FAITH HOUSE Manhattan

Good Atheism, Bad Atheism

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Even though there haven’t been any new arguments against the existence of God since late 18th century, atheism is hot again. The enlightenment—a powerful movement in recent centuries that helped us question superstitious stories told by our grandmother as well as theology taught by respected university professors—has triumphed. One glance at the Google News page makes this abundantly clear. Religion is not in charge of the world anymore.

However, spurred by fear of religious fundamentalism, new atheists want to go further than their forefathers. Instead of arguing about the existence of God, they are fighting against the existence of religion itself, calling humanity to brace for an apocalyptic showdown between faith and reason. 

Religion does deserve to be challenged. “Deserves” has two meanings. First, religion deserves the pain of criticism and correction because of its failures to live up to its own ideals. Second, religion deserves the blessing of criticism and correction because it has often been a precious catalyst for justice, peace and beauty in the world. Recent challenges should therefore be welcome by religious people as a chance to see, to grieve, to repent, and then with renewed wisdom act for the common good.

Atheism at its best is crucial in this process of religious renewal. With its own set of beliefs, constructive atheism—often described as humanism—sees God as a human creation and not vice versa. It therefore locates the mystery of life in this world, this matter, this humanity, as the only one we have. It insists that all religion must land on the ground where we humans actually live. Religion must learn to live on earth. If religion is not valuable on earth, it is not valuable at all.

Constructive humanism’s contribution to our life together on this planet is its insistence that every religion ought to embrace, not just its adherents, but the whole planet as their ethical community. In our newly small planet, this is not a matter of humility or virtue any more, but of survival. In this way, these atheists are like the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, calling people out of their hypocrisy toward better faith and a better world.

However, attacks that fight against all religion, instead of bad religion, are bad atheism. It reinforces the suspicion of people who cling to the status quo in religion that atheists are on a power trip of their own, on a mission to strip the world of mystery, beauty and spirit—getting rid of anything and everything that humans cannot understand, control or subjugate.

The problem with anti-religionist atheism is not that it questions the existence or character of God. It is problematic because it embodies a contempt for any faith at all—any belief or practice toward creating value and meaning for ourselves. In a recent article in the Los Angeles Times, Lee Siegel writes,

“The leap of faith is really a very ordinary operation. We take it every time we fall in love, expect kindness from someone, impulsively sacrifice some little piece of our self-interest. After all, you cannot prove the existence of truth, beauty, goodness and decency; you cannot prove the dignity of being human, or your obligation to treat people as ends and not just as means. You take a gamble on the existence of these inestimable things. For that reason, when you lay scientific, logical and empirical siege to the leap of faith at the core of the religious impulse, you are not just attacking faith in God. You are attacking the act of faith itself, faith in anything that can’t be proved. But it just so happens that the qualities that make life rich, joyful and humane cannot be proved.”

Atheistic fundamentalism is a dogmatic expression of a worldview equally capable of destroying humanity with zeal and effectiveness as any fundamentalist religion. Shutting out the spiritual, mystical, metaphorical and transcendent, atheistic fundamentalism resorts to cleaning up the world of those who disagree and creating a naked public square, devoid of any options but its own.

While philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rightfully observed that “Every truth is a tool in the hands of those in power,” atheistic fundamentalists have come to an irrational belief that they are an exception as they are trying to sell their ideas to those to whom they so openly condescend. What can be a greater power trip than believing everyone is on a power trip except oneself? Instead of promoting a secularization that fosters religious pluralism, these atheists impose secularism—a closed worldview, devoid of the windows and doors of self-doubt and hope.

To the end of his life, Sigmund Freud was an uncompromising atheist, describing belief in God in his book The Future of an Illusion as a “collective neurosis.” But his last book was titled Moses and Monotheism, in which he suggested a surprising view about religion, recognizing the poetry and promise of religion. He argued that Judaism and other expressions of monotheism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate, empirical world, opening up fresh and renewing possibilities for human spirit and practice. He argued that people who can worship what is presented in symbolic terms, practice the ultimate exploration of the invisible inner life. For Freud, faith in God opened a gift of inwardness and imagination.

Both faith and doubt are opposites of certainty and therefore part of the same whole that refuses to see only the obvious. To end religion, would be to end imagination.

The stingy polemics of religionists who defend religion at all costs on one side and anti-religionists on the other seem like arguments fought in an attempt to justify closing one’s ears to hearing the Other and sharing the planet with others. Both of their identities depend on a divided world. Instead of leading us to generosity and great hope toward an unknown future, and instead of enlightening and inspiring us, religionists and anti-religionists are moving us into a new dark age, both using God to bring an end to imagination.

People will not stop looking into the past and mining religion for its spiritual treasures and hard-learned historical lessons. And they will not stop organizing themselves into new kinds of religious communities. For we have learned from human history that religion does not have to be the opium, but can be the poetry of the people.

