I don't see why
an all-powerful god
would need a human
to sell me on
the existence of god.
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label atheism. Show all posts
May 18, 2024
Oct 4, 2023
God Who?
Sow honesty
Reap trust
America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists.
I like to say that my kids made me an atheist. But really what they did was make me honest.
I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.
I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time.
I thought of him as a fiction.
Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:
1. The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.
2. The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.
3. Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.
4. Child rape. War. Etc.
And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.
Being an “atheist,” at least according to popular culture, seems to require so much work. You have to complain to the school board about the Pledge of Allegiance, stamp over “In God We Trust” on all your paper money and convince Grandma not to go to church. You have to be PhD-from-Oxford smart, irritated by Christmas and shruggingly unmoved by Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” That isn’t me — but those are the stereotypes.
And then there are the data. Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.
Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked!
But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth.
Their first atheist lesson was completely impromptu. Noah was 5, Jesse was 3, and we were sitting on the couch before bed reading from “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” a holdover from my childhood bookshelf. One of the boys asked what a “myth” was, and I told them it was a story about how the world works. People used to believe that these gods were in charge of what happened on Earth, and these stories helped explain things they didn’t understand, like winter or stars or thunder. “See” — I flipped ahead and found a picture — “Zeus has a thunderbolt.”
“They don’t believe them anymore?” No, I said. That’s why they call it “myth.” When people still believe it, they call it “religion.” Like the stories about God and Moses that we read at Passover or the ones about Jesus and Christmas.
The little pajama-clad bodies nodded, and on we read.
That was it — the big moment. It was probably also the easiest moment.
Before one son became preoccupied with death. Before the other son had to decide whether to be bar mitzvahed. Before my daughter looked up from her math homework one day to ask, “How do we know there’s no God?”
Religion offers ready-made answers to our most difficult questions. It gives people ways to mark time, celebrate and mourn. Once I vowed not to teach my children anything I did not personally believe, I had to come up with new answers. But I discovered as I went what most parents discover: You can figure it out as you go.
Establishing a habit of honesty did not sap the delight from my children’s lives or destroy their moral compass. I suspect it made my family closer than we would have been had my husband and I pretended to our children that we believed in things we did not. We sowed honesty and reaped trust — along with intellectual challenge, emotional sustenance and joy.
Those are all personal rewards. But there are political rewards as well.
My children know how to distinguish fact from fiction — which is harder for children raised religious. They don’t assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expect arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens.
We need citizens like that.
Lies, lying and disinformation suffuse mainstream politics as never before. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 29 percent of Americans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected, a total composed of those who think there is solid evidence of fraud (22 percent) and those who think there isn’t (7 percent). I don’t know which is worse: believing there to be evidence of fraud when even the Trump campaign can’t find any or asserting the election was stolen even though you know there’s no proof.
Meanwhile, we are just beginning to grasp that artificial intelligence could develop an almost limitless power to deceive — threatening the ability of even the most alert citizen to discern what’s real.
We need Americans who demand — as atheists do — that truth claims be tethered to fact. We need Americans who understand — as atheists do — that the future of the world is in our hands. And in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.
Fortunately, there are a lot of atheists in the United States — probably far more than you think.
Some people say they believe in God, but not the kind favored by monotheistic religions — a conscious supreme being with powers of intercession or creation. When they say “God” they mean cosmic oneness or astonishing coincidences. They mean that sense of smallness-within-largeness they’ve felt while standing on the shore of the ocean or holding a newborn baby or hearing the final measures of Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu.”
So, why do those people use the word “God” at all? The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett argues in “Breaking the Spell” that since we know we’re supposed to believe in God, when we don’t believe in a supernatural being we give the name instead to things we do believe in, such as transcendent moments of human connection.
Whatever the case, in 2022, Gallup found that 81 percent of Americans believe in God, the lowest percentage yet recorded. This year, when it gave respondents the option of saying they’re not sure, it found that only 74 percent believe in God, 14 percent weren’t sure, and 12 percent did not believe.
