posted on Oct, 5 2014 @ 04:13 PM
As one predisposed to social interaction, I enjoy a good party, and I do my best to take part in the festivities. Halloween is next on my list.
I’ve ruminated on what I should be for halloween this year and I’ve decided to go as an atheist. However, this costume seems impossible, as an
atheist has no common dress or symbols I can utilize. Luckily, there are historical instances of where atheists were thrown to the lions, burnt at the
stake or tried in tribunals, so I imagine some sort of charred or chewed up corpse in prisoner’s garb might suffice. These people, of course, never
asserted themselves as atheists, instead they were condemned as such, like how people were condemned as witches or demons or devil worshippers.
But it’s striking; we don’t see people in everyday life walking around calling themselves witches and demons. Witches and demons, we've found,
are superstitions. But the atheist is not? How is it any less superstitious to condemn someone of atheism than it is to condemn someone as a witch? It
isn’t really. Then why aren’t people going around calling themselves witches and demons nowadays, while another ecclesiastical condemnation of the
very same sort, the atheist, still goes around calling himself an atheist like it's in vogue? I imagine people willingly entering a court of law
without being summoned and calling themselves "criminals", that they don't believe in the law, and demand respect for it in return, all while
becoming upset when the law is shoved down their throat. In fact, it isn’t less superstitious at all, for to assert that someone doesn’t believe
in God is to presuppose there is a God to not believe in, like to assert someone is a witch is to presuppose people are engaging in dark magic, or
that one is a devil worshipper is to presuppose there is a devil to worship.
It becomes quite evident that the atheist too, like the witch or djinn, is a mythical character. But for some reason you, as a self-condemned atheist,
don’t wear this costume one time out of the year, but as much as humanly possible. You are actually proud of this costume and the way the church has
dressed you. For you a believe yourself to be an actual atheist, a mythical creature postulated in the very same lore, an evil fabricated within the
confines of ecclesiastical minds. And how well you play your part—the fictional character, willing participants, adorning yourself in their vile
rhetoric-laden costumes, sewn by the same bloodied and charred hands that put your brethren and their works to the torch for all these years.
No. You are not without a god, for there is no god to be without. Let’s drop the nonsense. You are merely a fiction of the same insidious universe.
You’ve allowed yourself to use their condemnation as a badge of honor, defining yourself purely within the confines of their doctrines, having yet
to step outside of it. You are the unbeliever to their believer, the infidel to their fidelity, the apostate to the pietist, the pagan to the
non-Abrahamic, the heretic to the acolyte, the blasphemer to the theologian, who un-believes, who actively and proudly “lacks faith” in the most
mediocre of ideas, as if such a mindless feat was worthy of pride. I find it strange you accept their slanders, and wear it as if it was fashionable
to do so, as if ecclesiastical pejoratives carried with it a high-fashion credibility, instead of the millennia’s worth of genocidal and stupid
baggage it once denoted. You breath life into these myths. You give their demons body. You wear their branding. You play with their toys in their
sandbox. You throw their verbal excrement on yourself and roll around on their stage, with only your accusers as your audience. Irony, sweet irony.
The philosophers of old suffered greatly to avoid the accusation of atheism, usually by submitting their verse to be published posthumously, or under
the pseudonym, so as to avoid the condemnation of atheism by stagnant minds hell-bent on finding a mythological scapegoat for where only the stagnant
mind was guilty—stagnant minds who were too weak to wield the weapons of verse, unable to defend against the innumerable bee stings that assailed
their festering foundations in the form of words. These philosophers knew the hissy-fit that would result from their mere paragraphs. What better but
to silence them? What better than to discredit, defile and demean their very name in front of their peers? What better than to call them an atheist?
To think that these philosophers should come out as atheists, as if such condemnations had any credibility, is unreasonable, and dare I say, a form of
religious enthusiasm. The atheist, the infidel, the heretic is no different than the mythical witch, or angel, or devil, which in less than
superstitious societies nowadays, is nothing but halloween costumes that children seldom wear.
LesMis