Gimme
That Ole Time Non-Theism
May
26 2013
Unitarian
Universalist Church of Augusta
“Why can’t atheists solve exponential
equations? Because they don’t believe in higher powers.” (http://augustberkshire.com/specific-resources/atheist-humor-jokes/)
Freethinkers,
agnostics, secular humanists, ‘spiritual but not religious’ – these terms have
often been invoked when people want to avoid the ‘a’ word – atheist. But are
atheists coming out of the closet in the 21st century? Is the
hostility, stigma and shunning once attached to famous atheists such as Madalyn
Murray O’Hair a thing of the past for believers? And will nontheists ever be
able to define themselves in positive – not negative – terms?
After all, you
might have heard about the atheist walking through the woods one day...
‘What majestic trees’!
‘What powerful rivers’!
‘What beautiful animals’!
He said to himself.
As he was walking alongside
the river, he heard a rustling in the bushes behind him.
He
turned to look…and saw a 7-foot grizzly bear charge towards him.
He ran as fast as he could up the path. He looked
over his shoulder & saw that the bear was closing in on him.
He looked
over his shoulder again, & the bear was even closer. He tripped & fell
on the ground. He rolled over to pick himself up but saw that the bear was right
on top of him, reaching for him with his left paw & raising his right paw
to strike him.
At that instant the Atheist cried out, ‘Oh my
God!’
Time stopped.
The bear froze.
The forest was
silent.
As a bright light shone upon the man, a voice came out of the sky.
‘You deny my existence for all these years, teach others I don’t exist and even
credit creation to cosmic accident. Do you expect me to help you out of this
predicament? Am I to count you as a believer?’
The atheist looked directly into the light, ‘It
would be hypocritical of me to suddenly ask you to treat me as a Christian now,
but perhaps you could make the BEAR a Christian’?
The light went out. The sounds of the forest
resumed. And the bear dropped his right paw, brought both paws together, bowed
his head & spoke:
“Lord
bless this food, which I am about to receive from thy bounty through
Christ our Lord, Amen”.
Maybe,
since we now have funny atheist jokes, atheism is the new cultural taboo about
to be broken, since the gay rights issue seems to be less controversial and
increasingly mainstream. But there are still drawbacks, some of them legal, to
being ‘out’ as an atheist. From freethoughtpedia.com: Some states have
constitutions that discriminate against atheists, and atheists are banned from
holding office in Arkansas , Maryland, Mississippi,
North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas. However,
all laws against atheists holding office were ruled unconstitutional and
unenforceable by a 1961 Supreme Court case on a first amendment basis.
So it’s
not surprising that a very few elected representatives have publicly identified
themselves as nontheists – although
Edwina Rogers of the Secular Coalition for America says that 28 of the 525 members of Congress do not
believe in any sort of gods. (http://www.atheistrev.com/2012/06/atheists-in-congress.html )
Democratic California Representative Pete Stark
decided in 2007 to come out as the first openly nontheistic member of Congress.[37] In 2009, City Councilman Cecil Bothwell of Asheville, North Carolina was
called "unworthy of his seat" because of his open atheism. In the 113th
Congress, Democratic Arizona
Rep. Kyrsten Sinema, who was raised a Mormon, is religiously
unaffiliated. She doesn’t describe herself as an atheist, but says she favors a
secular approach. (http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2013/01/03/first-member-of-congress-describes-religion-as-none)
Most politicians have a canny sense for what is
acceptable to their constituents. A 2011 Pew Research Center study found that
its participants were more likely to vote for a candidate who had "used
marijuana, had an extramarital affair, is homosexual or had never held public
office than someone who did not believe in God" (http://thehill.com/capital-living/cover-stories/232445-in-god-we-trust-).
But
the UU denomination has been one of the most welcoming among the world’s faiths
and societies to nontheists. Once, when my mother told her friend that I was
preaching one Sunday at a local church, the friend asked her which church – upon
hearing it was a UU church, the friend exclaimed, ‘But they let atheists come
to that church.’ My mother said something to the effect that because we say we
welcome all people, we practice what we preach!
But
where does the influence of humanism upon our UU history and liberal theology
originate?