Not believing in God — that’s the very definition of atheism. But when people go around counting atheists, the number they come up with is far lower than that. The most recent number from Pew Research Center is 4 percent.
What’s with the gap? That’s anti-atheist stigma (and pro-belief bias) at work. Everybody’s keeping quiet, because everybody wants to be liked. Some researchers, recognizing this problem, developed a workaround.
In 2017, psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle tried to estimate the prevalence of atheism in the United States using a technique called “unmatched count”: They asked two groups of 1,000 respondents each, how many statements were true among a list of statements. The lists were identical except that one of them included the statement “I believe in God.” By comparing the numbers, the researchers could then estimate the percentage of atheists without ever asking a direct question. They came up with around 26 percent.
If that’s true or even close, there are more atheists in the United States than Catholics.
Do you know what some of those atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.
“If you added up all the nominal Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. — those who are religious in name only,” Harvard humanist chaplain Greg M. Epstein writes in “Good Without God,” “you really might get the largest denomination in the world.”
Atheists are everywhere. And we are unusually disposed to getting stuff done.
Iused to say, when people asked me what atheists do believe, that it was simple: Atheists believe that God is a human invention.
But now, I think it’s more than that.
If you are an atheist — if you do not believe in a Supreme Being — you can be moral or not, mindful or not, clever or not, hopeful or not. Clearly, you can keep going to church. But, by definition, you cannot believe that God is in charge. You must give up the notion of God’s will, God’s purpose, God’s mysterious ways.
In some ways, this makes life easier. You don’t have to work out why God might cause or ignore suffering, what parts of this broken world are God’s plan, or what work is his to do and what is yours.
But you also don’t get to leave things up to God. Atheists must accept that people are allowing — we are allowing — women to die in childbirth, children to go hungry, men to buy guns that can slaughter dozens of people in minutes. Atheists believe people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better.
No wonder we are “the most politically active group in American politics today,” according to political scientist Ryan Burge, interpreting data from the Cooperative Election Study.
That’s right: Atheists take more political action — donating to campaigns, protesting, attending meetings, working for politicians — than any other “religious” group. And we vote. In his study on this data, sociologist Evan Stewart noted that atheists were about 30 percent more likely to vote than religiously affiliated respondents.
We also vote far more than most religiously unaffiliated people. That’s what distinguishes atheists from the “nones” — and what I didn’t realize at first.
Atheists haven’t just checked out of organized religion. (Indeed, we may not have.) We haven’t just rejected belief in God. (Though, obviously, that’s the starting point.) Where atheism becomes a definite stance rather than a lack of direction, a positive belief and not just a negative one, is in our understanding that, without a higher power, we need human power to change the world.
I want to be clear: There are clergy members and congregations all across this country working to do good, not waiting for God to answer their prayers or assuming that God meant for the globe to get hotter. You don’t have to be an atheist to conduct yourself as if people are responsible for the world they live in — you just have to act like an atheist, by taking matters into your own hands.
Countless good people of faith do just that. But one thing they can’t do as well as atheists is push back against the outsize cultural and political power of religion itself.
That power is crushing some of our most vulnerable citizens. And I don’t mean my fellow atheists. Atheists, it’s true, are subject to discrimination and scapegoating; somehow we’re to blame for moral chaos, mass shootings and whatever the “trans cult” is. Yes, we are technically barred from serving as jurors in the state of Maryland or joining a Boy Scout troop anywhere, but we do not, as a group, suffer anything like the prejudice that, say, LGBTQ+ people face. It’s not even close.
Peel back the layers of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, though, and you find religion. Peel back the layers of control over women’s bodies — from dress codes that punish girls for male desire all the way to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade — and you find religion. Often, there isn’t much peeling to do. According to the bill itself, Missouri’s total abortion ban was created “in recognition that Almighty God is the author of life.” Say what, now?
Peel back the layers of abstinence-only or marriage-centered or anti-homosexual sex education and you find religion. “Don’t say gay” laws, laws denying trans kids medical care, school-library book bans and even efforts to suppress the teaching of inconvenient historical facts — motivated by religion.
