I am an atheist. I’ve been that way all of my life. My mother came from a Jewish background and my father came from a Christian background. When they married, they decided to become non-religious and I was raised in this non-religious environment. However, outside of the house, religion was something that I avoided talking about (living on a street with a church at the end of the block may have contributed to this). It was almost as if I was ashamed of my views. That’s not to say that I wished my family was religious (I have never had any religious ambitions), but I just didn’t want the inevitable questions to come up. Such things can be a source of torment when one is in elementary and middle school.
However, when I came to the high school, I went into Ms. Faulkner’s Enriched World History class. It was the best history class that I had ever taken. One of the things the class did was a comparative religion unit. I had definitely heard of the world’s other religions, but never had I learned about them in detail. I soon came to the conclusion that western religions were just plain silly. Conversely, eastern religions made far more sense to me. A religion such as Buddhism is an exploration of one’s self. I found this concept very refreshing.
In that class we also read works by several philosophers from the Age of Reason. It was here that I found the works of Voltaire. Micromegas astonished me. Here was a man from the 18th century who was ridiculing organized religion! Here was a man who disagreed with the mainstream and used satire to express himself! This was a watershed event for me. I became proud of my (dis)beliefs.
Ms. Faulkner would give the class journal assignments. This was basically my first chance to sort out and write down my worldview. I united my science knowledge (little of which had been gleaned from school…I’ll probably have gray hair before super-string theory is even mentioned in high schools) with my philosophical views in a comprehensive format. I finally had a view of my own. It didn’t have a church and thick text to go with it, but it was mine.
In essence, my belief is that I am a collection of accidents and matters of chance that began with the Big Bang. Consciousness is simply a matter of some of these parts working together in a complex way. I reject the supernatural and the mystical, since the fact that I am a collection of exploded star-stuff in itself holds a mystical (but not divinely inspired) quality. There are religions that indoctrinate people to believe that they should reject science as cold and insensitive. They still want to be the center of the universe. I embrace the fact that I, and the rest of the human race are not the center of the universe. We are mere collections of atoms (which are in themselves collections of other objects) in a collection of stars in a collection of galaxies in a collection of superclusters. Our insignificance is a result of the great number of accidents and matters of chance that formed us. In science, this is expressed in the Weak Anthropic Principle, which states that, “in order for conditions in the universe to be observed, conditions must allow a observer to exist”. In an atheistic view, this means that we shouldn’t be surprised (in a theological sense) that we’re here, since if our universe didn’t support life, we wouldn’t be here. This became the core of my beliefs*.
When I got into IRC a few years ago, I needed a name. I already had a screen name, but to put it bluntly, it sucked...So, I picked up Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time", and looked for something cool to name myself. I wanted something that sounded intellectual, but not in a blunt way. I wanted something that was uniquely me. What better way, I thought, to sum myself up then to choose the name Anthropic?
* If you do a search for "Anthropic Principle", you'll get results that favor both theistic and athestic views. I like this. There's a certain ambiguity there. I realize that not everyone has to agree with me. If my personal interpretation of the Anthropic Principle is the core of my spiritual beliefs, then Pluralism is the basis of my political beliefs.
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