Dawkins on Atheism

“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” – Richard Dawkins

What is Dawkins talking about?

Perhaps Dawkins means that most of the 6 billion people who belong to one of the world’s many faith traditions are atheists about every religion other than their own. They reject other people’s definitions of divinity. They are certain that other religions are harmless fairy tales or destructively misleading. They hold to their one “true” faith.

Dawkins, a passionate atheist, goes “one god further” by proclaiming that no god or religion is worth believing in. He rejects all gods, and he advocates his atheistic perspectives with missionary zeal.

The Time Almanac 2011 edition published by Encyclopedia Britannica Inc. estimates that there are 138 million atheists in the world today. This is, however, difficult to estimate with accuracy because atheists learned to keep their mouths shut a long time ago. Many people paid a high price for openly doubting the perspectives of locally empowered religious establishments. Doubters are conditioned to play it safe.

The right to disbelieve is yet to be established in many regions of the world. Do 138 million atheists represent a threat to the future of religion?

God Created Atheists

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about atheism:

“Atheism is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.”^”

Those who believe in an all-powerful divinity may be comforted by this thought: God created atheists.

What do you think?