Prerequisites for Atheism

   One of the chief  prerequisites for a person to become an atheist, he must first become a demigod.  A demigod is a human being that feels that the closest thing to God is mankind. “Nothing can be greater than man.”  For this reason a humanist demigod believes in his heart of hearts that if there is any alien life in the universe, it must be inferior to man or at least equal, but not super superior, for if superior it might be God. To them man is the measurement all things, even God.  Why else would they advertise our existence in the universe not knowing that the life found might be superior and hostile to humanity?  Have they really placed human curiosity before survival or does their position simply demonstrate the hubris of humanity?

Their behavior reflects a creature which believes itself to be the top dog.  Here lies one of the suppositions that lead a person to atheism.  This prerequisite could be defined as super egotism.  Though unspoken, it resides in the recesses of the human ego and is depicted in the Genesis story of man, namely Adam and Eve wanting to be like God.  It matters little whether you accept the story as historical or as myth, the truth that it teaches is true even to the casual seeker.

It is here where we find the source of the grandiose arrogance of the humanist and the atheist. Both have elevated humankind and human knowledge to an unwarranted place.  The result of this is a blind faith in unlimited progress, which has been taken to the degree of denying in their  imagination the finiteness of humanity, the planet we live on and the universe that we live in.  For example, we have the atheist who believes that he can make an absolute statement that there is no God.  Now let’s be honest and realistic, how can a human being that is in touch with reality make such a statement?  To make such a statement you would have to have all the potential knowledge about the universe, be in every place at the same time and have the absolute knowledge that there are no other dimensions where a God might dwell.  To have this kind of knowledge and power one would have to be God.  This is why atheism is the most unreasonable position that a human being can take and why it takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe in a God.

It would seem much more reasonable for a human being who has never experienced God to simply say that they are agnostics and don’t know if there is a God.  To conclude and deny the experience of billions of people and to arrogate that they are all delusional, must in itself be delusional and the most arrogant position one could imagine. In essence they are saying, “because I have not experienced something, it cannot exist,” which in itself is a God statement.  This idea is especially true when you consider that a large number of those who claim they have experienced God are some of the most intelligent people in the world.  I have read somewhere that out of the five people who have the highest IQs four out of five believe in some kind of deity[1].  It was reported in the latest Pew survey about 50% of scientists believed in a higher power.[2]

This is not to say that atheists are not intelligent, they are extremely clever. This is demonstrated by their ability to build a convoluted world view around a non-belief, which in the end is non-provable and a non-sensible position and then convince millions of people that it’s true.  Of course, they actually have not created a world view, what they have done is borrowed from a number of other world views to build theirs, e.g. materialism, naturalism, scientism, humanism and even theism.

Another prerequisite of atheism is the elevating of  human reason and knowledge to the status of an absolute.  This can be clearly seen in the enlightenment where intellectuals built systems of thought which they believed was ultimate truth and based on science.  The two clearest examples of this are Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx both of  whom were atheists.  Atheists are still to this day building intellectual systems and propagating them as the truth.  For example, Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene theory is propagated by him as the truth, when in reality, it is nothing more than a desperate attempt to prove his atheism.  His book is an example of how an intelligent human being can put together a complete book about nonsense and have it  embraced by other intelligent beings, if there is such a creature.

Still another prerequisite for atheism is for large numbers of people within a society to be reduced to one-dimensional people, which can only think in a very narrow conceptualization of reality.  Of course, in a modern capitalistic and industrial society, this is the goal of our education system.  It is geared not to make thinking people or creative people but rather to teach people to make the machine work, which tend to stifle the imagination and the creativity of the individual, hindering their ability to understand and construct conceptual and abstract ideas.  The whole system makes it hard to believe in and conceptualize a God without being.

William James in his book on pragmatism points out that one’s disposition has as much to do with one’s belief as anything else.  He expounds in his book that the thing that separates the empirical from the rational person is not so much knowledge or intellect as it is their dispositions.  This may point to another prerequisite to unbelief, which would be a cynical and pessimistic view of existence, which I have found among many atheists.  Though I freely admit that my sampling is small and in no way would I purport any form of determinism.  No matter, what one’s disposition might be it does not predetermine one’s beliefs.  However, it is fully possible that one’s disposition will influence a person’s beliefs.  So, we could say that a pessimistic disposition could possibly be a prerequisite to atheism.

All this points to the fact that atheism has  many roots and only one can be traced to the intellect. Many of the roots have their source in the psychology of the individual and the society they are planted in. In other words, the soil determines the kind of plant that will grow in it.

[1] Christopher Michael Langan is said be one the smartest person in the world with an IQ of close to 200, which means he has an IQ higher than Einstein.  Langan not only believes in God, but believes you can prove His existence with mathematics.  William James a believer, is reported to be the smartest man who ever lived with an IQ estimated as 285 to 300, over a 100 points higher than Einstein.

[2]  “A Pew survey taken in 2009 records that 33 percent of scientists believe in God and another 18 percent in a higher power, compared to 94 percent of the general public. On the list of long-ago scientists who believed in God are Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton; more modern names have been added, such as Lord Kelvin, Max Planck, and Francis Collins. So, to say that scientists don’t believe in God is a gross generalization”.