Atheism

Not a verdict, an absence¶

Atheism in Valdrin is constantly confused with Idurism, and the two could not be less alike.

Idurism is a verdict. It holds that gods exist as liars and has reached a settled, furious conclusion about them. Atheism has reached no conclusion at all. It is the absence of belief rather than the belief in an absence, and an atheist asked to prove the gods are not there will generally decline, on the grounds that proving a thing is not there is not how anyone establishes anything.

What is left, once that seat is empty, is a practical question the faith takes seriously: where do morality, purpose and the nature of the world come from, if nothing hands them down. The answers are various, they are argued about endlessly, and the arguing is the practice.

Philosophers rather than priests¶

The clergy, such as they are, are called philosophers, and their function is unlike any other clerical body on the map. They do not intercede, bless, absolve or bury. They teach, they keep libraries, and they take positions in public that they expect to be attacked.

Where an atheist community establishes itself, schools follow within a generation and they are usually the best in the region. Minds sharpen and knowledge spreads where faith does not bind, which is the boast, and it is one of the few boasts in Valdrin that the neighbouring faiths quietly concede by sending their own children to be taught.

The two ends it attracts¶

The faith is syncretic, tolerating everything and everyone, and this produces the widest and least comfortable congregation on the map.

At one end are the scholars, the physicians and the engineers, along with the Mongrel Company, which keeps no faith at all and finds the absence professionally convenient: nothing to convert, nothing to offend, nothing for an employer to appeal to.

At the other end are the Sintari, and their presence here is the thing atheist philosophers are asked about most often and answer worst. The Sintari hold no god because they hold that no god is needed to establish what was done to them or what is owed for it. They took the empty seat and put their own certainty in it, and a faith with no doctrine of restraint has no doctrine with which to tell them they are wrong.

Living beside it¶

An atheist quarter is the least trouble and the most argument. There will be no holy war, no visitation, no tithe, and no unexplained refusal to work a shift. There will be a school, and the school will teach your colony's children things you did not authorise, and it will be very difficult to explain why they should not have been taught them.

The Day of Reason and Lantern Night are kept: on the first, public debate that anyone may enter, and on the second, every window lit, all night, which is the closest thing the faith has to a rite and is officially about nothing more than being able to see.