May/June 2008

feature article

Going Godless

What does it mean to be atheist in a
culture of believers?

By Wendy Underhill

“Faith is believing what you know ain't so.” So said Mark Twain's character, Pudd'nhead Wilson. Pudd'nhead ain't recognized as one of the world's greatest philosophers, but he's got good company among non-believers. Bertrand Russell, Aldous Huxley, and Socrates were all atheists. More recently, Elton John has made news as an atheist, and Philip Pullman, author of the young adult trilogy, His Dark Materials, has raised the ire of some religious organizations, especially after his first book, The Golden Compass, was made into a smash-hit movie last year.

Usually atheists take a live-and-let-live attitude, quietly believing (or, rather, not believing) as they choose, and only occasionally getting caught up in dust-ups involving the Constitution's separation of church and state. Just recently, however, a handful of books with provocative titles such as God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens, The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins and Atheist Universe: Why God Didn't Have a Thing to Do With It by David Mills, have raised the profile of this irreligious subgroup.

With titles like those, it's no wonder that Christians, Muslims and other believers feel under attack. And yet, atheists say they are the ones under attack, a beleaguered minority faced with bias and oppression.

Who are these atheists, anyway? And are they on the attack--or being attacked?

Profile of a non-believer
In current parlance, says Marvin Straus, speaking for the Colorado Coalition of Reason (COCORE), a statewide umbrella group for atheist organizations, says “The word 'atheist' simply describes us: people who do not believe in gods.” Most are skeptical of all supernatural phenomena and beings: no fairies, no ESP, no shared consciousness.

To parse the concept is tough; related categories include freethinkers, humanists, naturalists, agnostics and others. (The possibilities for religious taxonomy are unending, too: theists, deists, polytheists and more.)

If atheists are defined by what they don’t believe in, what do they believe in? They believe in natural science, human equality and individual freedom. As such, most atheists don't see themselves as anti-religious; they may even say, jokingly, “Some of my best friends are believers.”

Originally, the word, “atheist,” was a pejorative (think of that 20th century slur, “Those Godless communists!”), just as the word “queer” was a generation ago. Now the word “atheist” has lost at least some of its bite, as “gay” has in some circles. Says Straus, “One of our goals is to remove the stigma from the word and to make it acceptable.”

But does the stigma still exist? Yes. A Pew Research Center for the People and the Press report from 2003 showed that 52 percent of Americans had reservations about voting for a candidate without religion. No surprise, then, that this year all the Presidential candidates have been quick to label and describe their faiths.

A 2006 study by University of Minnesota researchers shows even starker bias: “Atheists are less likely to be accepted, publicly and privately, than any others from a long list of ethnic, religious and other minority groups.” The report goes on to “demonstrate that increasing acceptance of religious diversity does not extend to the nonreligious.” Indeed, survey respondents name atheists as those least likely to share their (the respondents’) vision of American society—less likely than other marginalized groups such as Muslims, recent immigrants, and homosexuals. And attitudes toward atheists have not become more tolerant over the last 40 years, as attitudes toward other groups have.

Atheists take action when they perceive that a religious belief or tradition is being pushed on others, such as in cases of prayer in schools and Christmas scenes in public places. “It's not that the (Nativity) displays are particularly offensive; it's just that if you don't put your foot down at the beginning, things get steamrolling,” says Steve Mahone, a Colorado Springs spokesperson for Freethinkers of Colorado Springs.

Some recent examples of anti-atheist bias in the public arena:

• Darrel Lambert, an Eagle Scout from Port Orchard, Washington, was asked to leave the Boy Scouts in 2002, a private organization, because he didn't meet the membership requirements; he is an atheist.

• In 2004, atheist Nicole Smalkowski of Hardesty, Oklahoma, was dropped from her high school basketball team after she refused to recite the Lord's Prayer.

• The Military Religious Freedom Foundation filed suit in December, 2007, against the Department of Defense, alleging that the U.S. Air Force Academy had violated service members' rights to religious freedom by allowing Christians to evangelize. (The Air Force says it defends religious freedom in all arenas.)

