Yesterday Esther and Syd and I went to The First Universalist Church in Minneapolis instead of the First Unitarian Society (FUS) that we’ve been going to. It was interesting because it so clearly illustrated what, until that point, I had only read about which is the markedly different personalities of the various UU congregations. While the FUS church is markedly humanist in outlook, the FUC was definitely more deistic. I use the word deistic because there was no specific theological ideology presented, but there was definitely a message presented in the sermon that was far more supernatural than at FUS. The minister talked about angels, God and “something beyond us that cares for us”. It bugged me.

The reason it bugged me was difficult for me to figure out at first. I mean, there is the obvious whole “I don’t believe in the supernatural and this church is supposed to respect that” thing but it was more than that. I was also bothered by comments made by the president of the UUA, Bill Sinkford, in a letter he sent in response to an open letter to him from Rebecca Parker (another UU minister, I believe) that was posted in the social hall at the church. Es and I had a good discussion about what bothered us about the service and also about the comments by Sinkford and in the course of that conversation I came to some realizations and understandings that I would like to comment on here.

A few things first, in case you haven’t read my blog before or have only read parts of it, I am an atheist. For most of my life I was a believer in Jehovah, the god of the Judeo-Christian bible. I was not, contrary to many (most?) believers, an intuitive believer in this god, but rather a “rational believer”. The religion I was raised in, Jehovah’s Witnesses, is very diligent in it’s use of apologetics to give reasons to believe. They publish books with their ideas on creationism, comparative religion, prophecy and bible infallibility and these books go a long way towards convincing Witnesses that their beliefs are based on reason and rationale as opposed to “blind faith” or “credulity”. That was one of the attractions of Jehovah’s Witnesses for me, probably the main one. By nature I am a rationalist first, everything else second. As a kid in middle school I remember telling people that if I were not raised a Jehovah’s Witness I would have probably been an atheist because I was never drawn to the concept of god or to religion. I didn’t tell my parents that, of course, but it was the truth. I became convinced of the truth of the Bible and Jehovah’s Witnesses interpretation of it in 1985 at the age of 12 when I read their book “Life-How Did it Get Here? By Evolution of Creation?” and was impressed by the logic and evidence. Other books like “Mankind’s Search for God” and “Revelation-It’s Grand Climax at Hand” further cemented my beliefs. The part about religion and belief in god I always had a problem with was that I never really felt god, I never really felt internally that there was such a thing, I just trusted the evidence I was given. Last year that melted away when I discovered that the logic in apologetics used by the Witnesses is deeply flawed and fallacious. Since I am a rationalist first at my core, I reverted to my natural state of atheism. Lacking a concrete reason to believe in something that cannot be seen or experienced in any way (except an internal way that I have never personally experienced) I lack belief in it. This is what I mean when I say I am an atheist.

Unlike most believers, I have delved deeply into studying the origins of the ideas contained in the Bible. In the course of my studies I learned about the origins of the belief in the Biblical Jehovah (aka: YHWH, Elohim, El) and the development of the text of the Bible. On some level I actually hoped to find something supernaturally inexplicable but instead discovered a profoundly human and explicable story behind the formation of the Bible, the development of monotheistic belief and the development of Christianity. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to holding on to some shred of hope that I’d find a rational basis for belief all they up until just a few weeks ago when I finally dug far enough back into my research to begin to understand the pre-Hebrew origins of YHWH. I mean, I never considered Ba’al real, I see no reason to hold out any hope that his brother Yahweh is real either. Anyhow, that’s a bit of my background. I reached atheism by studying the roots of theism and finding that theism is based on human ideas invented in ignorant and regrettable times. My default state is to not believe something without a reason, god is a pretty huge thing to believe without a reason.

