That said, religion wasn’t drilled into my head week after week. I believed in God because seemingly everyone else did. But—aside from the aforementioned events spread across years, a few references my family made to the evil of atheism, and a sense that religion was “good” and lack of it was “bad”—my Christian belief was scarcely reinforced. My family rarely talked about religion, went to church, or said grace. We had a Bible, but it was usually tucked away somewhere like an old and forgotten book. I don’t recall seeing anyone reading it. Little did I know of its details.

Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson's popular, and violent, depiction of him

That remained the case for years of my childhood. Through that time, my belief waxed and waned as I wrestled with doubts about God’s existence. After all, I had seen neither hide nor hair of God or Jesus. Prayer seemed neither meaningful nor effective. The most significant relationship I had with the divine was looking at the crucifix on my wall as I lied in my bed. (Contemplate how some Christians complain often about violence in the media, but society thinks little of exposing children to the imagery of a suffering man nailed to a cross and on his way to a painful death. The cognitive dissonance at work is astounding.)

I held onto my belief, though, especially after I perused a religious text I found laying around the house saying anyone who didn’t believe in God was bound for hell. I was terrified! I remember literally telling myself, I do believe in God, I do believe in God, I do believe in God. I was scared that I wasn’t thinking the truth, but I impressed on myself the need to believe in God. I didn’t want to go to hell, and I wanted to be a good person.

I didn’t really start reading the Bible until after I’d gone to school for a while and learned a bit about history and science. What I encountered astonished me: Evaluating the Bible for myself, I found it to be a self-contradictory mess of anti-scientific rambling and bloodthirsty evil. I couldn’t square the Genesis Creation with science. I couldn’t accept God’s psychotic jealousy in such stories as that of the Golden Calf. I thought narratives such as that of the Garden of Eden, the Great Flood, and the Burning Bush resembled fairy tales.

The massacre of Golden Calf worshippers is one of the most sickening episodes in the Bible.

Delving into the Bible placed on life support whatever pretense I had that I believed in God. The pretense died as I learned more about religions across the world now and historically, many of them claiming to be the one true religion and all of them featuring elements just as fantastical as the Bible. On what basis could I believe Christianity right and other religions wrong? None. What support did the world’s religions have other than the say-so of their followers? None.

In my early years of high school, as I discovered more about sociopolitical groupings, I called myself an agnostic. I believed myself to be a reasonable person, and whereas I did not believe in God, I thought humanity wasn’t in a position to rule out God, either. I continued thinking of myself as an agnostic until I was in college.

The summer after my freshman year, I read Atheism: The Case Against God by George Smith, a former editor of Reason magazine. I found these to be the most important points it made:

• “Atheism” denotes lack of belief in God. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary will disagree, but dissect the word: “a-,” meaning “without,” and “theism.” Also, check out the etymology on the dictionary page: “Middle French athéisme, from athée atheist, from Greek atheos godless, from a- + theos god.” The earliest historical root of the word means “without god.” Representing theism and atheism with the logical symbols I learned in my Logic class the second half of my freshman year, theism would be T and atheism would be ~T.
• Agnostics who lack belief in God, ergo, would more properly be labeled atheists.
• Since atheism doesn’t claim anything, it has no need to prove anything. The burden of proof is on the theist, the religious person, who is making the positive assertion. Logically, as with all positive assertions, the theist must show the locus of his devotion exists.
• Since the concept of God as presented is inconsistent and illogical, we can safely conclude God does not exist. We don’t need to know anything beyond the scope of our universe to make this conclusion; pure reason rules out God, as much as it does a square circle. Whatever might exist beyond the scope of human comprehension, it cannot comport with the human God concept. (That should be tautological.)
• Faith is no foundation on which to believe anything. Because faith eschews evidence, it can’t distinguish fact from fiction. Therefore, one can’t claim it’s a path to knowledge. Believing something on faith is simply believing something because one wants to do so. Some people might be okay with that, but that doesn’t change faith’s opposition to reason. Faith and reason are mutually exclusive. (A person can indulge faith and exercise reason, but not at the same time.)

I had no problem calling myself an atheist after I’d read Smith’s book.

Cementing my atheism were a talk given by Michael Shermer and two books from Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion and The Blind Watchmaker. They demolished arguments for intelligent design such as irreducible complexity. I liked Dawkins’s quip that God would assuredly be much more complex than anything intelligent design advocates falsely point to as examples of “irreducible complexity,” so the creator concept introduces more explanatory problems than it solves and demonstrates the inconsistency of “intelligent design” to boot. If the idea that the eye could have arisen without a designer strains credulity, would not God as well, to an even greater degree?

In addition, Dawkins’s criticisms of the arguments of those who call themselves agnostics struck me. Agnosticism is a reasonable position when contentions in play are roughly equiprobable. The answers to the question of whether a creator exists, however, are not equiprobable. The existence of a creator is quite improbable, since we have no evidence of supernatural forces, the universe appears evolved rather than designed, and our notions of a creator are illogical and self-contradictory, anyway.

