Financial Atheism

Too Long; Didn't Read

<span>A</span>fter the tragic events of 9/11 2001 Sam Harris started writing his book “The end of faith” which happened to be released around the same time as Richard Dawkins’ “The God delusion”, Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the spell” and Christopher Hitchens “God is not great — How religion poisons everything”. These books kickstarted what in hindsight has often been referred to as <em>the new atheist movement</em> even though there has arguably never been anything new about atheism. Atheism must almost certainly have preceded religion since religious ideas require the person holding the idea to <em>believe</em> a certain doctrine or story. Atheism is just the rejection of ways to describe the world which are not verifiable by experimentation. A fly is probably an atheist by this definition of the word. Atheism is often accused of being just another set of of beliefs when in reality, the word itself describes what it is much better. A-theism. The lack of belief in theistic ideas. It is not a code of conduct or set of rules to live your life by, it is simply the rejection of that which cannot be scientifically verified. Many people, religious people in particular, have a hard time grasping this. If you believe that a supernatural entity created everything in everyone’s life you might not be too comfortable with a word that describes a complete rejection of what you believe created even the atheist that the word describes. The amount of different religious world views that exist is probably equal to the sum of all religious people on the planet but the world view that’s based on a rejection of these views require but one word — atheism. It is not the opposite of religion, it is simply the lack of it. It is the equivalent of the zero in relation to all the other numbers.