Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (63 page)

If you’re interested in seeing this kind of conversation and connection between different worldviews, Non-Prophet Status is the place to watch it happen. Check out the later section, “
Building bridges with the religious
” for more on what Stedman has written.

Providing perspective: Skepchick

Founded in 2005, Skepchick (
skepchick.org
) is the place to go for lively and intelligent blogging from the perspective of skeptical and/or atheist women. Described as “an organization dedicated to promoting skepticism and critical thinking among women around the world,” Skepchick is a collaboration of 18 writers, including a PhD in astronomy, a cultural anthropologist, a computational quantum chemist, an attorney, a former Muslim, the director of African Americans for Humanism, an artist, a couple of biologists, a pharmacologist, and an entomologist.

Writing with “intelligence, curiosity, and occasional snark,” the contributors tackle topics including science, skepticism, feminism, atheism, secularism, and pseudoscience with writing that is crisp and engaging. Skepchick is one of the great destination blogs in freethought.

Going beyond the Intellectual: The Complete Life without Gods

Letting go of supernatural beliefs is just the beginning of building a secular life. As ever-larger numbers of people walk away from those beliefs, a growing need for resources exploring ways to live a satisfying and complete life without religion exists.

These sections present a number of recent books that go beyond intellectual questions, addressing meaning, spirituality, inspiration, and ethics for the nonreligious.

Getting godlessly spiritual

The title of
The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality
(Viking) by André Comte-Sponville often draws a chuckle. Some see a contradiction in “atheist spirituality,” whereas others assume the book is a lightweight, touchy-feely book that substitutes religion with the Age of Aquarius. Fortunately it’s much better than that — a thought-provoking, accessible little book that tackles all of those important intangibles that a human being runs into after she’s given up the gods.

Comte-Sponville writes with the relaxed confidence of the European atheist he happens to be. For anyone deafened by the culture war, this kind of book is like hearing new music that’s refreshing and surprising. The author has advantages, of course — atheism doesn’t cause as many fits of the vapors among French philosophers as it does in Alabama. That leaves him freer to think and build instead of reacting and defending quite so much, so he can raise intriguing new questions instead of answering the same tired batch. He thinks about community and loyalty, the ways people stay attached to ideals and committed to each other after faith is gone, and how people think about and react to the death of loved ones without the traditional supports.

He has no interest in attacking religion and the religious. “Humanity is far too weak and life far too difficult for people to go around spitting on each other’s faiths,” he says. “I loathe fanaticisms of all kinds, including atheistic fanaticism.” So he’s not looking to de-convert anyone — just to understand and live his own life, and to help others do so. His book is a tolerant atheist perspective much less often heard, and a welcome addition to the 21st century atheist chorus.

“Truth, not faith, is what sets us free,” he says at the end of this marvelous little book. “We are already in the kingdom. Eternity is now.”

Flipping the idea of holiness

Chet Raymo is a physicist who occupies the challenging middle ground between religion and irreligion. Calling himself a “religious naturalist,” Raymo says he “attend[s] to this infinitely mysterious world with reverence, awe, thanksgiving, praise,” which he notes are “all religious qualities,” but doesn’t think there’s a supernatural God at the root of it all.

In
When God is Gone, Everything is Holy
(Sorin Books)
,
Raymo suggests that supernatural beliefs put limits on people’s experience of what he calls “holiness” — the wonder and mystery of the world — and that letting go of those beliefs can release that quality into the wider world. What was once mundane is now a full part of the mystery — and that includes all of humanity.

As Chris Stedman and others have found, being in that middle ground draws fire from both sides. Raymo’s use of words like “holy” and “mystery,” as well as his desire to hold on to some of the Catholic perspective of his youth, doesn’t sit well with some atheists. But others — especially those who are also in that middle ground, like Unitarian Universalists — find a lot of value and wisdom in Raymo’s approach.

Creating a humanist Bible

A few years back, British atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling had an arresting thought: How would world history have been different if the writers of the Bible used Greek and Roman philosophy instead of local religions as their sources? But they didn’t so Grayling did. The result is
The Good Book: A Humanist Bible
(Walker & Co.).

Despite the title, Grayling didn’t mean for his humanist bible to shove the Bible bible aside. He wanted to create a secular contribution to the age-old conversation humanity has with itself about the good. So he did what the creators of the Bible did — selected texts from a number of different sources, then edited them, wove them together, and added a bit of his own thoughts to make it flow.

But here’s the twist: It’s not just a collection of excerpts, an approach that’s been done a thousand times before. Instead, Grayling put everything into a kind of biblical structure, with chapters and verses, allowing the reader to really imagine that the original may have turned out very differently with different sources. If you know Plato and Aristotle, you’ll see their ideas pop up in this or that verse, but without citation. It’s a completely different way of experiencing their work, and you get the same kind of narrative flow you get from scriptures. Well worth a look.

Seeking the good without God

In
Chapter 9
, I introduce the Humanist Community at Harvard University and Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain who runs it. Both Greg and his organization play a crucial part in global humanism today, and Greg’s 2009 book
Good Without God: What A Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe
(William Morrow)
is a great contribution to the discussion of human ethics and life without belief in God.

Epstein is a relentlessly energetic and positive guy who’s devoted his adult life to studying humanism and putting it into action. If anyone can make the case for that transition from words to actions in a secular context, he’s the one.
Good Without God
argues that there’s nothing theoretical about the ability of humanists to lead meaningful and compassionate lives — they’re already doing it.

Some aspects of Epstein’s work and “New Humanism” in general have drawn sharp criticism from within the atheist community, from the idea of a humanist chaplain to participation in interfaith dialogue and cooperation to his criticism of the tactics of New Atheists, both stated and implied.

Good Without God
followed several New Atheist books onto the New York Times Best Seller list and has become a useful catch phrase for billboards, organizations, and events promoting this less confrontational form of unbelief.

Building bridges with the religious

Chris Stedman became an evangelical Christian in his teens. But when he came out as gay, and that community turned its back on him, he began to question his beliefs. Eventually he decided he was an atheist.

Change a detail here and there and you have the story of many an atheist. But Stedman’s story took a different turn after he left the fold. Instead of diving into his new secular life without a backward glance, or glancing back only to berate, Stedman recognized that not everything he’d lost had been bad. He also became aware that for all of the obvious differences, the religious and nonreligious shared a lot of common ground, more than either side usually saw.

Stedman had become a “faitheist” — a derogatory name some atheists use to describe other atheists who they see as too accommodating toward religion. Eventually he wrote a memoir of his experiences and co-opted the word for his title:
Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious
(Beacon Press).

Unlike many of the other books in this chapter,
Faitheist
isn’t a collection of arguments or a work of history. It’s a story, specifically a memoir of Stedman’s own complicated path through religion and into atheism. He went through the phases so many former believers describe — thinking he could fix Christianity, looking East for another religion, deciding religion was garbage but God was real, and then finally, in an instant, getting rid of God as well.

But as he engaged in the atheist community, he began to feel that something was missing. They had the intellectual side of life managed really well. But he felt that the more emotional, humane side of life, the side that religion had fulfilled for him, received too little attention.

The last chapters of the book describe Stedman’s re-engagement with religion — not for its beliefs, which he still rejected, but for what it seemed to know about satisfying human need — as well as his breakthrough work as an atheist in the interfaith movement.