And when religion loses a fight and progress wins instead? Religion then claims it’s not subject to the resulting laws. “Religious belief” is — more and more, at the state and federal levels — a way to sidestep advances the country makes in civil rights, human rights and public health.
In 45 states and D.C., parents can get religious exemptions from laws that require schoolchildren to be vaccinated. Seven states allow pharmacists to refuse to fill contraceptive prescriptions because of their religious beliefs. Every business with a federal contract has to comply with federal nondiscrimination rules — unless it’s a religious organization. Every employer that provides health insurance has to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate — unless it’s, say, a craft supply store with Christian owners.
Case by case, law by law, our country’s commitment to the first right enumerated in our Bill of Rights — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — is faltering. The Supreme Court has ruled that the citizens of Maine have to pay for parochial school, that a high school football coach should be free to lead a prayer on the 50-yard line, that a potential wedding website designer can reject potential same-sex clients. This past summer, Oklahoma approved the nation’s first publicly funded religious school. This fall, Texas began allowing schools to employ clergy members in place of guidance counselors.
You don’t have to be an atheist to worry about the structural integrity of Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church & State.” You don’t have to be an atheist to think that religion should not shape public policy or that believers should have to follow the laws that everyone else does. You don’t have to be an atheist to see that Christian nationalists are using “religious liberty” to perpetuate much of the discrimination Americans suffer today.
But atheists can do one thing about the country’s drift into theocracy that our religious neighbors won’t: We can tell people we don’t believe in God. The more people who do that, the more we normalize atheism in America, the easier it will be — for both politicians and the general public — to usher religion back out of our laws.
Okay, but should you say you’re an atheist even if you believe in “God” as the power of nature or something like that?
Yes. It does no one any favors — not the country, not your neighbors — to say you believe in God metaphorically when there are plenty of people out there who literally believe that God is looking down from heaven deciding which of us to cast into hell.
In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their God’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in “God” when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder. (Your “God is love” only lends validity and power to their “God hates gays.”)
So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?
If you answer “no,” you’re an atheist. That’s it — you’re done.
But if you go further: You’ll be doing something good for your country.
When I started raising my kids as atheists, I wasn’t particularly honest with the rest of the world. I wasn’t everybody’s mom, right? Plus, I had to get along with other people. Young parents need community, and I was afraid to risk alienating new parent friends by being honest about being — looks both ways, lowers voice — an atheist.
But, in addition to making me be honest inside our home, my children pushed me to start being honest on the outside. In part, I wanted to set an example for them, and in part, I wanted to help change the world they would face.
It shouldn’t be hard to say you don’t believe in God. It shouldn’t be shocking or shameful. I know that I’m moral and respectful and friendly. And the more I say to people that I’m an atheist — me, the mom who taught the kindergarten class about baking with yeast and brought the killer cupcakes to the bake sale — the more people will stop assuming that being an atheist means being … a serial killer.
And then? The more I say I’m an atheist, the more other people will feel comfortable calling themselves atheists. And the stigma will gradually dissolve.
Can you imagine? If we all knew how many of us there are?
It would give everyone permission to be honest with their kids and their friends, to grapple with big questions without having to hold on to beliefs they never embraced.
And it would take away permission, too. Permission to pass laws (or grant exemptions to laws) based on the presumed desires of a fictional creation. Permission to be cruel to fellow human beings based on Bible verses. Permission to eschew political action in favor of “thoughts and prayers.”
I understand that, to many people, this might sound difficult or risky. It took me years to declare myself an atheist, and I was raised Reform Jewish, I live in the Northeast, I’m White, I work at home, and my family and friends are a liberal bunch. The stakes were low for me. For some, I fully concede, the stakes are too high.
If you think you’d lose your job or put your children at risk of harassment for declaring your atheism, you get a pass. If you would be risking physical harm, don’t speak out. If you’re an atheist running for school board somewhere that book bans are on the agenda, then feel free to keep it quiet, and God bless.