William
Murry notes in his book Reason and
Reverence (2007) that the critique of religion by liberal theologians harks
back at least to Schleiermacher’s emphasis on the individual experience that
frees religion from a system of doctrines. Another
important influence was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s critique of authoritarianism of
the Bible and of the church, a critique that was based on his vision of the
divinity of humanity and the importance of free inquiry. And
early Unitarian Universalist Humanism was challenged to focus on theology –
literally, ‘God-talk’ - by the inability of African-American humanists to
reconcile the oppression experienced in slavery with “belief in a just and
powerful God” (Murry, 34). A bishop back in the 1830s wrote that he was afraid
the Christian church was losing the slaves because when they heard their
masters professing to be Christians, they lost faith because they knew that
“oppression and slavery are inconsistent with the Christian religion” (34).
After
the First World War there was a call within Unitarianism for religion to enter
the modern world, and to make the shift from belief in a supernatural power to
a belief that only humans can transform society by their own efforts.
In
1933 the Humanist Manifesto was
created with 34 signers, rejecting supernatural doctrines of religion and
affirming human goals and social responsibility. Murry also notes that soon,
because of the desire to share the Manifesto’s
‘Good news’, a rigid humanist orthodoxy developed in Unitarian Universalism.
One of its effects was to get rid of all but the most scientific, rational
discourse in a significant number of UU fellowships and congregations. The lip
service paid to our range of sources, in some quarters of Unitarian
Universalism, sometimes disguises a deep disrespect for theism that is the
legacy of that orthodox influence. Another effect was the ideal of the
autonomous individual, diminishing community and the legacy of covenantal
theology so important centuries before to the dissenters that settled in New
England.
So Unitarian Universalism has more than a passing acquaintance with
nontheism. And as we are finding today, there’s a growing number of people who
self-identify as non-religious and who may wish to be known as ‘religious
independents’. According to author Susan Jacoby, that is roughly 20% of the
population of this country. Actually, in last year’s Pew Center poll asking
about their religious affiliation, one in 3 young American adults chose the ‘none
of the above’ category. The ‘nones’ category contains more atheists than will
admit to being so, Jacoby claims, and she is especially critical of those who
define themselves as ‘spiritual but not religious’. Is this a way of fudging
their true feelings – shouldn’t they just come out as nontheists?
In her New York Times
article from this past January entitled ‘The Blessings of Atheism’, Jacoby says
that nontheists are “reluctant to speak out… with the combination of reason and
passion needed to erase the image of the atheist as a bloodless intellectual
robot.” They may also want to get out from under the stereotype of atheists as
people with a gaping hole in their lives, people who, as Steve Martin says, ‘don’t
have no songs’. But their reluctance to speak out as nontheists may also be
their distaste of the image of the rabid atheist who wants to sue every time a
manger scene appears in front of a city hall.
The nontheist of today may not fit into the mold of Madalyn Murray
O’Hair, who won the landmark 1963 Supreme
Court decision which ended school prayer in public schools across the U.S. and turned her
into the self-described "most hated woman in America." And although
the nontheist population ranges “from devout atheists and rationalists to secular humanists and other freethinkers, they are united in their
vision of complete separation of church and state” – and that was O’Hair’s
crowning achievement. Her determination is still appreciated to this day;
atheists who speak out in the forthright way she did still get a lot of
blowback when they voice their feelings or experiences. (http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Secular-Philosophies/Who-Was-Madalyn-Murray-Ohair.aspx?p=2#sthash.zCGZ7MFJ.dpuf )
Other
atheist moms are worthy of note here. Before Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s court
victory, Vashti McCollum from Illinois filed a lawsuit in Illinois courts in
1945 that laid the groundwork for O’Hair. It objected to prayer and religious
education in public schools. The Supreme Court in 1948 supported the so-called
‘wall of separation’ between church and state in the McCollum decision. A PBS
documentary called “The Lord is not on Trial Here Today” was broadcast in March
as part of Women’s History Month; it told the story of ‘that awful woman’, as
McCollum was called, and the McCollum v Board of Education case.
