I’m not sure what it means to be a committed atheist other than, perhaps, that you don’t expect to wake tomorrow as a committed theist. To me, discussions of the truth or falsity of theistic belief systems have faded so far into my rearview mirror that I no longer consider myself to be opposed to them. To the extent that universe exists to me at all, it is as an unwelcome intrusion into my philosophical equanimity. Someone says something obnoxiously theistic and I am forced to confront, again, that the world is still ablaze with this legacy and that rivers of blood still flow in country after country in the name of one or the other interpretation of one or the other of these theistic religions.
I only care because people won’t stop committing violence in the name of this God.
But I’m beyond atheism, which going by the Greek means nothing other than “not a theist.” I can still get with being an agnostic, which literally means “not possessing divine wisdom.” But I’d rather not be called anything. I’m not part of a team. I’m not trying to convert anyone to anything more than being good to each other.
Everyone is at a different stage in the process, and I recognize many of those stages, having gone through them at a younger age. But, trust me, after a while these theological questions cease to exist. Among the last to fade to black is the question about why so many people you respect insist on clinging to something that they know better than to actually believe. Sometime after that comes the compassion which follows from truly understanding the frailty of all human beings and being happy that they find comfort in their theism. I’m talking about being actually happy for them. This is where you overcome your wish that things were different, not in the sense that you’ll give up trying to make the world a better place but in the sense that you personally can do a better job consoling the grief stricken than the time worn solutions we know so well.
This is rationalism coming to peace with its limitations. It’s not rationalism that is particularly limited, but people, and that’s okay. Because the measure of a person, and the worth you place on them, is not their capacity for being reasonable.
The journey doesn’t end here, though, because you can’t view the mass of humanity as mentally handicapped and deserving of the same compassion as a wheelchair-bound cripple without at the same time having a debilitating sense of arrogance and self-regard.
The cure for this is to realize your own handicaps. They may not be in your capacity for logic or even in your overall moral behavior. But perhaps you can’t control your appetites. Maybe you aren’t as honest as you’d like to believe. Maybe your word isn’t as good as your bond. Maybe you’re selfish in your personal relationships. I’m sure you’ve let some people down who had the right to depend on you. The last arrogance is the arrogance that being smart or rational makes you a better person. If you’re truthful with yourself, you’re a cripple like everyone else, and you need forgiveness and you need to make amends.
Anyway, you go along in this journey long enough and one day you wake up and realize that you are no longer living in the universe where theistic questions are even part of the debate. No one in your world would even ask a question like “does God exist?”
The answer isn’t “no.”
The answer is “what?”
