Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (83 page)

I can’t begin to tell you how much that means to me.

As a parent, I’ve always urged my kids to get outside of my oversized influence as a dad and think independently. Whenever they ask for my opinion, especially about the big unknowables, I tell them what I think, but I always follow it up with a reminder that they should find other people who believe differently and talk to them — and that in the end, they get to work it out for themselves.

So when my daughter was about eight and asked, “Did Jesus really come alive after he was dead?” I said, “I don’t think so, no. I think that’s just a story so we feel better about death. But talk to Grandma Barbara. I know she thinks it really happened. Then you can make up your own mind and even change your mind back and forth a thousand times if you want.”

I didn’t know at first if other atheist parents took this approach, but I eventually learned it’s by far the most common. One 2006 survey of parents in the United States and Canada indicated that nearly 90 percent who identified as “very religious” said they raised they children specifically to believe as they do, while more than 90 percent of the parents who identified as atheists said they wanted their kids to make their own choices in religious identity. A larger 2012 parent survey by the author Wendy Thomas Russell had an almost identical result.

And why is that? Why do atheists leave such an important thing to chance? Consider these reasons:

They don’t actually leave it to “chance.”
They leave it to their kids.

Some want to steer clear of what they experienced as kids.
Many atheists were told what to believe when they were kids, and sometimes even frightened into religious belief with ideas of hell or the wrath of God. That’s given them a serious allergy to indoctrination of any kind, so they work hard to avoid doing it in reverse. And those like me who had an independent process want their kids to have the same advantage they enjoyed.

As a result, very few atheists raise their children specifically as atheists. They try to keep all labels off them for as long as possible until they can choose their own.

If my kids end up choosing a religious identity, I’m confident it will be one of the many positive expressions, one that matches the values of honesty, curiosity, and compassion with which they were raised. If they choose something I think is less positive, I’m sure we’ll talk about it, just like we do about anything else. But I won’t disown them, and I certainly won’t love them any less — another approach that atheist parents and liberal religious parents tend to share.

Chapter 17

Being an Atheist in a Religious World

In This Chapter

Seeing our religious culture through nonreligious eyes

Getting to know about religion, even if you aren’t religious

Choosing battles, making peace

Being an atheist in a religious family

R
eligion has a huge influence and presence in the world. Five out of six people identify as theistic believers of one kind or another, and the world’s history and cultures are steeped in religious ideas.

I sometimes refer to atheists as people who have “set religion aside,” but that’s a little misleading. An atheist can’t set religion aside any more than someone who rides a bike to work can set traffic aside. Even in relatively secular countries like the United Kingdom or Norway, religion continues to show up in public ceremonies and rites of passage, cultural identity, and even the architecture of the buildings. In the United States, a country with a much higher level of professed faith, religion is in everything from political speeches to public policy, from the daily Pledge of Allegiance to US currency, from public remembrances to the family dinner table.

This chapter explores some of the issues around being an atheist in a religious world.

Living in a Mostly Religious Culture

Like any minority, part of the challenge of being an atheist is figuring out how to live among the majority. An atheist has to ask him or herself many questions: Should I be open about my beliefs, or be quiet and let others assume I’m one of them? Do I skip religious rituals and traditions, or modify them, or just smile and go along? How can I assert my right to freedom of belief in a way that doesn’t trample on the rights of others — and how should I respond when others trample on me? Can I challenge beliefs that I think are harmful or dishonest? If I have kids, do I raise them as atheists, or raise them to make their own decisions? If I want them to decide for themselves, how can I make sure I’m not forcing my own views on them?

In the following sections, I look at some of the more public questions and some of the ways atheists choose to answer them.

Choosing battles, knowing rules

Most Western countries have some level of freedom of religion for individuals. Official religious tolerance is often a practical solution to stop people from killing each other over differences of belief. Today, such freedoms are commonly accepted as a natural thread in the fabric of a civilized society. Everybody fully understands what “freedom of religion” means, and all conflicts are happily in the past.

Yeah . . . okay, maybe not so much. Conflict between worldviews is still common despite religious freedoms for these reasons:

Religious belief is deeply personal, and the visible existence of contradictory points of view can feel threatening.

Some religions have a stated plan to convert the world (such as “The Great Commission”) or believe that their nation is theirs by divine right or history (orthodox Jews in Israel, for instance, or Christian Dominionists in the United States).

Some atheists see eliminating religion as an ultimate goal and “accommodation” of religion as an obstacle to that goal.

The line between exercising my own beliefs and stepping on the rights of others can be unclear.

Not everyone recognizes the right to openly criticize other worldviews, or where that line should be.

Many are not aware that freedom of religion includes the right to not believe at all — that “freedom of religion includes freedom
from
religion.”

When living with religious diversity, people still have a lot of misunderstanding, a lot of sharp elbows, and a lot of outrage. In addition to conflicts between religions (such as the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy in Manhattan), you may have heard about atheists protesting when religion ends up somewhere they think it shouldn’t be. It may be a politician making religious arguments against stem cell research, the Ten Commandments carved in stone outside a courthouse, a prayer over the loudspeaker before a high school football game, or references to God on money and in the Pledge of Allegiance. It can feel like the religious majority is forcing itself on everyone else, trampling my rights to self-determination in the process.

A lot of religious believers get angry about these challenges, feeling like their own freedom of expression is under attack. The rights of Christians and other religious believers to worship and believe freely in their own hearts, homes, and church communities must never be infringed. At the same time, no one else should be required to bend the knee or participate in religious rituals that aren’t their own in our shared spaces.