Atheism is not a “religion”.
We are not “sure” there is no god.

Dog tag showing ATHEIST

The most common misconception about atheism is that it is a religion. This strikes me as so incongruous that I’m not quite sure whether to be offended or laugh out loud. I’m perplexed… I bristle at being called a purple panda when I am actually a chestnut horse.

I am curious why this idea persists. I have 3 possible explanations:

1. Atheism takes a stand on religious questions so it’s sorta… you know… religious in scope. This strikes me as rather weak.
2. Believers want to drag atheism into their arena, where they can rip it apart with their theological or metaphysical pickaxes.
3. Believers are used to defending their particular religion from competing religions. They feel strongly any opposing views must also be religions.

I don’t know which of these is the main reason people keep selling this baloney. If you’ll pardon the expression, God knows I’m not a mind-reader.

I do confess labels change. With time, words do shift in their meaning. Maybe people used to mean something else when they called themselves atheist or agnostic. But for today… for our current moment, I really like Penn Jillette’s short, sharp story of why you can be both an atheist and agnostic. Here’s my version.

Atheist. I don’t believe in god. Believe is a verb, and I don’t do that verb with most people’s concept of God. Or if you like, belief is a kind of confidence, a sort of mental wager or opinion about some infinite being who typically:

• Answers prayers
• Demands tribute or worship
• Exacts vengeance or judgment
• New! Favors one religion over others, or over no religion

I say no to this wager. I think it’s a bad idea. I refuse it, I negate it. I withhold belief in it. I abstain from believing in god, praying to Him, or living my life in perpetual fear of His judgment. This abstention is enough to call myself an atheist. I don’t need faith in His nonexistence. That’s silly.

I’m not sure I’m right, but I’m pretty sure. I’ve evaluated all the reasons people give for believing in God—I believed in God for 20+ years, so you may be sure my evaluation was very thorough. I’ve had many, many spiritual experiences, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t need God to explain these. Neuroscience, physics and other disciplines are enough. Science doesn’t have all the answers, but God doesn’t offer any better ones. If not science itself, then the assumptions behind science are enough for me to frame all the stories I ever care to invest in with that wager called belief.

Agnostic. I think agnosticism is a bit more technical than atheism. I am not wishy-washy about whether God exists or not. Most concepts of God strike me as nonsensical or silly. But suppose you ask these rather technical questions. Then here are my answers.

1. Does God exist?
   Probably not.
2. Can you know the answer to this question?
   No. But don’t read too much into that—I also can’t “know” whether we’re being watched by multicolor cosmic unicorns.
3. Is it reasonable to even ask this question?
   I doubt it.

For the sake of argument, I limit myself to concepts of God exceptional enough to be called theism, which excludes “God is Love.”

I do believe in Love.

Notes

Theodore M. Drange tries to be consistent with his definitions in “Atheism, Agnosticism, Noncognitivism” (1998)

Suppose you are to answer the following two questions:

(1) Does the sentence “God exists” express a proposition?
(2) If so, then is that proposition true or false?If you say no to the first question, then you may be classified as a noncognitivist with regard to God-talk. If you say yes to it, thereby allowing that the given sentence does express a proposition, then you are a cognitivist with regard to God-talk. (Let us henceforth abbreviate these expressions, simply using the terms “cognitivist” and “noncognitivist”.) All theists, atheists, and agnostics are cognitivists, so the second question applies to them: is the proposition that God exists true or false? You are a theist if and only if you say that the proposition is true or probably true, you are an atheist if and only if you say that it is false or probably false, and you are an agnostic if and only if you understand what the proposition is, but resist giving either answer, and support your resistance by saying, “The evidence is insufficient” (or words to that effect).

I don’t think this close parsing is necessary outside a philosophy class. I don’t think human thinking is limited to “propositions”. Among other problems, formal propositions omit any time component and pretend to be almost mathematical in their abstraction. This technical machinery is overkill. It doesn’t reflect normal human cognition, even cognition about beliefs. In everyday educated culture it’s not terribly useful.

