An atheist: being just one step ahead of us

There is a general tendency to denigrate atheists. This seems a bit unfair and irrational. After all, we are all born atheists. We love baby-atheists, don’t we? Given that a baby is normal and in good health, and taken care of with tenderness, you will find her so innocent, adorable, full of spontaneous joy, harmless and surely much less calculating and self-seeking than any of us. Hence, hardly anyone has anything against baby-atheists. Of course, she will throw a tantrum if she feels uncomfortable or hungry, but it may be for her bare survival rather than due to any wickedness resulting from her being an atheist. We, adults, who are persistently programmed to be religious from early childhood, are surely a bit more self-centered and grasping, aren’t we? Of course, babies later quarrel for toys, but if religious regimenting has made them less aggressive as they grow, today we wouldn’t be in this mess, clamouring for harmony and what not, would we? What’s amiss?

We don’t have the same impartial attitude towards those rare grownup-atheists, who are not quite different from us with respect to ‘sinfulness’. Rarely are they more aggressive, greedy and calculating than the rest of us, but we find it difficult to assess them for what they are without bias. Let’s admit that we are pretty much predisposed against not only those so-called atheists but also other religious groups. Truth is said to be stranger than fiction.

What is being religious? One religion descending from above begins to have a monopoly on us in the same way our first language does. If our parents were liberal-minded and not respecters of tradition, they would reject religious indoctrination of their children. What would be the result? The children would grow up being socialized through all the progressive social institutions like family with its sense of belonging, interaction with peers, learning, creative art, aesthetics, team work, sports, media, recreation, travel, etc., and mind you, unlike religious programming, none of these are coercive. What would be the result? Will such children turn out to be brutes? Not likely. Instead, they will bloom with no unhealthy and culturally constructed bias against others. They would be freed from the stultifying effect that indoctrination would otherwise have on them. You can call them ‘atheists’ but since the word has unfavourable connotations, let’s be fair and call them ‘children who escaped brainwashing’. If a child is barred from being exposed to all the above socializing schemes and trained on a strict regimen of religion, will she be an angel? Not very likely.

On the other hand, if babies were allowed to remain atheists untouched by programming, would they be any more vicious than those who have had no way to escape being conditioned? Wouldn’t they be better qualified to select a religion they like as mature people? Most probably they wouldn’t see the need because they would at this stage be able to look at religions with the same spirit of freedom and intellectual curiosity with which they would look at any other discipline in the world. Perhaps it would be, for some of them, a fascinating subject where they would be able to look at a range of religions with their quaint rituals, historic details, customs of worship, moral codes, narratives of mythical figures, miracles, etc. That would be a most sobering and intellectually rewarding exercise. Now where’s room for ‘religious intolerance’ or ‘religious violence’? Or, for that matter, where is the need for the much hyped ‘religious reconciliation’?

Let’s look at the other option, the routine. Let’s say the children are programmed by a religion to the exclusion of all the other religions which, by the way, have equal ‘legitimacy’ to have a stranglehold on them. The result is the chaotic world we live in with all kinds of mind-made rivalries, with covert and overt attempts to adore and extol the virtues of one’s inherited faith as against the others.

It’s smugly admitted that parents have a right to impose their religion on their children. Let’s look at the situation of a child born to parents of different faiths. If parents have a right to thrust their religions on their progeny, here, which of them has a more ‘legitimate’ right to decide the faith of the child? Father? Mother? On what basis? Toss a coin? Does the child have a say in this? How about teaching both religions? The more the merrier?

We are living in a world of atheists without admitting it. It’s true that we have allegiance to one faith- not of our own choice, though. However, we reject hundreds and thousands of other faiths, don’t we? Let’s say you are given a list of 10 main religions in the world including your religion, and asked to tick the religion of your choice. You will tick one and cross out nine. Each time you look at a religion in the list, you express your disbelief in it except in one. Hence, you are many times more unbelieving than believing? For all those thousands of people who follow those religions you turn away from, you would simply be a nonbeliever, an outcast. If you take into account the thousands of faiths in the world, you have rejected all of them except yours. Technically speaking, aren’t we overwhelmingly more unbelieving than believing? Those whom we label as atheists are just one step ahead of each of us, the lucky us, who are believers of one religion, no? Do those ‘atheists’ deserve a special label, a disparaging one at that?

Susantha Hewa