Atheism and BDSM

So yes, I’m an atheist. I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in ANY form of higher power, or that humanity was created by a celestial being.

(Oh, and if you’re religious, then I’m not saying you don’t have the right to worship a deity or whatever. You have every right to be wrong.)

I was born and raised a Christian (Roman Catholic) and I will admit, I was – for a long time – very prejudicial in my views. Gays? Vile people. Other religions? They’re gonna burn in HELL! Looking back, I do feel deeply ashamed of how close-minded I was.

So what made me become more enlightened, accepting and open-minded?

BDSM.

Well, partly. That, and a healthy fucking dose of common sense.

Anytime someone outside of kink asks me about BDSM and my role, one of the first things they say is “Isn’t that degrading to women?” and of course I reply that it’s not. After all, reverse the roles and you’ll rarely be asked if it’s degrading to men. The main point is, as all you kinky fuckers know, it’s all down to consent. To deny a submissive her desire to be submissive, and all it entails because of her gender is precisely the sort of misogyny that the non-kinkster would happily accuse me of enabling.

Once you realise that, despite the roles of Dominant and submissive (or the many derivatives thereof), the TRUE power lies with the submissive, it all suddenly makes sense. However, that’s a blog for another time.

It’s the preconceived notions and, yes, prejudices from people outside the BDSM life that really made me question MY prejudices.

If they had NO right to judge me on my kinks, my interests, then who am I to judge others? Why should I be anti-homosexuals or transsexuals? Why is their choice of lifestyle any different to mine? The more I thought about it, the more I realised how hypocritical I was. And, as cliché as it sounds, it really was like having a lightbulb switched on in my head.

Thereafter, of course, I started thinking why I had become so prejudiced and I concluded it was my upbringing. Not my parents as such, they were always pretty cool and if they had any prejudices, they kept them pretty well hidden (and if they were kinksters too, they kept that especially well hidden…) No, it was the fact that I was raised as a Catholic, with Catholic teachings, with Christian friends. Surrounded with that dogma shaped my thinking, shamefully. Luckily, being in the UK, we weren’t taught Creationism as a science (sorry, America, but that’s just stupid, right there!) so I was given a head-start in my atheistic musings.

Science always wins over religion. Always. Please, I implore you, go to YouTube, and listen to the likes of Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson. Listen to what they say about the world, how it works, where it came from. Tell me it doesn’t compel you to want to learn more.

If there’s something that science hasn’t got an answer for, that doesn’t mean ‘God did it.’ It just means that science hasn’t discovered it yet. But chances are, it will. WAsn’t that long ago that everyone on Earth knew for sure that the planet was flat. Who knows what we’ll know in 50 years’ time, compared to today?

Anyway, got mildly side-tracked there. Do I think BDSM practitioners would be better off without religion? Absolutely, but then I think everyone would be. However, to be true to the spirit and ethos of BDSM, means not having the sort of prejudices that poison the mind; the type of poison that only religion can inflict. Free your minds from irrelevant teachings that are hundreds of years out of date and have NO bearing on the world we live in today.

And don’t get me fucking started on astrologers and psychics.