But for everyone else who doesn’t believe in God and hasn’t said so? Consider that your honesty will allow others to be honest, and that your reticence encourages others to keep quiet. Consider that the longer everyone keeps quiet, the longer religion has political and cultural license to hurt people. Consider that the United States — to survive as a secular democracy — needs you now more than ever.
And the next time you find yourself tempted to pretend that you believe in God? Tell the truth instead.
I like to say that my kids made me an atheist. But really what they did was make me honest.
I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.
I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time.
I thought of him as a fiction.
Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:
1. The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.
2. The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.
3. Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.
4. Child rape. War. Etc.
And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.
Being an “atheist,” at least according to popular culture, seems to require so much work. You have to complain to the school board about the Pledge of Allegiance, stamp over “In God We Trust” on all your paper money and convince Grandma not to go to church. You have to be PhD-from-Oxford smart, irritated by Christmas and shruggingly unmoved by Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” That isn’t me — but those are the stereotypes.
And then there are the data. Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.
Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked!
But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth.
Their first atheist lesson was completely impromptu. Noah was 5, Jesse was 3, and we were sitting on the couch before bed reading from “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” a holdover from my childhood bookshelf. One of the boys asked what a “myth” was, and I told them it was a story about how the world works. People used to believe that these gods were in charge of what happened on Earth, and these stories helped explain things they didn’t understand, like winter or stars or thunder. “See” — I flipped ahead and found a picture — “Zeus has a thunderbolt.”
“They don’t believe them anymore?” No, I said. That’s why they call it “myth.” When people still believe it, they call it “religion.” Like the stories about God and Moses that we read at Passover or the ones about Jesus and Christmas.
The little pajama-clad bodies nodded, and on we read.
That was it — the big moment. It was probably also the easiest moment.
Before one son became preoccupied with death. Before the other son had to decide whether to be bar mitzvahed. Before my daughter looked up from her math homework one day to ask, “How do we know there’s no God?”
Religion offers ready-made answers to our most difficult questions. It gives people ways to mark time, celebrate and mourn. Once I vowed not to teach my children anything I did not personally believe, I had to come up with new answers. But I discovered as I went what most parents discover: You can figure it out as you go.
Establishing a habit of honesty did not sap the delight from my children’s lives or destroy their moral compass. I suspect it made my family closer than we would have been had my husband and I pretended to our children that we believed in things we did not. We sowed honesty and reaped trust — along with intellectual challenge, emotional sustenance and joy.
Those are all personal rewards. But there are political rewards as well.
My children know how to distinguish fact from fiction — which is harder for children raised religious. They don’t assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expect arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens.
We need citizens like that.
Lies, lying and disinformation suffuse mainstream politics as never before. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 29 percent of Americans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected, a total composed of those who think there is solid evidence of fraud (22 percent) and those who think there isn’t (7 percent). I don’t know which is worse: believing there to be evidence of fraud when even the Trump campaign can’t find any or asserting the election was stolen even though you know there’s no proof.
Meanwhile, we are just beginning to grasp that artificial intelligence could develop an almost limitless power to deceive — threatening the ability of even the most alert citizen to discern what’s real.
We need Americans who demand — as atheists do — that truth claims be tethered to fact. We need Americans who understand — as atheists do — that the future of the world is in our hands. And in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.
Fortunately, there are a lot of atheists in the United States — probably far more than you think.
Some people say they believe in God, but not the kind favored by monotheistic religions — a conscious supreme being with powers of intercession or creation. When they say “God” they mean cosmic oneness or astonishing coincidences. They mean that sense of smallness-within-largeness they’ve felt while standing on the shore of the ocean or holding a newborn baby or hearing the final measures of Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu.”
So, why do those people use the word “God” at all? The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett argues in “Breaking the Spell” that since we know we’re supposed to believe in God, when we don’t believe in a supernatural being we give the name instead to things we do believe in, such as transcendent moments of human connection.
