There is a god! and...

His name is...her name is...it's name is...

Oh, forget it.

There is a philosophical barrier between those of faith and those without. This is a no-brainer, of course. There are those of us [atheists] who have crossed the barrier of the religious divide and...are...just there. After lifelong indoctrination most of the atheist bloggers here have shed their skin and moved on.* What is hard to grasp is theists see the divide but is as yet a fuzzy, incomprehensible horizon. Am I making any sense here? Why is that horizon so fuzzy and incomprehensible? What is so hard about realizing that there is no god or supernatural beings outside of our selves? Only one explanation comes to my mind. Need.

"Born again" atheists sure the hell know all about the role of religion in there lives, yet theists can not possibly look in the direction the infidel has traversed. Most atheists have "been there" (it's not like atheists have just cropped up out of nowhere or were churned out of some atheist factory), most theists have not "been there".

So what is the role of the dichotomy of the whole atheism/theism debate? Simple. To convince one party to believe in the others argument. Inherently, it's not at all about whether there is a god or not.

This goes back to the "need" I spoke of earlier. It's about social unity; about setting up a litmus test in order that individuals be accepted into an "inner circle" or otherwise socially acceptable among ones peers. THIS is the root of the atheist ire. Being an atheist comes with some social baggage that sets them up to be de facto pariahs. Misfits and freaks. That what they say is irrelevant, because "there IS a god ya know...stupid!" It's like friggin' high school. Ya gotta fit in or it's spitballs and getting tripped in the hall.

*Not me, I never grew up indoctrinated.