A person who decides or forms opinions based on reason, not faith. Most atheists or freethinkers are humanists, basing morality on human needs, not imagined “cosmic attitudes,”
We embrace a respect for our planet, other animals, and feminist principles of equality.
Atheists are convinced that religious claims do not withstand the tests of reason. That there is nothing to be gained by believing in an untruth, and everything to lose when we sacrifice the indispensable tool of reason on the altar of superstition.
There is meaning in life, and we atheists find it in human compassion, social progress, in art, music, literature,
in personal happiness, pleasure, joy, love ---- in the beauty of humanity and in the advancement of knowledge.
Religious leaders believe that life is so complex that there had to be a designer (God) responsible for life and everything that followed. We say that Darwin’s theory of evolution , with cumulative nonrandom natural selection designed for billions of years, has provided the explanation. A “Divine Designer” is no answer because the complexity of such a creature would be subject to the same scrutiny itself.
People of faith say that religion has done tremendous good in the world. Many religionists are good people but they would be good anyway. Religion does not have a monopoly on good deeds. Many non-religionists have enriched humanity – people like Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Margaret Sanger, H.L. Mencken, Charles Darwin, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady and many, many others.
We are free to do our own thinking, free from restraints of orthodoxy, of the blind maintenance of ancient superstitions or self-effacing prostration before divine tyrants known only through primitive revelations. We are truly free.
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