Atheism On Negation In Tuscany

[Note: Since I attempted to be clever in this essay by using double-negatives, I ended up confusing myself and making a mistake. The mistake -- failing to create a double negative where needed -- has been corrected. If some of you read this and said, "What the-?", well, now you just have to say, "Huh?"]

I turned to the atheist next to me and asked if he ever thought in anything other than negation. He said he did not.

I've decided that an essay on atheism is all wrong. There are starting points that offend my pretensions, everyone being smarter than I. Irrespective of my ever-maturing idiocy, I've convinced myself that the starting point for a theist is always a positive - God. I've even noticed that the starting point for a theist is a positive predicate - God is. In contrast, the atheist is forever chained to negation; the atheist can only say that God is not, or that there is no God. The atheist cannot, however, tell you what is; there is no affirmation offered that is not mere subjective whim, mere preference or pet-interest.

But if the atheist is right, my theism is really the denial, the negation. Yet I protest that I do not know what it is I am negating: I assert there is something rather than nothing. I am not saying -- am I? -- that God is not non-existent, nor am I negating some principle common to atheism. Perhaps I must content myself with being a non-atheist, with atheism, of course, being some form of positive position. I can't deny then that my non-atheism is an abuse of the positive positions of atheism, those jolly positions I often hear described as bursting with "alacrity" and optimism and liberty. (Indeed, I really can't deny that I am thoroughly abusive of these notions.)

All this the wind tells me is so much nonsense. I hear squirrels chattering more sanity, even when cats wait nearby. The atheist cannot tell me what is but only what isn't. An atheist's negation of my affirmation of theism is a bit like zero telling 1 that multiplication is a fantasy. And it is fantasy, if you embrace nothing. But the atheist recoils at this, shouting, I don't embrace nothing! If one listens for but a moment one hears what the atheist so passionately and earnestly embraces -- beauty, truth, love, progress, posterity, science. In fact the atheist, being incredibly zealous for his ideals, won't take long to dispel the annoying rumors of nihilism preventing him from enjoying his favorite peace. But point out to him that his creed is filled with ideals that hold no objective compulsion -- that his ideals are unique to him and his subjectivity -- and you will hear more bluster than a creationist sacked by a gang of Darwinists. Then add to the punch the obvious -- that if all truth is subjective and theism is one of those subjectively held truths (in a godless world) -- it thus follows that one man's atheism is no advantage over another's theism. If there is nothing but negation and subjectivism; if there is nothing absolute, then what can an atheist say to that man who knows there is no God and yet to spite the very universe believes in God anyway, comforted and compelled in his theism by the atheist's primary convictions, e.g. all truth is subjective and headed for oblivion? Why should an atheist enamored of subjectivism care at all that there are Christians, or other subjective theists, in a world rushing toward the void? We all share the same fate -- annihilation. Then what could possibly induce an atheist to expend one moment decrying theism when nothing he can offer and nothing he believes can save anything?

How odd that the zeros should care so much.

But, as I said, I am the dope in this room. Outside the door? The waiting, crushing abyss.

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.