of faith.

Some religious types even compare antitheism to racism, while a more accurate analogy would be that antitheism is like being opposed to racism. Few of these same people would argue that racism is harmless just because it is based on beliefs, or that since most racists don’t kill people they don’t contribute indirectly to racial violence and repression. Clearly, not all beliefs warrant absolute tolerance. This is just another example of religion getting held to different standards than other institutions. And to anyone who thinks comparing religion to racism is unfair, please do at least some research on The Ku Klux Klan, The Holocaust and the pro-slavery verses in The Bible and Q’uran.

(3) RELIGION MAKES PEOPLE MORE MORAL.

Simply not true. Prison populations are exceedingly religious, as are the more barbaric countries in the world. The United Nations Intelligence Report in 2005 evaluated countries by life expectancy, adult literacy, per capita income, educational attainment, gender equality, homicide rate and infant mortality. The highest-ranking countries were also the most secular, whereas the lowest-ranking countries were generally theocratic in nature.

This is not surprising to anyone who has read the books of the central monotheisms, which encourage killing and condone rape, genocide, sexism, child and spousal abuse and slavery. These books are generally referred to when something cannot be justified by secular means. Good will towards others requires no such rationalization, but certain atrocities do. This is why religion functions much more thoroughly as a tool for evil than a tool for good.

The argument that killers like Stalin and Mao were atheists is very common on this point of contention, ironically coming from Christians who also argue that you can’t judge Christianity based on “a few individuals”. Maoism and Stalinism were religions like the Abrahamic religions because of their demands for servitude and blind faith. Whether or not they were theistic religions is debatable. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot did not call themselves "God" but if we're really going to examine what theism is we're going to have to get past the myriad of semantic problems to the actual nature of the beliefs ("pantheism", for example, uses the word "God" as a metaphor for The Universe but ideologically it is essentially atheism). These religions are called “cults of personality” because they are based on the worship of human leaders. No doubt theism can center around a mortal human—otherwise Christianity would be atheism, and it isn’t. There is no question that North Korea's religion is theism because their president is not Kim Jong-Il but his dead father Kim Il-Sung—the supernatural element makes that easy because it puts it in the same category as Christianity. With other “atheistic” dictators it depends entirely on how broadly you define “God”, but we do know they didn’t kill _for_ atheism the way religious dictators killed _for_ religion which makes the role atheism played in their regimes completely different and the analogy flawed.

No doubt people can find reasons to kill each other without religion, but when your best defense for something is that it isn’t responsible for _all_ the evil in the world you should probably reconsider whether it’s really that great. The Holocaust, The Crusades, The Inquisitions, Islamic terrorism, witch trials, honor killings—theism is still responsible for that. Some would argue that science is responsible for death, too, but science is necessary and contributes substantially to the health and well-being of humans everywhere. When people die because of religion, they are dying because of something that is completely unnecessary. It isn’t just the fault of the ones holding the weapons—if millions of other theists didn’t perpetuate the continued existence of these mentalities they wouldn’t exist. So the blood is on all their hands.

Is theism the biggest problem in the world? I think that’s the wrong question, because it assumes it is something distinct from other problems. Racism, sexism, homophobia, slavery, genocide, rape, war, child abuse, mental illness, ignorance, hypocrisy—the list of bad things exacerbated by theism is endless. To support theism is to support every great evil in the world for no sane reason.

... And that’s why you should be an antitheist.

Written By thedeviliam of AvC