All the discussion over on The Daily Dish about religion and atheism has led to some premature ejaculations on my part. I’ve meant to write about the various forms of atheism and the ones to which I ascribe for a long time now¹ but I never got around to it until these discussions reinvigorated me on the subject.

In particular, the form of atheism I most often identify with, apatheism, is described quite well by one of Andrew’s readers:

Maybe there is a god. Maybe there are many gods. Maybe there’s no god at all. Maybe I could drive myself crazy second-guessing myself and every theologian and pastor and religious friend out there. Maybe in the end it doesn’t matter, and I’ve just got to lead the best life I can, as I see it, and if that’s not good enough in the end — if there be an end instead of a simple fading away — then as far as I’m concerned, any god that would condemn me for doing my best to be the best person I can isn’t a god I’d want to believe in, in the first place.

Dedicated readers out there might recall that I was once a very passionate christian. Well, I called myself christian but I didn’t believe in the holy trinity nor in the divinity of Jesus Christ, so really I was just a guy that strongly believed that God existed. I had debated with myself about the nature of God for so long and in such detail that I had come to the conclusion that God is so far beyond human comprehension that any attempt by us to understand his wishes or obey his will would be a terrible distortion.

Eventually, I argued myself down to seeing it as this apatheist does: I’m going to live my life the way I think is right and good. The god that deems my sincere efforts unacceptable while leaving his criteria ambiguous is not a god I want to worship.

At the time this moved me deeply and I can remember understanding the significance of this shift. I had gone from a mostly-Anglican Christian to an I-don’t-know-what², and I felt great relief at finally overcoming some of my deepest issues with my faith.

Naturally, not long after that I stopped believing in God. Not necessarily as a result of this religious shift, rather I suspect that this shift was merely a stepping stone my psyche deemed necessary as I weaned my mind off the belief in deities. Nonetheless, I had become a full-bore apatheist.

Apatheism can appear deceptively like a form of lazy religion³, but what I believed then and what I believe now are very different. What I believed then was that a god that will ultimately judge my life, but I accepted the impossibility of knowing its criteria and simply lived a life I thought was right.

But to the apatheist, God is not unknowable, God is irrelevant. God, even if he did exist, doesn’t matter.

If everyone but me believed in God, but they didn’t let that belief affect politics, or science, or education, I’d be content. But what I see instead is the vilification of atheism and the slow creep of church into state. And that’s when I’m not an apatheist anymore.

I’d love to not have to care about religion, but quite frankly that’s irresponsible given the growing atmosphere of religiosity in our culture.

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Footnotes

1. With numerous drafts broaching the topic from slightly different angles sitting on this blog from two years ago [↩]
2. I later realized that it was strikingly similar to a view known as ignosticism, though I contend there are still vital, though subtle, differences mostly borrowed from apatheism [↩]
3. Or conversely, lazy religion can be seen as a form of apatheism [↩]