So if you want to get technical, I’m probably a theological noncognitivist. But come now! I am already tired of explaining atheist and agnostic. Do you really want me to go around saying theological noncognitivist in everyday conversations whenever the topic of metaphysics arises? That’s silly.

At what point does fundamentalist or credulous belief become immoral? Should we care when false beliefs influence policy, or is this part of individual religious liberty?

Paramecium

At Pharyngula, K Davidson on “Why I am an atheist”—Davidson writes that Religion may be dear to people and give them comfort, but…

The problem comes when those with power believe in a false cause and effect. That is dangerous, that is anti-social and needs to be stamped out for the betterment of people.

There are two obvious problems with false cause and effect. The first is quite obvious. If a child is sick with infection and her adult care-taker believes that doing three cartwheels down a particular road in Katmandu will cure her, but antibiotics won’t, that empowered caretaker will cause unnecessary suffering, and possibly death. We can extrapolate that across society. If people with power believe that giving HPV vaccinations will lead to retaliations from a vengeful god, those empowered people will cause unnecessary suffering, and possibly death. There are so many examples of this affecting OUR shared society. Psychological torture of gays, miseducation of our children, stunting the potential of young girls by refusing them access to information about birth control, shooting wars with other cultures… ad infinitum.

That is completely unacceptable. We cannot allow the hard won bounty of human endeavor, i.e., knowledge and information, to be squandered at the expense of real, live humans who have the right to the best possible lives we as a society can offer each other. We have come together throughout history to benefit from our collective knowledge and works. Those who would stand in opposition to this knowledge reap its benefits every day. They flush toilets and watch television and eat cheap food. In my view, there is no difference in avoiding cholera by means of sewage systems and avoiding the pain of ostracism by means of admitting that it’s the only downside to homosexuality.

In short, I believe that failing to proceed with the best possible information about cause and effect is a crime.

The second problem with religious adherence is more subtle, but possibly more dangerous. On an individual level, believing that there is a set of specific desires held by some higher power leads to a population of people “just following orders.” It removes all ethical and moral agency from the individual, which is, in my view, distinctly unethical and immoral. One hears the tired argument, “How can anyone who doesn’t believe in God’s retribution know right from wrong?” The absurdity of this is obvious to anyone with a deeply personal and evolved set of principles. I know it is wrong to hurt people for my own gratification and I suffer emotionally in the here and now for it. I am not so disconnected from the rest of humanity that I forget the value of other humans. I am not so mercenary that without threat to my own personage I would harm others. I am a fully formed, typical human in that way.

That’s not all. Davidson leads with the most basic problem: the burden of proof is on God-promoters. Outlandish claims require extraordinary evidence. A warm feeling of self-confirmation is not sufficient.

This does not indict every kind of God-centered belief. Not all theologies are attached with false notions of cause and effect in the real world. But it’s worth a second look to make sure that our leaders are not creating policy from mistaken beliefs about the physical world.

These days as a person with a secular worldview, I must confess up front I have a slight distaste for statements of faith. It’s not that all my beliefs or actions have scientific evidence to back them up. I try, but that would be a standard of perfection beyond any sane person’s ambition. Besides as we all know, 99% of our interactions in life are one-off situations—minutiae of work and home life where the grand repeatable ideas of science don’t hold sway. Oh sure, the laws of physics still apply, but we don’t live our lives in controlled circumstances. We aren’t lab rats, let alone accelerated particles.

Rather it’s that the word faith conjures up herds of images and assumptions that repel me. The idea that we should positively esteem popular notions of faith, that we should actively seek to increase our beliefs in unprovable claims, particularly claims which bear on our lives or on the physical world—this strikes me as obviously foolish and harmful. I think we humans already operate with too much certainty about nonsense, not to mention actual falsehoods. We don’t suffer from a lack of faith.