(from Signs of the Times, Australia, March 2008, adapted by the author)

Less Anti-theism, More Humanism

~ Greg Epstein serves as the Humanist Chaplain of Harvard University. He recently agreed to write his first book, Good Without God, for William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Epstein was the primary organizer of “The New Humanism,” an international conference in honor of the 30th Humanist Chaplaincy of Harvard University, which drew one of the largest and most diverse audiences of any Humanist gathering in North American history. He blogs for Newsweek magazine and The Washington Post, and his work as a Humanist rabbi and Chaplain has been featured by National Public Radio, BBC Radio, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Jewish Daily Forward, and more. 

Endorsement of Faith House Manhattan:

"Faith House Manhattan is a really intriguing idea, and quite possibly a necessary one. I would encourage my fellow Humanists, atheists, agnostics and the non-religious to check it out, and to consider getting involved. Samir Selmanovic should be commended for reaching out earnestly, in respect and friendship, to our community. We secularists and freethinkers should do the same to him and to theistically-oriented Christians, Muslims, Jews and other religious people everywhere. Global warming doesn’t care what we believe or disbelieve about a god, and that’s just one of the many dangers that may doom us if we can’t figure out how to work together and care about one another despite differences. I’m hopeful this project can help build common ground and enable us to learn from one another in New York City and beyond."

Following post is adapted for Faith House by Greg Epstein, originally posted on On Faith, an online conversation about religion facilitated by Newsweek editor Jon Meacham and Washington Post journalist Sally Quinn.

Christopher Hitchens, author of the bestselling book God Is Not Great writes that "Religion is violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children."

In this quote, Sally and Jon identify a classic example of the way in which Christopher Hitchens’s approach to religion goes far beyond atheism and is really better understood as anti-theism.

While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in god and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.

Anti-theists are often brilliant scientific thinkers. The ones I know tend to be passionately ethical in their personal lives. And as in the case of Hitchens, they can be ferociously eloquent. So why hasn’t anti-theism ever gained any real political or social power?

In most people’s minds, “religion” does not just stand merely for belief in an unseen, all-seeing deity with a baritone voice and a flowing beard. It stands for the things we hold most dear: family, tradition, and community. Memories of lost loved ones and consolation in the face of death. The organized pursuit of social justice. Not to mention music, art, architecture, and I could go on and on.

These things are all good. If you take a rhetorical blowtorch to religion without acknowledging the way it provides them, you get precisely what we have today: a nation and world where despite all our scientific knowledge, 80 to 90 percent of people say they are religious.

Now let me be perfectly clear about myself. I have zero belief in god, gods, goddesses, or any other manner of supernatural spirits. I affirm that there is one and only one world: this natural world. As far as any human being will ever know we get only one life, from womb to tomb.

My conviction that this life is all I have, however, is precisely why I don’t want to spend my days focused on the worst in religion. I prefer seeking the best in each of us. I am not an antitheist, and not simply an atheist, but a Humanist.

Humanism is the non-religious pursuit of all that is best in human life. It is based on reason, compassion, and creativity, and promotes loving and ethical connections with family, community, all human beings, and the natural world surrounding us. It is a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment, aspiring to the greater good of humanity.

Simply put, Humanism is being good and living well without god. And that is no small matter, because it is hard to live a good life in this world regardless of what you believe. We human beings are all so imperfect—we are hurt so easily and too quick to hurt others. We get sick and die just when it is least fair and most painful.

Ultimately, we are social animals. We need each other. Our lives are best when we take part in an ethical community that extends far beyond ourselves; for thousands of years, religion has been the best human institution at providing that community. So if all we stand for is anti-theism, we will get nowhere, even though Hitchens is right -- partially -- about the evil religion can do.

Today, the billion of us around the world who are not religious can and must join together to create a humanistic alternative to religion. And let us do so while honoring the good in those of our religious sisters and brothers who are trying to live well according to a belief system we cannot share.

For a Humanist, it is not enough to simply rage, rage against the dying of the enlightenment. Let us get involved in Humanism and make this world, though it will never be perfect, a better place.

Links to explore:

The New Humanism
American Humanist Association
Institute for Humanist Studies
International Humanist and Ethical Union

While atheism is the lack of belief in any god, anti-theism means actively seeking out the worst aspects of faith in god and portraying them as representative of all religion. Anti-theism seeks to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god.

Anti-theists are often brilliant scientific thinkers. The ones I know tend to be passionately ethical in their personal lives. And as in the case of Hitchens, they can be ferociously eloquent. So why hasn’t anti-theism ever gained any real political or social power?

In most people’s minds, “religion” does not just stand merely for belief in an unseen, all-seeing deity with a baritone voice and a flowing beard. It stands for the things we hold most dear: family, tradition, and community. Memories of lost loved ones and consolation in the face of death. The organized pursuit of social justice. Not to mention music, art, architecture, and I could go on and on.

Atheism At Its Best

~ by Samir Selmanovic

Atheistic Fundamentalism is atheism at its worst, a dogmatic expression of a worldview equally capable of destroying humanity with zeal and effectiveness as any fundamentalist religion. Shutting out the spiritual, mystical, metaphorical, and transcendent, atheistic fundamentalism resorts to cleaning up the world of those who disagree with it and creating a naked public square, devoid of any options but its own.

