The term atheist is annoying because it seems like a double negative. The term (a) attached to a word in English means not or against, so at first encounter with the word one might think the atheist was against gods. The term appears to cover all concepts of gods, not just the Christian one, or pre-christian ones like the Greek or Roman gods but any and all variations on the concept of untestable volitionally directing entities. It seems there must be a component, however small, of consciousness and willful decision-making by these postulated gods.
These gods perform supernatural actions and not just natural ones that are associated with testable physical reality. But, it is claimed, they somehow do interact with our physical reality, because if they didn’t there would be no way to perceived, they would be absolutely invisible, and they could be totally ignored. Sometimes even nature can seem capricious, but for a nontheist or atheist or perhaps a natural scientist these unknowable behaviors are tallied up to the specific details of random sloshings about of real things bigger than us and our perceptions or even our potential understandings. These atheists would accept being struck by a meteor as just exceptionally bad luck and not as an act of a wrathful god intentionally disciplining them for being uniquely bad persons or for some ungodly act.
An act which one would think would annoy a god and make him wrathful would be to use his name in vain, or to say he doesn’t exist or perhaps worst of all simply ignore him altogether. Wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said, “The only thing worse than being spoken ill of is not being mentioned at all”? No – I just looked it up and he said, “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about..” It would seem the gods would be vengeful toward atheists, but even more so against those who totally ignored their existence. The atheists at least acknowledge the possibility of the gods’ existence, but then go on to doubt them because of lack of personally convincing proofs. The gods might rationalize their letting atheists out of punishments, because they, the gods, just didn’t want to bother with illustrating their power by performing some supernatural deeds for these atheists. The gods might also just ignore those people who ignore them. Why bother with someone who isn’t interested in you; it’s a waste of time and energy.
Those thoughts postulate the possible existence of gods, but what if that idea was just a string of words without any meaning — what if gods didn’t exist no matter how broadly you stretched the definition? If that were the case then an atheist would be against nothing whatsoever. It’s like saying I am opposed to nothing. This isn’t in the open-minded sense of being open to everything, but instead it’s the opposing of an utter vacuum in an absolute void. It doesn’t make much sense to be an atheist ( a — theist ) because it is against nothing.
There is one supernatural thing which nonbelievers could believe in if it were thought of in the right way, and that is the void itself. Everyone who thinks at all can wonder where their consciousness and being came from, why it is here and where it will go. What were they before they were born and what will become of them after their body is totally dissolved back into the universe and vanishes back into the void? This void is the supernatural entity of which we and everything we can conceive of has been created, is part of, and will vanish back into. It is the supernatural entity to which we should address ourselves when we ask for help, it is the supernatural entity we must cooperate with or be destroyed sooner rather than later. When we accept the void as our supernatural god we can get on with our lives as we see fit.
We came from the void, exist in the void and shall return to the void.
Well, the Void is there, but then so is Creation, which is eternal also, I believe. So it’s scarey to me think I’m going back to nothingness, I’d rather imagine that I can freely participate in Creation eternally, too. Don’t want to get bored there. Neither did Mark Twain.