I do not consider myself an agnostic, despite the fact that I don’t deny that a god is possible. After all, no rationalist can rule out a logical possibility (namely, that a something/somebody exists that could be called god) but after examining all the so-called evidence in favor of the idea I can safely leave all the known gods (Jehovah/Yahweh and Christ included) in the same dustbin with leprechauns, elves and dragons. Here is what I will say with absolute certainty about god at this point. If such a being exists, it has nothing to do with us OR has never communicated with humans OR is represented by some belief system I have yet to encounter. This being, if it exists, left no obvious sign of it’s existence that can be detected by rational means and no discernible message about what, if anything, it wants/wanted. The fact of the matter (as any analysis that includes all the available evidence will attest) is that every single religion and holy scripture can be traced to distinctly human causes and creators. An agnostic position says that god (usually the Biblical one) might or might not exist, it’s just unknown. An atheist position says that on consideration of the evidence in favor of god (none) and the evidence for human origin of belief in god (all of it) the idea of god can reasonably be considered a human invention. If new evidence were to arise to provide positive evidence and explain the negative evidence in a way that recasts it in a light that supports the idea of god, then any rationalist would have to go ahead and consider it and change position.

Now, after that lengthy aside, I will get back to my point. As a formerly god-believing atheist I can understand (in a way that believers or people who never believed might not be able to) the viewpoints of both the theistic and atheistic sides of the issue. I can understand why some theistic writers claim that atheists do not actually exist. For example, an essay by a Dr. John Russell (available here) states:

“Atheistic rationalizations or systems of belief do exist as abstractions in the minds of human beings. But, Atheists Do Not Exist.”

I highly recommend reading his essay because it illustrates just how little believers actually understand about the minds of non-believers. I want to discuss a few of the things in this essay now as another little aside…

First, he claims that there are least three types of atheism:

“1. Practical atheism includes those who have become disillusioned with religion or who choose to ignore God. They live as though there were no God.

2. Dogmatic atheism includes those who openly profess atheism. These people may be militant and will probably have a codified “theology.” Examples of dogmatic atheists are the secular humanists, Marxists and certain philosophers. Elaborate rationalizations are required in order to maintain some semblance of personal integrity.

3. Virtual atheism includes those who hold principles that are inconsistent with the belief in God or violate the common use of language. God is defined in such vague terms as, “an active principle in nature,” “the social consciousness,” “the unknowable,” “personified reality,” “energy,” or “force.”"

Notice his choice of words here. The first type, “practical atheism” is described as people who just ignore God out of disillusionment with religion who live as if there is no god. These people exist, certainly, but one would have to wonder if they really are atheists if they still believe but just lack the discipline to follow an organized religion. I guess I would personally put people in this group in the agnostic or even theistic-but-not-religious category. The second group, “dogmatic atheism” is the most interesting as I am a secular humanist (as are most UU folks in the FUS congregation) so it claims to represent me. He claims, “elaborate rationalizations are required in order to maintain some semblance of personal integrity”. Now, leaving the completely offensive nature of the comment aside for a moment, notice what this remark tells about the writer. It tells you that writer firmly believes that the default position for all human minds if theistic and that atheists rationalize themselves into non-belief against their own natures. He makes this clear at two other points in his essay in which he claims:

“Anthropologists have found belief in the existence of God in all cultures. Thus, science, history and the Bible concur in the universal belief that God exists. Somewhere deep in the human spirit there is a settled knowledge that God is. If I choose a lifestyle that is opposed to the Bible, then my mind begins to rationalize in an attempt to justify my behavior. This process works automatically on an unconscious level, as well as on a conscious level. This process can be triggered by at least two events: (1) A perceived injustice, in which the individual gets mad at God, or (2) A deliberate choice of the individual to do wrong.”

and

“When there is no longer a psychological “need” to believe in atheism, the mind reverts to a normal theistic belief.”

He is quite clearly saying that he believes that the natural state for all human beings is an innate belief in god. What he fails to recognize is that the existence of the belief of god in all CULTURES does not equate to the belief in god in all INDIVIDUALS any more than the presence of a preference for the color red in all cultures would mean that everybody likes the color red. The belief in god is common, maybe even the majority belief, but is far from universal. In fact, the belief in a monotheistic god, such as the Judeo-Christian tradition asserts, is actually a minority view among human kind. More human beings currently alive and having lived throughout history believe in multiple gods or none than believe in a single universal god.

The writer states that atheism is an “arrogant” belief because “the believer must assume that he has an exhaustive knowledge of all things in the universe” but this argument is absurd. An atheist need only have sufficient knowledge of the specific claims of god that they are rejecting. I do not need to know all things in the universe to establish that the Biblical god is a human fiction, I only need sufficient knowledge of the history of the development of Christianity and Judaism and the development of the Bible. If I do not find evidence in that process of a divine hand and if I find positive evidence of purely human motives, I have no choice but to reject that particular concept of god. One, of course, could turn this argument right back at a theist and say that theism is an arrogant position because it assumes a special privileged knowledge of not only the physical universe, but also another metaphysical dimension that can’t be found by reason but only through the believers internal “faith”.

