Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (35 page)

The Qing Dynasty, the last of the ruling dynasties of China, collapsed in 1911 and was replaced by the Republic of China, a chaotic era in which feuding warlords fought for control of the central government, finally erupting into 23 years of civil war. The Communist Party of China won in 1949. Like the Community Party in the Soviet Union, this government was officially atheistic.

In 1966, the Communist Party of Mao Zedong (also spelled
Mao Tse-tung
) announced the beginning of a Cultural Revolution to finish the political revolution and thrust China forward into a supposedly shiny future. It didn’t quite work out that way, partly because it was crammed with contradictions. “Four Great Rights” were granted to the people, including freedom of speech and association. But in the same breath, certain ideas were forbidden, including anything that sounded like the pre-revolutionary days, including what was called the “Four Olds” — Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Ideas. These “Olds” did include some real obstacles to human progress, though few people today would argue that the benefits gained for Chinese society were worth the horrific costs that followed.

The Party saw religion as one of the ways the “Four Olds” were carried forward — the main enemies of progress. Mao created a terrifying paramilitary movement called the
Red Guards
— young people full of revolutionary certainties who became Mao’s proxies in every school and village, spying on parents, teachers, and friends to catch and report any pre-revolutionary ideas or actions, including religious ones. Mao issued an order forbidding the police to interfere with the actions of the Red Guard. Temples and churches were closed or destroyed, and religion was portrayed as a “bourgeois” tool of foreign elements who were opposed to China’s best interests. Clergy and monks of all faiths were rounded up and detained in “re-education camps.” Thousands of people were tortured or killed.

Like Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s Cultural Revolution underlined the point that no worldview can be trusted with absolute power, and that enforced atheism is every bit as bad, both in principle and in practice, as enforced religion.

Birthing Modern Humanism

Getting a handle on the birth of an idea can be difficult, but a few tools can help. Google’s Ngram Viewer is one of them. Type in any word or phrase and Ngram scans millions of books, and then creates a graph that shows how common the word is over time. It’s like a glimpse into the maternity ward of ideas. And the idea of modern humanism is no exception.

The word
humanism
started in the 15th century, although at that point it described the study of the ancient classics, not a secular worldview. For four centuries Ngram shows a mostly flat line for humanism, meaning the word didn’t appear in many books. Then suddenly a wobble shows up in the 1850s, then a bump. After gestating for 400 years, the idea of modern humanism was born.

Zoom in to the year 1853 and the details come into focus. An organization called the British Humanistic Religious Association formed to promote knowledge of science, philosophy, and the arts. It was a step in the direction of modern humanism.

The line starts a steady climb through the end of the 19th century. And just as it had been with “atheism” centuries earlier, the phrase
secular
humanism
was used as a put-down in the early going, an accusation mocking the efforts of people like Felix Adler to create religions that are both ethical and God-optional. As the 20th century starts, the Ngram continues skyward as more people, movements, and organizations adopted humanism as a preferred label for an ethical life philosophy without supernatural beliefs.

The following sections introduce some of those key people, movements, and organizations.

Redefining God: John Dewey

Few people can claim a greater influence on American culture than the philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952). In the course of a long career, Dewey practically reinvented the American system of education from the bottom up. He was also a key figure in the rebirth of modern humanism. But his approach was controversial, even among humanists — partly because he wanted to keep using the word God, even though he didn’t believe such a being existed.

A lot of atheists and humanists today are pretty much allergic to religious language and ritual. For some, such reminders of religion bring up too many bad memories or resentments. Others don’t want to be assumed to be religious, an assumption that makes them disappear into the mainstream and reinforces the idea that atheists are rare.

But Dewey, writing in the 1930s, was coming from a very different place. Though an atheist himself, he wasn’t allergic to religion. In fact, he worried aloud that there was a growing “crisis in religion” as increasing knowledge of the world made it harder for people to be religious.

Are you wondering why an atheist wanted people to keep believing in God? Well he didn’t, really. Like Felix Adler in the 19th century (see
Chapter 7
), Dewey said he wanted to rescue the religious impulse, to keep religious language and ritual,
even if people no longer believed in God.
This may seem strange at first, but it’s very similar to Unitarian Universalism today, which I describe in the “
Doing Religion With an Optional God
” section later in this chapter. Religion, he said, is a way to gather in community, to focus on ideals, and to take positive action together. Wouldn’t want to lose that just because God is off the clock.

But Dewey went even further than most UUs when he said
Let’s keep using the word God, but mean something else
— not a supernatural being, but community, ideals, whatever it was that made people want to strive to be their best. That, he said, is “God.”

