I have noticed an unnecessary rift between theists and nontheists here at dkos and in the progressive community at large that needs addressing. I here use the term "nontheist", because it includes, among others, agnostics, atheists, Buddhists, Taoists and deists. [Oxford American Dictionary: "THEISM: belief in the existence of a god or gods, especially belief in one god as creator of the universe, intervening in it and sustaining a personal relation to his creatures. Compare with DEISM." "DEISM: An intellectual movement of the 17th and 18th Centuries that accepted the existence of a creator on the basis of reason but rejected belief in a supernatural deity who interacts with humankind. Compare with THEISM." ] I will be writing from the perspective of a nontheist who has studied and appreciated many religions. Although I was raised by atheists, there are also Quakers, Buddhists, and Catholics in my family; I respect them all.
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God talk minus flaming was attempted by RenaRF yesterday. It's a difficult task, one which I have started and abandoned several times already. Rena's noble effort hopefully made some progress, but for me missed the mark, because when you come from the majority Christian camp, without real understanding of nontheists, our history and experience, it's hard to avoid being hurtful to us. We seem to be political lepers. It's similar to unconscious racism or sexism. It can only be tempered by learning about us. For example, Rena made a statement about there not having been any great nontheists that she knew of -- I responded with a list that includes many of the Founding Fathers, cultural figures, writers, philosophers, artists, scientists, and inventors that have shaped our world.* Many of them are heroes of the progressive movement.
Many nontheists have attempted to explain what it's like to be on the receiving end of this bias, conscious or unconscious, against the value of our contributions, and indeed our intrinsic merit, but it continually goes unrecognized even here, as is common with majority privilege. To recap: progressive nontheists choose to be profoundly moral because of our acceptance of reality as it seems to be, with no absolute, we're on our own. (When we define moral, we mean things that really matter, like declining to inflict tyranny, harm or death.) It's a simple, practical matter of not soiling one's own nest. Nature and evolution have favored cooperation in social species from bacteria to humans, because it works to facilitate survival and reproduction. Ethics and cooperation are perfectly natural phenomena, under whatever rubric. As Albert Einstein once said: "It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere.... Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." ("Religion and Science", New York Times Magazine, 9 November 1930)
A common misunderstanding is that nontheists lack peak experiences of extreme awe. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nontheists have what the religious call "spiritual experiences" all the time; we just interpret them differently. And scientific knowledge accentuates and amplifies the appreciation of existence; it does not in any way reduce wonder. Indeed, it is wonder that draws people to science. When I look at a rainbow, I also see a sky full of billions of prismatic raindrops each refracting rainbows and nearly fall to my knees in homage to nature. We have no illusions about our humble place in it all -- looking through a good telescope at a cluster of galaxies millions of light years away is at once ennobling and devastatingly humbling, in the most profound way. Light that left millions of years ago to strike my retina at this moment -- if you haven't experienced it, there is no substitute. As Albert Einstein once said, "As the diameter of light increases, so also does the circumference of darkness." In other words, the more you know, the more questions arise, the richer the texture of reality, multiplying wonder. And I would add, the more amazing and precious this life is.
On the other hand, the very existence of nontheism appears to trouble many religious people. We gleefully continue to insult the intelligence and intellectual subtlety of progressive Christians by ridiculing their belief as equivalent to belief in unicorns and FSMs (I admit guilt). But, my fellow nontheists, please be aware that progressive Christians have internalized an extraordinarily powerful story of goodness made to suffer by injustice and corrupted power that constantly reminds them of the immense amount of work that is needed to be done for those who suffer. We can relate to that very well. We have come to the same conclusion by a different route. When gypsies meet at a festival, no one argues over how each got there. They sit around the campfire and share the warmth of each others' company. I hope for the day when we progressives can do that. But we first need to dispel the disrespectful myths about each other.
