What it means to be an atheist

PZ has put up a fantastic post about what it means to be an atheist. It expresses pretty much everything I’ve ever tried to say about how not believing in God doesn’t, in the least, reduce ones ability to find meaning or beauty in our lives.

The whole thing is well worth the time it takes to read, but if you really don’t have the time I’m pulling out my two favourite sections here (emphasis in the original).

What we atheists are saying is that we need to turn away from those powerless rationalizations, no matter how poetic they might be, and recognize that their power and their appeal flows from their humanity, not their religiosity. Forget god, that empty hulk, that great vacuum that humanity has stocked with its fears and dreams, and look at what we have created and felt instead. When someone weeps over a dead child or creates a great poem, it should matter not at all what some priest imagines his pantheon is doing. Take your eyes off your hallucination of heaven—what’s real are that woman’s tears, that child’s triumph, that grain of sand, that bird on wing. The meaning is derived from the reality of what we see and feel, not some convoluted vapor and self-serving puffery about an abstract concept like “god”.

and

None of those [atheist] writers want the Bible burned or denied to readers. What we want is for people to think of it as a great hodge-podge of human expression which doesn’t so much vindicate a nonsensical image of a divine being as it does the complex, earthy, sometimes soaring and sometimes hateful picture of us.