Before I get back to the main point of this long rambling post, I want to assault one last set of claims this writer makes:

“It is more rational to believe in God, since one can more easily infer the existence of God through limited knowledge.

There are five main areas of evidence:

1. Intuition, which states that the belief in the existence of God exists universally in the human psyche. Even in the atheist’s mind, the idea of God necessarily exists in order for him to attempt to disprove the existence of God. When there is no longer a psychological “need” to believe in atheism, the mind reverts to a normal theistic belief.

2. The Jewish and Christian Scriptures assume the existence of God. The scriptures are credible, and therefore are a strong witness for the existence of God.

3. Rational arguments support the existence of God. The first rational argument is the

3.1 Cosmological (Cause-Effect) Argument: Since everything that had a beginning had a cause, the universe itself must have had a cause. To say that matter or energy is eternal is to deny basic human cause-effect thinking, and simply begs the question. The second rational argument is the

3.2 Teleological Argument: The order and design in the universe imply an intelligent and purposeful Creator. The third rational argument is the

3.3 Ontological Argument: The idea of God implies something of what he must be if he exists: infinite and perfect; and since human beings would not conceive of such an idea, the idea must have come from God. Therefore, God exists. The fourth rational argument is the

3.4 Moral Argument: Human beings have a conscience, which tells us what is right and wrong, and urges us to do the responsible thing. If we do right, conscience rewards us. If we do wrong, conscience “punishes” us. Implied is the existence of the creator of conscience, a moral lawgiver, who rewards good behavior and corrects wrong behavior. The fifth rational argument is the

3.5 Argument from Congruity: The theory that best explains the related facts is probably right. The existence of God as described in the Bible best explains the available evidence.

4. A changed life: the most compelling evidence for the existence of God is a changed life. When one accepts Christ as his Savior, his/her life is changed for the better. Drug addictions drop; marriages are saved; love replaces hatred; hope replaces despair; life replaces death. When many receive Christ in a society, society is changed for the better—see Timothy L. Smith’s Revival and Social Reform for documentation.

5. Cumulative evidence: The cumulative evidence for the existence of God is stronger than any single fact or argument. ”

As you can see, he considers the rational position to be theism but each of these arguments proves fallacious. On the first point, the intuitive belief in god does not exist universally. I can personally state that if the idea of god hadn’t been taught to me at a very young age, it never would have occurred to me. It’s a strange and counter-intuitive idea for me and I had to wrestle to maintain belief in it for years. So, this is an argument from a false premise. The belief in god is not universal and even if it were, human intuition is far from a reliable guide to the way things actually are. Intuition would tell you the sun revolves around the earth, for example, and be dead wrong.

His second point, that the Bible assumes the existence of god and is a credible witness is something I have researched extensively and I can only say that this is silly and demonstrates a lack of understanding about the Bible. The Bible, if examined properly, demonstrates a belief in the existence of multiple gods, developing into the belief in a single one. It shows the development of ideas, but does not demonstrate the truth or falsehood of those ideas. It is contradictory, erroneous on many counts (both historical and scientific) and does not stand up to critical scrutiny. The Bible is strong evidence for the human belief in god but not for the existence. I don’t need the Bible to show me that people believe, bumper stickers can prove that rather easily.

