Does it matter whether or not you believe in God? Would it make any difference in your life? Here is what the author of “Pearls Of Eternity” Bangambiki Habyarimana had to say: “An atheist is someone who is disappointed in his search of god. He is a man who strongly needed god but couldn’t find him. Atheism is a cry of despair.”
Like Bangambiki Habyarimana, I also agree that atheism leads to despair. In the classical and dictionary sense of the word, atheism implies a strictly physical universe, where everything evolved or was created by natural processes. And that anything that is deemed spiritual, supernatural, or divine is a figment of our imagination.
Why would atheism necessarily lead to despair? Many modern atheists have not really thought this through. If there is no God, if all that exists is physical natural processes ending permanently in death, then there is no real meaning in the real sense of the word. Sure, you may have temporal meaning in your life such as: “I enjoy drinking beer with my friends; I enjoy having sex with various women; I enjoy watching the Super Bowl games.”
But you see, after you are long dead and thousands of years have passed, your petty temporal pleasures will become utterly meaningless. The cold universe won’t care whether or not you enjoyed your life and neither will you and your friends, since you and your friends won’t have any memories left to remember.
As an atheist in the classical and dictionary sense of the word, the only thing that you will be ultimately looking forward to is disappearing into permanent oblivion. Now I don’t know about you, but the thought of that makes me crap ice cubes. It scares the crap out of me! If that’s all life is, then Mother Nature has played a very cruel joke on all of us!
Throughout most of my young adulthood, I had been a hardcore atheist. I believed that if something could not be proven in the laboratory by a double-blind experiment, then it did not exist. Given this, I did not believe in God, prayer, or divine intervention. This left me feeling quite powerless throughout most of my atheistic life with gnawing despair eating the back of my head.
But today, I’m a believer. I believe that God exists, cares about me, and listens to and answers my prayers. I don’t see God as a brutal celestial dictator as the famous anti-theist Christopher Hitchens did. Instead, I see Him as a loving God who cares about my well-being. And I am much happier today than when I was a hardcore atheist. The difference is like night and day.
Are you tired of feeling sad, hopeless, and full of despair? As well as other steps, believing in God may be a good positive step to take. “But how do I do this?” you may ask. I have outlined a plan to help you believe in God.
Take the time to deeply ponder the following ideas:
1) “Why is there something rather than nothing?” –Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
2) “Nothing comes from nothing.” –Parmenides
3) “What caused the First Cause?”
4) “So multiverse or not, we still have to come to terms with the origin of the laws of nature. And the only viable explanation here is the divine Mind.” –Antony Flew
If you seriously take the time to ponder these ideas instead of superficially reading them, you will be on your way to believing in God. Deep thinking is the cure for atheism. Many people are atheists simply because their culture or environment told them to become atheists, and they mindlessly went along with it just to fit in.
ADDENDUM: Back when I was a teenager, everyone knew the difference among the terms atheism, theism, and agnosticism, at least in my social circles. I used to enjoy debating back then. Atheism was understood to mean the belief that God does not exist; theism was understood to mean the belief that God does exist; agnosticism was understood to mean the belief that “I don’t know whether or not God exists.” It was cut and dry. There was no confusion.
But I notice something strange going on today. There appears to be a significant number of secularists attempting to change the definition of atheism from the belief that God does not exist to “I don’t know whether or not God exists.” This is an attempt to change atheism to agnosticism, making them exact synonyms of each other.
But why is this going on?
Not too long ago, the Four Horsemen of Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett) wrote very popular books promoting atheism while denouncing religion. This strongly affected the culture in the United States and Western Europe. All of a sudden, it was cool to become an atheist.
But this movement did not last long, because the Four Horsemen of Atheism became bold and began engaging prominent Christian philosophers in public debates. The prominent Christian philosophers, especially William Lane Craig and John Lennox, utterly destroyed the Four Horsemen of Atheism in most of these public debates, proving that the position of atheism is not sustainable during cross-examination.
So to deal with the embarrassing defeat of the Four Horsemen of Atheism, I believe many secularists in the United States and Western Europe went to work trying to redefine atheism from the belief that God does not exist to “I don’t know whether or not God exists.” Because, after all, the public debates had proven that real atheism is not sustainable as a belief.
At this point, you are probably wondering “Okay, so atheism is now dead and agnosticism lives on. But if a person is an agnostic, why would he mislabel himself as an atheist? Why not simply label himself as an agnostic?” You may be wondering this, since more and more agnostics are mislabeling themselves as atheists on the Internet forums.