Whatever the case, in 2022, Gallup found that 81 percent of Americans believe in God, the lowest percentage yet recorded. This year, when it gave respondents the option of saying they’re not sure, it found that only 74 percent believe in God, 14 percent weren’t sure, and 12 percent did not believe.
Not believing in God — that’s the very definition of atheism. But when people go around counting atheists, the number they come up with is far lower than that. The most recent number from Pew Research Center is 4 percent.
What’s with the gap? That’s anti-atheist stigma (and pro-belief bias) at work. Everybody’s keeping quiet, because everybody wants to be liked. Some researchers, recognizing this problem, developed a workaround.
In 2017, psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle tried to estimate the prevalence of atheism in the United States using a technique called “unmatched count”: They asked two groups of 1,000 respondents each, how many statements were true among a list of statements. The lists were identical except that one of them included the statement “I believe in God.” By comparing the numbers, the researchers could then estimate the percentage of atheists without ever asking a direct question. They came up with around 26 percent.
If that’s true or even close, there are more atheists in the United States than Catholics.
Do you know what some of those atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.
“If you added up all the nominal Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. — those who are religious in name only,” Harvard humanist chaplain Greg M. Epstein writes in “Good Without God,” “you really might get the largest denomination in the world.”
Atheists are everywhere. And we are unusually disposed to getting stuff done.
Iused to say, when people asked me what atheists do believe, that it was simple: Atheists believe that God is a human invention.
But now, I think it’s more than that.
If you are an atheist — if you do not believe in a Supreme Being — you can be moral or not, mindful or not, clever or not, hopeful or not. Clearly, you can keep going to church. But, by definition, you cannot believe that God is in charge. You must give up the notion of God’s will, God’s purpose, God’s mysterious ways.
In some ways, this makes life easier. You don’t have to work out why God might cause or ignore suffering, what parts of this broken world are God’s plan, or what work is his to do and what is yours.
But you also don’t get to leave things up to God. Atheists must accept that people are allowing — we are allowing — women to die in childbirth, children to go hungry, men to buy guns that can slaughter dozens of people in minutes. Atheists believe people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better.
No wonder we are “the most politically active group in American politics today,” according to political scientist Ryan Burge, interpreting data from the Cooperative Election Study.
That’s right: Atheists take more political action — donating to campaigns, protesting, attending meetings, working for politicians — than any other “religious” group. And we vote. In his study on this data, sociologist Evan Stewart noted that atheists were about 30 percent more likely to vote than religiously affiliated respondents.
We also vote far more than most religiously unaffiliated people. That’s what distinguishes atheists from the “nones” — and what I didn’t realize at first.
Atheists haven’t just checked out of organized religion. (Indeed, we may not have.) We haven’t just rejected belief in God. (Though, obviously, that’s the starting point.) Where atheism becomes a definite stance rather than a lack of direction, a positive belief and not just a negative one, is in our understanding that, without a higher power, we need human power to change the world.
I want to be clear: There are clergy members and congregations all across this country working to do good, not waiting for God to answer their prayers or assuming that God meant for the globe to get hotter. You don’t have to be an atheist to conduct yourself as if people are responsible for the world they live in — you just have to act like an atheist, by taking matters into your own hands.
Countless good people of faith do just that. But one thing they can’t do as well as atheists is push back against the outsize cultural and political power of religion itself.
That power is crushing some of our most vulnerable citizens. And I don’t mean my fellow atheists. Atheists, it’s true, are subject to discrimination and scapegoating; somehow we’re to blame for moral chaos, mass shootings and whatever the “trans cult” is. Yes, we are technically barred from serving as jurors in the state of Maryland or joining a Boy Scout troop anywhere, but we do not, as a group, suffer anything like the prejudice that, say, LGBTQ+ people face. It’s not even close.
Peel back the layers of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, though, and you find religion. Peel back the layers of control over women’s bodies — from dress codes that punish girls for male desire all the way to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade — and you find religion. Often, there isn’t much peeling to do. According to the bill itself, Missouri’s total abortion ban was created “in recognition that Almighty God is the author of life.” Say what, now?
