The Atheist Maxim

The path to my atheism was littered with self probing questions about nature of god, dissatisfaction with the reasons trotted out in favour of his/her existence and the bare illogicality of accepting something just because everyone else believes in it. The path to declaring myself an atheist was, in many ways, a torturous one but in the end a gratifying one because I was at last free of an irrational notion of existence that my logical side had rejected long ago. Of course, atheism throws up many more questions than it answers, once the cocoon of familiarity of religion and its explanations are broken.

But that is how society has always progressed….first we break the mould, the hardest part, and then we remake it…..

But I do believe that even veteran atheists would be stumped at first sight by the eternal simplicity of this argument by the Greek philosopher Epicurus in favour of unbelieving….it is an argument that even a child would understand in all its profundity, for it effectively destroys the very foundation of a God as we have been taught, consciously or unconsciously.

I stumbled upon it in Khushwant Singh’s column yesterday in telegraph….

So here it is….a set of lines that should become the maxim for every person who likes to have a mind of his own and I firmly believe it’s something that should be taught in our schools as well so that we are not burdened with all the nonsense of organized religion and form an individuality of our own from the earliest age.

“Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able but unwilling? Then he is malevolent.

If he is both able and willing, then whence cometh evil?

If he is neither able nor willing, then why call him God?”