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A few days ago, I was speaking to my grandmother in light, irreligious discussion. Of course, the subject eventually and inevitably began to center around my atheism. As the well-mannered, Republican, devout Christian my grandmother is, she's always in search of fresh, new arguments that she hopes will someday "bring me back."

Her latest crusade has been the far-too-familiar act of accusing atheists of being self-centered ******** who can't get their heads out of their asses and realize that there just may exist something higher than themselves. You know... the "atheists have no god but themselves" argument.

Well, that, like other things, got me on a real thought riot.

An atheist, according to the Random House Unabridge Dictionary, is "a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings." God, assuming he exists, doesn't believe in such a being (this would make him a lesser being). This creates an interesting paradox; by strict definition, God is an atheist by default.

This conclusion leads to a veritable yachtload of problems with the existence of God:

1. Despite his supreme atheism, God demands the untainted belief of everyone on earth. I call double standard.
2. God's atheism implies that anyone who worships him, in order to attain higher "godliness," should become an atheist.
3. If he's an atheist, then what the hell is he doing in heaven?

You could argue that God does believe in a supreme being: himself. But everyone who is alive must believe in themselves. God may believe in himself (if his self-esteem is sufficient), but this has no bearing on his religious belief (or lack thereof). The question must then be asked: does God believe in a being higher than himself? If God is a supreme being, then this is impossible. Thus, God is still an atheist.

Of course, God, being the omnipotent puppetmaster he is, could delude himself by following a religion and believing in a higher power. The problem with this situation, however, is that God would cease to be the supreme authority of the universe. Not to mention that we would then have to account for the beliefs of God's god. I don't think I need to discuss the problem with an infinite god-loop.

So... what have I proven in all of this? If anything, I've proven that Christian fundamentalists who believe they're doing God's work by squelching the voice of atheists in the political spectrum are following quite an ironic path by worshipping a divine atheist. Or, on a more practical level, whether God exists or not, atheism is the way to go.

This is also in my journal, which, unlike God, is somewhat existent.

The property of personhood shouldn't have anything to do with whether or not God could be an atheist. All one needs is to grasp the concept of religious belief. Animals don't have this, so we exclude them from the theism/atheism dichotomy. But since God is supposedly of a higher understanding than mankind, he should be capable of religious belief (or lack thereof) as well.

Of course, God would know and not believe that there is no higher being. So he definitely wouldn't be a theist by any stretch. Or an agnostic, for that matter; he would have knowledge (gnosis) that there is no higher being than himself.