The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever (4 page)

It is very often argued that religion must have some sort of potency and relevance, since it occurs so strongly at all times and in all places. None of the authors collected here would ever have denied that. Some of them would argue that religion is so much a part of our human or animal nature that it is actually ineradicable. This, for what it may be worth, is my own view. We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we persist in self-centeredness. That could be a lengthy stretch of time. However, it is just as certain that we shall continue to cast a skeptical and ironic and even witty eye on what we have ourselves invented. If religion is innate in us, then so is our doubt of it and our contempt for our own weakness.

Some of the authors and writers and thinkers assembled in these pages are famous for other reasons than their intelligence and their moral courage on this point. Several of them are chiefly celebrated because they took on the most inflated reputation of all: the elevation into a godhead of all mankind’s distilled fears and hatreds and stupidities. Some of them have had the experience of faith and the experience of losing it, while others were and are, in the words of Blaise Pascal, so made that they cannot believe.

Arguments for atheism can be divided into two main categories: those that dispute the existence of god and those that demonstrate the ill effects of religion. It might be better if I broadened this somewhat, and said those that dispute the existence of an
intervening
god. Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be determined. Defining matters in this way, I can allow myself to mention great critics such as Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine, who perhaps paradoxically regarded religion as an insult to god. And sooner or later, one must take a position on agnosticism. This word has not been with us for very long—it was coined by the great Thomas Huxley, one of Darwin’s stalwart defenders in the original argument over natural selection. It is sometimes used as a half-way house by those who cannot make a profession of faith but are unwilling to repudiate either religion or god absolutely. Since, once again, I am defining as religious those who claim to know, I feel I can lay claim to some at least of those who do
not
claim to know. An agnostic does not believe in god, or disbelieve in him. Non-belief is not quite unbelief, but I shall press it into service and annex as many agnostics as I can for this collection.

Authors as diverse as Matthew Arnold and George Orwell have given thought to the serious question: what is to be done about morals and ethics now that religion has so much decayed? Arnold went almost as far as to propose that the study of literature replace the study of religion. I must say that I slightly dread the effect that this might have had on literary pursuit, but as a source of ethical reflection and as a mirror in which to see our human dilemmas reflected, the literary tradition is infinitely superior to the childish parables and morality tales, let alone the sanguinary and sectarian admonitions, of the “holy” books. So I have included what many serious novelists and poets have had to say on this most freighted of all subjects. And who, really, will turn away from George Eliot and James Joyce and Joseph Conrad in order to rescrutinize the bare and narrow and constipated and fearful world of Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Osama bin Laden?

It is often unconsciously assumed that religious faith is somehow conservative and that atheism or “freethinking” are a part of the liberal tradition. This is for good and sufficient historical reason, having to do with the origins of the American and French revolutions. However, many honorable and intelligent conservatives have rejected “faith” on several grounds. These grounds may include sheer implausibility, or the apparent privilege given by religion to one of its main constituencies—that of the losers, the diseased, the inert, the mendicants, and the helpless. To many an upright poor person, it seems needless to invent a god who will wash the feet of beggars and exalt those who do not care to labor. What is this but a denial of thrift and a sickly obsession with the victim? The so-called common people are quite able to penetrate this ruse (“The good lord must indeed love the poor, since he made so many of them”). Many decent people are made uneasy by the constant injunction to give alms and to dwell among those who have lost their self-respect. They can also see the hook sticking out of the bait: abandon this useless life, leave your family, and follow the prophet who says that the world is soon to pass away. Such an injunction coupled with an implicit or explicit “or else” is repulsive to many conservatives who believe in self-reliance and personal integrity, and who distrust “charity,” just as it was repulsive to the early socialists who did not think that poverty was an ideal or romantic or ennobled state.

Finally, I want to come to the question of sex. If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life. The disease is pervasive, from the weird obsession with virginity and the one-way birth canal through which prophets are “delivered,” through the horror of menstrual blood, all the way to the fascinated disgust with homosexuality and the pretended concern with children (who suffer worse at the hands of the faithful than any other group). Male and female genital mutilation; the terrifying of infants with hideous fictions about guilt and hell; the wild prohibition of masturbation: religion will never be able to live down the shame with which it has stained itself for generations in this regard, anymore than it can purge its own guilt for the ruining of formative periods of precious life.