Peel back the layers of abstinence-only or marriage-centered or anti-homosexual sex education and you find religion. “Don’t say gay” laws, laws denying trans kids medical care, school-library book bans and even efforts to suppress the teaching of inconvenient historical facts — motivated by religion.
And when religion loses a fight and progress wins instead? Religion then claims it’s not subject to the resulting laws. “Religious belief” is — more and more, at the state and federal levels — a way to sidestep advances the country makes in civil rights, human rights and public health.
In 45 states and D.C., parents can get religious exemptions from laws that require schoolchildren to be vaccinated. Seven states allow pharmacists to refuse to fill contraceptive prescriptions because of their religious beliefs. Every business with a federal contract has to comply with federal nondiscrimination rules — unless it’s a religious organization. Every employer that provides health insurance has to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate — unless it’s, say, a craft supply store with Christian owners.
Case by case, law by law, our country’s commitment to the first right enumerated in our Bill of Rights — “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion” — is faltering. The Supreme Court has ruled that the citizens of Maine have to pay for parochial school, that a high school football coach should be free to lead a prayer on the 50-yard line, that a potential wedding website designer can reject potential same-sex clients. This past summer, Oklahoma approved the nation’s first publicly funded religious school. This fall, Texas began allowing schools to employ clergy members in place of guidance counselors.
You don’t have to be an atheist to worry about the structural integrity of Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church & State.” You don’t have to be an atheist to think that religion should not shape public policy or that believers should have to follow the laws that everyone else does. You don’t have to be an atheist to see that Christian nationalists are using “religious liberty” to perpetuate much of the discrimination Americans suffer today.
But atheists can do one thing about the country’s drift into theocracy that our religious neighbors won’t: We can tell people we don’t believe in God. The more people who do that, the more we normalize atheism in America, the easier it will be — for both politicians and the general public — to usher religion back out of our laws.
Okay, but should you say you’re an atheist even if you believe in “God” as the power of nature or something like that?
Yes. It does no one any favors — not the country, not your neighbors — to say you believe in God metaphorically when there are plenty of people out there who literally believe that God is looking down from heaven deciding which of us to cast into hell.
In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their God’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in “God” when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder. (Your “God is love” only lends validity and power to their “God hates gays.”)
So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?
If you answer “no,” you’re an atheist. That’s it — you’re done.
But if you go further: You’ll be doing something good for your country.
When I started raising my kids as atheists, I wasn’t particularly honest with the rest of the world. I wasn’t everybody’s mom, right? Plus, I had to get along with other people. Young parents need community, and I was afraid to risk alienating new parent friends by being honest about being — looks both ways, lowers voice — an atheist.
But, in addition to making me be honest inside our home, my children pushed me to start being honest on the outside. In part, I wanted to set an example for them, and in part, I wanted to help change the world they would face.
It shouldn’t be hard to say you don’t believe in God. It shouldn’t be shocking or shameful. I know that I’m moral and respectful and friendly. And the more I say to people that I’m an atheist — me, the mom who taught the kindergarten class about baking with yeast and brought the killer cupcakes to the bake sale — the more people will stop assuming that being an atheist means being … a serial killer.
And then? The more I say I’m an atheist, the more other people will feel comfortable calling themselves atheists. And the stigma will gradually dissolve.
Can you imagine? If we all knew how many of us there are?
It would give everyone permission to be honest with their kids and their friends, to grapple with big questions without having to hold on to beliefs they never embraced.
And it would take away permission, too. Permission to pass laws (or grant exemptions to laws) based on the presumed desires of a fictional creation. Permission to be cruel to fellow human beings based on Bible verses. Permission to eschew political action in favor of “thoughts and prayers.”
I understand that, to many people, this might sound difficult or risky. It took me years to declare myself an atheist, and I was raised Reform Jewish, I live in the Northeast, I’m White, I work at home, and my family and friends are a liberal bunch. The stakes were low for me. For some, I fully concede, the stakes are too high.