But the Mormon testimony, ah! now that’s a special breed of faith. I wonder if mainstream Christians would recognize this exotic creature as a brother to their thing-called-faith. Or would they see it like I do, as a kind of fetish? The LDS faithful venerate and… yes, cherish… what they call their testimony in a unique set of rituals and practices. If you want to understand members (what they call themselves) of The Church (as members refer to their religion), you must appreciate the contours of the Mormon Testimony.

View from a Mormon pulpit, where members stand to say "I know The Church is true!" Photo at Wheat & Tares: If I Were In Charge: Make “I Believe” As Valid As “I Know” In Testimonies By: Mike S May 24, 2011

I look back on my 20-plus years of Mormon testimony without real bitterness, but with a measure of fondness and rue. It’s like reminiscing about a great love which ended badly. You know how it goes. It’s tempting to blame myself or tell myself I knew better all along, but in reality I bought the whole thing. I was like other Mormons. That “testimony” was more precious to me than most other things in life.¹

Most of my friends in high school weren’t Mormon. Sure, we talked about beliefs a lot, but they were bemused at best by my “testimony”. My best friend in high school practically dared me: if something that special had happened to me… if I possessed that kind of special knowledge, why didn’t I share it with the world? Why didn’t I talk about it even more than I did.

Here’s the thing. Mormons aren’t content to believe. Notice that verb, believe? They aren’t happy with a mere verb. They aren’t even content with a relatively tame noun: faith. Faith is to Mormon “testimony” what coca leaves are to pure cocaine. Mormons have concentrated faith to its most concentrated form, refined it into an intoxicating drug… to the hottest, most extreme form of belief I have ever witnessed in person. That is the Mormon testimony.

Witness the Mormon Fast and Testimony Meeting. Members of The Church gather once a month. They are instructed to attend this meeting in a state of fasting, forgoing food but not water for up to 24 hours, except children and infirm. The usual worship service, Sacrament Meeting, is suspended so that members can participate in this monthly ritual.

Members of The Church take turns rising to the pulpit, or in some cases standing in place and accepting a portable microphone from an usher. They begin a heartfelt recitation of the reasons they “know The Church is true”. This testimony is extemporaneous, but it is almost always built out of a few set phrases. Children are taught the accepted mode of this performance from a very young age, primarily by example.

Before I tell you the words which make up the typical Mormon “testimony”, let me emphasize that heartfelt again is too weak a word. How often in daily life do we share tear-soaked stories of what we hold “most precious”? How often do we gentiles (as Mormons call us non-members) get to publicly expose the most tender, intimate feelings of our heart? To express in fervent tones how “absolutely CERTAIN” we are that “Joseph Smith was a prophet of God”?

View of 1934 pulpit from http://ldsarchitecture.wordpress.com/

Here are some more of the tried-and-true phrases from Mormon “testimonies”. These words give you a small taste of the Mormon “testimony”, but you must remember that just knowing the phraseology is not enough. You have to imagine your friends and neighbors reciting these clichés every month: their heads, hands and voices shaking in fervent belief, their faces streaming with tears of sincerity… swelling with the desire to make you believe as they do.

• I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. [Yes. They. Say. This.]
• Jesus is The Christ.
• Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God.
• The other day my ___ [puppy] was almost ___ [caught in a table saw]. When it miraculously ___ [went my way], I knew that ___. [The Church was True, Joseph Smith was a Prophet of God, Jesus was The Savior, etc.]
• I Know The Church Is True.
• … Beyond a Shadow of a Doubt. [!!]
• I don’t just believe, I KNOW it! I know it!
• At funerals, the deceased are praised for the sweetness or strength of their “testimony”. How powerful it was.
• Members repeatedly refer to their “testimony” as their most prized possession, precious above anything else except their family… and sometimes even more so.

All of this has terrific impact. You cannot help but be affected by the sheer emotional power of Mormon members’ personal conviction. For most of us, quotidian life drones along with trouble and uncertainty. At monthly Fast And Testimony Meeting, Mormons receive a bear-tranquilizer dose of complete certainty—high emotions and bodily fluids dished out like freshly cut nerves on a platter.