A saving grace of the human condition (if I may phrase it like that) is a sense of humor. Many writers and witnesses, guessing the connection between sexual repression and religious fervor, have managed to rescue themselves and others from its deadly grip by the exercise of wit. And much of religion is so laughable on its face that writers from Voltaire to Bertrand Russell to Chapman Cohen have had great fun at its expense. In our own day, the humor of scientists such as Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan has ridiculed the apparent inability of the creator to know, let alone to understand, what he has created. Gods seem not to know of any animals except the ones tended by their immediate worshippers and seem to be ignorant as well of microbes and the laws of physics. The self-evident man-madeness of religion, as well as its masculine-madeness in respect of religion’s universal commitment to male domination, is one of the first things to strike the eye.

A terrible thing has now happened to religion. Except in the places where it can still enforce itself by fear superimposed on ignorance, it has become one opinion among many. It is forced to compete in the free market of ideas and, even when it strives to retain the old advantage of inculcating its teachings into children (for reasons that are too obvious to need underlining), it has to stand up in open debate and submit to free inquiry. In the summer of 2007, I was sitting in a studio in Dublin, debating with a lay spokesman of the Roman Catholic Church who turned out to be the only believing Christian on a discussion panel of five people. He was a perfectly nice and rather modest logic-chopping polemicist, happy enough to go for a glass of refreshment after the program, and I suddenly felt a piercing stab of pity for him. A generation ago in Ireland, the Church did not have to lower itself in this way. It raised its voice only slightly, and was instantly obeyed by the Parliament, the schools, and the media. It could and did forbid divorce, contraception, the publication of certain books, and the utterance of certain opinions. Now it is discredited and in decline. Its once-absolute doctrines appear ridiculous: only a few weeks before this radio show the Vatican had finally admitted that “Limbo” (traditional destination for the souls of unbaptised children) did not exist after all. There are also local reasons for the decline, the reverberations of the child-rape scandal being prominent among them, but the secularization of Ireland is a part of a wider enlightenment in which well-grounded unbelief has become a genuinely strong and rooted presence. The availability and accessibility of well-produced books, cassettes, and DVDs, emphasizing the triumphs of science and reason, is a large part of this success. And so, of course, is the increasingly clear realization, on the part of civilized people, that the main enemy we face is “faith-based.”

Open the newspaper or turn on the television and see what the parties of god are doing to Iraq, in their attempt to reduce a once-advanced society to the level of Afghanistan or Somalia (the last two countries where the parties of god had things all their own way). Observe the menacing developments in neighboring Iran, where the believers in the imminent return of a tooth fairy known as the Twelfth Imam are reinforcing their apocalyptic talk by the acquisition of doomsday weaponry. Or shift your gaz to the western bank of the Jordan, where Messianic settlers hope, by stealing the land of others in accordance with biblical directives, to bring on Armageddon in their own way. The chief international backers of these religious colonists, the American evangelical fundamentalists, are simultaneously trying to teach stultifying pseudo-science in schools, criminalize homosexuality, forbid stem-cell research, and display Mosaic law in courtrooms. From Rome, the Holy Father proposes to remedy the situation by restoring the historically anti-Semitic “Tridentine” form of the Mass, preaching crusading rhetoric with one hand while capitulating to Islamism on the other and maintaining that condoms are worse than AIDS. In Europe and America, newspapers and theaters and universities quail at the demands of Muslim fundamentalists, sleepless in their search for things at which to take “offense.”

So the enlightenment of which I was writing is by no means developing in a straight line. The alternative to it, however, is being delineated for us with extraordinary vividness. It is in the hope of strengthening and arming the resistance to the faith-based, and to faith itself, that this anthology of combat with humanity’s oldest enemy is respectfully offered.

From Book I

2

Now, for the rest, lend ears unstopped, and the intellect’s keen edge;

Severed from cares, attend to a true philosophical system;

Lest it should hap that my gifts which I zealously set forth before you,

Scorned, you abandon untouched before they can be comprehended.