Not too long ago, Famous American comedian Stephen Colbert said the following about agnostics: “Agnostics are just atheists without balls.” This may be the best explanation for why many agnostics want to be mislabeled as atheists. I believe that many agnostics are deliberately mislabeling themselves as atheists due to their fear of being perceived as cowardly, weak, and indecisive.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the Concise Encyclopedia defines atheism as the following:
“Critique and denial of metaphysical beliefs in God or divine beings. Unlike agnosticism, which leaves open the question of whether there is a God, atheism is a positive denial. It is rooted in an array of philosophical systems. Ancient Greek philosophers such as Democritus and Epicurus argued for it in the context of materialism. In the 18th century David Hume and Immanuel Kant, though not atheists, argued against traditional proofs for God’s existence, making belief a matter of faith alone. Atheists such as Ludwig Feuerbach held that God was a projection of human ideals and that recognizing this fiction made self-realization possible. Marxism exemplified modern materialism. Beginning with Friedrich Nietzsche, existentialist atheism proclaimed the death of God and the human freedom to determine value and meaning. Logical positivism holds that propositions concerning the existence or nonexistence of God are nonsensical or meaningless.”
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary explains the difference between atheism and agnosticism in more detail:
“How Agnostic Differs From Atheist
Many people are interested in distinguishing between the words agnostic and atheist. The difference is quite simple: atheist refers to someone who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods, and agnostic refers to someone who doesn’t know whether there is a god, or even if such a thing is knowable.”
So, in summary, the difference between atheism and agnosticism is as follows: An atheist believes that God does not exist, while an agnostic believes that “I don’t know whether or not God exists.” It’s that simple.
Al A. Gammate's Self Help and Religion Blog 
A lack of belief in God is not the same as a belief that God does not exist.
An Atheist does not believe.
An agnostic does not know.
These can both occur in the same person. 😯
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Hello Archon’s Den:
Thank you very much for your comment. In the article, I was using the term “atheism” in the classical and dictionary sense of the word — dictionary sense as in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary!
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You mean, the one that ‘Good Christians’ made up, and insist on for false equivalence??! The one that many Atheists deny and correct, causing Apologists to object that Atheists ‘are changing??’ 😕
I am my usual level of disappointed, but not surprised, at the poor usage. 😯
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atheism is a conclusion that the baseless claims of humans is nonsense. It is a theist that has to pretend that everyone but them is unhappy to convince themselves they are special. Happily, their claim is just a rather pitiful lie.
Yep, things will end and I’ll be forgotten. So? Only a sad little man who needs adulation would care and invent a eternity where he gets magic presents.
“here appears to be a significant number of secularists attempting to change the definition of atheism from the belief that God does not exist to “I don’t know whether or not God exists.””
No evidence of the above at all.
And agian, the theist tries so hard to convince others, when he has nothing at all to show his god is the right one, and has invented his god in his image, ignoring anything that is inconvenient for that.
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Hello Club Schadenfreude:
Thank you so much for your comments. I’m going to take the time to respond to some of them. You stated that “atheism is a conclusion that the baseless claims of humans is nonsense.” The real definition of atheism is the belief that God does not exist as corroborated by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.
You stated that “It is a theist that has to pretend that everyone but them is unhappy to convince themselves they are special.” This claim appears to be unsubstantiated. I don’t know many theists who pretend that only they are happy and everyone else is miserable. Nevertheless, there is scientific evidence that indicates that religious people are, on average, happier than non-religious people.
Here’s what Dr. Andrew Sims, Past President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Leeds, had to say about religious faith and mental health:
“For years, as a Christian working in psychiatry, it was frequently leveled at me that profound religious belief and regular churchgoing are bad for health to the point of being harmful.
Then practitioners started using the scientific methodology known as epidemiology, which is the application of statistical principles to ‘outcome studies’ with large numbers of people. Over the years, some 3,000 studies have compared people who have a religious belief with those who have none. They are published in The Handbook of Religion and Health, by Harold Koenig, Dana King, and Verna Carson. The overriding finding is, in fact, that people with religious belief have better mental – and physical – health than those who have no faith.
The fact that having a religious faith is good for you is psychiatry’s best-kept secret.”
