Atheism
My Positions
- I consider myself an atheist.
- I do not consider myself a hard atheist. I do not claim to know that no god exists.
- My atheism is a response to the claims made by theists, not a worldview in its own right. If no one had ever claimed that a god exists, there would be no need for a word describing those who do not believe it.
Notes
- I do not act in the world as if a god or gods exist, or as if any religion is true.
- This is not a knowledge claim. It is a position in relation to the proposition that a god exists or that a religion is true. The proposition has not met its burden of proof (Hitchens' Razor, Sagan Standard), and so I do not accept it. See God for the detailed reasoning.
- The label "agnostic atheist" is sometimes more precise: agnostic as to knowledge, atheist as to belief. I use "atheist" because it answers the question people are actually asking, which is "do you believe?" rather than "do you know?" See Definitions, Atheism and Fire Hydrants for a longer rumination on labels.
- Atheism carries no further commitments. It does not entail materialism, determinism, or any particular politics, though I happen to hold several of those positions for separate reasons.
Personal Context
(These notes are a work in progress.)
I have never been religious or adopted a theistic worldview. I grew up in an irreligious household. My father was, and remains, an atheist, and my mother held what might be described as loosely spiritual beliefs of no particular flavour. My grandmother was more of a spiritualist and attended a spiritualist church, but she never took me along or tried to recruit me, which I suspect was due to my mother's intervention. This is all to say that I did not earn my atheism the hard way, as many have done, by emancipating themselves from a religious upbringing, all too often at the cost of family, friends, and social standing. I like to think I would have had the strength to do this had it been necessary, but I am acutely aware of just how many strong-minded, independent thinkers have found themselves wearing Nazi uniforms. The temptation to conform to one's society, in other words, can be extremely powerful. Those who have resisted that social momentum and stood their ground at great personal cost have my admiration.
That said, I was not entirely spared exposure to religion growing up; few, I suspect, are that lucky. In primary school (ages 7 to 10) I was taught to adopt a Christian (Church of England) worldview. We sang hymns and said prayers in the morning, and again before lunch. We performed the nativity at Christmas and had parables read to us during morning assembly. Also, somewhat oddly, my neighbour growing up was the local vicar. For a very brief period, and for reasons I do not fully recall or understand, I was a choirboy at his church. To the best of my recollection this lasted two or three weeks, and, odd as it may sound, I do not remember ever connecting it to religious belief. It was simply another oddity in the baffling and largely capricious experience of childhood.
I do remember, around the time Salman Rushdie published The Satanic Verses in 1988, when religious tolerance and intolerance were prominent in the news (and often confused for one another), feeling that I ought to have a position on this "God thing". Playing a sort of eleven-year-old's version of Pascal's Wager, I concluded that "Team Believe" was probably the safest bet, with the added bonus of being able to ask for things, which seemed rather appealing. For the rest of that day, and perhaps the following one, I attempted to adopt this view. But it didn't stick. I wasn't reasoning my way to rational atheism; I simply couldn't maintain what felt like an irrelevant and unnecessary idea. For me, believing in God was exactly like not believing in God, just with extra steps. I quickly lost interest.
Later, in my early teens, I had a friend who would often try to get my friends and me to spend time at the local youth church. He had had a turbulent childhood, as many in our town had, and I think he found comfort in the suspiciously open arms of the church. I don't believe he was particularly religious; rather, he was in need of support, and sadly the church was one of the few places that provided it. His attempts to bring us along were likely made at the request, or at the very least the strong encouragement, of the church leaders. The honeypot was an open "youth centre", a place we were told wasn't full of "church stuff" but was just somewhere we could go and hang out. The only time we were tempted to go, we discovered they had a pool table, a dartboard, musical instruments, and free soft drinks. We played pool tentatively and began to think the place might be all right. But before long we were ushered into a back room and pressured into saying prayers and talking about how great we thought Jesus was. We didn't go back after that.
Over the years my friend and I didn't stay in contact, but I understand he is now a vicar. The rest of us remained atheists.
