How I Learned Not to Fear the Anti-God Squad
As I read celebrity atheist Christopher Hitchens's recent Newsweek attack on the pope in particular and Roman Catholicism in general, I remembered an incident that happened when I was in the U.K. in early January. Walking out of London's Victoria Station, I was stopped by a TV reporter who asked me what I thought about the British atheists' newest ad campaign. It was one of those typical man-in-the-street interviews, with a reporter and a cameraman buttonholing passersby to find a snappy quote for the evening news.
In England, which has long been a cultural template for the U.S., the atheists, after years of calling themselves humanists, have finally come out of the closet. With strong support from the renowned Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, the new campaign has splashed an ad on the side of 800 British buses proclaiming, "There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Immediately following the ads came an announcement from the BBC early last month that it would add atheists to the list of various people of faith who are invited to offer the three-minute "Thought for the Day" on the influential Radio 4.
Britain has actually recognized atheism for some time now. As a country with an officially established church, it requires all its state primary schools to include religious-education classes. The classes often reflect the ethnic and religious composition of the schools' surrounding neighborhoods, so that those in heavily Muslim or Hindu communities will focus largely on non-Western religious traditions. Yet one mandate of all these classes involves introducing students to religious diversity and pluralism rather than teaching any specific dogma. In 2004, the government decided that pluralism requires that all schools include some instruction on atheism.
While figures for the U.S. suggest that 5% to 10% of our population claims not to believe in God, the comparable numbers in England are 35% to 40%. We should keep in mind, however, that, like surveys about sexual practices, body art or TV habits, such figures are always suspicious. When it comes to our private lives, how many of us conceal or exaggerate?
Back in the States, the closet door on adamant disbelief may not yet be open, but President Barack Obama's inaugural address certainly began turning the doorknob. For the first time in history, a president publicly acknowledged atheists by including "nonbelievers" in our "patchwork heritage" of "Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus." To make sure no one missed his point, he spoke admiringly of "humanists" and "those who subscribe to no faith" in his comments a few weeks later at, of all places, the National Prayer Breakfast.
Our new president's cautious phrasing may suggest that the country is not yet ready for the full debut of atheists, but they are certainly claiming a louder voice in the culture wars. And that voice sounds very different from the bizarre theatrics of Madalyn Murray O'Hare. A group once relegated to the edges of our culture, to college student unions and late-night cable, is now poised for prime time.
The somewhat aging enfant terrible Christopher Hitchens, author of an oddly dyspeptic attack on Mother Teresa ("The Missionary Position") and the recent bestseller "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," is simply the most public face of American atheism. Also on the bestseller list in the past have been Sam Harris's "Letter to a Christian Nation" and Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion." And now, behind the scenes, groups like American Atheists, the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Council for Secular Humanism have been busy publishing journals, funding college scholarships and establishing Web sites.
They are also venturing cautiously into advertising, with public campaigns in cities as diverse as Denver, Washington, Philadelphia and Charleston, S.C. Just in time for this year's Lenten season, an ad in gaudy Mardi Gras colors on the side of a New Orleans streetcar proclaims, "Don't Believe in God? You Are Not Alone."
So far, American atheists have no figurehead with the brilliance or literary and scientific prizes of Britain's Mr. Dawkins, the recently retired Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, where Balliol College named one of its most prestigious awards after him. Even so, these new American atheists are far better advocates for their cause than the dysfunctional O'Hare clan. Now that they have broken the ice, in fact, we should only hope that even more thoughtful atheists will follow them into the pool.
Why should believers welcome this emergence of unbelief? Why not? We should be glad that there are people, even the devil's disciples, who take religion seriously enough to attack it, especially in these days when God seems to appear only in quarrels over holiday displays, during political campaigns or on the self-help shelves of Barnes & Noble. Should the primary goal of religion really be to fund municipal crèches, allow politicians to end every speech with the tag "And God bless America," or inspire works like "Tea With God: A Divinely Inspired Self-Help Book" and "The Christian Entrepreneur: How to Profit From Your God-Given Idea"?
In attacking the cloistered monks and nuns of my Roman Catholic Church, the brilliant, if occasionally logorrheic, John Milton wrote in his defense of free speech, "Areopagitica," that "I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed." And what will possibly make us exercise and breathe more fully than challenges by intelligent, thoughtful opponents?
Even my Jesuit teachers admitted, at times grudgingly, that the Protestant Reformation re-energized the Catholic Church by forcing it to respond to Luther's call for religion to engage the world rather than separate from it. While some who trumpet their faith may be a little too eager to engage in petty squabbles, we should be able to expect our leaders in all fields to articulate how their beliefs shape their vision, values, actions and policies.
And if we truly believe that an open, vigorous marketplace of ideas will establish value and truth as clearly as honest and open economic markets, shouldn't we encourage everyone to enter that market?
I told the London reporter at Victoria that I admire people who take religion seriously enough to challenge it. And I suspect God would too, if he thought ads on the sides of buses or atheist thoughts for the day were as worthy of his time as helping people find meaning in their lives and peace in their souls. Perhaps if we are confronted with better questions about the meaning and value of religion, we will be forced to find better answers.
Mr. O'Sullivan, author of "The Books of Job," is Kenneth Curry Professor of Literature at Rollins College.
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Reader Comments:
Just a comment on the above
Just a comment on the above post. That quote has been found to be made up by someone. No one can find a reference to that quote, so it's best not to use it.