I am not writing to ridicule this ritual, although any deep sentiment is vulnerable to ridicule. (In my daily post-Mormon life, I’m as deeply sentimental as the next guy, and I don’t believe in taking cheap shots.) Instead, I’m trying to explore how unique, how singular is this thing Mormons call their “testimony”.

Here’s the strangest part. Sometimes they will talk about their past selves, but they will identify more strongly with their testimony than with their actual self. They’ll say, “I went through a period where my testimony was severely tested.” See the difference? They don’t say, “Sometimes I believe less strongly, but now I believe very, very strongly.” In effect they are saying,

“This ‘testimony’ is my real, true self. The rest of me—that part of me which would ever question this “testimony”—is like a foreign object. It is an intruder and I reject it.”

What more can I tell you? Mormons obsess about the influence of The Adversary, The Devil, The Evil One, The Father of Lies. (2) This is another way they split their mind. The good part is themselves, their “testimony” or “The Spirit”. The bad part is “The Adversary”.

God help them if members of The Church ever find themselves questioning! This is as dangerous a word as you can find in the Mormon vocabulary. It brings up dark, shadowy feelings of eternal peril—paranoia about an Adversary who is “cunning” and never-tiring in his efforts to deceive “yea! even the very elect!” (the special ones who are Chosen of The Lord)

True, Mormons believe that Judgment Day will be even more dire for “apostates” or “sons of Perdition”—those who once “knew the truth” and now “actively fight against it”. But I would argue that greater psychological paranoia swirls around members who are questioning, because apostates are by definition lost causes, whereas members who are questioning stand in a liminal state. On the one hand, safety. On the other, hellfire… losing any chance at exaltation and eternal life. Total loss.

This part is reminiscent of North Korea. With the passing of Kim Jong-Il, you may have heard that North Koreans conceive of themselves as a uniquely pure and paradoxically vulnerable race. Mormons are somewhat similar. Because The Evil One has singled them out, he targets even those who were “most valiant in the Pre-Existence”… “that he may deceive, yea!, even the very elect”. Mormons refer to themselves figuratively as Israel and to Utah as Zion.

This is another manifestations of Mormons’ “Chosen People” status, their spiritual narcissism… one more side of Mormon religious chauvinism.

¹ Like most Mormons, I did share my “testimony” pretty often. But even in my teens I could see both sides of the issue. I could see that my mainstream Christian and nonbelieving friends had logically consistent positions. And besides even Mormons—who repeat the slogan, “every member a missionary!”—don’t want to crash a party when they’re not invited. Like most people, I was abashed at sharing my testimony where I feared it was unwanted or subject to ridicule.

² Yes, Mormons believe in a personal Devil as well as a personal Savior. The LDS leadership frowns upon dwelling too long on The Adversary. But many a “testimony” has meandered into a confessional blow-by-blow about the coarse charms of The Evil One. These poorly received “testimonies” are more like 12-step confessionals of personal sin. In my experience, they only happened every few months, maybe once a year.

Mike S writes If I Were In Charge: Make “I Believe” As Valid As “I Know” In Testimonies at Wheat & Tares Blog.

Last time I wrote that many Christians externalize their personal, human, emotional resources—as the influence of God, Jesus, the Comforter (Holy Ghost), so much that they think only Christians have these capabilities.

This kind of religious chauvinism runs even deeper in Mormons. Back when I was Mormon, we talked about one aspect of the Holy Ghost: The Comforter. When events in life are unbearable, Mormons believe The Comforter steps in to help righteous Mormons bear their troubles.

In fact, Mormons believe they are the only Christians who truly possess the Gift Of The Holy Ghost, which gives them special powers of discernment on spiritual matters and gives them special powers of clairvoyance and prescience when “prompted” by the “Holy Spirit” (synonym for “Holy Ghost” in Mormonism).

Mormons believe The Gift Of The Holy Ghost entitles them—and only them—to the constant companionship of the third member of The Godhead. This follows from their belief they are the only Christians authorized by God The Father (whom Mormons call Elohim) on the earth, the only latter-day heirs of the early Christian Church.

