In Defense of Antitheism
A Sunday Sermon
Antitheism has gotten a bad rap—mostly from people who think it involves setting fire to churches or arguing with their grandmothers at Thanksgiving. In truth, antitheism isn’t about ruining anyone’s Sunday; it’s about asking a very reasonable question: “Do we really need an invisible supervisor to tell us not to be jerks?” It’s not rebellion for rebellion’s sake; it’s the intellectual version of uninstalling outdated software that keeps crashing your moral operating system.
To be clear, antitheists aren’t out to destroy wonder or beauty. We love wonder—just not the kind that comes with fine print about eternal damnation. Religion gave us some great art, to be sure—cathedrals, chorales, Michelangelo’s ceiling—but it also gave us the Inquisition, so let’s call it an uneven record. Antitheism doesn’t want to burn the myths; it wants to file them correctly under “metaphor,” not “user manual for the cosmos.” When someone says, “The universe was made in six days,” the antitheist hears, “This person has never heard of plate tectonics, but boy, they have imagination!”
The moral argument is even simpler. If the only thing keeping someone from murdering their neighbor is the fear of divine lightning bolts, we probably shouldn’t give that person sharp objects. Morality that depends on surveillance isn’t morality—it’s spiritual house arrest. Antitheism argues that empathy and decency work just fine without celestial policing. We don’t need a deity to tell us not to kick puppies; we have mirror neurons and a general sense that yelping is bad.
And let’s face it, religion and power have been a disastrous couple since the dawn of time—a toxic relationship the rest of humanity keeps enabling. Every time we think they’ve finally broken up, they post a new selfie captioned “#blessed.” From crusades to witch trials, divine authority has been the original “because I said so.” Antitheism isn’t content to just mute that conversation; it wants to swipe left on the entire relationship.
But here’s the fun part: once you kick out the gods, you realize the universe didn’t get smaller—it got bigger. Meaning isn’t handed down from a cloud; it’s handcrafted right here, by us, in all our fumbling, glorious humanity. No more cosmic middle management—just you, me, and the Milky Way, trying to figure out how to be kind before the heat death of the universe. Nietzsche said, “God is dead,” but he forgot to add, “and now we can finally get some work done.”
Antitheism isn’t about hating religion—it’s about loving truth, humor, and freedom more. It’s about standing upright instead of kneeling, questioning instead of confessing, and finding awe not in fear but in curiosity. It’s not a war against the sacred—it’s a campaign to move it somewhere better: out of the temples and into our hearts, where it can stop demanding tithes and start telling jokes.