Another
mother came to light due to a CNN iReport website that has had close to a
million hits to a blog posted on it in mid-January. It’s entitled “Why I Raise
My Children without God”. In it the blogger TXBlue08, who is a Texas mother of
2 teenagers, explains “I want my
children to be free not to believe and to know that our schools and our
government will make decisions based on what is logical, just and fair—not on
what they believe an imaginary God wants.” She lists her objections to God,
including things like: God does not protect the innocent; God is not fair; God
is a bad parent and role model…some of the classic arguments down the ages
about the nature of God. What is interesting about this blog is that it has had
over 9 thousand replies; many readers have tried to stifle her story by
‘flagging’ it as inappropriate, but CNN has kept it on the website. Just this
week after the tornado wiped out most of Moore, Oklahoma, the tolerant face of
CNN took a bit of a punch to the nose…Wolf Blitzer interviewed a young mother
holding her child and told her that as a survivor ‘you’ve just gotta thank the
Lord…do you thank the Lord?’ And here is what a blog posted the next day
commented:
“It's
fine if Wolf says, "I guess you gotta thank the Lord!" then moves on.
But it was weird how he turned it into the Spanish Inquisition. "...*do
you* thank the Lord?"
That lady handled it perfectly, though. She didn't
go all abrasive …Instead, she just smiled, said she was an Atheist, and extended
the "But, I don't blame those that do," olive branch to Wolf. Well
played.” (Timothy Burke, ‘The Bottom Up’, http://deadspin.com/wolf-blitzer-asks-atheist-tornado-survivor-if-she-than-509150402 )
Earlier I mentioned
Susan Jacoby, an atheist herself, whose book The Great Agnostic (2013) profiles a long-forgotten name in
American Freethought, Robert Ingersoll. He was a critic of public religiosity
and an advocate of reason in the years leading up to the 20th
century. Ingersoll fervently believed that the responsibility that humans have
to one another IS the ‘religion of humanity’. He wrote: “There is no evidence
that God ever interfered in the affairs of man…from he clouds there comes no
help. In vain the shipwrecked cry to God. In vain the imprisoned ask for
liberty and light – the world moves on and the heavens are deaf, dumb, and
blind…the frost freezes, the fire burns…the wrong triumphs, the good suffer,
and prayer dies upon the lips of faith” (Murry, 31). If you read the blog from
Rez this week, a man named Alan who lives in the area of Oklahoma pulverized by
the tornadoes pretty clearly articulated Ingersoll’s perspective from over a
century ago:
Things
happened to people today. Devastating things. They did
nothing to
‘deserve’ them. It was not a ‘punishment’, nor a ‘trial’, nor a ‘test of faith’.
It was nature being nature – absent of any self-awareness – and doing
what nature does. A tornado is neither ‘evil’ nor ‘good’. It just
is, until
it isn’t any longer. When
the danger passes – we figure out what we can do, and then we do that.
We look out for each other – not because we have to be told, or warned,
or threatened – but because, from generation to generation, we know
that it’s the right thing to do. (http://rez.li/2013/from-moore-with-contemplation/)
But
there has been a rash of New Atheists leading the charge into the 21st
century – Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett
– who have written a lot of books and who have received a lot of media
coverage. Even though most self-identifying nontheists would agree that they
have in common no belief in God, the New Atheists since 9/11 have been said to
militantly position themselves as being anti-religion – so technically not
nontheist but antitheist.
However,
taking a closer look at contemporary
nontheism, we might see that the picture is not as simple as that for most
nontheists:
Black
Atheists
If,
because of the reasons I mentioned before, the ordinary nontheist is loathe to
speak up for nontheism, imagine how much more difficult it must be for a person
who belongs to an ethnic group in which 88% believe in God with “absolute
certainty and more than half attend religious services at least once a week”
(Emily Brennan, “The Unbelievers,” New York
Times 11/27/2011).
In
2009 an African-American atheist Facebook page had 100 members, a number that
has now passed 800. The Black Atheist Alliance has more than 500 members on
Facebook who share their experiences of ‘coming out’.
Even
though there is a percentage of the African-American community that is Muslim,
the assumption most of us make is that religious African-Americans are
Christian. But even non-theist African-Americans feel a cultural affinity with
Christianity, according to Pew research: “2/3 of those who report no religious
affiliation say religion plays a somewhat important role in their lives.” Black
atheists are a minority within a minority, and they run into disapproval from
their own community that is based on the feeling that they are turning their
backs on African-American history and the struggle for civil rights, which of
course, was overwhelmingly a Christian one.