That takes us to the past couple years, wherein my views have remained largely unchanged.

So, when left to decide matters of faith for myself without indoctrination or pushing, I eventually became a solid atheist. Contrary to what many religious believers would seem to think, though, I don’t think I have a grasp on absolute truth.

The same observation and reason that backstops my atheism says human beings are very limited creatures with very finite knowledge; none of them could know absolute truth. Claiming to do so would bespeak too literal an interpretation of Nietzsche’s advice to be one’s own god, since only a god could claim understanding of absolute truth. Such a claim would exude an irrational faith in one’s own rightness. I say faith because science tells us we lack the intellectual capacity that would make such righteousness rational.

I believe the stipulations of reason and the rules of logic point to atheism. And I believe superstition, not rationality, buttresses religion. But, as my choice of verb indicates, I’m under no delusion these are anything but beliefs. And I respect people, even friends, who don’t share my beliefs.

After all, I once supported the Iraq war. The outcome of that fiasco was the ultimate lesson in humility. I shall not wag my finger at what I perceive to be irrationality in others when I’m capable of irrationality myself. And I always try to keep an open mind; that doesn’t entail lacking firm beliefs, but keeping in mind they might, under circumstances I cannot presently foresee and consider unlikely, change someday.

Watch these

(Hypersyllogistic Forums thread discussing the above video.)

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Many people would answer, “God.” God provides our lives with purpose. In a universe that God forged, we all have a role in His master plan. This means we all matter within the grand scheme of existence. Without God, our lives could have no meaning, because we’d just… be. We would have no more relevance to the universe than a stone or a stick.

I object to that viewpoint. If one lives because of God’s will, then he is little more than a cog within the universe that is God’s machine. He has no identity but that which God allows him to have. Certainly, he can’t bear culpability for the shape of the universe or the condition of his brethren, because ultimate blame for the way things are doesn’t lie with him. It doesn’t reside with anyone else, either, but with God.

Far from giving humanity purpose, God instead robs us of individuality and absolves us of responsibility. We become helpless babies within the orchestration of existence. (The similarity in this regard between religion and Marxist dialectics is ironic, considering the anti-left rhetoric of the modern Religious Right.)

Without God or any other supernatural force, our lives have no preordained purpose. No one from on high has constructed paths for us to follow. In those senses, we do indeed have commonality with the matter and energy around us. But from similarity doesn’t follow sameness. We still possess something that makes us inherently different from everything else: sentience, a.k.a. self-awareness, a.k.a. the ability to think. We know who we are, we know what we want, and we formulate and execute plans based on our identities and desires.

Therefore, we imbue our lives with meaning ourselves. We construct our own paths and then follow them… Or not; maybe we’ll change our minds and think another direction is better, and so veer off that way. With all this power, though, comes responsibility. We can’t hold anyone else at fault for our actions. We can’t shift accountability for the state of our world onto anyone else. Our lives are only what we make them, or what we don’t make them.

This, and not vapidity, is what some people fear in a life without God. The onus of control terrifies them. So they attempt to transfer it to another agency, God.

They don’t succeed, though. Consider that the God or supreme force of everyone who is religious conforms to whatever the believer thinks is righteous. No person worships exactly the same God someone else does. One man’s God condemns homosexuality, whereas another man’s does not. One cleric’s God commands the masses to slaughter unbelievers, whereas another cleric’s does not. Etc., etc. God isn’t a mystical otherworldly force telling his flocks what to do. He is a mental construct people use to justify the beliefs they’ve chosen to hold and the lives they’ve decided to lead. God buttresses what individuals were going to do or think anyway, and he functions as a lightning rod to draw away the attendant responsibility.

Ergo, all that separates people who derive their meaning from God, and those who craft their own meaning, is the latter’s recognition and acceptance of personal responsibility and control. Even if this concept isn’t new—Friedrich Nietzsche expounded on this with his Superman concept—it is, in my opinion, profound. It makes everything we do more important.

The television program Angel, which was more philosophical than superficial critics believe, made this point in the 16th episode of its 2nd season, “Epiphany.” Angel, the main character, realized at the end, “Nothing we do matters. So all that matters is what we do.”

That phrasing is quirky, but the message is insightful: In a universe that has no great plan behind everything, there’s nothing else but our actions and choices. So they’re not meaningless, but as meaningful as they could possibly be.

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These advocacies of violence for one’s own selfish ends are not Machiavelli’s only breaks with the teachings of ancient philosophy and Christianity. Machiavelli also put forth a conception of the world whereby no natural order exists. God or luck is not around to guide the world or anyone on it. Humans and their own initiative are responsible for shaping and changing the world. Consequently, if one wants to acquire anything, one must fashion or achieve it himself, without relying on divine providence or luck.¹

Agathocles the Sicilian, King of Syracuse, whom Machiavelli describes in the middle of The Prince, is a paragon of Machiavellian philosophy.

