Throughout history religion and myth have bound communities together in part by providing answers to life’s mysteries. However, as humanity progressed, and we began to uncover the workings of the cosmos through reason, these myths and stories began to fall by the wayside. Does this mean that reason and religion are diametrically opposing forces? This depends on how dogmatic one’s religious beliefs are. The soul of reason, and of human progress, is acknowledging you could be mistaken and being willing to alter or discard a belief in favor of a better explanation. The more authoritarian and dogmatic a belief, be it religious or otherwise, the more it stands in opposition to reason. For example, to blindly follow a doctrine handed down by a human religious authority, such as a particular religious text being the unaltered word of God, is a rejection of reason. If, however, one accepts what reason has revealed to be our best current explanation, the one most likely to be true, and accepts what we do not yet know, it becomes possible to practice a religion not only consistent with reason but based upon it.

New Atenism is a religion of reason and the “New” is what reason has revealed. New Atenists believe that divine is revealed to all of us through the process and power of reason. A 17th Century Dutch philosopher named Baruch Spinoza is best know for declaring “God or Nature.” By “nature” Spinoza didn’t mean just trees and flowers, he meant the entirety of reality, all that ever has or ever will exist. Spinoza believed that only through reason could humans come to know God/Nature. When we learn a new thing, another little piece of Nature, of God, is revealed to us. Spinoza, and New Atenists, believe reason reveals the divine to all of us through the acquisition and verification of knowledge rather than by private conversations between God and divinely selected prophets. New Atenism is continually “new” in that we are constantly acquiring and verifying knowledge through the process of reason. Religions have a checkered history of censoring, locking up or even torturing and killing people whose discoveries challenge their doctrine, but New Atenism LOVES to be proven wrong about something. Every time a better explanation is found, the “New” becomes a bit newer and we celebrate learning one more new thing about God.

Reason has also revealed a path to individual and collective progress. When you use reason to embrace your positive instincts and urges and reject your negative ones, you do better in life. The use of reason to manage instinct is at the heart of every moral edict ever handed down and self-help book every written. The collective use of reason is what created and verified the knowledge that has made our lives longer and more comfortable. Like most other religions, New Atenism integrates a cosmic creation story and a set of moral ideas into a narrative. What makes New Atenism different is that this narrative is based on what we know and how we know it. It is based on the God reason is revealing more of each day and an individual and collective morality which reason developed and continues to improve. To learn more of what New Atenism is and what it means to be a New Atenist, please read the initial blog post on this site or download the e-book.