What is an atheist?

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Atheists are people who profess faith in the power of evidence-based reasoning. Where evidence is lacking, which is to say, in most domains, they create evidence from its lack. This is in accordance with everyone else’s metaphysical-spiritual beliefs, but atheists do it without an even basic awareness that they’re doing it because their beliefs blind them and make them feel superior to the stupid religious rubes.

They then play rhetorical tricks to try to paint their beliefs as not-beliefs. Lack of evidence for God becomes evidence against God in their minds, but their words state that they just ‘don’t believe’, not that they ‘believe there’s not’. It’s the exact same thing, but good luck trying to get one of them to see that.

To illustrate the logic at play here, I don’t believe that a magic space bunny holds dominion over the underwater city-state of Atlantis. The difference between this and atheism is that I don’t bother to refute or explain my lack of belief logically, much less choose to identify as the reverse of that position. I would treat someone who tried to proselytize that viewpoint to me in the same vein as when my father tries to foist his silly Pizzagate crap on me. It’s funny. I don’t bother trying to refute it. I don’t identify as a non-Pizzagater or as a non-MagicBunnyite. It’s not worth serious treatment. If I went around and held up my non-Pizzagater flag 30 years after the controversy stopped being relevant, you would be well within reason to accuse me of not being entirely sincere and more than a little nuts.

God is a serious idea and subject for discussion and debate, religion and spirituality are integral parts of the human psyche, regardless of whether the specific beliefs are themselves metaphysical or supernatural in nature, and all humans contend with them. But only atheists put their hands to their ears and hum as loudly as they can in order to avoid thinking about it, even while their underlying thoughts follow the exact same patterns.

Intrinsic to atheism is the philosophical stance of materialism. This is the position of no-God taken to it’s next logical extreme where nothing that is not physical is deemed to exist. This is amusingly discounted by the undeniable presence of something sacred to the atheist worldview, mathematics. Whole numbers are pure Platonic perfection, entities that do not and cannot exist physically yet are impossible to say aren’t real.