Susan
Jacoby says that a reprint of her New
York Times article on atheism in the Dallas
Sunday News led to an explosion of comments on her website, including one
from an 85-year-old African American man, who wrote of how hard it was to have
lived as an atheist in Texas and in the African American community.
Faitheism
We
are familiar with the type of atheist who is critical of religion and cuts ties
to it. But there is an interesting morphing of nontheism today in this country
into what has been coined ‘Faitheism’…because a ‘Faitheist’ could be said to
find religion a very useful thing – and notice I said, religion, not belief.
Chris Stedman wrote a book called Faitheist
(2012), a pejorative term that he has instead claimed with pride.
The
introduction is written by Eboo Patel, the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core
and this year’s Ware lecturer at our Unitarian Universalist Association’s
General Assembly in Louisville; Patel describes Stedman this way:
“His
atheism doesn’t hate God; it loves people…His goal is to nurture a movement of
Humanists who emphasize cultivating humanity, express it in terms of serving
others, and work with people of
all faiths, in good faith, towards that end. Chris understands that we get
there together or not at all.” (Stedman, xiii)
Stedman
criticizes the New Atheist brand of antitheism that “lumps all religious
believers together and shames them as a uniformly condemnable bloc” (9). And he
feels that it’s their loss when nonbelievers are dismissive of religion, as in his
story (3ff) about a reception following a panel discussion on how the nonreligious
should approach religion. And
Stedman, who is the Assistant Humanist Chaplain at Harvard University, is
mainly concerned with building bridges, not separating from those who hold
different beliefs. Maybe his concept of respect is what already exists in Unitarian
Universalism…
The
depth of his anguish about antireligious secularism run amok is captured in
this short passage about Stedman’s attempt to introduce interfaith cooperation
to the organized atheist movement in this country:
“My
first atheist conference…was for me a nightmare. Witnessing the sheer vitriol
some expressed toward the religious, I actually cried…I called friends of mine
back home – atheists, no less – and recalled what I’d seen. They were shocked
and appalled. One friend said to me: “You see, this is why I don’t want to call
myself an atheist.” (145)
Now,
Stedman is quick to point out that criticism of religion is not the exclusive
domain of the nonreligious – there are plenty of outspoken religious leaders,
such as Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther, and - oh yes,
Jesus of Nazareth. So, alienating
those who may be in a position inside the religious establishment to encourage
and perhaps even enact reform is not helpful. But for antitheists who want to
do away with religion all together that is not a distinction they are
interested in making.
I
would like to draw my last example of how nontheism is becoming more nuanced
from the latest book by Alain de Botton, Religion
for Atheists – a Non-Believer’s Guide to the Uses of Religion (2012). Because
to read this book is to end up marveling at the genius of using religion as an
instrument for building “a sense of community, making relationships last, and
reconnecting with the natural world” – only 3 of the uses De Botton suggests
that are derived from Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism. And nontheists can
do this without having to believe in any of religion’s strange doctrines or
weird beliefs.
De
Botton describes the often satisfying pastime for atheists of debunking
arguments for belief in God, kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. But he goes
on to explain that humanity invented religion to serve two ‘Central needs’ that
secularism has not been able to satisfactorily deal with: the first is the need
to live together in community despite our violent impulses; the other is to
help us cope with painful events in our lives, like the death of a loved one,
and our own mortality. And he says, “The error of modern atheism has been to
overlook how many aspects of the faiths remain relevant even after their
central tenets have been dismissed” (12-13). He
describes how he came to understand that his “continuing resistance to theories
of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on
the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal
meals and illuminated manuscripts of the faiths” (14). He says that secular
society just has not come up with artifacts or activities that are as
satisfying as those that originate in religious observance, and it is not fair
to make us choose one and give up the other.
Indeed,
De Botton admires the way that Christianity was very skilled at “subsuming
countless pagan practices which modern atheists now avoid in the mistake that
they are indelibly Christian” – such as the repackaging of the ancient pagan
midwinter holiday as Christmas, and the rebranding and occupation of shrines
and temples of pagan heroes.
And
so, he proposes, we should look at aspects of religious life that can be
advantageously applied to the problems of contemporary secular life. The one
aspect he begins with is community – which he claims lost its central
importance around the time that “we ceased communally to honor our gods” (23).