If you think you’d lose your job or put your children at risk of harassment for declaring your atheism, you get a pass. If you would be risking physical harm, don’t speak out. If you’re an atheist running for school board somewhere that book bans are on the agenda, then feel free to keep it quiet, and God bless.
But for everyone else who doesn’t believe in God and hasn’t said so? Consider that your honesty will allow others to be honest, and that your reticence encourages others to keep quiet. Consider that the longer everyone keeps quiet, the longer religion has political and cultural license to hurt people. Consider that the United States — to survive as a secular democracy — needs you now more than ever.
And the next time you find yourself tempted to pretend that you believe in God? Tell the truth instead.
Dec 19, 2022
Overheard
Religion:
Why do they love me and hate you?
Atheism:
Because you're a comforting lie,
and I'm the painful truth.
Jun 1, 2019
Fake Lord Have Mercy
If I could count on that happening - even just once in a while - I might have to consider going back to church.
Friendly Atheist:
In 2016, Pastor B.J. Blackburn of Kentucky’s Elevate Church received national attention as the owner of a pizza chain called Giovanni’s of Prestonsburg because he made it very clear he ran a Christian establishment. He played Christian music over the speakers, put Bible verses on his receipts, and didn’t care who complained about it.
“We, here at Giovanni’s of Prestonsburg are unapologetically a Christ-based business that runs and operates with Christian values and principles. We wholeheartedly believe that we have been blessed the way that we have because of the goodness of God. We understand that this is not the view of every customer and/or business owner and we are not trying to push this view on anybody,” Blackburn wrote (in a now-deleted Facebook post).You know where this post is going already, don’t you…?
Of course you do.
He’s a Christian who can’t stop telling you how Christian he is. This can only end one way. (Wait for the twist.)
Bobby “BJ” Blackburn is charged with using an electronic device to try to get a minor to engage in sexual activities. Police said he messaged an employee, who was a minor, and asked her to engage in a “threesome” with another minor, among other obscene messages.
On May 25, police said Blackburn followed a third minor to the station where she tried to give a statement saying she sent the obscene messaged from Blackburn’s phone. But when they questioned her further, she took back her statement and admitted that Blackburn told her to say it or she would lose her job.Police tried obtaining Blackburn’s phone, but he allegedly threw it in a river. Like all innocent people do.
So if I have this right, Blackburn is now known for allegedly soliciting an underage girl for sex, destroying evidence, obstructing justice… and Jesus. Sounds about right.
If convicted, he faces up to five years in jail.
Should make for a fascinating sermon this Sunday.
Jul 1, 2018
Some Dots For Connecting
Golf pro Lee Trevino said:
"If you're caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron."
Even when he says shit like that, Franklin Graham is never seen holding a 1-iron.
"If you're caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron."
Even when he says shit like that, Franklin Graham is never seen holding a 1-iron.
In light of that simple truth, there can be no god.
May 10, 2018
Jul 13, 2017
Jul 8, 2017
Today's Lesson
Michael Shermer - Morality: absolute and otherwise
Without god, there can be no "Objective Morality"?
How do you claim anything is objective if it's based on something as subjective as a belief in god?
If you start with a premise that's false, it's almost impossible to reach a conclusion that's true.
Mar 31, 2017
Mar 27, 2017
Today's Atheism
If every trace of any single religion were wiped out and nothing were passed on, it would never be created exactly that way again. There might be some other nonsense in its place, but not that exact nonsense.
If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
If all of science were wiped out, it would still be true and someone would find a way to figure it all out again.
--Penn Jillette
Jan 8, 2017
Dec 25, 2016
Yeah But It's Christmas
Today is a very special day for me, but that doesn't mean I stop thinking.
When your theism is outwardly silent, my atheism will be as well. Merry Christmas.
When your theism is outwardly silent, my atheism will be as well. Merry Christmas.
Dec 11, 2016
Sunday Question
When you say you'll pray for me, does that mean I need to do the thinking for both of us?
Jul 15, 2016
A Glimmer
Saudi Arabia has roving bands of Morality Police with the power to beat up citizens they deem not behaving as good little Wahabis.
