THE UNLIT BONFIRE
By Howard Thompson
Editor: The Texas Atheist
Copyright 1999 by Howard Thompson ------------------------------------------------------------
DOES OUR ATHEISM HAVE MEANING?
We have sought knowledge of how reality works despite the personal cost of religious hostility. Our search has led each of us to accept reality as it is, free from magical superstitions. Having found our way to this liberating idea, it is now fair to ask what is it we have achieved? Can we define a purpose for our atheism?
I'd like to share with your one purpose for our atheism, a purpose that views us as a social and cultural evolution. This is a view of our potential, of what atheism's future might mean for humanity.
I think we are seeds of hope. That hope is our liberation from superstition and religion. So far, we have used our freedom mostly for discussions of our materialistic ideas. Our self-realization and ideas have yet to emerge as an effective social movement. The present reality is that religions are winning their mind-control war against humanity.
Christian culture has harassed and scattered atheism. They inhibit our actions, deplete our emotions and render us impotent in our disorganized isolation. We wait for the awakening of our will to live our beliefs. We await mostly as passive observers, an invisible minority, each of us making our private deal with society for the crumbs of survival.
ATHEIST HOPE UNREALIZED
We await as hope unrealized. Our realism lies latent on the stage of history, denied power as a hated and barely tolerated heresy. We await dynamic leadership to call us together. We await a spark that will ignite within us a purpose that can redirect humanity.
We wait and survive with a little bit of whining protest our only voice. We await the judgment of history as unwilling accessories to a dominant Christian culture of magical beliefs we know to be false. We live hoping that our lives will escape the rising fundamentalist backlash. We hope that it somehow won't happen.
We await the future like believers. We expect a miracle of change to come from nothing. The mocking guilt of our weakness and fear echoes from the future in our minds.
Nothing comes from nothing. If our minds cannot create effective action, then our atheism is meaningless in the future of humanity. History would not even record that we were a failed beginning, since supernaturalists would write our history. If we are to make our hopes real, it must start in our minds, impact our decisions and begin the evolution of necessary actions.
THE UNLIT BONFIRE
We are not smarter than our genetic heritage. We can not levitate ourselves above our nature. What we can do is offer humanity the one advance that only we can bring. We can offer a materialistic culture that frees humanity from superstition. We can offer each human the hope of a free mind with which to enjoy the only time we have.
That may sound small. Students of history will grasp the significance of a fundamental change that redirects beliefs away from the unreal and towards reality. A shift by one major nation to reality-based beliefs could ignite all of humanity. It could begin the cultural revolution that frees us to face and solve the problems that religions cause with magical beliefs.
Our potential bonfire of change will be ignited when a critical mass of atheists choose to begin the change within their own minds. It will flame strongly when enough of us band together in effective social and action groups. You can't win if you don't play. If you don't play, then your ideas fail and the future will be chained in superstition.
A DEAD MIND'S INSPIRATION
The plight of atheists in America calls to mind Xenophon. Xenophon was the Greek author of the Anabasis, written after the Peloponeasean wars. He told a wonderful saga of human ambition, duplicity, and courage that has a lesson for us.
Xenophon was a secondary leader in a group of about 12,000 Greek mercenaries. They were hired by an ambitious Persian prince for the usual sordid dynastic war of succession. The Greek mercenaries marched from Ionia on the Aegean sea to join their prince's army.
They marched on foot through Asia Minor into the Tigris and Euphrates valley of present day Iraq. The armies of the warring princes camped across from each other to ready for the next day's big battle. history's twists, however, had a surprise for the Greeks.
The next morning, the Greek mercenaries awoke to find the dynastic battle resolved through treachery by one of their prince's allies. Their prince was dead, their enemy victorious.
Now, all arms were raised against the Greeks. The last thing any Persian wanted was a force of Greek hoplites, then the world's premier warriors, loose in the kingdom. A tense day of combat with Persian forces ended and the Greeks faced a hopeless night.
Fear and panic swept the Greek encampment. Months of march from home. Hostile forces greatly outnumbering them all around. Limited supplies. No offered chance to leave. It appeared the Persians would kill them if panic did not scatter them first.
The Greek generals had no plan, no hope. In the early morning, when all were trying to sleep, Xenophon, lying sleepless also, had his insight born of crisis.
