Pleasure #4 - Choice
Anyone who has voluntarily left Catholicism and other conservative faiths will no doubt cite lack of freedom to make individual choices as one of their chief reasons for seeking a different path. I was no exception. In my personal experience, there was no pleasure in being told that I would have to remain celibate until marriage, even if for some reason I chose never to marry. I didn’t see the point of having the church decide the circumstances under which I could have sex, whether it be as a single or married person. I thought it both absurd and intrusive that a church had the arrogance to tell me I should never use certain kinds of birth control to prevent pregnancy. Or that I couldn’t indulge in certain sexual acts that avoided pregnancy altogether. Since I valued my freedom more than observing the arbitrary and cruel rules of Catholicism, secularism was by far the better choice.
Pleasure #5 - Power
Having the freedom to control our own destiny is very powerful indeed. Whether we use that power wisely is entirely up to us. We can use it to make good choices in life to benefit ourselves and others. Conservative religious leaders often argue that power should only be in their hands, and we must trust them to use the power they have for our benefit. What a terrible idea! Too often in past history, leaders such as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin have used this power for cruel and terrible purposes. Those who trusted them paid the ultimate price, by sacrificing their own lives.
To surrender the power we have to others is a dangerous course of action, especially when leaders tend to have only their best interests at heart, not ours. Of course we’ll stumble and make bad choices sometimes, as a result of keeping our personal power. But we still must keep it ourselves, not hand it over to ‘leaders’ without question. We cannot, as Benjamin Franklin warned us against, give up our personal liberty to have a little safety. When we do, we usually end up losing both.
Pleasure #6 - Health
When we are free to make our own choices in life — within the bounds of secular law that is — we are in fact very healthy, both in body and in spirit. We don’t have priests or pastors looking over our shoulders telling us that what we are doing is ‘wrong’. We aren’t forced to attend church, since there are no civil laws on the books saying that church is a must on Sunday. Therefore, our Sundays are free to use as we choose, whether it’s to stay home and read a good book, indulge in wild, unrestrained sex with our spouses or significant others, have lunch in a good restaurant, or go to the beach in the summertime. We can dress in our nicest clothes, or wear little or no clothing at all. Naturally, the last option assumes we’re in the privacy of our homes at the time.
Pleasure #7 - Tolerance
The final pleasure of freethinking, as I see it, is the freedom to tolerate and accept philosophical or religious differences. Every secularist I’ve known is perfectly happy to allow others the liberty to practice their own faith or philosophy, as long as those others aren’t insisting we must trade our beliefs for theirs. Hard-line theists insist that secularism will eventually lead to anarchy. A few believe we already have it. If that is the case, I haven’t noticed.
Law breakers come in all shapes, sizes, philosophies and religions. Meaning some criminals will be atheists, while others won’t. Speaking for myself, I haven’t had as much as a traffic ticket, let alone committed a major crime. So let’s put the absurd notion that a theist is a better citizen than an atheist or secularist to rest, since there’s absolutely no truth in it.
Personally, I consider the pleasures of atheism to be far more effective as teaching tools than the ‘seven deadly sins’ associated with conservative and fundamentalist religions. The words kindness, knowledge, happiness, choice, power, health and tolerance reflect a far more positive outlook on life than the negative thoughts associated with ‘deadly sin.’ To atheists and secularists around the globe, they come together to shine on the most important pleasure; freedom. Is there anything better in the world to have?