For ’tis high lore of heaven and of gods that I shall endeavour

Clearly to speak as I tell of the primary atoms of matter

Out of which Nature forms things: ’tis “things” she increases and fosters;

Then back to atoms again she resolves them and makes them to vanish.

“Things,” for argument’s sake, my wont is to speak of as “matter”;

Also the “seeds” of those things to name the small parts which beget them:

Further, those infinitesimal parts, (an alternative figure)

Primary “atoms” to call, whereof matter was all first created.

3

When in full view on the earth man’s life lay rotting and loathsome,

Crushed ’neath the ponderous load of Religion’s cruel burdensome shackles,

Who out of heaven displayed her forehead of withering aspect,

Lowering over the heads of mortals with hideous menace,

Upraising mortal eyes ’twas a Greek who first, daring, defied her;

’Gainst man’s relentless foe ’twas Man first framed to do battle.

Him could nor tales of the gods nor heaven’s fierce thunderbolts’ crashes

Curb; nay rather they inflamed his spirit’s keen courage to covet.

His it should first be to shiver the close-bolted portals of Nature.

Therefore his soul’s live energy triumphed, and far and wide compassed

World’s walls’ blazing lights, and the boundless Universe traversed

Thought-winged; from realms of space he comes back victorious and tells us

What we may, what we must not perceive; what law universal

Limits the ken of each, what deep-set boundary landmark:

Then how in turn underfoot Religion is hurled down and trampled,

Then how that victory lifts mankind to high level of heaven.

4

One apprehension assails me here, that haply you reckon

Godless the pathway you tread which leads to the Science of Nature

As to the highroad of sin. But rather how much more often

Has that same vaunted Religion brought forth deeds sinful and godless.

Thus the chosen Greek chiefs, the first of their heroes, at Aulis,

Trivia’s altar befouled with the blood of Iphianassa.

For when the equal-trimmed ribbons, her virgin tresses encircling,

Unfurled from each fair cheek so bravely, so gallantly fluttered;

Soon as she saw her sorrowing sire in front of the altar

Standing, with serving-men near, their gleaming knives vainly concealing,

And, at the sight of her plight, her countrymen bitter tears shedding;

Dumb with fear, her knees giving way, to earth she fell sinking.

Nor in her woe could it be of avail to the hapless maiden

That it was she first gave to the king the title of father.

For, by men’s hands upborne, she was, quivering, led to the altar;

Not, forsooth, to the end that, sacred rites duly completed,

With ringing clarion song of marriage she might be escorted;

But, pure maid foully slain in wedlock’s appropriate season,

That she a victim might fall ’neath the slaughter stroke of her father,

So that a happy and lucky dispatch to the fleet might be granted!

Such are the darksome deeds brought to pass by Religion’s fell promptings!

6

Now this terror and darkness of mind must surely be scattered,

Not by rays of the sun, nor by gleaming arrows of daylight,

But by the outward display and unseen workings of Nature.

And her first rule for us from this premiss shall take its beginning;

“Never did will of gods bring anything forth out of nothing.”

For, in good sooth, it is thus that fear restraineth all mortals,

Since both in earth and sky they see that many things happen

Whereof they cannot by any known law determine the causes;

So their occurrence they ascribe to supernatural power.

Therefore when we have seen that naught can be made out of nothing,

Afterwards we shall more rightly discern the thing which we search for:—

Both out of what it is that everything can be created,

And in what way all came, without help of gods, into being.

7

If out of nothing things sprang into life, then every species

From all alike could be born, and none would need any seed-germ.

First, mature men might rise from the sea, and scale-bearing fishes

Out of the earth; or again, fledged birds burst full-grown from heaven.

Cattle and other beasts, and the whole tribe of wild herds, ungoverned

By any fixed law of birth, would of desert and tilth take possession.

Nor would each fruit be wont to remain to its own tree peculiar,

But all would change about, so that all could bear all kinds of produce.

How, if for each distinct kind there were no producing corpuscles,

Could any matrix for matter exist that is fixed and unchanging?

But, as it is, since all from definite seeds are created,

Therefore each is born and comes into regions of daylight

From out the place where dwells its substance, the primary atoms.

Thus each cannot spring from all in promiscuous fashion,

Since a peculiar power indwells each fixed kind of matter.

