Why Atheism Now

Is something I have been asked. For me it came about, or returned to focus, I was brought up to reason and to be sceptical of what I am told, for a few reasons. 9/11 saw a group of people who believed that their souls would carry on in to a different plane after their physical deaths fly aeroplanes in to buildings killing thousands of people to please a supernatural being. It isn't uncommon for murder to take place through belief in the supernatural but usually it has nothing to do with my country. Tony Blair and George bush responded to 9/11 by engaging in a war that resulted in the deaths of far more people. Both believed their actions were supported by a god. One would presumably need some loophole through which to slip on the inevitable nights when you question your actions.
In earlier postings I talked of the third Dethronement of man. The first two were these. Galileo figured out, through a telescope of his own development, that the earth was not central to the universe. This clashed with the religious beliefs of the day. The Spanish inquisition tried him in court, showed him the instruments of torture he would face if he didn't recant. He spent the rest of his life incarcerated. Man was no longer central to the universe but in some random back alley of the universe.
Next up came the idea of evolution. Darwin figured out that we were, like all other animals. A development of natural selection. One would have thought that this would have prevented the teaching of creationism in schools but it continues to this day in America. A campaign spearheaded by Richard Dawkins has stopped this stupid practice over here.
Thirdly and most recently have been the discoveries in neuroscience. The mind is dependent on the brain. We can now locate the seat of our consciousness. We can now disregard ideas of a consciousness separate from the body; there is no soul.
The 17th century saw a shift in how we treated one another. "One gets a sense that people started to place a higher value on human life. Part of this new found appreciation was an emotional change: a habit of identifying with the pains and pleasures of others. And another part was an intellectual and moral change; a shift from valuing souls to valuing lives. The doctrine of the sacredness of the soul sounds vaguely uplifting, but in fact is highly malignant. It discounts life on earth as just a temporary phase that people pass through, indeed, an infintesimal fraction of their existence. Death becomes a mere rite of passage, like puberty or mid life crisis.
The gradual replacement of lives for souls as the locus of moral value was helped along by the ascendency of skeptisim and reason. No one can deny the difference between life and death or the existence of suffering , but it takes indoctrination to hold. Elsie's about what becomes of an immortal soul after it has parted company from the body. The 17th century is called the age of reason, an age where writers began to insist that beliefs be justified by experience and logic. That undermines dogmas about souls and salvation, and it undermines the policy of forcing people to believe unbelievable things at the point of a sword."
The central remaining excuse put forward by religious apologists is that morality is a cultural phenomena. That without guides from without we can only provide a subjective code to live by. The previous paragraph begins to show that science, or the scientific method can in fact provide help regarding morality. Once we accept the concept of well being, and most if us will agree it is better to not be in pain, to be warm, safe from attack and with full belly, we can begin to rationalise the better ways to conduct ourselves. I would argue that the highest rates of atheism, western Europe focused on Norway, the netherlands, are also where the lowest homicide rates are. Roughly 1 to 100,000 per year. North America where faith is far greater is isolated in the western world with the highest murder rates.
A coherent philosophy emerged from the age of reason and the enlightenment that coalesced in what we can call Enlightenment Humanism. This took us a step on from the more barbaric religios past. "it begins with skeptisim. The history of human folly, and our own susceptibility to illusions and fallacies, tell us that men and women are fallible. One therefore ought to seek good reasons for believing something. Faith, revelation, tradition, dogma, authority, the ecstatic glow of subjective certainty- all are types for error, and should be dismissed as sources of knowledge."