Mormons believe THE GIFT of the Holy Ghost is bestowed (only) through the laying-on of hands by Mormon Elders. This sharp distinction is an example of Joseph Smith’s obsessive word-splitting and parsing of words from the King James Bible. This sort of thing abounds in Mormon theology:

• The Holy Ghost. May fleetingly influence non-Mormons. Apparently sits in on Godhead board meetings, though they only need 2 chairs, because the Holy Ghost is the 1 member of the Godhead who doesn’t have a body. Third member of the Godhead: 3 separate personages who are “one in purpose”. This special caveat is so Mormons can claim to be monotheists even though they admit believing in 3 separate God-level beings: God the Father, Jesus Christ who Mormons identify with Jehovah, as well as the Holy Ghost or Holy spirit.
• The Gift Of The Holy Ghost. Special privilege, power, or faculty possessed only by Mormons. They must receive it in a ceremony of laying-on of hands by Mormon Elders, men authorized by the Mormon Church.
• The Light of Christ. Conscience possessed by everyone, including non-Mormons and—ironically—non-Christians. (Mormons group non-Mormon Christians with Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims and all other non-Mormons.) Mormons believe even atheists have the Light of Christ.

Mormons believe non-Mormons may occasionally be comforted by the Holy Ghost—or their inherent conscience, which Mormons call The Light of Christ. But only Mormons are entitled to the constant companionship (“The Gift of”) The Holy Ghost.

When Mormons disagree with non-Mormons, they sometimes chalk it up to the Gift of the Holy Ghost. I’ve overheard my brothers muttering darkly about some third person, “That shows how you can only understand these things with the help of the Holy Ghost.”

Mormons often believe they must be right because only they have special powers flowing from The Gift Of The Holy Ghost.

I was a Mormon for over 20 years. Many, many times believed I felt the “promptings of the Holy Spirit” (Joseph Smith left Holy Spirit as a synonym for Holy Ghost instead of teaching his followers that it meant yet some new baroque doctrinal curlicue, thank goodness).

For over 20 years now, I have been convinced those “promptings” were emotional self-talk similar to feelings of conviction or certainty—nothing more, nothing less.

As I said before, we all have the same resources, the same feelings. We just tell different stories about them.

In a rehearsal at The Metropolitan Opera a few years ago, we were told that a colleague—whom we’d just seen a day or two before—had suddenly taken gravely ill and was in the hospital. As human beings, life-and-death situations trigger our Big Stories about the nature of Life.

Huddled nearby I overheard a colleague say something about God. I moved closer. The man speaking said that only faith can give you the strength to face great adversity such as life-threatening illness… something about comfort too, or maybe even The Comforter:

“I just don’t know how an atheist could face a crisis like that.”

I moved towards the huddle in what I hoped was a casual, friendly way. “I can answer that!” I hoped my voice sounded sunny and light. I wanted to represent my people well. “I’m an atheist / agnostic / whatever…

“Atheists have the same… resources… as everyone else. Those are part of being human. We just tell different stories about them.”

Well… He accepted that and seemed slightly taken aback in a good way. “That’s beautifully said.”

SPEAKING of falling under the influence of our future cephalopod overlords…

This just in—GIANT SQUID seen as pawns in the global homosexual agenda:

I must have missed that meeting. –Mr S M

A lesson from Dante Shepherd at Surviving the World.

Brilliant little video, It Getteth Better, showing how you can satirize something and still love it. Draw your own conclusions, but it’s pretty clear the video’s makers are on the same side as the It Gets Better series of videos.

Critics of the video say it’s against God. That’s silly. It’s against simpleminded and bigoted theology.

—Video from Simon & Schuster marking of publication THE LAST TESTAMENT: A Memoir by God, co-written with David Javerbaum, the 11-time Emmy Award-winning former head writer and executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

In a Wired article, Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up, Jonah Lehrer writes about the ways our assumptions (and experience) blinker us from seeing new evidence, even when it’s staring us in the face.