You stated, “Yep, things will end and I’ll be forgotten. So? Only a sad little man who needs adulation would care and invent a eternity where he gets magic presents.” You seem to gloss over and minimize the fear of death that so many atheists have. Do you really believe that permanently disappearing into oblivion, never to be heard from again, is no big deal? If so, can you tell us your secret? Many of us would like to know.
You stated, “No evidence of the above at all” to the part of the article where I wrote “There appears to be a significant number of secularists attempting to change the definition of atheism from the belief that God does not exist to ‘I don’t know whether or not God exists.'”
As we all know, many so-called atheists of today balk at and reject the real definition of atheism, the belief that God does not exist. They instead embrace the so-called new definition of atheism, lacking or not having enough belief that God exists.
Given this, it appears that these “atheists” don’t have enough belief to commit to the position of God exists, nor do they have enough belief to fully commit to the position of God does not exist. In other words, the new definition of atheism allows these “atheists” to be noncommittal of the positions. This to me is agnosticism.
The reason a person doesn’t have enough belief to commit to a position of whether or not God exists is because that person doesn’t have enough knowledge to commit to a position of whether or not God exists. So “I don’t have enough belief of whether or not God exists” implies “I don’t know whether or not God exists.” That’s agnosticism!
Not too long ago, I posted a critique of real atheism on Christian Forums titled “Atheism, Learned Helplessness, and Clinical Depression.” I defined real atheism as the belief that God does not exist. Much to my surprise, a significant percentage of so-called atheists (secularists) who responded to my post rejected the real definition of atheism and instead embraced a more agnostic one. It seemed clear to me that these so-called atheists were not atheists at all, but were agnostics!
Agnosticism may be alive and well, but atheism is dead or dying!
You stated, “And agian, the theist tries so hard to convince others, when he has nothing at all to show his god is the right one, and has invented his god in his image, ignoring anything that is inconvenient for that.” It appears to me that you have misunderstood this article. Nowhere in this article did I claim that a specific god or religion was the correct one! I merely referred to theism in the very general sense of the word.
Once again, thank you very much for your comments.
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You can call me Vel. Club Schadenfreude is my blog.
Yep, Merriam webster confirms what I said, the conclusion that no god exists, aka believing that no god exists. Belief is based on conclusions: conclude – : to reach as a logically necessary end by reasoning : infer on the basis of evidence.
There is scientific evidence that being social makes people happier, not that religion makes people happier. If this were true, then only one version, the “true” one would be the happy ones.
I don’t have a fear of death and do tell where you know these “many atheists” who have a fear of death from. And yes, I really do believe that ending is no big deal. You have to repeat question in a desperate hope of a different answer to validate your baseless claim. My “secret” is not thinking I’m some extra special person with a magical friend who agrees with me and knowing that death is part of life. I make way for someone or something else. Why should I begrudge that?
Not surprising at all that you cannot show any evidence for your claim: ““There appears to be a significant number of secularists attempting to change the definition of atheism from the belief that God does not exist to ‘I don’t know whether or not God exists.’” What you try is truly pathetic, a baseless claim that “we all know” which isn’t true at all. I don’t know this baseless claim you make to be true, and I do know that it isn’t, since atheists don’t reject the “real definition of atheism” at all. We don’t embrace any other definition than “a person who does not believe in the existence of a god or any gods “
Us atheists do indeed have enough evidence to commit to the position that gods don’t exist. Being an atheist too, you are quite sure e.g. you have concluded, that other gods except for your own version of the Christian god don’t exist.
Agnosticism is concluding that there isn’t enough evidence to make a conclusion: “the view that any ultimate reality (such as a deity) is unknown and probably unknowable : a philosophical or religious position characterized by uncertainty about the existence of a god or any gods” Nothing about “ “I don’t have enough belief of whether or not God exists”” implies the lack of knowledge to make a decision,
Again, you seem to be just one more theist who can’t accept anyone doesn’t agree with him. You have to make up new definitions of words, claim implication when there is none, to try to convince yourself people “really” do agree with you.
I do love when armchair amateurs try to diagnose mental illness. It’s even better when they make baseless claim that atheists responded to their post and agreed with him.
Atheism is quite alive and healthy. So much so that you find you must lie about it, ignoring your god’s supposed words that say never to lie, not even if you think it is *for* it, Romans 3. You may have not claimed that Christianity is the only right religion here; however you are a Christian and Christianity says that no other religion is true, so do refrain from trying to lie and claim you really didn’t mean Christianity.
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