Response to the Challenge: How Am I Different After Leaving Atheism?

During my lengthy stay under Atheism, I did that which I think most Atheists do: I co-opted Judeo-Christian ethics and standards without even thinking about it, much less giving credit to the source of those standards. This theft of standards is easier to accomplish than is the more honest approach, which is to live as an Atheist would live under no objective standards whatsoever, or under temporary personal standards generated on a daily basis or for every situation.

The real difference that I see is my sense of personal value. Under Atheism, the individual is an accident. There is no more value to an individual human than to a head of lettuce. Value is derived not from mere existence, but from accomplishment, ability to contribute to society, or association with elitist dogma.

It is under this system of values that Humanism emerges, valuing not individuals, but groups, with this valuation being performed as an accomplishment of superiors. The superiors who place value on groups and devalue individuals position themselves as ultimate arbiters of moral truth.

My problem as a youth was that I had no self-value when I was an emerging adult, in a slow recovery from a rebellious adolescence. I had to acquire value somehow. My first steps to acquiring value included pursuing an education that only elites could acquire (electrical engineering) and by taking the easiest of steps toward elitism: rejecting God. This allowed me to acquire a semblance of differential value by mere association: the implied association with elite intellectuals which was acquired by joining their religion of rebellion.

But mere association provides little to no satisfaction, it turned out. So accomplishment was needed in my life to provide me with a sense of self-value. I will give only a couple of examples of this pursuit of accomplishment. I wanted to excel in something outside of the daily engineering tasks, and I wanted to be a musician. I failed at that due to an inability to play really fast, a result I think of an inherent mismatch between slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers. At another time I wanted to be an accomplished competitive distance runner. And I failed at that, probably due to the same deficiency in muscle fiber twitches as well as my size disadvantage at 6’ 3”, and my age of 40+.

In the cases where I did succeed, the success did not produce the desired effect in a permanent fashion. After a mediocre first third of my career in engineering, I finally did produce tangible accomplishments in the final two thirds, significant enough to produce a self-assurance of my significant value… as an engineer. But not necessarily as a whole human. When I left engineering, that value was eliminated.

The point is that I valued myself by what I could achieve, and in many of the pursuits that I chose in an attempt to define myself, there were many other individuals who were far better than I could ever be. When I did produce significant accomplishments, those did not seem to apply to me as a complete human. This didn’t help my self-valuation, and it raised a serious paradox in my life: I was certainly selfish enough to feel that I had value, yet I could not produce hard evidence to support that feeling, to turn it from a feeling into a conclusion.

I think that this contributes to the reasons behind the shrill assertions of “reason” and “rationality” that seem to define today’s Atheists. They need to acquire value from their rebellion. Attempting to equate rebellion with reason is an attempt to produce self-value within a valueless pursuit. But it leads to two ancillary positions, the need for eliteness, and the misunderstanding that individuals have no value (outside of eliteness).

My egress from Atheism was not accomplished in an instant, with a flash of enlightenment and a slap to the forehead. It started with the observation that much of what is said by Atheists is demonstrably erroneous. Why should that be, I wondered, if Atheists are as unrelentingly rational as they unrelentingly claim? When I retired onto a cattle farm I began to have enough time to pursue this question. It was not a spiritual journey so much as an intellectual program, a concentrated study of issues that were ignored in my formal education. I undertook to complete my education, a task that will likely never be completed regardless of the intensity with which I pursue it.

How has this changed me? The knowledge that material evidence does not cover all possible existence led me to understand that Atheism cannot be valid and that agnosticism is pusillanimous. My persistent feeling of value has origins in a reality that cannot be assailed by materialist empiricism. I don’t need physical evidence to prove my value as a distinct, sentient, non-entropic, acausal and intentional being which defies the four forces of the universe, and produces causes rather than merely consuming them.

My value as a person is not questionable. People are born with the ability to understand that, outside the restricted knowledge provided by empiricism with its mechanical limitations. The feeling of valuelessness is not innate, it is acquired.

The ability to comprehend is not predictable from raw elements nor from complex molecular constructions; the ability to comprehend is outside the Atheist / Philosophical Materialist purview. Speculative radical reductionism by Atheo-materialists does not serve to supply real explanations for the issue of the source of sentience in a material universe; sentience lies outside and beyond. Nor does negative reductionism, claiming that damaging the neural brain stops sentience, when it is just as likely that damaging the neural brain interrupts the connection. (It is just as rational to argue that ripping out the heart stops sentience, so the heart is the source of sentience). Nor does evolution supply real explanations, it responds to every question with one response: mutation, selection, deep time – three gods which answer for everything without explaining anything.

Atheist necessary absurdities abound. The universe arose as a material effect without a material cause. Life arose as a nonentropic chemical accident. Life is not exceptional, nor does it have an essence. Life has no value except as it contributes to the perpetuation of the species. Human life has no value, except as it contributes to society; hence an embryo has no value, the elderly have no value, and the non-productive have no value. Yet society as a whole has so much value that it is to be pitied that there are inequalities in outcomes. These values are determined by the highly valued intellectual elites, those whose self-derived morals are superior to all other morals. Traditional values for personal character development are denied, in favor of egalitarianism and social justice.

I am different now because I question these things, and I do so with a background in logic acquired both in my career and in my subsequent study. I am different now in the understanding that the entire foundation of my self-view was wrong under Atheism. I am different now because I realize that that applies not just to me, but also to every individual: each individual has an inherent value that is not determined by other people or by relative accomplishments. My entire worldview was wrong.

By understanding the concept of the inherent value of individuals, all individuals, I now understand that the source of Rights is outside the hegemony of governments or elites, but that those Rights can easily be violated by just those groups; hence those groups are dangerous. A person born with a mind has an implied Right to use that mind to self-direct his life. Obviously, that Right can be violated. So there is also an implied Responsibility to protect that Right, the Right to use one’s natural sentience, from those who would violate that Right with their own self-derived ethics and power. I only partially understood that concept before.

I could ramble endlessly; but I will stop here.