Until my mid-twenties I hadn't seriously engaged with the idea of religion. I was, and still am, fairly liberal in my views. Religion simply wasn't for me, but I had adopted a live-and-let-live, agree-to-disagree mindset. In truth, I thought the world was growing out of its interest in religion, and that it was something of an anachronism. This was naïve, to say the least, as I was about to learn.
September 11, 2001. As I watched the World Trade Center towers fall, I was confronted with the reality that religion might not be content to leave me alone. To many, it seemed that Islam had just declared its intentions to the world. While the actions of a few were mistakenly seen as representative of an entire religion, it was undeniable that religion played a role, both in manipulating the individual actors and in empowering those who manipulated them, cloaked in authority and conviction. Terrorism, fear, paranoia, hatred, prejudice, ignorance, intolerance, conspiracy, bigotry, self-righteousness, and other ugly forces were injected into public life that day, fuelled by an emerging 24-hour news cycle. War followed, and religion was rarely far from the headlines. (See also 9-11 Terrorist attacks.)
On January 6, 2002, the world woke to the first article in The Boston Globe's Spotlight series exposing sexual abuse by Catholic priests. The headline read: "Church allowed abuse by priest for years." This marked the beginning of a seemingly endless torrent of sexual abuse and child rape allegations levelled at religious institutions, particularly the Catholic Church. We became numb to the steady stream of new cases, the horrifying scale, and the decades over which these crimes had been committed. What was at the time a shocking revelation soon became normal through repetition. Now the discovery of yet another ring of paedophile Catholic priests seems as unremarkable as the weather report. It became increasingly difficult to claim that religion was, or is, a force for good. (See The Catholic Church is a Force for Good in the World and Catholic Church Apologies.)
Four years later, on July 7, 2005, a coordinated series of suicide bombings struck London's public transport system during the morning rush hour. Four Islamist extremists detonated homemade explosives, killing 52 people and injuring over 700. Just months later, a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad. Unable to compel a retraction from Denmark's free press, a group of Danish imams and activists added further, more offensive images, not published by the newspaper, to a dossier they presented during a tour of the Middle East, including Egypt and Lebanon. The tour was intended to highlight perceived Islamophobia in Denmark, but it was the dossier, not the original publication, that provoked violent global protests. Soon after, various religious groups, Islamic and opportunistic non-Islamic alike, called for the reinstatement of blasphemy laws, demanding exemptions from free speech protections in the name of "religious sensitivity".
In 2006 religion was in the news again, and once again someone had written a book that had made a lot of people angry. Just as everyone wanted things to calm down and return to the illusory peace, along came this "militant atheist" Richard Dawkins with his dangerous book The God Delusion. It was condemned endlessly by the church in the news, with claims of deep "offence" and "insensitivity" of the sort we were all getting rather sick of. The church was far too slow to realise that it was inducing what was coming to be known as The Streisand Effect: the more religious outrage and scorn was poured onto the book, the more it was talked about, and the more people learned about it. For me, I suspect it was a lingering intrigue from the Satanic Verses controversy that led me to want to know what could possibly be so dangerous about a book. Surely, even if it was dangerous, it could hold no terrors for me; I already didn't believe. And so I read it. As someone who has Dyslexia, this was no small feat. Now I would listen to something like this as an audiobook, but at the time I actually picked it up and read it cover to cover.
The God Delusion had a profound effect on me. It was elegantly written and even witty. It calmly, and with no small charm, addressed the arguments for the existence of God (see Religious Apologetics). It made its case against religion plainly, and yet it was clearly angry that religion had for too long held sway over society without justification. The passion and wonder with which it described the natural world made the religious account seem not merely unsupported but small.
It also helped me realise that, despite how I might feel about religion, religion still had a great deal of influence over me, my life, and the society I lived in. Religious leaders were invited on stage to discuss matters of public welfare, health, science, and even foreign policy when there was no reason for them to be involved. Twenty-six Church of England bishops sit by right in the House of Lords. And while state schools in England, such as my primary school, have never been universally required to be Church of England, many were historically Anglican owing to their origins as church-led institutions, and all state schools remain legally required to provide a daily act of collective worship that is "wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character" (Education Reform Act 1988, continued by the School Standards and Framework Act 1998). It was this realisation that moved me from indifference to secularism.
(To be continued.)