This designation is a big problem for a lot of people, religious and secular alike, even today. If someone thinks the supernatural God is an important idea to preserve, they want to know that when someone says “God,” she means
God.
And if someone thinks belief in a supernatural God is a harmful thing, it doesn’t help when the very word is redefined to mean pretty much anything. Suppose I’m a researcher dedicated to the fight against cancer, and the word “cancer” is suddenly redefined to include backyard gardening. My efforts will begin to look a bit bizarre:
You’re fighting against cancer? But that’s one of my favorite hobbies!

Not long after Dewey proposed this redefinition, the United States entered the Cold War, religion became entwined with patriotism, and God was added to the currency and the Pledge of Allegiance. If “God” has been redefined to mean anything a person wants it to mean, arguing that church-state lines have been crossed becomes very difficult.

With or without religious language, Dewey’s ideas profoundly influenced modern humanism and liberal religion, including Ethical Culture and Unitarian Universalism.

Making manifestos and declarations

Even though religious doubt has been around for thousands of years, it was a new idea to many in the early 20th century. And it was certainly new to have it traipsing around the world stage. Prominent humanists of this era felt it was time to define humanism and the humanist movement more clearly.

Creating A Humanist Manifesto

If an idea or movement is new, it helps to have a framing document — something that outlines what it’s all about, why there’s a need for it, and what its supporters consider important and true. Humanism got its first such document in 1933 with
A Humanist Manifesto.

The word “manifesto” can be a little jarring to modern ears, sounding like a thrown gauntlet, a defiant challenge. It can be that, but a manifesto is just an attempt to
manifest
an idea, to take something abstract and make it solid and clear — something humanism really needed in the early 20th century.

Even as humanism tried to find its legs around this time, religion was going through an identity crisis of its own. As science advanced into areas once explained by religion, a Social Gospel movement turned the attention of many churches away from abstractions like salvation and grace and toward the alleviation of suffering — feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, caring for the sick. Good stuff. But the chaos of the First World War gave rise to a new revival of fundamentalism that quickly swamped the Social Gospel movement in a new tide of superstition.

A Humanist Manifesto
was an attempt to capture the ideas of humanism in the midst of that swirling mess, with 15 statements of naturalistic belief. It was also a challenge to the supernaturalists of the time. Beliefs should be based not on revelation, it said, but on reason and science.

You may think the 34 signers of this Humanist Manifesto of 1933 were ardent rejecters of religion. But like John Dewey, who was one of the signers, they weren’t looking to throw out religion. In fact, nearly half of them were ministers or theologians. They were advocating a new
kind
of religion — one with all of the supernatural elements whittled out — calling it “religious humanism.”

It was common for humanism at this point to brim with optimism about human potential. Supernaturalism was on the way out. Science was marching forward, bringing progress and plenty in its wake. The new religion (as they called it) of humanism, informed by science and driven by reason and compassion, would lead humanity forward into a bright future by pushing aside harmful and reactionary beliefs.

Or so they thought.

Declaring a global movement

Something astonishing happened in many developed countries after World War II — a rapid, dramatic, and often unexpected shift to the secular. I’ve heard dozens of possible reasons for this, from the use of religious hatred by the Third Reich to the introduction of universal health care. Whatever the reason, it quickly became clear that some kind of international umbrella organization was needed to connect and represent the many atheist, humanist, and other freethought organizations suddenly popping up around the world. In 1952, the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) was created at a World Humanist Congress in Amsterdam.

Now think about it for a moment: What would a world congress of nonbelievers have sounded like to people like Protagoras (see
Chapter 4
), al-Rawāndī (refer to
Chapter 5
), Jean Meslier (see
Chapter 6
), and Percy Shelley (check out
Chapter 10
), all of whom hid their unbelief or suffered severely for not doing so? I can imagine them flying in to Amsterdam as representatives.

The first order of business for the World Humanist Congress was drawing up the Amsterdam Declaration, an accessible, cross-cultural statement of principles to unify a growing global movement.

Embracing the secular: Paul Kurtz and Humanist Manifesto II

By the 1970s, many humanists felt it was time to manifest humanism clearly yet again — and this time, that meant a clear step away from religion. The answer was
Humanist Manifesto II,
and the leader of the effort was the American philosopher Paul Kurtz (1925-2012).

Forty years had passed at this point since the first Humanist Manifesto, and a lot had happened to blunt the optimism of that first attempt: Fascism, the Holocaust, the Cold War, and the very real possibility that the world would meet its end in a global thermonuclear fireball. It had been a sobering and difficult 40 years.