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Socially Atheist

Posted on July 22nd, 2011 by Staks

Yesterday, I saw a great video on YouTube by Dusty Smith. In the video he talks about the claim Christians often make that atheists believe in nothing. Then, last night I attended my local monthly atheist meetup group. If atheists believe in nothing, then a social group of atheist must have nothing to talk about. Despite that assertion, there seemed to be no shortage of conversation topics.

The thing is that we probably only spend half of our conversations discussing atheism and religion. Despite the fact that we were all there because of our lack of believe in deities, we spent a great deal of time talking about politics, science, education, sci-fiction, and various other topics. The thing that made these conversations interesting, fun, and valuable was that we were all people of reason.

People within the greater atheist community tend to value reason over faith and as a result, our social interactions and conversation tend to reflect that value. As Dusty put it his video, atheists believe in everything that exists in reality. In my view, reality gives atheists a rather large pool of interesting conversation topics.

This is the real value of being part of the greater community of reason. While it is certainly important to discuss how to deal with the absurdities, atrocities, and the pervasiveness of religion in our society, it is perhaps even more valuable to be able to have intellectual conversations with people who actually value reasonably discourse over faith-based thinking. So I want to encourage more people to be socially atheist.