In this post, I am speaking solely for myself. I don’t know where Skinnyhead sits on the topic, though I imagine that he aligns with me, but without having had that conversation, I don’t want to put any words in his mouth. The only things I like putting in his mouth are beers, and he and I haven’t had the opportunity to do that in far too long. Stupid busy lives…

Now, some of you might not know what Atheist Plus means, so I’ll put up a link to their page and you can see for yourself. The short and skinny of it is that Atheism Plus is about saying, “I’m an atheist and I believe in social justice”. And I do. So I am.

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I’m about to piss off a lot of armchair historians, but I don’t care. However, let me start off by saying that I am not advocating removing this section of the lyrics from O Canada. I don’t like that they are there, but I think this would be stupid. This is not like removing “In God We Trust” from money, which can essentially be done any time one feels like it by changing the design of the coin presses (or whatever the appropriate terminology is).

The national anthem is different, at least the way I see it. It isn’t re-written every year, it was written in 1880 for the Saint-Jean Baptiste Day ceremony, though the lyrics have been tweaked a time or two since then. And to my Anglophone readers who are now saying to themselves (in a haughty voice, no doubt) “Yeah, like when they translated the damn thing into French to make the goddamn Quebecers quit their bitchin’!” allow me to inform you that it was originally a French song which was translated into English in 1906, some 26 years after its first performance, and it wasn’t made the national anthem until 1980. Don’t believe me? Read the wiki!

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Wow, I didn’t realize there was an Ask The Atheist Day, and it turns out it’s today. Big thanks to WWJTD for pointing it out to me. Well, I’m an atheist, and I like to answer things. How shall I celebrate this auspicious day? I suppose I should ask an atheist some questions. Hey, I’m an atheist! I’ll ask me some questions and see what answers I can come up with! Or better yet, you could ask me a question in the comments here or through email and I could respond. But only if you want to…

Question 1: Why don’t you believe in God?

I’ve actually answered this a few times, like here, for instance, but I’ll do the short answer here. I used to believe in God. I was raised to believe in the Christian God, or more to the point, the loving hippie Christian God my parents believe in. But as I grew up, I saw things that confused me. How could the happy, loving God of my childhood be responsible for so much of the truly attrocious crimes he commits in the Bible? How come the book of God’s word is so inconsistent and factually flawed? That freaked me out, and I began to try to find proof of God’s existence. Long story short, I didn’t.

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There is a common complaint about atheists, especially us New Atheists, which it seems to me merely means “people who are atheists and aren’t dead and buried”, and that is that we just accept the new dogma of our leaders, particularly Richard Dawkins, and we hold onto it as tightly as the religious hold theirs. This seems to me to be a ridiculously weak place to stand, especially as they then cast stones, saying that their dogma is better than ours, but it is weak for another reason, it’s wrong.

Now, I happen to like Richard Dawkins and the other New Atheist voices, but that hardly means I agree with them dogmatically, which is to say absolutely and with nary a question to the authenticity of their claims. I began my fall from false-grace long before I ever heard of the New Atheists. I began seeing holes in my religious upbringing that caused me to doubt. The more I explored, the more really glaring those holes became, and the more I was embarrassed by what I had always believed. It was long after I finally admitted to myself that there was no God that I ever read anything by any of the modern day atheist authors.

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