Atheism 2.0

First, watch this speech by Alain de Botton at TED titled Atheism 2.0. Click here.

Now, I can't say that I have always been an atheist. I think that on some level I've always been a non-believer but it wasn't until I read Christopher Hitchens and watched speeches and debates with Hitchens, Dawking, Harris, and Dennett that I finally felt I had the ammo, so to speak, to "come out" as an atheist. It was through these writers and speakers that my opinions about atheism was largely informed.

Now, I must admit prior to watching this speech by de Botton I'd never heard of him. However he makes some very good points. In churches people seek and receive, frequently with gusto, moral guidance. Obviously there are other ways of forming one's morals but none of them are as easy as simply asking the pastor you see every Sunday, and sometimes, Wednesday.

I can see how some would see this as an affront to atheism and see this as weakening atheism but I don't think it would. It would give our community a sense of actual community. I know there are other atheists out there but we don't have a real community center, a physical structure, and perhaps we should look into creating one. Perhaps, even, I dare say, an Atheist Church. Or perhaps we could call it, what I believe would be more widely accepted, an Atheist Community Center. And it could be structured like a church. Sermons on Sundays, meals afterward. Perhaps the best part of this, in my opinion, would be that we could send people on missions across the world, and instead of proselytizing to them we could actually help them. Humanitarian missions. I think that we have and will continue to lose ground on the moral arguments, or at least it will seem that way to people on the fence in the bible belt. By having a community where we send people on humanitarian missions we could not only gain moral ground but provide a better argument for our community than any religion can. By doing something like this we could say that we don't do this because some mythical creature told us to. We do it because we believe, as individual people, that it is a good moral thing to do.

Atheism cannot survive by scaring children like religion. Instead we have a much more difficult task, we have the power of our ideas and examples alone and until we show people that our morals are not only more rational but that they satisfy that sense of longing to belong to something bigger than ourselves, we lose. And an Atheist Community could solve that problem.