Stay Positive: Embracing Agnosticism & Atheism

I read an opinion piece in The Washington Post today that I had to share.  

It's titled "America Doesn't Need More God. It Needs More Atheists" (gifted article) It's an article reformulated from Kate Cohen's book We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should Too). 

The article speaks to me in many ways. 

If I had to describe myself from a faith-based standpoint, I'd call myself a skeptical agnostic or, if you go by the bar Cohen has in the article, I'm basically an atheist. 

I guess it's possible that there's something going on with the "thousand faces of the hero" (Joseph Campbell's work) and the similarities of many different religions, but the likelihood of there being some divine being or set of beings who created the universe and have a hand in what people do in their lives is highly improbable. 

Slim chance. 

If anything, if we consider Jung's archetypes and Freud's idea of wish-fulfillment, perhaps myths/religions are simply a manifestation of some massive human wish-fulfillment that there's something after we die and that there is some kind of higher meaning to everything. 

I doubt it. 

Cohen has some great points for her thesis that the world needs more atheism and less religion. 

Here are some good points to be positive about being an agnostic or atheist:

• "My children know how to distinguish between fact and fiction - which is harder for children raised religious. They don't assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expected arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens." 
• "We need American who demand - as atheists do - that truth claims be tethered to fact." 
• Researchers have done the appropriate data crunching, and it seems the percentage of atheists is around 26%. 
• "In some ways, this [being atheist] makes life easier. You don't have to work out why God might cause or ignore suffering, which parts of this broken world are God's plan, or what work is his to do or what is yours." 
• "But you also don't get to leave things up to God.... Atheists believe people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better." 
• Apparently atheists are "more politically active" and "about 30 percent more likely to vote than religiously affiliated voters." 
• Basically, instead of relying on a divine being, atheists think people need to do good in the world. 

Cohen does an excellent job of providing the perspective that many atheists are unlikely to share their dispositions because they are a minority in a world where lots of people want to share their religious ideas and force their religious/political viewpoints on others. 

As a result, we need to rebuild the "wall of separation between church and state" that Jefferson talked about and Cohen references.  

And like Cohen relates, people should embrace their agnosticism/atheism because there are a lot of us out there.