Lehrer tells a layered story, rich with examples, such as Kevin Dunbar’s look at how scientists actually work.

[W]hen experiments were observed up close — and Dunbar interviewed the scientists about even the most trifling details — this idealized version of the lab fell apart, replaced by an endless supply of disappointing surprises. There were models that didn’t work and data that couldn’t be replicated and simple studies riddled with anomalies. “These weren’t sloppy people,” Dunbar says. “They were working in some of the finest labs in the world. But experiments rarely tell us what we think they’re going to tell us. That’s the dirty secret of science.”

This reminds me of my lower-division astronomy class at Caltech in the 1980s. Maartin Schmidt taught us about various methods for measuring Hubble’s Constant (for expansion of the cosmos) involving red shift measurements and type 1-A supernovae. The problem was, different methods for measuring distance yielded different values for Hubble’s Constant (and for the amount of mass in the cosmos). As measurements and computations became more precise, the discrepancy only got more glaring.

Then in the 1990s (long after I had decided an astronomer’s life was not for me), Dark Energy and Dark Matter were finally offered as the least bizarre explanations for what at first had seemed like experimenter error.

Scientific experiments are an attempt to screen out the chaos of everyday existence – to shine a beam of light narrow enough to illuminate a single, repeatable fact of nature. But the teeming world is always right outside the door of our neat little experiment, and often the chaos finds a way inside. Even when it doesn’t – and here is Lehrer’s main point – we have a human tendency to discard new results as mere gibberish. Our expertise gets in our way.

We can’t escape this tendency (so suggests Dunbar’s experiment where students’ brains were observed while they watched videos of falling balls), but our predicament is not hopeless. Lehrer offers up some helpful strategies for escaping the trap of our own preconceptions.

How to Learn From Failure
Too often, we assume that a failed experiment is a wasted effort. But not all anomalies are useless. Here’s how to make the most of them. —J.L.

1. Check Your Assumptions
   Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.
2. Seek Out the Ignorant
   Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.
3. Encourage Diversity
   If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.
4. Beware of Failure-Blindness
   It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

So it seems the illness is chronic and the prescription takes constant work. But at least there is some kind of remedy.

It is a personal quest of mine – albeit a long-term, low-flame quest – to learn more Hegel. In one sense this will not be hard since I know so very little Hegel now. At a delightful, intimate dinner party a few days ago, I met UCLA Hegel scholar John McCumber and worked up the courage to ask the canonical question of a tyro:

Where should I start to learn more Hegel?

Hegel silhouette (Jena)

Often the best answer is to jump right in with the original source. Accept No Substitutes! But my German is not strong enough to bear reading philosophy at any length. So at the very least I need to choose an English translation. (This worked for me with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I just jumped into the best English translation. For motivation, I met up with a buddy to discuss what we read, sort of like a work-out partner.)

I have been warned by other Hegelian friends that it is nigh impossible to make proper sense of Hegel without a thorough understanding of the philosophical milieu in greater Germania during Hegel’s time. Their warnings had the effect of turning the already low flame of my Hegel quest even lower. It’s still a burning desire in the back of my mind, but the flame is small, bluish, and flickering.

Asking philosophers questions at parties. As I was gathering up the heart to ask John about Hegel, my mind was still churning on a bit of advice from my friend Gianfranccesco Zanetti, scholar of philosophy and law in Bologna, Italy. Gianfranccesco’s advice was kindly, by way of anecdote:

“I hate it when people ask me about philosophy at parties!”

(Ouch! I thought. That’s me!)

Philosophy is my profession. I read it and write it and teach it all day, just about every day of the week. I have nothing to say about it at a cocktail party.

John McCumber and Terry Pinkard’s generosity of spirit. And so it was with some timidness that I turned to John and asked where to start with Hegel. John could easily have referred me to his own respected books and articles on the subject, but instead he kindly and patiently turned me onto a terrific resource, Terry Pinkard who has freely offered to the world the entire text of his German-to-English translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in side-by-side, English-only, and chapter-by-chapter versions.