The Logical Atheist

Belief in God (or any god) requires you to embrace notions completely foreign to everyday experience and language, which is rooted in that experience. What is a nonmaterial entity that is said to be infinite and unlimited? Our natural notion of entity  contains the elements of matter and therefore limits. To be is to be something . To be something is to have a finite set of attributes -- a nature -- by which we understand what an entity is capable of. (So-called nonmaterial things such as justice and love describe actions, feelings, and relations between living beings.)  But God falls outside of this framework, just as by definition it falls outside of reality. In other words, God and related concepts cannot be integrated with anything else we know. It requires one to disregard logic and context in certain matters. It requires one to engage in what George Orwell in  Nineteen Eighty-Four  called "doublethink." I don't see how that serves one's well-being. Tim Whi...

"Atheism, we are so often told, is a modern invention, a product of the European Enlightenment: it would be inconceivable without the twin ideas of a secular state and of science as a rival to religious truth. This is a myth nurtured by both sides of the "new atheism" debate: adherents wish to present skepticism toward the supernatural as the result of science's progressive eclipse of religion, and the religious wish to see it as a pathological symptom of a decadent Western world consumed by capitalism. Both are guilty of modernist vanity. Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills.... There have been many [atheists] throughout history and across all cultures who have resisted belief in the divine." -- Tim Whitmarsh,  Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World