Point three brings up some “rational” arguments for god. The first is cosmological, or the law of cause and effect. Since everything has a cause, the universe must, i.e. god. This one is easily demonstrated as silly by asking the question, “what was the cause of God?”. Is it more rational to believe that a complex rational cosmic God just happens to exist without cause or to believe that the underlying non-sentient energy of the universe just happens to exist? One (god) is infinitely complex and the other is not. I find it entirely irrational to believe that infinite complexity and intelligence can “just happen” but that mindless energy has to have a cause. Theists postulate a far lass rational idea than non-theists on this front. The second argument, teleological, uses the words “order and design” in reference to the universe. There are many, myself included, who see a balance in the universe between order and chaos, between organization and entropy and with analysis come to realize that the universe is not a symphony of order and purpose but is in fact a series of complex systems that exhibit all the positives and negatives one would expect of complex but mechanistic processes. There is the illusion of design, but it tends to fall apart once the causes for the observed effects are understood. The next argument is odd, it states that because human beings would not have conceived of the idea of a perfect god, therefore he exists because the idea could only have come from him. This is ridiculous. Billions of human beings have lived and they have conceived of pretty much everything that anybody you care to name and the moment you name it, it’s been conceived of by a human being. There is nothing to stop a human from conceiving of an infinite and perfect god or a purple leprechaun or a giant turtle supporting the earth. It’s called “imagination” and is far from rational. The fourth argument, the moral one, claims that conscience could only come from god. This is incorrect, as the evolutionary forces that would shape the development of conscience are quite well understood. It is a strong survival trait among humans to have a conscience and natural selection has selected for it. This does not argue for god. The final point is the nail in the coffin of theism. Congruity. The theory that best explains the related facts is probably right. The theory of the god of the Bible does not satisfactorily explain any of the available evidence, although the evidence clearly supports the idea of the human development of belief in that god. His additional two points, a changed life and “cumulative evidence” are additionally pointless. Lots of things change the lives of people for the better and for the worse. I know people who have been driven to madness and suicide by belief in god and people who have had their lives changed dramatically for the better by drugs, technology and all sorts of things. For many people belief in god is a powerful agent of personal change but that change need not be externally motivated. The belief itself is powerful and causes change internally. It’s a “placebo effect” if you will. The cumulative evidence for the existence of god is nothing but the cumulative evidence for human belief in god is overwhelming.

Now, to attempt to circle back to my original point… This guy here demonstrates a very common belief among theists which is that atheists are simply willfully constructing a self-delusion, that they are trying to avoid the consequences of belief in god although they actually have it. I find that it is quite a common belief among theists that atheists are secretly theists but just don’t want to believe. it seems impossible for some of them to grasp that perhaps there are people who WANT to believe, but can’t do so without evidence. I personally cannot conceive of believing in something without evidence in your favor and yet I am not willing to be so foolish as to deny the existence of the majority of people who do.

This illustrates one of the difficulties facing atheists, however, it is not the only attitude confronting a non-theist. The other is more difficult to describe and discuss but is evident in the dialogue between William Sinkford and Rebecca Parker and in the message that came from the pulpit at the FUC church this week, and that is the assumption that theists and non-theists share the same basic concept of the mystery of life and that the language used in that discussion is inherently “god oriented”.

To understand the nature of the dialogue, it helps to understand the initial statement that started the controversy. The issue under discussion was the need for a vocabulary of reverence for non-theistic humanists. Sinkford is the head of the Unitarian Universalist Association, a group consisting of lots of atheist UU members and he made the following comment:

“Our resistance to religious language, I believe, helps to account for the struggle that so many of us experience in trying to say who we are as Unitarian Universalists. I always encourage people to work on their elevator speech, what you’d say when you’re going from the sixth floor to the lobby and somebody asks you, “What’s a Unitarian Universalist?” You’ve got forty-five seconds. Here’s my latest: ‘The Unitarian side tells us that there is only one God, one spirit of life, one power of love. The Universalist side tells us that God is a loving God, condemning none of us, valuing the spark of divinity that is in every human being.’ So my version of what Unitarian Universalism stands for is, ‘One God, no one left behind’.”

When the leader of a group consisting of a large number of true atheists, people like myself who simply find the entire concept of god irrational and non-intuitive, makes a statement like this, defining the religion as “one God, no one left behind” you might be able to imagine that some of those people weren’t so keen on it. In fact, people were downright furious that he used the “G” word to describe their religion. I attended a sermon by American Humanist Association president Mel Lipman in which he talked about how bothered he was by this choice of words. I then attended the sermon on sunday in which the minister used similar language, talking about angels and god, trying to be as inclusive as possible in her choice of words, using angels as a metaphor and god as a name for something beyond the ego. This turned both Esther and I off to the message and we got to talking about it and in the process I came to a realization. When theists treat non-theists as theists who simply use a different vocabulary to talk about god, they completely deny and disrespect the situation a non-theist is in and in so doing they belittle the non-theist even as they seem to be tolerating them.

