Dear Oprah

We atheists get awe, we always got awe, our experience is as diverse and rich as any other people. It is full of the simultaneous beauty, hideousness, complexity, simplicity, horror, the vast macro scale, the intricate and counter intuitive nanoscale, and everyday midi scale with human nurturing, care, and cruelty, insanity, humour and consideration of our experience is the human experience.

It needs no gods, no ancient writings of savage civilizations, no poetically twisted language of science offered to sell books.

Humans are by nature emotional creatures, it was true yesterday, it is true today and it will be true tomorrow. We are also capable of reason and through reason we find no evidence of god in the traditional sense. Powerful and profound emotional experiences are just that. They can be beautiful uplifting or devastating. If they happen to be the former there is no reason to call them God, it simply demonstrates that the word does not mean what you think it means. The word god has  meaning referring to an all knowing superpower so what ever you call awe, be it yugen or amazement or joie de vivre, the one thing it is not is god. If you are going to torture the English language, have the decency to do it out of public view, like the CIA.

And while your at it knock off the "The Secret" stuff. because when things don't work out like people hope it just leaves them frustrated and depressed and being led to believe that there lives suck because they haven't a strong enough imagination to overcome their reality which is that trickle down economics is a scam designed to extract money from the working poor an middle class and give it to the rich.

Traditionally the word soul referred to living person there was no supernatural element to this word until the Catholics started chewing on their own dictionaries and the lead in the ink affect their brains. It was all good though it filled the coffers nicely. All the priests had to say was "Nice soul you have their, wouldn't want anything to happen to it." And the gullible and poorly educated peasants would respond to this empty threat, and fill the golden platter with contribution for the godfather tithe to the church. Like the traditional concept of God, the concept of the eternal or extra-corporeal soul has no evidential support.

Props to Diana Nyad for being straight up and showing that people don't need god to be extraordinary.



In case you were still wondering what Atheism is, Take 5 minutes to let Bill Maher explain it to you...