Different strokes for different folks

[rug]

There is room for both belief and unbelief in our secular nation



Photo- Mahmud Hossain Opu/Dhaka Tribune

June 3, 2013 at 14:09
Fawaz Rob

The story goes like this: An atheist goes to a fancy restaurant and asks for a cup of tea. The religious waiter brings the tea and there is a fly in it. Angry atheist says, “What is a fly doing in my tea?” The waiter says politely, “Well, I think he is praying.” The atheist gets angrier and says, “Prayer never solves anything, I can’t drink this. Take it back.” The waiter smiled and said, “You see? The fly’s prayers were answered.”

I am not an atheist. I am not a blogger. I am not a person who finds it amusing to hurt other people’s religious sentiments. However, in light of the continuous chant “Hang the atheists” that is going around these days, I am just a citizen who is attempting to understand this widely misunderstood phenomenon called “atheism.”

Persona non grata

In Bangladesh, nastikota or atheism has been considered derogatory for as long as we can remember. Any self-proclaimed nastik is automatically outcast from the society and dealt with the harshest of social ostracism. Even the Ekushey Padak winning writer Humayun Azad had to suffer because he truthfully expressed his atheism in public. The fear of being called a nastik is so widespread that even among the most educated classes very few will publicly admit their slightest disregard for religion. Therefore, any interpretation of religious dogma, no matter how outrageous it appears, will be tolerated silently. Otherwise, any protest against it would mean being branded as a nastik, a sure death to any political or social aspiration. Most of the youths in Shahbagh movement were not atheists, but as soon as they were labelled so, somehow the movement lost sympathy of many believers. An atheist is almost automatically seen as a bad person bound to burn in the fires of hell for eternity, which is ironic, because atheists don’t tend to believe in heaven or hell anyways.

What I understand is that atheism is not a religion. Atheism is the disbelief of any existence of God or deity. Atheists don’t have religious scriptures or “holy” books, they don’t have a prophet or an idol, and they don’t have a temple or a mosque. They believe in the non-existence of all that a theist would believe. In our country we brand anyone who doesn’t follow an organised religion as nastik. In reality there are many forms of disbelief. You have your garden-variety confirmed atheists, then there are the ones who subscribe to “no religion.”

http://dhakatribune.com/op-ed/2013/jun/03/different-strokes-different-folks

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

1. "What I understand is that atheism is not a religion."

It can be, to those who insist that there is no God. They take this attitude based on what can only be called faith. Dawkins is a sterling example of a "religious atheist".

[Promethean]

2. This everybody is what is called Projecting.

See you take your viewpoint and Project it onto someone else while twisting it to appear as negative as possible. Projecting generally has absolutely nothing to do with words like "Truth" or "Fact."

Take the above statement. Dawkins has repeatedly stated that he is willing to accept evidence of the existence of a deity. However none has been brought forward so he looks to the only thing he can to determine his thought process. That is probability. What is the probability of there being a creator deity? It is so low that it is far more reasonable to not believe in such a concept than to believe there is one. Dawkins actually goes into this subject in extreme detail in at least one of his books.

Of course for someone like the poster I am responding to know that would require doing actual, you know, research. Instead of just assuming or take the word of someone who is also as biased as they are.