To me, it mattereth not what you believe. It's what you do. We volunteered for years during the 80s to work with a well-known Catholic priest in order to try to stop what we found intolerable -- the slaughter in Central America, directed and paid for by our government. I always felt in complete harmony with the peace and justice Catholics I knew and worked with. There was no time or reason to argue over philosophy, and thus it was rarely if ever discussed. Reality was right in front of us, in the form of scars on refugees from torture, in the eyewitness accounts of massacres of entire villages that we translated for the press, in the smuggled-out films of massacres at universities, in the priests and nuns and lay people who were murdered trying to help the poor. People were suffering and dying. Peace and justice Christians are among the truest, bluest, most indefatigable progressives you will ever hope to meet. Their faith is so deep and intrinsic, it's like the comfort of an old shoe that isn't felt, yet serves, elevates, and energizes. None ever patronized or tried to convert me. There was simply too much real work to be done. They, and other religious folk who work for peace and justice, are truly beautiful, among the best that humanity has to offer.
On the other hand, in order to gain knowledge, understand existence and heal the sick, rationalists, philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists have had to fight constant, often brutal interference from the various churches and religious folk that have gone so far as to torture and murder these Promethean heroes (among many others). This is part of the history of rationalism, science, and medicine; it goes back millennia. Few if any of the progressive Christians at this site support those crimes, and should not be tarred with that shameful history. The religious fascists of the past also hauled in St. Theresa of Avila for questioning and imprisoned St. John of the Cross. The real divide is between corrupted power and true humanity.
That is not to say that all scientists and rationalists were nontheists -- indeed, some of the most beautifully subtle concepts of deity have arisen from them, like the pantheism of Spinoza. But many were, in the way of Albert Einstein: "The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery-- even if mixed with fear-- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man." I can't imagine that any of us would find fault with this.
When I was young, it was regarded as impolite to talk about religion. The concern of the politics of the day was to keep religion and government separate, so that policy-making would constrain itself to those things that are common to all regardless of belief, an essential limitation and the wise rationale informing our Founding Fathers. As Thomas Jefferson once said, "...it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." Our Founders felt it necessary to include Article VI, section 3, in the Constitution that "... no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States." Yet, we still have a de facto test in the 21st century. For the nontheist 15% or so of the population, there is still no political representation, as Bill Maher pointed out. The majority of American society has not yet evolved to where our Forefathers began, for it was the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment that inspired the Founders of the United States, not any religion.
But now, when demagogues use religion as a cudgel, and attempt to claim transcendental authority for corrupt, improper and devastatingly harmful actions, nontheists feel a need to speak up. We have lived quietly among you, as the good neighbor, the helpful stranger, the interesting artist, the intelligent person you met at school or at a demonstration; we are everywhere. Now we are all under attack in America by a virulent strain of religiosity that bears no resemblance to the philosophies of peace, humility, and service that religious progressives know and strive to live by. It is indeed a "divide and conquer" strategy. A stern warning from Thomas Jefferson: "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own. It is error alone that needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself."
Finally, I feel it is essential for us all to make careful distinction between belief and knowledge. There are many things that we can know, that are true everywhere on earth, indeed anywhere in the Universe, regardless of what anyone believes, like physical laws and demonstrable scientific facts. Things like polio vaccine prevents polio, flu viruses mutate, and turning the key in a functioning car results in transportation. This knowledge works and has lifted us out of ignorance and lives that were "nasty, brutish, and short". Even Pope John Paul II stated that "Truth cannot contradict truth", giving deference to the facts of science, these facts that are common to us all. Belief is mutable -- it varies between individuals and over a single individual's lifespan. Thence, no one's belief system is universal or universally true and applicable and thus should have no place governing those who do not share it. There is enough that we all have in common to deal with. And there is plenty of good work to be done.
*George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, Ben Franklin, Tom Paine, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Susan B. Anthony, Luther Burbank, Ernest Hemingway, Upton Sinclair, George Orwell, Albert Einstein, Buddha, Lao Tzu, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, Voltaire, Jean-Paul Sartre, Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Pierre LaPlace, Simon Bolivar, Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Robert Frost, Thomas Huxley, Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Henry Stephens Salt (founder of the American Humanitarian League), Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Hardy, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Marie Curie, Frank Lloyd Wright, Kemal Ataturk, James Joyce, H.L. Mencken, D.H. Lawrence, Diego Rivera, Arthur Rubenstein, Jawaharlal Nehru, Linus Pauling, Joseph Campbell, Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and many, many more...