Closer to home—in Lafayette, Colorado—children at Peak to Peak public charter school experienced harassment (name calling, shoving, and being told they'd go to hell) by fundamentalist Christian students over religious differences, causing one child to cut her wrists and another to consider suicide.

A law suit against the Boulder Valley School District filed by one of the families (their child is an atheist) is still open, but the mother, Louise Benson, MD, says that the school has since made sufficient changes that she and her husband are not actively pushing the case forward. She has since written a book about these cases and other charter school questions, Scapegoating for Columbine: Collateral Damage in the War on School Violence (iUniverse, 2007).

Are atheists the target of a new “ism,” in line with racism, sexism and ageism? (Would that be atheism-ism?) Yes, says Straus. “We think of ourselves as about the fourth or fifth wave of civil rights movements,” he says, after people of color, women, the homosexual/transgendered community and people with disabilities.

Atheists in America
According to the February 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 1.6 percent of adult Americans self-identify as atheists, and another 2.4 percent call themselves agnostics. Including those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” makes a total of 16.1 percent of the population being “unaffiliated,” double the number who were “unaffiliated” in the late 1980s.

How does the number of atheists compare to those who self-identify with other religions? In the United States, all forms of Christianity make up 78.4 percent; after that, the numbers drop rapidly. Jews account for 1.7 percent of the population—very close to the same as atheists--and Buddhists for just 0.7 percent, Muslims, 0.6, and Hindus, 0.4 percent.

We assume that Sufi parents raise Sufi children and Methodist parents raise Methodist children. Likewise, atheists are more likely to have nonbeliever children. (Mahone has another thesis; he says “We're all born atheists, and we're shaped by our environment, our genetics and the knowledge around us; how we put all of this together determines how we come out” religiously speaking. Babies, according to this view, are atheists.)

But atheists aren't churning out non-believing offspring. Statistically speaking, they’re not very productive people, baby-wise. If you look at 100 frequent church attending adults, they'll have 223 children. For 100 people who attend less than once per year, they'll have 158 children. according to the 2006 General Social Survey.

Where else do atheists come from? A steady trickle of people turn aside from their family's traditions. Barrett Sather, a University of Colorado undergraduate in engineering, says “I became an atheist when I started questioning all the things I was told when I went to (Catholic) church.” The questioning began when “I was starting to take chemistry and physics in high school” and his science-based view of the world was formed. Sather says that his view is that “since the Big Bang, it's just been one big physics equation,” even if physicists haven't fully solved it yet.

Straus, spokesperson for COCORE, was born in Saint Joseph, Missouri, in a moderate Southern Baptist household. His Sunday School teachers had a special prayer for him: “Dear God, here comes Marvin with another question.” By the time he joined the military (“I'll put my patriotism up against anyone's”) he knew he was an atheist, but only in recent years has he become an atheist activist.

Mahone spokesperson for Freethinkers of Colorado Springs, grew up Protestant. He began moving toward atheism early. He remembers a particular Sunday when he was 11 years old. The sermon included what he remembers as a difficult-to-follow, “fire and brimstone” message. That night, Mahone asked his dad what the sermon meant. The answer: “Son, what it means is that we're going fishing next Sunday.”

People can shift away from atheism, of course. The most recent and noteworthy case is of Antony Flew, an octogenarian, Oxford professor and author of God and Philosophy (Hutchinson, 1966) and The Presumption of Atheism (Barnes and Nobel, 1984). Now it seems he has adopted deism: his most recent book is There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (HarperOne, 2007), co-authored by Roy Abraham Varghase.

Why did Flew “change his mind”? Is it because the end is presumably near, and the fiery inferno is conceivably beckoning? In an interview with Dr. Gary R. Habermas (printed in the Winter 2004 issue of “Philosophia Christi,” the journal of the Evangelical Philosophical Society), Flew said he “had to go where the evidence leads.” At this point science, more than moral reasoning, leads him to believe in the existence of a god, but not a “special revelation” such as those that have lead to Judaism, Christianity or Islam.

