A friend sent me a link to About.com article - Atheism Is A Religion? - Austin Cline handles the question well. It is worth a read if you have the time.
What are my thought on this? Well… Atheism is the opposite of religion. It is about not having any a well-defined believing structure. It is about not believing in a god, be he Jesus or Buddha. Atheism is not belief in nothing, but about having no supernatural beliefs at all.
People often ask me where I will go when I die as if it were scary to think of facing the future with no assurance of an afterlife. The response that springs to mind, although rarely spoken, is nowhere at all. I normally answer, “I don’t know”. Nor do I ponder death much, I prefer to think about life. Death is the absence of life like Atheism is the absence of religion. It just is, and that comforts me.
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2 comments:
I'd say that you're right... Atheism is not a religion or a belief.
That Atheism is a Religion blog is a trip! Did you see that?
I haven't yet been asked about where I think I will go when I die, but I'm pretty sure that I'd answer, "in the ground" or "in the an oven." But I'm like you. I don't think of death often. I think it may be because I'm not afraid of dying...
I think that's why people want so badly to believe in a heaven. Out of fear of the unknown (the same reason that the believe in god).
Fear of not existing drives a lot of religious people to convince themselves of a life after death. There are, and have always been, those who trade on that fear, namely organized religions, who cater to that fear and use it to their advantage for both power and profit. It's not difficult, after living a life in which such individuals are led to believe that they are the centre of their little universe, and to convey the idea of their importance to god. With the alternative death being nothing but a return to water and maybe $5.00 worth of chemicals, a poor alternative to ascending into some place called heaven, there to experience eternal life; however mind numbingly boring that sounds.
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