Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (9 page)
Read Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) Online
Authors: Dale McGowan
One of the most pressing questions for the nonreligious is how to interact with and respond to the religious world around them.
Chapter 17
explores the many issues around that, including
Choosing battles and knowing the rules
Grappling with church-state issues
Living in the closet, and coming out
Choosing how to interact with religious friends and relatives on religious issues
Getting religiously literate
Taking a seat at the cultural table
Chapter 18
looks at the many ways nonreligious people are finding to achieve the benefits that religious communities enjoy without the supernatural beliefs. It starts by understanding the real reasons people go to church — not my opinions, you understand, but actual research on the topic — then follows up with
Creating community
Celebrating life’s landmarks
Counseling and support without religion
Doing good together
Getting personal: Why I’m an atheist
Atheists come to their conclusions for a lot of different reasons. Here is a brief look at mine.
My own path to atheism was smoother than some. I didn’t have a painful break with religion, and I was certainly never “mad at God.” I figured if he did exist, he was probably exasperated at the way most religions described him — petty and egotistical, and more than a little inconsistent. And if he was real, I thought he was likely to be a better sport than that. But I wondered, from a very early age, if he actually existed, or if humans had made him up.
Our family went to church, but I was never pushed to declare any particular beliefs. I also had a ravenous curiosity about the world. Everything about it fascinated and amazed me. My parents encouraged my curiosity as much as they could, and they gave me space to think and explore. One of the things I explored was whether any god or gods exist. How could I not? It’s the most interesting question in the world! If there’s a supernatural being that created and controls everything, that’s astonishing. If the universe developed and runs without such a being,
that’s
astonishing. I just wanted to know what was actually true. In short, I treated the question of God as a real question.
I explored the question in every way I could think of. I went to church for 25 years, asked believers why they believe this and not that, and read scriptures from every religion I could lay my hands on. And I thought about it, a lot.
I also studied the sciences, a lot. Eventually I came to see them both as expressions of the human mind’s need to know. Leaving a lot of blanks in the human head about how the world worked didn’t feel safe for most of human history. People needed to fill those blanks in with something so they could at least cultivate the illusion that they were in control of things — or at least someone powerful and good was in control. Science is asking many of the same questions about the world, but by controlling human biases, it has a much better chance of getting the right answers.
I’ve left our most of the details, of course;
Chapter 3
fills in the rest. But that’s my basic story. I’m an atheist because I felt the question of God was wonderful enough to deserve an honest answer.
Chapter 2
Unweaving the Rainbow of Disbelief
In This Chapter
Understanding basic terms and labels associated with atheism
Sliding along the scale of belief and disbelief
Getting comfortable with doubt
Feeling the humanist pulse of atheism
F
or as long as religious claims have been made, some people have surely been standing in the back of the room, hands in pockets, declining to buy into those claims. And the ways and degrees and reasons they disbelieve, not to mention the things they actually do believe, are fascinating and varied. This chapter introduces the characters who populate that world — including the atheist, the agnostic, the freethinker, the skeptic, the humanist, and more — and shows how one person can be, and often is, several of those characters at once.
Here you also discover how to think of religious belief not as an on-off switch, but as a sliding scale, see what a difference a capital letter can make, and begin to explore the rich landscape of humanism, the life philosophy that flows from the decision to set supernatural beliefs aside.
Tomato, Tomahto? The Wonderful, Maddening World of Atheist Labels
Labels can be helpful. A good, clear label can guide me to the right off-ramp or keep me from shampooing my steak. Likewise, labels can provide a quick and useful shorthand for understanding what a person does, or who she is, or even what he believes is true about the world.
However, labels can also be unhelpful, especially if they cause you to make assumptions about a person that aren’t true. You may have heard the word “atheist” used as a shocked accusation (accompanied by a theatrical gasp). I sure have. As a result, you may have a hard time seeing that word and similar labels in a more neutral, descriptive way. The fact that you picked up this book is a good sign that you’re up to the challenge.
The following sections explain a bit more about what labels mean when discussing atheism. I discuss in general what atheism is, explain different types of atheists, and examine the capitalization question.
Defining atheism: Implicit versus explicit
A quote from an 1861 speech by the pioneering feminist and atheist Ernestine Rose shows how many atheists think of atheism. Rose said, “It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds they would remain so.”
In other words, people who set religious belief aside are returning to a state that is natural for humans — atheism.
Although technically true, I’ve come to see this conception of atheism as a bit misleading. If you define
atheism
as simply “the absence of belief in God,” a newborn baby (not to mention a pastrami sandwich) qualifies as an atheist because it lacks belief in God. But I’m inclined to see the difference between my atheism at birth and my atheism now as a pretty important one. These two terms define that difference perfectly:
Implicit atheism:
An
implicit atheist
is one who doesn’t believe in any gods but hasn’t consciously rejected such belief.
Explicit atheism:
An
explicit atheist
is one who has consciously chosen to disbelieve — who has, to put it plainly, an actual opinion on the matter.
Whenever I talk about atheism in this book, I am referring to explicit atheism — not the implicit atheism of babies and deli sandwiches.
Other abstract labels exist — implicit negative, explicit negative, weak versus strong, soft versus hard, and so on — and they range from mildly interesting to redundant to silly. You don’t need to know what they all mean to understand what atheism is. For my sake as much as yours, I will skip those and turn to labels that matter more in the next section.
Coming to terms: A quick look at labels
Ask a religious person to identify his or her belief and you’re unlikely to hear, “Who me? I’m a Theist!” It’s accurate, but it says too little. They might say, “I’m a Christian,” “I’m a Lutheran,” or even “I’m a Missouri Synod Lutheran,” and all three could be true at once. The same goes with Jewish, Jewish Orthodox, and Lubavitcher Hasidim. Several labels can easily apply to one person, each emphasizing a different aspect of belief or a different degree of detail.
Identifying some of the more common labels
The same is true of atheism. A few of the most common and useful descriptive terms in and around atheism are
Atheist:
A person who’s of the opinion that no supernatural god or gods exist.
Agnostic:
One who doesn’t claim to know whether a god or gods exist, and often also thinks that it’s unknowable.