A judge in Kentucky decided he could refuse to officiate at a civil wedding ceremony because the couple didn't mention God in their vows.
Bands of psychotically religious assholes do all manner of shitty things to people everywhere, in the name of their love and devotion for any of a dozen versions of the one true merciful and loving god.
Fuck 'em.
Still, there's this tiny glimmer of hope in USAmerica Inc.
A judge in Kentucky decided he could refuse to officiate at a civil wedding ceremony because the couple didn't mention God in their vows.
Bands of psychotically religious assholes do all manner of shitty things to people everywhere, in the name of their love and devotion for any of a dozen versions of the one true merciful and loving god.
Fuck 'em.
Still, there's this tiny glimmer of hope in USAmerica Inc.
Mar 1, 2016
Logic Error
Thinking it's pretty amazing that we can know this with such certainty and precision. Yay nerds - not kidding - Fucking Yay Nerds.
It gets real easy to imagine how eager the (eg) Mayan rubes would be to confer power on the guys who could predict a solar eclipse 8 or 9 hundred years ago and who would then claim it to be their ability to discern what was on the minds of their gods.
Then I think about people today still making claims they can channel a god thru all kinds of magical mystical bullshit, and who then presume to tell us what their god wants the law to be.
I get that the Magic, the Woo, the whatever; it's about power and politics. It always comes down to that transactional thing where I disconnect part of my living thinking brain in trade for the warm fuzzy feeling of safety within the shelter of the herd, or the arms of a protector, or whatever I get in return for my willingness to self-infantalize - and I'm right back to thinking religion really is a mental illness.
Feb 21, 2016
Dec 2, 2015
Today's Coming Out
I got out from under the god thing a long time ago - or more accurately, I started pushing back against it as a teenager in the late 60s. It still took me a very long time to come to the realization that I am actually atheistic - I guess I just got an earlier start than most.
Anyway, it's always seemed to me that it should be relatively simple for anybody else to break away as well, but when I put aside my own ego and I stop and listen to the stories people tell of what it's taken for them to get free, I have to count myself lucky to have been afforded the space to make my own decisions.
From John Pavlovitz, here's the story of a guy who's starting to get it. At the very least, he understands that way too often, religion is just another political straightjacket.
I’ve outgrown the furrowed-browed warnings of a sky that is perpetually falling.
I’ve outgrown the snarling brimstone preaching that brokers in damnation.
I’ve outgrown the vile war rhetoric that continually demands an encroaching enemy.
I’ve outgrown the expectation that my faith is the sole property of a political party.
I’ve outgrown violent bigotry and xenophobia disguised as Biblical obedience.
I’ve outgrown God wrapped in a flag and soaked in rabid nationalism.
I’ve outgrown the incessant attacks on the Gay, Muslim, and Atheist communities.
I’ve outgrown theology as a hammer always looking for a nail.
I’ve outgrown the cramped, creaky, rusting box that God never belonged in anyway.
Most of all though, I’ve outgrown something that simply no longer feels like love, something I no longer see much of Jesus in.
If religion it is to be worth holding on to, it should be the place were the marginalized feel the most visible, where the hurting receive the most tender care, where the outsiders find the safest refuge.
It should be the place where diversity is fiercely pursued and equality loudly championed; where all of humanity finds a permanent home and where justice runs the show.
That is not what this thing is. This is FoxNews and red cup protests and persecution complexes. It’s opulent, big box megachurches and coddled, untouchable celebrity pastors. It’s pop culture boycotts and manufactured outrage. It’s just wars and justified shootings. It’s all manner of bullying and intolerance in the name of Jesus.
Feeling estrangement from these things is a good thing.
Dec 21, 2014
Jul 31, 2014
Jul 26, 2014
Who Sez We Ain't Got No Songs?
God Fucks You Up --John R Butler
Fuck Me In Ass Because I Love Jesus --Garfunkel and Oates
More if I find any.
Fuck Me In Ass Because I Love Jesus --Garfunkel and Oates
More if I find any.
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