Atheism at its best is an expression of faith in humanity, even faith in religious humanity, first by asking the difficult but legitimate questions that religious people are prone to dismiss. And then by dedication to a kind of believing that is committed to denying the existence of God until a picture of “a God worth believing in” emerges. Atheism at its best is a rebellion against the god offered in the market of religions, a demand that God ought to be what God should be, if God is in fact there at all. Atheism at its best grabs us by our collars and throws us on the ground, demanding to see the righteousness we talk about, forcing us to dig deeper and harder into the best of our own religions. Atheism at its best is hanging on to the hope that our religions have not grasped reality adequately, and that there must be more to the mystery, beauty, and justice of life than what we have offered.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam need such atheists. They have a prophetic ministry to us. For the option of believing that God is not there is always available to the world. And it sometimes makes more sense than God we are conveying to the world.

James Kavanugh is a Catholic priest, a poet and a writer.  His poem entitled My Easy God is Gone is one of the great examples of atheism at its best.  If you are a believer, I think this poem will hurt you.  And somehow help you heal. 

Milorad Kojic, a genetic scientist from Manhattan, New York, sent it to me after our conversation about "God with eyes too blue to understand" (Thank you Milo!).

My Easy God is Gone

I have lost my easy God - the one whose name
I knew since childhood.
I knew his temper, his sullen outrage,
his ritual forgiveness.
I knew the strength of his arm, the sound
of his insistent voice.
His beard bristling, his lips full and red
with moisture at the moustache,
His eyes clear and piercing, too blue
to understand all,
His face too unwrinkled to feel my
child's pain.
He was a good God - so he told me -
a long suffering and manageable one.
I knelt at his feet and kissed them.
I felt the smooth countenance of his forgiveness.

I never told him how he frightened me,
How he followed me as a child,
When I played with friends or begged
for candy on Halloween.
He was a predictable God, I was the
unpredictable one.
He was unchanging, omnipotent, all-seeing,
I was volatile and helpless.

He taught me to thank him for the concern
which gave me no chance to breathe,
For the love which demanded only love in
return - and obedience.
He made pain sensible and patience possible
and the future foreseeable.
He, the mysterious, took all mystery away,
corroded my imagination,
Controlled the stars and would not let
them speak for themselves.

Now he haunts me seldom:  some fierce
umbilical is broken,
I live with my own fragile hopes and
sudden rising despair.
Now I do not weep for my sins; I have
learned to love them.
And to know that they are the wounds that
make love real.
His face alludes me; his voice, with all
its pity, does not ring in my ear.
His maxims memorized in boyhood do not
make fruitless and pointless my experience.
I walk alone, but not so terrified as when
he held my hand.

I do not splash in the blood of his son
nor hear the crunch of nails or thorns
piercing protesting flesh.
I am a boy again - I whose boyhood was
turned to manhood in a brutal myth.
Now wine is only wine with drops that do
not taste of blood.
The bread I eat has too much pride for transubstantiation,
I, too - and together the bread and I embrace,
Each grateful to be what we are, each loving
from our own reality.
Now the bread is warm in my mouth and
I am warm in its mouth as well.

Now my easy God is gone - he knew too
much to be real,
He talked too much to listen, he knew
my words before I spoke.
But I knew his answers as well - computerized
and turned to dogma.
His stamp was on my soul, his law locked
cross-like on my heart,
His imperatives tattooed on my breast, his
aloofness canonized in ritual.

Now he is gone - my easy, stuffy God - God,
the father - master, the mother - whiner, the
Dull, whoring God who offered love bought
by an infant's fear.
Now the world is mine with all its pain and
warmth, with its every color and sound;
The setting sun is my priest with the ocean for it's alter.
The rising sun redeems me with rolling
waves warmed in its arms.
A dog barks and I weep to be alive, a
cat studies me and my job is boundless.
I lie on the grass and boy-like, search the sky.
The clouds do not turn to angels, the winds
do not whisper of heaven or hell.

Perhaps I have no God - what does it matter?
I have beauty and joy and transcending loneliness,
I have the beginning of love - as beautiful as it
is feeble - as free as it is human.
I have the mountains that whisper secrets
held before men could speak,
I have the oceans that belches life on
the beach and caresses it in the sand,
I have a friend who smiles when he sees
me, who weeps when he hears my pain,
I have a future of wonder.
I have no past - the steps have disappeared
the wind has blown them away.

I stand in the Heavens and on earth, I
feel the breeze in my hair,
I can drink to the North Star and shout
on a bar stool,
I can feel the teeth of a hangover, the
job of laziness,
The flush of my own rudeness, the surge of
my own ineptitude.
And I can know my own gentleness as well
my wonder, my nobility.
I sense the call of creation, I feel its
swelling in my hands.
I can lust and love, eat and drink, sleep
and rise,
But my easy God is gone - and in his stead
The mystery of loneliness and love!

(source: The Recovery Emporium, © Copyright -  James Kavanaugh)