I find it baffling that the first philosopher to be an outspoken atheist should describe the entire inner being of our world as will. For those of you who don't know, I'm referring to Arthur Schopenhauer: 19th century "pessimist" philosopher, who believed that the reality we are aware of is merely an "appearance" (and that derived from Immanuel Kant), and that the other side of things - the reality of which we're not aware - is a seething, undifferentiated mass of will.
What's so puzzling to me is this: to be called an atheist, one must have renounced the idea of an all-knowing, all-powerful totality of being that would normally be called "God." Granted, Schopenhauer did describe that underlying "will" as blind (i.e. it is not "all-knowing") - but the implications of the way he describes reality are in a very obvious sense theistic.
This all brings to mind an idea that I and many others have had, namely that human nature is actually incapable of true atheism. It may be that Schopenhauer outgrew the idea of "God" in the Judeo-Christian sense of the term, or that Richard Dawkins renounces the idea of "God" in any of its multi-cultural manifestations - but did not Schopenhauer simply replace God with will? Has Dawkins actually conquered the metaphysical need for absolute reality - or has he simply filled this need with science instead of God? Considering the nature of what we call "God," it's easy to see that one "God" has simply been replaced by another: no man can do without.
I suppose the real purpose of writing this down is to warn my fellow men: the idea of a "practicing atheist" is truly absurd. Try and find one - at best, you will find some decadent excuse for a neo-nihilist that wants some good-old-fashioned attention. In all honesty, an "atheist" is nothing more than someone who has replaced the Christian "God" with some other absolute principle or ruling idea - in other words, someone who has found a new God. Unfortunately for us (and them), they've yet to find anything better.