Secondly, why do we see spring flowers, see golden grain waving

Ripe in the sun, see grape clusters swell at the urge of the autumn,

If not because when, in their own time, the fixed seeds of matter

Have coalesced, then each creation comes forth into full view

When the recurrent seasons for each are propitious, and safely

Quickening Earth brings forth to the light her delicate offspring?

But if from nothing they came, then each would spring up unexpected

At undetermined times and in unfavouring seasons,

Seeing that there would then not be any primary atoms

Which from untimely creative conjunction could be kept asunder.

Nor, again, thirdly, would time be needed for growing of matter

When the seeds unite, if things can grow out of nothing;

For in a trice little children would reach the fulness of manhood:

Trees, again, would spring up by surprise, from earth sheer outleaping.

But ’tis apparent that none of this happens, since all things grow slowly,

As is but normal when each from a fixed seed in a fixed season

Grows, and growing, preserves its kind: thus telling us clearly

That from appropriate atoms each creature grows great and is nourished.

From Book II

5

But do not think that the gods condescend to consider such matters,

Or that they mark the careers of individual atoms

So as to study the laws of Nature whereunto they conform.

Nevertheless there are some, unaware of the fixed laws of matter,

Who think that Nature cannot, without supernatural power,

Thus nicely fit to manners of men the sequence of seasons,

Bringing forth corn, yea, all earth’s fruits, which heavenly Pleasure,

Pilot of life, prompts men to approach, herself them escorting,

As by Venus’ wiles she beguiles them their race to continue

So that humanity may not fail. When therefore they settle

That for the sake of man the gods designed all things, most widely

In all respects do they seem to have strayed from the path of true reason.

For even if I knew nothing concerning the nature of atoms,

Yet from heaven’s very lore and legend’s diversified story

I would make bold to aver and maintain that the order of Nature

Never by will of the gods for us mortals was ever created…

From Book III

15

Now then, in order that you may learn that the minds of live creatures

And their imponderable souls are to birth and death alike subject,

I will proceed to compose such verse as shall earn your attention,

By long study amassed, and devised by delightful endeavour.

Please comprise these natures twain ’neath one appellation:

When I pass on, for example, to speak of the soul, how ’tis mortal,

Know that I speak of the mind as well, inasmuch as together

Both one single entity form, one composite substance.

Firstly, then, since I have shewn that ’tis rare, and composed of small bodies;

Shaped from much smaller atoms than fashion a liquid like water,

Atoms far smaller than those which constitute mizzling and smoke-clouds—

For it is nimbler by far, and a far feebler blow sets it moving,

Stirred as it is by the films which mist and smoke shed around them,

As for example when steeped in sleep we seem to see altars

Breathing forth flames of fire, and exalting their smoke to the heavens;

Doubtless from objects like these such films as I speak of are gendered.

Since too, when vessels are shattered, you see how in every direction

Gushes the liquid flood, and the contents utterly vanish;

Since once again the mists and the smoke are dispersed by the breezes;

Know that the soul, too, is scattered abroad, and dies much more quickly,

And is the sooner resolved back into its primary atoms,

Once it has quitted the limbs of a man and abandoned his body.

For when the body, which forms its receptacle, cannot contain it,

Being from any cause crushed, or by issue of life-blood enfeebled,

How can you think that the soul can by fluid air be encompassed?

How can the air, than our body more rare, be able to hold it?

From Book V

39

Next, having gotten them huts and skins and fire; and when woman

Mated with man shared a man’s abode; and when family duties

Therein were learnt; and as soon as they saw their own offspring arising;

Then ’twas that mankind first began to lose power of endurance.

Fire made their gelid frames less able to bear the cold weather

Out ’neath the open sky; their virility Venus exhausted:

Childrens’ caresses too easily sapped the proud spirit of parents.

Neighbours in those days, too, began to form friendly agreements

Neither to inflict nor receive any hurt, and asked for indulgence

Towards their women and bairns, as with cries and gesticulations

And in their stammering speech they tried to explain to each other

That it is meet and right that all should pity the helpless.

And although harmony could not be won in every instance,

Yet did the greater part observe the conventions uprightly;

Else long since would the human race have been wholly abolished,

Nor could their seed till this present day have continued the species.