To illustrate, the minister talked about caring and about whether people felt as if they were cared by something other than other humans, something beyond themselves. She said that she spoke to others within the congregation and found that the people she spoke to all said that they had felt that caring support from outside themselves. She talked about the idea that the regardless of faith tradition, when we talk about that “thing that’s beyond ego” that we’re talking about the divine. She talked about how we’re all seeking to discover this caring and that it helps us feel comforted in the human condition. This, however, is completely wrong where an atheist is concerned.

Somebody who does not believe there is a god or the supernatural, who has never felt the “presence” or “external caring” in their lives but who has reverence and awe for their lives and situation is emphatically not referring to the same thing that a theist is when they refer to god. A theist feels grateful for the gift of their life from god. A non-theist, on the other hand, is grateful to their parents for the part they played in it and might marvel at the odds that they exist at all and be deeply awed by the sheer unlikeliness of the whole thing, but they do not feel indebted to any external force. A theist seeks something outside of themselves, they seek to understand and venerate somebody else, a non-theist simply tries to understand how to make the most of the fortunate position they find themselves in by existing in the first place. The dilemma facing the believer in life is understanding their relationship to god, the dilemma facing the non-believer is understanding how to make the best use of the limited time they have.

To refer to my awe and reverence for the universe, for the humbling thought of my tiny life span measured against the span of the age of the cosmos as the same thing as reverence for god completely devalues, misunderstands and disrespects what that means for me and does nothing to help me with my issues as a human being. I am in awe of my tininess next to the universe, not in awe of some fictional comparatively recent human conception of where that universe came from. I want to know how to deal with my life within the framework of what the universe is, I don’t need to hear how theists place the responsibility for support and personal growth outside of themselves on some supernatural force. I have no intuitive or factual way basis for thinking such a thing exists. This places the responsibility for my life square on my shoulders and that is an entirely different situation than the situation facing a believer. God is not a synonym, our personal dilemmas are not equivalent and, this is the important bit, by defining the vocabulary the theistic side defines the issue in terms that literally make it IMPOSSIBLE to communicate what a non-theist actually believes. Contrary to the belittling statements of people who deny the existence of atheists or who think they atheists simply give a different name to god, atheists are usually people who find themselves stuck with the realization (which they didn’t even want) that god simply wasn’t there to be found and they were stuck with figuring it all out for themselves. This is a lonely and frightening prospect when it’s first encountered and is often a shock. People in this situation, people in my situation, have challenges in life that are completely different from the challenges of the theist and part of that is the need to find answers in themselves and in the world around them.

This is not shallow, cheap or less awe-inspiring than the feelings of a theist, in fact you feel so very small and alone, not arrogant but humbled and fortunate and it’s bothersome to constantly hear the terms of the discussion using a language that does not convey the ideas or challenges facing an atheist at best or that belittles an atheist as if they are simply immoral or stupid. I would rather theists just honestly admit that they differ from non-theists and stop pretending that it’s just a matter of semantics rather than that they pretend it all means the same thing in the name of inclusiveness (while using language that inherently disrespects the non-theistic viewpoint).

I’m an atheist. I don’t want to avoid god. If there was evidence that god existed, I’d be a theist. If there were evidence that a particular god was real, I’d believe in that one. I can’t find evidence of god in general or the Bible god in particular. I just wish that believers could at least comprehend the real situation, motivation and dilemma of a non-theist and use language that allowed that situation to be mutually understood but by using theistic terminology they can not. It’s extremely frustrating in general and doubly so in a group like UU that is supposed to be beyond these things.

I doubt I will return to FUC because I am not looking to religion to help me find somebody outside of humanity, I am looking to it to provide me with a connection to humanity and practical solutions to the problems of existence that don’t require that I fake the belief in the supernatural. The supernatural is a crutch, a mental shortcut to prop people up in times of distress and confusion but a crutch only works if it can legitimately be leaned on. For me, that is not possible. So, being tolerant of me, the atheist, is not helping anything. I need you, the theist, to attempt to understand what it means to be in my situation and to offer, if possible, solutions or empathy based on humanity without the supernatural which is powerless in my case. If you cannot do that, we are not having a dialogue, you are simply not understanding me.

I think there needs to be, and I might try to put it together, a primer for believers that explains the different problems facing the atheist in super simple terminology that they can understand. Preferably with pictures. :-)

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