When asked if he now considers himself a deist, he answered “Yes, absolutely right. What deists, such as the Mr. Jefferson who drafted the American Declaration of Independence, believed was that, while reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.”

Staus and Mahone are among a minority of a minority: those who publicly proclaim their status as atheists. Just as not all gardeners join garden societies, not all atheists join groups. (Indeed, there could be an inverse correlation between atheism and joiners.) That said, in Colorado, the membership organizations that belong to Colorado Coalition of Reason represent about 1500 people statewide. The latest group to join COCORE is the Student Secular Alliance of the University of Colorado-Boulder.

What do the groups do? The Boulder Atheists, as one example, adopt a stretch of highway, organize blood drives, and meet for lunch on Thursdays. Their cheery motto: “No Gods, no devils, no heaven, no hell...just the wonderful universe around us.”

What don’t these groups do? Proselytize. Says Mahone, “Truly, honest to goodness, we couldn't care less; we get no validation when others change their beliefs.” If there is a political agenda amongst atheists, it's to protect the nation from what they see as a potential slide into state-sponsored religion. In doing so they may be the strongest advocates of religious freedom—and of freedom from religion as well.

A Question of Ethics

If you don’t believe in god, if there’s no supreme being to whom you are accountable, what keeps you on the straight and narrow?

Where does someone who’s self-avowedly “godless” get their sense of ethics, of right and wrong, if not from religion?

The answers are many: from secular law (well-regulated societies benefit everyone), from personal experience (if you know what it's like to be hurt, you'll choose not to inflict that on others), or from natural science (some thinkers and researchers view altruism as a survival mechanism for a species, ours and others).

Rev. Sean Curley, a Golden-based secularist, atheist, and celebrant for weddings and other occasions, says “I base my sense of right and wrong, and my actions, on humanity, on science and on reason, and not on the possibility of religion. And I think the government should operate on the same basis. The corollary is that we have to rely on ourselves.”

He says that people learn right and wrong in the context of societal interactions and expectations. Children learn from the values and lessons they were taught while growing up--both formally through parental rule making, and experientially, in observing mores and interacting with others.

All societies, including those that pre-date monotheism, have had codes of conduct, and there is a great deal of overlap among them: don't kill, don't lie, offer a helping hand to the other guy. Christianity codified these early, and apparently universal, human ethics into the golden rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Confucius came to a similar stance: “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.” As for atheists, each can formulate his or her own “rules,” but they tend to be closely aligned with everyone else's.
What's Curley's rule of thumb? “If you try to make decisions based on right and wrong and not what is easy, you’ll be proud of who you are.”

Learn More About Living Without God

It’s a provocative topic, this debate about the existence of God; these thought-provoking books and web resources may answer more of your questions.

Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism, by David Mills and Dorion Sagan (Ulysses Press, 2006), offers just what its subtitle promises.

The New Atheist Crusaders and Their Unholy Grail: the Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith, by Becky Garrison, (Thomas Nelson, 2008), which uses satire to skewer the atheists' arguments (while not denying the inadequate response religions have offered to war, medical ethics, and social justice).

Books by local authors:

• Humanism for Parents: Parenting without Religion, by Sean Curley (Lulu.com, 2007), a Colorado humanist who performs weddings and celebrations. In this book Curley offers advice on how to raise ethical children and create rites and rhythms—without religion

• Scapegoating for Columbine: Collateral Damage in the War on School Violence, by Louise Benson, MD (iUniverse, 2007) shares this mother's experience with religious harassment in her child's charter school and explains the charter school movement as an occasionally religious force.

Web resources:

• American Atheists, Inc. (atheists.org) is a membership-based group that tries to maintain freedom from religion; the website has all the usual pages: breaking news, testimonies, resources, lists of member organizations.

• COCORE (cocore.org), or Colorado Coalition of Reason, puts viewers in touch with humanist /atheist/secularist groups in Colorado, pertinent Colorado legislation, and two Colorado-made documentaries, “The Last Presentation,” which answer FAQs about atheism, and “Journey of Life,” which shows how the milestones of life from birth to death are viewed by atheists.