Reason's Greetings

A few weeks ago I heard a story about a coalition of atheist groups purchasing space on billboards in Denver and Colorado Springs to post slogans like “Don't believe in God?– you're not alone.” These public declarations of unbelief join the efforts of the American Humanist Association which purchased ads on buses and in newspapers in New York City and Washington, D.C., asking their fellows: "Why believe in god? Just be good for goodness sakes!"

And now The Wall Street Journal reports that “nonbelievers of every description -- will gather in dozens of cities at the end of December to mark the holiday they call HumanLight.”

Ironically these secularists will celebrate by emulating common religious rituals as they sing from a Humanist hymnal, decorate a winter wreath, or light “candles dedicated to personal heroes.”

This recent surge onto the public scene of humanists, secularists, skeptics, agnostics, atheists, and self-proclaimed heretics both surprised, and I must admit, bemused me.

On the one hand, it takes a real act of courage to proclaim your lack of belief in a divine creator in a society where a 2007 Gallup poll showed that most Americans would rather vote for an openly gay person to become president than an atheist.

Yet launching these campaigns at the beginning of a major religious season does seem to be throwing down the gauntlet. Certainly displays like the placard the Freedom from Religion Foundation placed near a Nativity display at the Washington State Capitol have an “in your face” quality. The placard begins innocuously enough with the words: "At this season of the Winter Solstice, may reason prevail” but concludes with the far more combative: "Religion is but myth and superstition that hardens hearts and enslaves minds."

That is hardly the way to win friends and influence public opinion, particularly for a much maligned minority that makes up no more than five to ten percent of the population.

Of course, it's typical of our fast moving, jump cut, sound bite media culture that complex ideological and philosophical questions about freedom of expression and the existence of God are being waged through billboards, placards, and bumper stickers.

But it's also ironic that the very development of atheism as a modern philosophical and ethical position was fostered in large part by the same historical processes that generated so many of the Christian religious sects that now flourish in the United States.

If Gutenberg had not used his new printing press to publish the Bible and make it far more accessible, and if men like Tyndale, Luther, and Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples had not translated new versions of the Bible into English, German, and French so that most people could actually read it, we would not have had the revolution in the relation between individual and God that Protestantism created.

The most influential historical legacy of Protestantism derives less from its protest against the corruption of state religion than from its encouragement of each individual believer to pursue a personal relationship with God, mediated through the reading of the Bible.

As more and more believers interpreted the Bible on their own, the Protestant movement rapidly fractured into more and more individual religious sects--ranging from Lutherans and Calvinists to Huguenots, Methodists, Anabaptists, Quakers, and Deists--and the slippery slope of individual interpretation produced Christians who believed that the Bible was literally true we well as those who denied the divinity of Christ and eventually nonbelievers who came to reject the Bible as the revelation of God.

Not surprisingly nonbelievers demonstrate a similar heterogeneity of ideas about the existence of God. A quick perusal of Wikipedia's entries on atheism finds practical and theoretical varieties as well as links to “agnostic atheism” and “theological noncognitivism.” There appears to be just about as many different ways of talking about unbelief as there are talking about belief in God.

Of course, the hostility towards atheism in our culture has always had a lot less to do with religious differences than with a widespread fear that atheists are inherently immoral.

Philosophically I myself occupy a kind of boundary between believers and nonbelievers in that I was raised as a Missouri Lutheran and still hold myself to the Christian principle of “loving one's neighbor as one's self” even as I have come to doubt the existence of God.

So while I do not feel the hostility of a Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens towards those who hold religious beliefs, I do share a sense of impatience and even anger when I come across the canard that secularism/humanism/atheism is destroying the moral fabric of our nation and that the tiny fraction of Americans who do not believe in God are somehow responsible for all the social ills of our culture.

So I was encouraged when I read that among the responses to the atheist/religious billboard wars was an effort to build bridges between believers and nonbelievers.

A former president of the Atheist Alliance International, Margaret Downey and her colleagues, had underwritten a billboard reaching out to other atheists in Philadelphia. When a local church responded with a “pro-God” billboard, Downey and her group did not respond with escalation in rhetoric, but rather with an invitation to join forces to help a local charity.

The congregation of the Light Houses of Oxford Valley accepted Downey's olive branch, and the Christians teamed up with the atheists "to spend a half-day sorting and packaging food for the needy." Downey calls her approach "positive atheism" -- an effort to convince the public at large that most atheists share the same moral values as most other Americans.

I endorse Downey's efforts and in the spirit of such outreach, I will venture to offer my readers “Reason's Greetings” as well as my hope that all of us, believers, nonbelievers, the unaffiliated, and the church-goers will put aside our feelings about the existence of God and instead share our mutual commitment to loving our neighbors as ourselves and to helping those in need.

It's time to tear down the dichotomy between belief and unbelief that artificially divides us when the unmet needs of poverty, ignorance, injustice, and so many other forms of suffering are crying out for people of faith and people without faith to put their energies into solving our social ills and not in debating who holds the moral high ground.