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During various conversations I've had over years where the talk eventually drifted to the thorny topic of religion, people have asked me (with an accompanying skeptical expression), "but aren't you really just an atheist who doesn't want to be called one?"
I reject the "atheist" label for several reasons. First, I dislike labels in general, since they often lead to incorrect assumptions about one's real beliefs. This might not be such a big deal if you are, say a Christian living in the Western world; most people with any modest degree of worldly exposure realize that there are many different stripes of Christianity, and are probably unlikely to assume that because you are one you automatically share the views of a Pat Robertson. Not so for other designations, "atheist." among them. Once someone accepts the "atheist" moniker, many, particularly more conservative American Christians, will lump him in with the Madalyn Murray O'Hair/Rob Sherman crowd, or with other rabidly antireligious and hostile non-believers they have met or read about.
Second (which is really just a more general case of the first), labels are misleading and of little use without a common understanding of what the key concepts to which they relate actually mean. "God" and "atheist" mean very different things to different people. I'll explain to people what I mean when I talk about God (which is not the petty, petulant , micromanaging personal deity of the Judeo-Christian variety; more on the subject of A Very Small God in a future article) -- and if they still want to call me an atheist after that, my response is often along the lines of, "hey, whatever shocks your rocks, pal." Finally, I reject the term because it would define me in terms of something in which I do not believe -- I also do not believe that there are little green men living on Mars -- but I don't define myself based on that non-belief.
I describe myself, when necessary, as a open-minded, independent thinker and skeptic who refuses to accept a set of beliefs simply because generations before me believed them and set their precepts down in a holy book of some sort. Or I may tell people that I am a freethinker (with a small "f") -- since that is a designation that is sufficiently obscure that most will need to ask what it means.
Finally, I reject the "atheist" label because it will lead many to the mistaken conclusion that I have a depressingly sterile outlook on life, devoid of any of the spiritual joy and exultation that the more traditionally religious may experience. In fact, I find that exactly the opposite is true, and in fact would go so far as to assert that I am very spiritually and religiously inclined, though admittedly not in the sense most attribute to those words. When I say I am "spiritual", I am not, I must stress, saying that I believe in things supernatural or deity-driven. I simply mean that I believe that the religious experience is something very real, having experienced it both as a young Evangelical Christian (before falling into the pit of my current apostasy) and in my present, blessedly unlabelled state. It is not for me now, though, fed by faith in a deity and ecstasy basking in the warmth of His infinite power, glory and love, but by knowledge and direct experience. It is that, coupled with the capacity to marvel at the magnificance of it all, to lie on my back alone in the forest at night (I am an avid solo backpacker) and look up into the almost ungraspable reaches of space and see the continuity of my own existence with it, with the smaller scale nearby world of rocks and trees, soil, bears, mosquitoes, microorganisms, molecules and atoms, and with the physics and chemistry that tie it all together.
It is far from a sterile existence.
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