Privatized religion led us to disregard our neighbors.
But
De Botton then goes on to discuss the nature of the Catholic Eucharist and the
Jewish Passover meal, and how religion knows how to solve the problem of
creating tolerance between strangers – by making them eat a meal together (50)!
The
book’s chapter on perspective begins by DeBotton proclaiming the book of Job in
the Hebrew Scriptures as the most consoling of biblical texts for atheists!
Here is a man whose tragic life seems to be direct punishment from God, but Job
can’t fathom why that should be. Instead, the moral of the story of Job is that
his little life is no match in scale or importance to the vast eternity of the
cosmos: “human beings did not bring the cosmos into being and, despite their
occasional feelings to the contrary, they do not control it or own it” (198).
So listen to what De Botton diagnoses as the danger when we have a godless
society:
“When
God is dead, human beings…are at risk of taking psychological center stage.
They imagine themselves to be commanders of their own destinies, they trample
upon nature, forget the rhythms of the earth, deny death…until at last they
must collide …with the sharp edges of reality. Our secular world is lacking in
the sorts of rituals that might put us gently in our place.” (200)
It’s
an intriguing idea that nontheism can prosper by reassuring itself through
traditions associated with religion that were, so to speak, sacrificed on the
altar of Reason.
You
may think that this appreciation of religion that is voiced by people like
Chris Stedman and Alan De Botton is a far cry from the passionate rejection of
religion found in the writings of Robert Ingersoll, who in 1899 wrote:
‘Religion
can never reform [hu]mankind because religion is slavery.
It
is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades of
to
stand erect and face the future with a smile.
It
is far better to… think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations
of the
breathing life…to
lounge in the picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps and
kisses of the past, to bring life's morning back, to see again the forms and
faces of the dead, to paint fair pictures for the coming years, to forget all
Gods, their promises and threats, to
feel within your veins life's joyous stream and hear the martial music, the
rhythmic beating of your fearless heart.
And
then to rouse yourself to do all useful things, to reach with thought and
deed the ideal in your brain, to give your fancies wing, that they, like chemist
bees, may find art's nectar in the weeds of common things, to look with
trained and steady eyes for facts, to find the subtle threads that join the
distant with the now, to increase knowledge, to take burdens from the weak,
to develop the brain, to defend the right, to make a palace for the soul. This
is real religion. This is real worship.' (The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll:
What Is
Religion?
1899. http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/ingwhatrel.htm )
Well,
when you read that poetic description, maybe the distance between this ole time
nontheism and De Botton’s contemporary appreciation of religion in broadening
our perspective past our own importance may not be as far as it first seems!
Those
of us who have become so repelled by the excesses and abuses of religion, by
the illogical nature of supernatural belief on a higher being, and the
infuriatingly smug and vapid pontification of believers on how we should live
our lives – or thank God that we survived extreme weather - might want to
ponder a bit more on the urgings of nontheists like De Botton and Stedman to
think again about the uses of religion as a social system. As De Botton
concludes, ”The wisdom of the faiths belongs to all of [hu]mankind, even the
most rational among us, and deserves to be selectively reabsorbed by the
supernatural’s greatest enemies. Religions are intermittently too useful,
effective and intelligent to be abandoned to the religious alone” (De Botton, 312).
So
don’t feel guilty when you get in the car to go home today and listen to a Bach
cantata, when you dye some Easter eggs for the kids, when you decorate the
Christmas tree and sing along to Joe playing “O Come All Ye Faithful.”
And
I in turn won’t feel silly singing an old Gospel hymn to conclude this message,
because I can appreciate its sentiment about the wonder of nature without
believing that the hands of an anthropomorphic God-figure created the world in
7 days. For me, “How Great Thou Art” (Stuart K. Hine) expresses the humble
nature of being human in comparison with the immensity of creation, very much
in line with De Botton’s idea of nontheist perspective. I gave up the idea of a
personal God who gives me things if I pray for them a long time ago.
The faith
tradition that gave me this hymn is not part of my belief system anymore, but I
am grateful for the perspective that allows me to sing it as a love song to
life and as a reminder of the transcendent.
O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder,
Consider all the works Thy Hands have
made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling
thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe
displayed.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to
Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, My Saviour God, to
Thee,
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
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