Atheism will replace religion
I say good! Hopefully it will help more people reach an enlightened belief that is fully their own rather than simply a leftover from their upbringing or culture. Most forms of religion today are in generally poor shape. It is individual believers within these faiths who light them up.
Atheism is founded upon reasoned observations of the world and is often arrived at after an independent investigation.
Religion - and by that I exclude absolutely none of the world religions -needs purified from an obsession with manmade customs, vain adherence to lifeless creeds that hold no meaning for people in the 21st century, cultural and mythical elements and simplistic understandings of God or the afterlife, amidst a myriad of other things.
True religion changes peoples' lives for the better and inspires so many people in our world today to do acts of immense charity and humanity without any thought for self.
Atheism however represents a chance for believers of every faith to purify their religious beliefs and their conception of God/supreme reality.
I welcome it.
Religion will only succeed in Europe again, as it does still in the rest of the world (Christianity is, for example, the fastest growing religion in Africa and China) when it becomes once again a force for change for the better of individual people rather than being itself corrupted by individual people.
I am reminded of the famous words of a certain high-profile Cardinal of the Catholic Church during the Renaissance, who spoke these powerful words (that I think are very in tune with Sikhi) in the opening speech of the Fifth Lateran Council:
"...Men should be changed by religion, not religion by men..."
- Cardinal Egidio da Viterbo (1469-1532), Italian Augustinian friar, reforming theologian, humanist, Catholic mystic & poet
And so I give to you the modern Catholic mystic (and convert from Atheism), Simone Weil (brought up in a secular Jewish family), who explained thus:
"...Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong....That is why St. John of the Cross calls faith a night. With those who have received a Christian education, the lower parts of the soul become attached to these mysteries when they have no right at all to do so. That is why such people need a purification of which St. John of the Cross describes the stages. Atheism and incredulity constitute an equivalent of such a purification...Whenever one tries to suppress doubt, there is tyranny...There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God...At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being...God is absent from the world, except in the existence in this world of those in whom his love is alive...Their compassion is the visible presence of God...An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God...I am absolutely sure that God exists, in the sense that my love is not an illusion. I am absolutely sure that God does not exist, in the sense that nothing corresponds to whatever I may think when I utter this name. But what I cannot think is not an illusion..."
- Simone Weil (1909 – 1943), Jewish Catholic mystic & philosopher
Hence why Saint Edith Stein, a Catholic martyr of the Holocaust who died in a concentration camp because of her Jewish ethnicity (she converted from Judaism to Catholicism after a wander into agnosticism/atheism), once said about her mentor from her agnostic/atheist days:
"...I am not at all worried about my dear Master. It has always been far from me to think that God's mercy allows itself to be circumscribed by the visible church's boundaries. God is truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not..."
- Saint Edith Stein (1891 - 1942), Jewish Catholic mystic & Holocaust victim, speaking about her atheist mentor Edmund Husserl
The most daring forms of orthodox Catholic mysticism are quite akin to atheism anyway.
There is a tradition of what is known by academics as "mystical atheism" in Catholic mysticism. Obviously, ordinary lay Catholics don't often think of it in this way but scholars do. A Vajrayana Buddhist online once asked me to explain it to him. He said:
I understand that there is a very strong non-theistic tradition even in historical Catholicism, and a number of Catholic (as well as of course Muslim and Jewish) scholars and mystics have discussed the issue of not using the label "God" because it allows us to make our own presumptions about what that is.
An example:
The most daring forms of Catholic mysticism have emphasized the absolute unknowability of God. They suggest that true contact with the transcendent involves going beyond all that we speak of as God - even the Trinity - to an inner "God beyond God," a divine Darkness or Desert in which all distinction is lost.
This form of "mystical atheism" has [as its] main exponent the Pseudo-Dionysius, who distinguished "the super-essential God-head" from all positive terms ascribed to God, even the Trinity (The Divine Names, chapter 13).
In the West this tradition is first found in Erigena and is especially evident in the Rhineland school. According to Eckhart, even being and goodness are "garments" or "veils" under which God is hidden. In inviting his hearers to "break through" to the hidden Godhead, he daringly exclaimed, "let us pray to God that we may be free of 'God,' and that we may apprehend and rejoice in that everlasting truth in which the highest angel and the fly and the soul are equal" (German Sermons, 52).
In fact Sam Harris, the famed atheist neuroscientist, admitted last year that he enjoys reading Catholic and Indian mystics and actually "gets" them:
"If I open a page of [the 13th-century Catholic mystic] Meister Eckhart, I often know what he’s talking about.”
This is practically a form of religious atheism within a Catholic context:
"...God never did exist
Nor ever will, yet aye
He was ere worlds began, and
When they're gone he'll stay.
God is a pure Nothing,
He stands not in time or place
And cannot be touched
God is an utter Nothingness,
Beyond the touch of Time and Place:
The more you grasp after Him,
The more he flees your embrace
The vengeful God
of wrath and punishment
is a mere fairytale.
It simply is the Me
that makes me fail.
God stands far above the anger,
rage and indignation
ascribed to Him by primitive imagination
All heaven's glory is within
and so is hell's fierce burning.
You must yourself decide
in which direction
you are turning
Unless you find paradise
at your own center,
there is not
the smallest chance
that you may enter..."
- Angelus Silesius (1624 – 1677), German Catholic mystic
God doesn't exist. Many theists probably believe in a God they have thought up in their own head, one who corresponds to their personal needs, a comfort and a crutch to lean upon. That God, the God of "reward and punishment", the God of nationalisms and narrow belief systems, he
certainly doesn't exist. I would be more than happy to let that God die and write the obituary for him and all the suffering he has caused countless human beings through meaningless wars, upheavals and rattling them with all kinds of unnecessary guilt and self-loathing. The worship of this God is idolatry, a subtle form of idolatry, that I am sure many people are innocently guilty of. Atheists are some of the few people on earth who are not guilty of this idolatry and for that alone they would warrant my respect.
"...In order to attain perfect union, we must free ourselves of God...The common belief about God, that He is a great Taskmaster, whose function is to reward or punish, is cast out by perfect love; and in this sense the spiritual man does divest himself of God as conceived of by most people. The intellectual where is the essential unnameable nothingness. So we must call it, because we can discover no mode of being, under which to conceive it...A man may in this life reach the point at which he understands himself to be one with that which is the nothing of all the things that one can conceive, imagine or express in words. By common agreement men call this Nothing "God" and it is in itself a most essential Something. And here a person knows himself to be one with this Nothing, and this Nothing knows itself without the activity of knowing. But this is mysteriously hidden further within..."
- Blessed Henry Suso (c. 1296-1366), German Catholic mystic & Dominican priest
I therefore have a very positive view of atheism in general mundahugAnd what's more many of them live highly principled lives under the auspices of such modern ethical systems as Secular Humanism and without any hope of a heavenly reward, they do it out of the sheer goodness of their humanity and empathy for their suffering brothers and sisters. That gets a huge thumbs up from me!
What I find dangerous is not atheism (the denial of God and even an afterlife) but
materialism and the sating of lusts, a kind of 'enjoy yourself and be a hedonist' attitude which is often falsely promoted as real atheism by popular writers of books and which gives a terrible example to confused young people today who want something more from life. The false gospel of "do as you please" materialism is the true sickness affecting Western civilisation, not principled atheists.
BTW I do believe that pure religion will never vanish, only corrupted/stale manifestations of it.
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