A Challenge to the Theists

This week's post is not for the antitheists, or even for the atheists. This week I shall instead be addressing the theists. I put forth a challenge to all of you who believe in the holiness of any God, as defined in my earlier posts.

All atheists, even though we are part of no congregation, no community, and even though we follow no single teacher or even multiple teachers, share a common "belief" (I put this in quotes because I do not count atheistic belief as actual an actual "belief system"). We "believe" in what we can see, in reason, in logic, and in what there is reasonable evidence to believe without any "leaps of faith".

Obviously, theists share a similar but opposite belief system -- belief in that which requires a leap of faith.

The two systems seem to be symmetrically opposed, but a closer inspection reveals vast differences hidden just beneath the surface.

Once you take a leap of faith in your beliefs, you have stepped away from that which we can all agree upon as human beings. Your beliefs are diverse. You have different Gods with different desires. Many "agnostics" take to the reasoning of Pascal's Wager. Basically, Pascal says, if atheists are wrong, when they die, they will suffer for eternity. If Christians are wrong, when they die, they'll have wasted a little bit of time praying. Obviously, the risks of one far outweigh the risks of the other, and so why not Believe? The complete and utter lack of integrity that this demonstrates non-withstanding, the dilemma comes when you must choose a God. There are hundreds of religions out there which claim to have the keys to heaven, and to have the exclusive path to salvation.

Atheists on the other hand, believe in only that for which there is a community consensus. We all see trees, so trees must exist. If somebody hears voices in their head, that person is not hearing the voice of "God" or "Angels" -- they are crazy. That is the state of the world -- the universe. People do not need to be convinced that trees exist, but they do need to be "convinced" of and converted to the ideas Christianity or any other religion. Thus, religions are stuck with the endless task of trying to convert everybody to their religion, battling against other religions. Meanwhile, Atheism has no need to "spread" or be "evangelized", except only so far as to immunize people against the ridiculous claims of organized religion.

And so I challenge all theists: Come up with a unified system of belief. If you can all come together and form a consensus about what "God" is, and what that "God" figure wants... well... I can't say I'll believe you, but I will be very impressed.

Only atheism offers humanity a chance at unity.

Defining "God"

Defining "God" is a challenging prospect -- nearly as difficult as defining "belief". Really, "God" is a blanket nominal that has come to represent many things. To the ancient Greeks, the Gods were just one of many supernatural beings, which often took forms quite similar to humans, though with extra powers. Today, in Western Society, there is a rising trend of being "spiritual" rather than "religious".
Though I can't be for certain, what I think these people are trying to say is, "I believe in a higher, supreme power, but not as it is described by any institutional religions." There are also those who claim that God is "Love" or any number of human emotions which represent "God". Are these things truly Gods? Is there a difference between Zeus, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Brahman, a "higher power", or a "natural energy"? Defining myself as an atheist or antithiest, I am defining myself as the opposite of a theist, but to understand what a theist is, one must understand what a God is.
The difference, as I see it, between a character like the Christian God and a label such as "love" or "natural energies", is that the former has his/it's own will, whereas the latter does not. A God, in the institutionalized sense of the word, has desire. There is something you must do for God. There are rules you must obey or even missions you must accomplish. A "natural energy" makes no such request of it's followers. It has no will or desire, it simply is. It is the woven fabric of the universe that is beyond our power to comprehend, or at least, that is what I think these "spiritual" people are describing to me.
So really, God for anybody is the highest possible power. Institutional Gods are generally modeled after human beings, complete with all of our flaws (wrath, vengeance, and in the case of Zeus even lust). They also tend to be warped by those who evangelize in their names. More "spiritual" Gods, on the other hand, are in my opinion simply an attempt to describe powers which we don't understand. These descriptions do not even necessarily make any assumptions about supernatural powers.
God is everything, the universe, all of it. And in this case, plain old secularists have taken the institutional word and warped to simply describe one's perception of the universe, be it optimistic or pessimistic.
These "Gods", I can deal with. But "anti-institutional-traditional-dieties" is a rather long nomer, and so I think I'll just stick with "atheist".