This man was born of non-royal lineage to poor parents; his father was only a potter. Agathocles lived a lifetime of crime, but his sins were of “such virtue of spirit and body” that he rose through the ranks of the military to become praetor of Syracuse. And then, Agathocles decided he wanted to become Syracuse’s leader. He naturally sought to achieve this goal with the same criminal methods that brought him to prominence in the military.

After warning Hamilcar the Carthaginian, a general fighting in Sicily, what he was planning, Agathocles summoned the senators and populace ostensibly for a discussion of important public issues. But when everyone had gathered, Agathocles commanded his soldiers to slaughter all the senators and wealthiest people of Syracuse. With them then dead, Agathocles took control of the city as its prince.

Despite the brutality of Agathocles’s rise to power, however, there was nary a public complaint about the affair. Agathocles was secure in his position during his reign as well.²

This all demonstrates the Machiavellian principle that violence and criminality are the means by which one obtains power. “To kill one’s citizens, betray one’s friends, to be without faith, without mercy, without religion” are not ethical, says Machiavelli, but they constitute the path to empire and dominion. So any overlord who employs these methods is not the inferior of any other leader.³

One might think this is nonsensical, for violent actions do not inspire love, and are not good leaders ones who are loved? Machiavelli contends this is not true. Love relies on “a chain of obligation,” that men will break because they are evil. Therefore, a prince who must use a people’s love for him to rule lives upon a shaky foundation. Also, seeking love paradoxically inspires hatred, because funding beneficent works for some people requires either taking property from other people or financing the works oneself. The latter makes one poor, and ergo weak and contemptible. And the former enrages those from whom money must be taken.

Instead, says Machiavelli, inspiring fear within one’s subjects is the better course of action. If the people fear their leader, they shall retain that fear into perpetuity, rather than forgetting it as they do love when convenience strikes. The violence that instills this fear will not cause a country to hate its leader, either. The prince need only take care to show justification for his endeavors, and to refrain from touching men’s property and women. After all, Machiavelli proclaims, “Men forget the death of a father more quickly than the loss of a patrimony.” (This ties into why taxation to fund good works, in the pursuit of love, instills hatred instead.)⁴

Additionally, to avoid hatred, a leader must ensure he commits most of his atrocities swiftly as he is assuming power. This is necessary “to secure oneself.” Afterwards, the prince should discontinue routine violence and only use it for “utility for the subjects.” Otherwise, if cruelties persist, one’s people will not feel secure, and so they will despise their leader.⁵

Agathocles demonstrated Machiavelli’s philosophy of violence very well. He wrested supreme power for himself with a swift flash of brutality. But he refrained from seizing anyone’s property, and his thirst for blood did not run rampant during his administration. This is why, according to Machiavellian values, the people of Syracuse feared Agathocles but did not hate him. Consequently, Agathocles gained and kept power without significant opposition.

Another Machiavellian principle Agathocles showed during his seizure of power was caution of the aristocracy. The rich always scheme for more possessions and more control, says Machiavelli. Whereas “the people want not to be oppressed,” the aristocrats “want to oppress.” Should any opportunity arise, “the great” as Machiavelli calls them, will betray their leader for their own gain.⁶ Thus, when Agathocles executed the richest citizens of Syracuse, he eliminated what could have been a threat to his rule, as per Machiavellian guidelines.

Machiavelli also emphasizes relying on oneself, instead of on fortune or on other people. Fortune, after all, does not exist; humans are the makers of their own fates. And other individuals are wicked schemers who will take advantage of one’s reliance on them.⁷ The only force or person, on which one can depend, is oneself.

Agathocles receives praise from Machiavelli for his self-reliance. Agathocles did not rely on anyone’s help as he rose to power. Instead, he climbed through the ranks of the military by his own efforts, experiencing “a thousand trials and hardships.” After Agathocles staged his coup d’etat, he maintained his rule himself through “many spirited and dangerous policies.” He did not depend on others or on any public love of him.⁸

He also did not rely on luck when, into his reign, the Carthaginians twice defeated him in battle and eventually laid siege to Syracuse itself. Instead, Agathocles took the initiative to defend his city, and turn the tide of the war against Carthage. While keeping some troops in Syracuse to withstand the Carthaginian siege, Agathocles slipped out of Syracuse with the rest of his men and assailed Africa, where Carthage stood. Agathocles beat Carthage on its own soil, thereby freeing Syracuse and forcing the Carthaginians to concede Sicily to him.⁹

² Ibid., 34-35, 37.

³ Ibid., 35.

⁴ Ibid., 63-65, 66-68.

⁵ Ibid., 38.

⁶ Ibid., 39-40.

⁷ Ibid., 66-67.

⁸ Ibid., 35.

⁹ Ibid., 35.

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