Dear Y, I have said this before and I shall repeat it again at the risk of being accused of doing exactly the same thing they themselves do so often, i.e., repeat myself. We all are born with no belief at all, but with an innate proclivity to implicitly trust our caregivers. This proclivity is essential for survival and procreation, an evolutionary imperative. It is this proclivity that is mistaken for a gateway to God and the amorphous spirituality. This proclivity, combined with the innate but transparent evolutionary pressure upon the parents to pass on every trick they have been taught for survival, inevitably results in the parents pushing the drug that was pushed upon them, the proverbial opium if you will, in turn, upon their off-springs.
Salman Rushdie in his Midnight's Children observes the children are the vessels into which the parents pour their poison. Karl Marx quotes a report by the Child Employment Commission of 1866 in his Das Capital, albeit in an altogether different context, but no less appropriate in the present context, "It is unhappily, to a painful degree, apparent throughout the whole of evidence, that against no person do children of both sexes so much require protection as against their parents."
This, in its fundamental nature, is the essence of theism. Theism is not a singular ideology, there are infinite variations of it. To one thiest, all others are no more than an athiest in essence, even if they are theists par excellence in their own flavor of theism. To Muslims, all others are Kafirs. To a Brahminist, all others are adharmic. To a Christian, those who don't accept Jesus as Christ are headed to eternal torment. So, to a thiest, an athiest is anybody who entertains doubt, not any doubt, but doubt about their own indcotrinated theistic POV.
Nobody becomes a theist until they are indoctrinated. There is no theist in the whole world who was not taught to be one. On the contrary, the fictional Tarzan, in his natural state, surely was not a theist. Not being a theist is what has come to be called an atheist, for want of a better name. To be an atheist is the natural state, just as long as one does not get contaminated by the society with handed down superstitions, or able to get out of it, in spite of the indoctrination, as some of us have done.
Those who truly wish to understand atheism must first free themselves of socially indoctrinated notions of God, open all the doors and windows of the mind, let ideas through, regardless of source, occidental or the much revered oriental source, and be critical, and be ever ready to reject mere assertions, and equally ready to be persuaded by rational thought whatever the sourcve may be, even if it is the much Brahmin-reviled EVR. In other words, put to the acid test the mere rhetoric that one is open minded.
Cheers!
