Op-Ed

When I hear the term antithesis, or antithetical, I can’t help but think about religion. There are few subjects as polarising as religion. The nearest contender these days would be politics, but that’s a lot less entertaining.

There has been much debate recently, from online forums and television debates right up to books and rebuttal books, discussing the natures of religion and atheism, trying to convince everyone that the two are antithetical.

On the one hand you have the religious, convinced without a shred of evidence that their religion and theirs alone is the right, true and undeniable faith. They work from a standpoint of feeling and belief. On the other hand you have the atheists, equally convinced that there is nothing in the way of god, nothing after death and the physical world is all we have. They work from a standpoint of logic and reason. Let’s refer to these two groups as the Wilfully Ignorant and the Stubbornly Reasoned.

Each camp has its problems. The problems and inconsistencies among the Wilfully Ignorant are legion and plain to see (for the un-indoctrinated that is). For example, the complete lack of evidence; the fact that most holy books are plainly written by people seeking power and regularly updated; the strangely large number of men that claim to be god’s voice on Earth that are actually career kiddy fiddlers and so on and so forth. The problems for the Stubbornly Reasoned are a little less evident, but no less striking. Naturally, the burden of proof for something, especially something as important as a god, is on those who believe such an entity does exist. There is no burden of proof on the Stubbornly Reasoned, as their proof is already evident. Where’s god? Nowhere to be seen. Case closed.

However, the Stubbornly Reasoned are usually against every kind of unnatural or supernatural phenomena and thereby cut themselves off from some of the beauty and wonder in the universe, refusing to accept that anything is unexplainable. Sure, everything might be explained by science one day, but why spoil the party by refusing to speculate in the meantime. The truth is, we can’t be sure yet, so a blind faith in science is almost as bad as a blind faith in a god. Well, it’s not nearly that bad actually, but it’s still not good.

In that vein, it is possible to be completely against organised religion, completely unconvinced in the existence of a creator god and yet still not a member of the Stubbornly Reasoned.

Look at the Taoists, for example. At the essence of Taoism lies the concept of The Way. There is no anthropological creator with an ego bigger than his own universe that requires belief from things he made. There’s no weird situation where the god made himself manifest on earth and then sacrificed himself to himself to forgive us all for his own mistake. Or something. So technically, without a belief in a god, the Taoists are Stubbornly Reasoned. But let’s look at the definition of atheist:

- a lack of belief in the existence of God or gods (from a secular dictionary)

or

- denial that there is a God (from a Christian dictionary. The difference is not as subtle as it seems).

I’m not that keen on either of those definitions. Here’s another:

- a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings.

I’m a little more comfortable with that concept. You see, the Taoists believe in a power beyond themselves and beyond the Earth. That power is the Tao. But the Tao is not a long bearded Caucasian man, with a finely honed physique and a Charlton Hestonesque appeal. Talk about god made in man’s own imagination.

So the Taoists would deny the existence of gods or supreme beings, but they wouldn’t really fit comfortably into the description of an atheist, and therefore fall somewhere between the camps of the Wilfully Ignorant and the Stubbornly Reasoned. (Of course, a lot of Taoists these days do have something of a polytheistic world view and pay homage to a number of gods or “saints” and mix their beliefs with Buddhism and Confucianism. But let’s not look too deeply at that and spoil my analogy.)

So, to get back to the point in hand, it’s very hard to point to organised religion and atheism as being antithetical as many people try to do. Organised religion comes in many flavours, from the vaguely philosophical to the rabidly militant. Atheism could be said to come in the same flavours. So, like the Taoists, you can be religious and still not believe in “god”. Or, like many atheists, you can deny the existence of a creator or supreme being, yet still believe in forces beyond the ken of humanity.

So it’s impossible to say that organised religion and atheism are antithetical; the terms themselves are too broad to be pinned down like that. So what is the antithesis of organised religion? Well, it’s possible that many might consider the antithesis of organised religion to be common sense, but that’s at least inflammatory and at worst fatwa inducing. It’s not necessarily their fault anyway.

In truth, by definition, the only thing antithetical to organised religion is disorganised religion. And that might just be the scariest prospect of all.

Alan Baxter is Alan Baxter is an independent author based in Sydney, Australia. He has been described (by himself) as an optimistic cynic – someone with little faith in the chances of anything, but hopeful nonetheless. Convinced that the humanity seems to be fighting a battle between progress and idiocy, Alan has placed himself firmly in the no man’s land between the two camps, happy to make sandwiches during breaks in the fighting. He is also a martial arts instructor, so don’t complain about his sandwiches.
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