I wrote an essay about this question back in the day (before I was posting essays on the Internet…) and it seemed clear to me that atheism was a “religion” with beliefs, just with beliefs in no-god(s) versus my then belief in the God of the Fundamentalists Christians. The problem, of course, was that I didn’t recognize that I was interpreting someone else’s non-belief through my own lens of belief. And, admittedly, I didn’t come to my own faith through anything “scientific” or through some exclusively rational process. I became this kind of Christian because I had what Rudolf Otto would have called a “Religious Experience” as a 15-year-old and with the help and encouragement of my small group of (Christian) friends interpreted this experience via Christian traditions and beliefs. It is kind of like that saying, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. 

So, given that my “proof” of the correctness of my faith, Christianity, was primarily based on an unexplainable experience (and I was okay with that), then I assumed that those on the other side had a similar foundation to their different belief. Just the language used to discuss the topic lends itself to that framework. I get John Green’s reluctance to explore this topic. It’s easy to stumble on just the terminology being used. 

I understand how and why self-identified atheists reject the notion that atheism is just another form of religion. If anything, they’ve often come to their conclusion against the belief in god because they had been religious and found issues and problems with their prior religious framework and they felt that said problems could not be resolved except by rejecting that religious framework. For many atheists, this is a rational process, which they feel is the opposite of basing their lives on an unexplainable experience. 

Having been on the non-believing side, for the second time, for well over a decade, I tend to reject this binary belief/non-belief scenario, in as much as I would not deny anyone who says that they had a religious experience, just as I had back in 1973. I’m just highly skeptical over the interpretation that gets applied to these experiences, just as  I applied to my own experience. I don’t deny that people have epiphany experiences all the time. Thus just like any personal experience, what one feels is what one feels… then what? That’s where I think there is room for less fundamentalistic rigid interpretations. But then, all of this is based on my own “experiential” based faith, and lots in the belief camp and disbelief camp found themselves in said camps simply by the accident of birth and have no other anchor event or even need to explore the question of belief or disbelief beyond that. 

If there is a lesson here, which would seem to be a recurring theme in these Crash Course videos, it would seem that one is likely to better understand people and communities who hold to different frameworks in their approach to reality when we begin by recognizing that we are using our own framework to try to understand this other group and maybe that’s the problem. Let each party describe their own position using their own language and when we find common language we might then be able to understand one another better. And it all begins with having some common understanding. 

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Tags: atheism, belief, Crash Course Religions, Religious studies, video Wednesdays

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