Atheism and Humanism: A Modern Perspective

Religion is one of those subjects that most people loath to talk about unless they are with like-minded people. A severely polarizing subject that has led to wars, people dying for a cause, and dozens of zealots peppered through history. I asked AI to give me a the top 5 wars fought in whole or part in the name of religion:

• The Crusades (1096-1291) – A series of wars initiated by European Christians to capture and hold the Holy Land from Muslim control.
• The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) – Originated as a conflict between Protestant and Catholic states in the fragmented Holy Roman Empire.
• The French Wars of Religion (1562-1598)– A series of civil wars between French Catholics and Huguenots (French Protestants).
• The Islamic Conquests and the Wars of Apostasy (7th century) – Early Muslim campaigns that expanded Islamic rule across the Arabian Peninsula and beyond.
• The Partition of India (1947) – The division of British India into predominantly Hindu India and Muslim-majority Pakistan.

Say I’m crazy, but so many people have died in the name of religion, with the religion at the time driving the conflicts. Millions have died in the name of religion. Although I could not find a specific number (or maybe did not want to know), it is clear to me that humans created religion, humans fight for religion, humans can choose to do something different.

Atheist humanism is a worldview that combines two positions:

1. Atheism: the belief that no gods exist. Unlike agnosticism, which suspends judgment, atheism affirms the absence of deities.
2. Humanism: the view that human beings are the source of meaning, value, and ethical responsibility. Humanist principles emphasize reason, science, compassion, and the pursuit of human flourishing without reliance on the supernatural.

Together, atheist humanism asserts that morality, purpose, and progress should be grounded entirely in human reason and human needs, independent of any belief in divine beings or supernatural authority. I am a believer of “something” that created everything that we as yet are not able to explain. Unexplainable things from our past were considered religious miracles, magic, witchcraft, or anything that has been used to explain the unexplainable. That is until we figure out why something is and understand that it had nothing to do with religion, magic, or anything other than the factual knowledge that humans discovered.

I have my theories about why religion was first created and why it continues to perpetuate into our modern society. Put simply, religion was created to control large groups of people along moral standards and create communities around those moral standards. Handmaids Tale, while fictional, is centered around a religion that corrupted and took over the constitutional republic that hindered or thwarted their plans. It wasn’t until they gained enough control in the existing government that they replaced it with their own built around their rigid misogynistic belief system.

Do I think me determining that I’m an atheist humanist will change anything? No, of course not. What it is doing is helping me see the whole system of control and the game that is played by a few elites controlling the larger population. We already have failing educational systems that have been stripped of necessary subjects and programs. We already have the majority of our media owned by only a few people, such as Rupert Murdoch and Jeff Bezos. We are now seeing the next phase where the government is systematically being taken over by corporations and elite and no longer choosing to serve the people. The inspiration behind this post is a quote from Barack Obama:

It’s fair to say that [about] 80 percent of the world’s problems involve old men hanging on, who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won’t let go. They build pyramids, and they put their names on everything. They get very anxious about it.

I think he was referring to our current “president” when saying “put their names on everything.”