Atheism loves to claim the high ground. No dogma, no blind faith, just straight evidence and logic. That’s the pitch. But what it actually offers is a worldview just as rigid as the ones it criticizes. Not because it lacks belief, but because it denies having any.
The phrase “lack of belief” is a clever trick. It sounds passive. Unbiased. Clean. But in practice, atheism often comes bundled with a need to explain, to reduce, to dismiss anything that doesn’t fit into a neat, mechanistic frame. That’s not neutrality. That’s ideology.
The irony is sharp. The people most insistent that “we don’t know” are usually the first to shut down any deeper questions with a quick appeal to science or reason. As if those aren’t also belief systems built on current human limitations. As if the only honest stance is one that ends in a lab report or a philosophical shrug.
Atheism isn’t unique because it lacks gods. It’s typical because it clings to explanation. It just replaces myth with math, spirit with system, and still ends up trying to control the mystery of existence with its own set of rules.
Once you need to argue, to be right, to win, you’re already inside a belief.
And saying “I don’t know” isn’t a get-out-of-faith-free card. It’s simply a more palatable mask for the same impulse: to define reality, to name it, and therefor, to contain it.
This isn’t about religion. It’s about arrogance. The kind that mistakes absence of belief for freedom, when really it’s just belief stripped of self-awareness.
You don’t escape the need for faith. You just get to choose which story you pretend isn’t one.
— Wout
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