"What am I lying here for? The night is passing and at dawn the enemy will probably be here. If we fall into the King's hands, there is nothing to prevent us from seeing the most terrible things happening, from suffering all kinds of tortures and from being put to death in ignominy. Yet so far from anybody bothering to take any steps for our defence, we are lying here as though we had a chance of enjoying a quiet time. What city, then, do I expect will produce the general to take the right steps? Am I waiting until I become a little older? I shall never be any older at all if I hand myself over to the enemy today." [Xenophon, The Persian Expedition (Anabasis), Rex Warner translator, Penguin Books Ltd, 1949.]
Xenophon roused himself, roused the other leaders, and pestered them into a meeting. He did have an idea, impossible, dangerous, but better than waiting to be butchered by Persians.
Xenophon proposed to march north out of Persia through the rugged mountains of present day Turkey to the Black Sea coast where there were Greek colonies. The march up country would leave them in hostile Persian territory for the shortest distance. It would take them through mountainous, unknown kingdoms north of Persia.
The other leaders were contentious to say the least. First, Xenophon was obviously not one of the key leaders. Second, his plan meant near certain death.
Xenophon agreed. They would almost certainly all die on the march. Winter would come on them in the wilds of mountainous Turkey. They'd have to fight all the way, starting with Persians and then with every local kingdom where they'd need supplies.
But, it was better than waiting until morning when their force would disintegrate in panic and they would all die or become slaves. By marching up country, they'd at least die fighting with a purpose, not in a panic, and, who knows, some of them might make it. And what a wonderful tale they'd have to tell!
So they did.
OF MIND AND WILL
We think of these ancients as crude, ignorant, illiterate primitives, and they were. But, their brains and emotions were as capable as ours. They could hope and achieve as all humans can hope and achieve.
Those Greeks survived and triumphed by their minds and their will for one of history's great moments. They chose. They acted. Even if they had all died, their achievement of mind and will would stand as honorable testament for their lives. They won through because they were unwilling to give up in the face of unbeatable odds.
What a wonderful moment when those in front crested the last hill and finally saw the Black Sea, with cries of "Thallasa" ("the sea") moving back down the column.
I don't want to push the analogy to absurdity. The helplessness of atheists in America is only vaguely similar to the near immediate death facing an ancient band of mercenary warriors. The real similarity is in our minds and our ability to choose and act.
We atheists are powerless because that is what we've chosen by our inaction. We have exactly the lack of power and exactly the disrespect we deserve based on our ineffective implementation of our belief system. We deserve what we get because we accept it and do little to change it.
Our materialist potential is our realist mind. Our minds are the source and only existence of reality-based beliefs. What we are, what we may become, and what we may achieve for humanity is our choice, our will to act. Your choice of belief, your choice of action or inaction, and your will to live your belief are the only things that count.
I am certainly not Xenophon. I am no one to issue a call to action. But, for whom should I wait to do it for me? Whom are you waiting for to do it for you?
VICTORY FOR FREEMINDS
Total victory is the only acceptable goal in a mind-control war because humanity is diminished so long as a single mind remains trapped in superstition by programming or choice. Humanity's hopes and progress are thwarted to the extent that belief in the unreal supernatural dominates the minds of mankind.
I am not talking about force or coercion. Total victory is every human mind freely choosing to accept reality as their reasoned belief. A mind that accepts reality because of programming did not choose freely.
Atheists must accept the reality of the mind-control war to understand total victory as a goal. Our beliefs and lives can only prosper when we realize that our beliefs are in competition with other ideas. Our lives, and humanity's hopes, are determined by how well we compete.
Atheists must accept the meaning of their beliefs. We must accept our duty to humanity so that we may find the purpose and the will to fight. Each of us living the life we may have denied. Each of us living our beliefs.
I invite you to search your free mind and to make your own free choices. We are realists. Our beliefs have meaning. Our lives have meaning. How much longer should we deny ourselves with the only time and minds we shall ever have?
Impossible task you say? Not tomorrow certainly. Not in a century. But -- sometime. Sometime we must begin. We cannot fully enjoy our lives as long as we meekly accept second-class status. We cannot offer free minds for all if we never begin the march.
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Howard Thompson is editor of The Texas Atheist newsletter. You may contact him at gofreemind@aol.com.