Atheism: A new faith

There is no church on Sunday. There are also no dietary requirements. Nor are there required days of the year set aside for worship of G-d, gods or a higher power.

As Bill Maher said, “Atheism is not a religion.”

In this sense, he is correct.

However, religion and faith are not mutually exclusive even in the most secular of definitions.

All people have faith that what they believe at this moment is correct, whether it come from biblical texts or science books. However, there is a major difference in how atheists and religious people reconcile information that is contradictory to what is currently believed.

With modern science or atheism, a new concept may be met with opposition, but once it becomes established, old texts and beliefs are scrapped and referenced for limited purposes.

For example, the lobotomy was considered sound science until 1967, when it became banned. It is important to remember that these were certified, educated doctors that made this mistake and not charlatans. Nobody is perfect, and medicine has brought great leaps and bounds to end suffering around the world. In this particular case, however, there was a mistake. The lobotomy is now regarded as the 20th century equivalent of leeching and bloodletting — which even practitioners of its day truly believed to be good medicine.

The general point of view is that these were mistakes of the medical past. While this is certainly a progressive viewpoint, it does perpetuate a certain overconfidence in what we believe to be true now. Nobody wants to admit that what diet, medication or surgery they are living by may in =read more =http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/23/atheism-fact-religion/