STATE OF DENIAL

Alcoholics as well as families and friends of alcoholics - that covers about 99.9% of the Western world - can all identify this stage zero before what they hope will be an addict's progression towards recovery : "Problem ?  What problem ?  It is other people who have a problem.  I drink, sure I drink, but I don't have a problem with it.  I can give it up whenever I like.  Sure I drink quite a bit, every day, but never too much.  Of course I'm not dependent.  I'm not an alcoholic."

Hopefully such people find the help, the support, the courage to move to the first rung of the A.A. ladder : admission of having a problem and needing help.

Can people at both ends of the belief-in-God spectrum be said to be in a state of denial ?  Some refuse to admit that God exists, others refuse to admit that He doesn't.  Some believers emerge from their state of denial and affirm their atheism.  Some non-believers change their mind and accept religion's basic tenet about God's existence.  But when they are not so much non-believers as ex-believers who have become atheists (like me), such a change, in this case a return, is extremely rare.  "Non-believers" are not, in spite of the negative structure of that word and of the word "atheism", in a state of denial, who need to "progress" to admitting God's existence.  Theirs is not so much a denial as an affirmation of life and a recognition of death as the end of personal existence.  Their only Heaven is what they succeed in making of their lives.  They place their trust not in an imagined God but in the opportunities that life offers them.

Why the difference ?  I suggest it is because only the believers suffer from an addiction, only they are dependent on an illusionary belief-system which they have not yet recognized as a drug as addictive as alcohol.  Once they come to renounce the habit, to overcome their dependence, they can not only do without their drug.  They can for the first time see reality as it is, and enjoy the precious freedom they have found.

Atheism is not a drug.  It is religion that has rightly been named the opium of the people, a poison which like alcohol creates both dependence and a state of denial.  Ergo ...

                                                            DELENDA   RELIGIO