The only thing (I know) that Einstein said about Vedic culture was that we taught the world how to count.
Re: Quote from Einstein
All right, I withdraw that quote until there is evidence it was from Einstein.
Here is an actual Einstein quote:
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us the 'Universe', a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security." - New York Post, 28 November 1972
Anti-God Squad and Intelligent Design
This comment almost takes the side of the "atheistic" camp, but if you read to the end, you will see this is not the case.
The increase in atheistic propaganda could point to the fact that the bad times we live in make people more interested in spiritual life.
The atheistic camp, or perhaps more correctly, the skeptic or introspective side, wants to counteract this with their increased propaganda.
It can be well argued, that most of the "atheist" camp members are simply honest people who do not know of any other method for gaining knowledge than the ascending, empirical method. This is the method they have been teached since the times of their mothers milk. Who can blaim them?
But I feel the attack is more against the Christian creationists, who have been found without answers, for example when some court cases happened in USA against creationism in the school curriculum, and the whole creationist agenda was tested. They were found to be without answers and soundly defeated in court.
As a previous Christian myself, what I see coming out of this, is that the people will question their faith more deeply, and for many it will be a time when they will deepen their faith, and for others it will be a time when they will loose their faith.
Here is what the adherents of an intelligent Creator are up against:
The main argument the atheist camp has to offer is now that they have soundly defeated the Christian creationist camp, even in courts in the USA, where some schools started to offer the creationist school books replacing the evolutionist ones, or both side by side.
They say that the idea presented by the Christian creationists, that the component parts of the bacterial flagellum have no function outside the flagellum, is disproved by science. This denies the idea of irreducible complexity.
These components do function outside the flagella as pumps, adhesion systems and to allow bacteria glide over surfaces. Even the 20-molecule base is being thought to function as an evacuation system.
The same is true for the blood clotting system. Science predicted that more primitive blood clotting systems should exist in fish, for example, and they claim they have found that to be the case.
The final blow in the face of the Creationists could be that the human genome has 26 genomes, whereas the "forefather" of humans, the ape, has 28.
Now, if there are not two fused genes in the human genome, which are not fused in the apes, then the whole evolution theory is flushed down the toilet.
So far I have heard of only one fused gene, the gene no. 2, which would leave us with 27 genes, not 26 as we now have. Is there another fusion which apes do not have?
What is the defence of the Intelligent Design camp? Is it to deny these "findings of science" as not true? Personally I do not think that is a good path to thread, unless you are an established scientist, and can show how those findings are more an attempt to prove the atheist agenda than good science.
For me, being a member of the Hare Krishna movement, and the Vedic path, I have to see what my books say.
First, it states that this material world is a small part of creation, a playing field for those who do not want to serve the Supreme. Most of the living entities are in their true home, the spiritual world, engaged in loving pastimes with the Supreme Personality of Godhead.
For this world to work as a playing ground for souls not wanting to serve the Lord, the inhabitants with that attitude of I-me-mine have to be kept in ignorance about the source of the creation.
With that I mean that by reading the details of the micro- and macrokosmos, it should not be too obvious that there was a Creator behind it.
Otherwise there would be a clash between what the egocentric people found out and the desire in their hearts. The lord does not want this, since freedom is the prerequisite of love.
The Lord loves us, and He does not at all like the idea of forced conversion, either by weapon or empirical evidence. The Lord wants our desire for Him to be so strong when we finally return to His loving service, that we will never want to come back here again on the basis of our ever-existing freedom of choise.
Lord Vishnu could certainly foresee that humans would study nature and try to found out the origin of man and the creation.
Therefore He instructed Lord Brahma, to whom He delegated the task of creating this specific cosmos, to do it in such a way that the beings embodied within it would not find out via an empirical method.
I remember reading that Lord Brahma even asked Lord Vishnu, his Lord, how to avoid being proud from countless souls praising his achievements, and thus the above answer was solicited. Any commentator could provide the quote. If so, thank you beforehand.
If the empirical path to God is somewhat blocked, then how to attain true knowledge, how to realize the Supreme Personality of Godhead?
The answer is found in the Bhagavad-Gita, of which Mahatma Gandhi said:
In the Gita, Lord Krishna personally states ( http://www.asitis.com/4/34.html ):
"Just try to learn the truth by approaching a spiritual master. Inquire from him submissively and render service unto him. The self-realized soul can impart knowledge unto you because he has seen the truth".
This is the message that you find all the religions, that by finding a great soul dear to God and who loves God over everything else, and following the instruction of such a great soul, ones path Back to Godhead has begun.
In the Vedic tradition there is a system of checks and balances, and that means what the guru (spiritual master) says, what the sadhu (holy person) says, and what the shastra (scripture) says, has to be in harmony.
There is also a list of 26 Godly qualities of a person dear to God. Here those qualities are listed, and an explanation of each is given:
http://www.harekrishnatemple.com/bhakta/chapter23.html
In this way the message of God Vishnu or Krishna, wihtin the culture of the vedic tradition, has arrived to the present day, and a branch of this timeless tradition has manifested in the western countries in the form of the Hare Krishna movement. That vedic culture means the cultivation of our forgotten relationship with the Supreme Presonality of Godhead.
PS Although Einstein was known to have affinity towards Buddhism, he also gave the following quote: