ATHEIST MANIFESTO Version 1.0.1
Atheism favours our reconciliation with our own humanity by rejecting the alienation caused by baseless and dangerous beliefs. Despite its negative grammatical form, atheism is a positive force.
We value reason, critical thinking, empiricism, science, knowledge and progress. Reason and cooperation are essential to meeting the challenges that confront humankind. We value the evidence of our senses and rely on what we can sense and measure in this natural world. We draw our conclusions based on the best evidence, and change our conclusions accordingly as new data become known. Our ethics and values are evidence-based. Ethics and morality evolve over time as we better understand our world and the consequences we cause in it.
Science is the best tool we have for seeking truth and understanding our world. We value knowledge and we hold the endeavor to increase it as best we can, in order to pursue truths about our world, to be one of the noblest efforts one can make; and any and all efforts to stifle or denigrate knowledge and learning to be immoral. We believe in modernity and progress and the ability of humanity to develop a better world based on reason.
We are convinced that human compassion and empathy are crucial to improving the human condition. Life is precious and has value, as this life is the only one we know that we and our fellow living beings will have. We hold that all people have the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that all people are entitled to freedom of conscience. We support the values outlined in the International Convention of Human Rights as inalienable human rights. Freedom of conscience includes not only freedom of belief but also freedom of non-belief, the right to have no religion.
We abandon all magical thinking, all infantile hopes in a salvation provided by gods or spirits originating in whatever illusory supernatural realm. We know that we human beings of this small planet must survive by our own wits and resources, however modest these may be. We are responsible for humane interaction with other people and other animals and for the preservation of our habitable planet.
We are not pollyannas. We detest ignorance and the obscurantism which causes it. We hate censorship and the prohibition of free speech. We deplore the duplicity and credulity which many people display in their response to supernatural allegations. We reject narrow-mindedness and dogmatism, because they are incapable of adapting to progress or to new knowledge.
We are materialists. We reject all belief in one or various gods or goddesses, in demons or angels, in agents whose alleged acts would be incompatible with our painstakingly acquired scientific knowledge, or in any other supernatural nonsense. Indeed, the so-called supernatural is an oxymoron, because if a "supernatural" phenomenon did in fact exist, it would thus be natural, i.e. part of the our observable natural world and subject to scientific inquiry.
We are atheists. We also call ourselves humanists, freethinkers, skeptics or secularists, but we do not use these labels as cowardly euphemisms to mask our atheism. Atheism is not a system of beliefs, but rather the rejection of theistic systems. Atheism is the result of the rigorous application of doubt to theism.
We are not agnostics. We know that the various theisms are baseless prescientific mythologies, inherited from antiquity, and that their falsehood is a certainty beyond all reasonable doubt.
We are especially not deists. We know that the hypothesis of a creator, even one who never intervenes in the natural world after his/her/its hypothetical act of creation, is superfluous and has no scientific or moral value.
We are moral and imperfect beings, responsible for ourselves, just like the humanity of which we are a part. We know that our moral sense is innate, a product of our biological and cultural evolution as human animals. We know too that to assign moral authority to a fictional deity alienates us from our own humanity, compromises our freedom, and robs us of our own responsibility. We know that any religious authority which has the pretention to speak for an illusory god abuses that authority.
We are antitheist, antideist and antireligious. We are convinced that the free expression of ideas is necessary. To criticize religions is not only a right, it is a necessity. Of all supernatural or paranormal beliefs which infect human thought, the various theisms are among the most widespread and the most dangerous. We do not limit our criticism to fundamentalists or extremists. We also criticize religious tendencies considered "moderate" or "liberal". All supernatural beliefs are irrational, while so-called "moderate" beliefs are just a somewhat lighter version of irrationality. All forms of religion, be they fundamentalist or liberal, have in common moral arrogance, the arbitrary nature of their supernatural beliefs, and an unhealthy attachment to religious authority and tradition at the expense of reason.
We promote secularism, that is, the complete separation between religion and State, and the expulsion of all partisan religion from public institutions. We are willing to work in coalition with any other association, even a religious one, which shares with us a clearly secular objective. But we will not sweeten or tone down our antireligious criticism in an effort to avoid offending whomever. We respect freedom of belief and non-belief, and we do so by promoting legal measures to guarantee that freedom, but we are not bound by any obligation to respect beliefs themselves.
We are not religious, and we will not imitate those who are religious. We do not claim to be morally superior to believers. But, most importantly, neither are we morally inferior, because the religious prejudice which associates atheism with immorality or amorality is nothing but a dirty old lie which is promoted, self-servingly, by religious institutions and their allies. We know that atheism is beneficial, or at worst innocuous. We have no inclination to criminalize behaviour simply because we may find it ethically dubious; that is what fundamentalists do. The various theisms are morally repugnant ideologies, but we have neither the ability nor the desire to forbid their practice. Rather, we wish only to minimize the damage they do, so that the religious practice of some does not compromise the freedom of others.
But what we know above all, is that all knowledge is incomplete and subject to revision. If a new phenomenon or a new technology or new data incompatible with our worldview should present itself, then we will study that novel discovery with an appropriate balance of open-mindedness and skepticism, and change our conception of the world if modification is justified.