The Unapologetic Atheist

This summer, Richard Dawkins has been my recreational reading companion. A renowned atheist and science writer, Dawkins most recently wrote a book called The God Delusion—just the sort of book, in the words of an awesome old woman I met on an airplane, I don’t want to be waving around in Mississippi. Me, I have a more than casual interest in atheism and the separation of church and state. Last summer, as a non-believing outsider coming to teach in a Bible-thumping state, I wrote a passionate, very personal blog entry in support of religious tolerance. I remain a First Amendment fanatic, and by the way, I believe it is a travesty of the broad-minded principles enshrined in our Constitution that “In God We Trust” has become our official national motto, minted on our money and posted, by law, in Mississippi classrooms. (Don’t tell anyone, but I broke that law all year long! Consider it my small, symbolic act of civil disobedience. It wasn’t hard. If I were a little less thorough, I might never have found my copy, broken as it was.) Today, I pause to reflect once again upon religion, particularly in response to Richard Dawkins, balanced against my profession as a public school teacher in the community context where I teach.

My critique of The God Delusion is a that, by its strident tone, the book serves largely as sermon for the converted (so to speak). It fires me up, though! Many of the arguments Dawkins puts forth are familiar to me because, as a life-long (well, since the 6th grade) atheist, I thought of most of them myself. However, he does make a few points which I find intriguing. Particularly, he causes me to reassess the singular deference we give to religion. He calls it “underserved respect,” the fact that, as soon as anyone invokes the name of religion, no matter how preposterous the beliefs themselves might be, polite company must instantly bow to religious deference. What makes religion deserve such respect?

The fact that God cannot be proven not to exist is, after all, a baseless claim to legitimacy. As Bertrand Russell once pointed out, we also cannot prove that a small “celestial teapot” is not orbiting somewhere out there in the Solar System, but the idea itself is so unlikely as to be unworthy of our consideration, and furthermore, Dawkins goes on, just because we are uncertain about the existence or non-existence of something does not imply a 50-50 chance of its existence.

Furthermore, the claim often made that religion forms the basis of morality is equally without merit. Read any respected figure from history, even from as little as a few decades ago, and often their comments and language about politically sensitive topics seem to our modern ears vulgar, at best, often blatantly sexist, racist, etc. The point is, the moral consensus of society changes with the times, and in our present day is changing quite rapidly, far outpacing the churches themselves, let alone the sacred canons of religious texts, which have remained static. Religion is not the source of morality; it is actually irrelevant or if anything, generally resists the changing of the times, otherwise known as moral progress.

Yet, when it comes to religion, we are silenced. In any other realm of conversation, even politics to some extent, if we believe someone else mistaken in their beliefs, we feel not only justified, but often we even feel a duty to disabuse them of their mistaken notions. As if that were not enough, we have, at least in America, a clear popular bias against non-religiosity. Faith is in. Not only must we defer to religion in all aspects, public and private, but despite all that we know, despite the clear and overwhelming majority of elite scientists being atheists, it is taboo in most of this country to admit atheism as a personal belief. Arguably, due to the rise of the religious right as a significant political force, we have even become, in recent years and by small degrees, a more theocratic nation. Yet Dawkins believes there are more atheists in America than there are conservative Jews, despite our obviously wielding far less political power. Why are we so silent?

To my point: I do believe, almost militantly, in a strict separation between church and state. Government should never, by any means, promote or inhibit religion, even by implication. This means no prayer, no Ten Commandments, no mention of God whatsoever in public schools (or in Congress, or in the Supreme Court!), not because government is saying people should not pray or read the Bible, but simply that government should not touch upon religion in the slightest degree.

I also believe, however, that society, indeed the human race as a whole, would be better off casting aside the shackles of ignorance that are packaged in the name of religion. Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others that have been tried,” and I believe there is a pithy truth to that. But part of the reason democracy is so lousy at times is due to its ultimate decision makers, its citizens, being so ignorant. How can a democracy not be impaired by the fact that so many of its citizens are (1) poorly educated to begin with, and (2) blatantly inculcated with false and irrational beliefs without even so much as a credible choice? We live in a society where ignorance and delusion still rule unchallenged.

And let’s be real. Religion is hardly harmless, is it? Look at Northern Ireland, the Middle East, the Old Testament, all over the world and throughout history: Religion is the number one cause of us-vs-them-ism, the primary source of conflict between groups who are often otherwise indistinguishable. Nobody ever fought a war to say there is no god, but okay, suppose we forget for a moment about jihads and crusades. What about guilt? How many recovering gay Christians do I know? Fear of eternal damnation, ostracism, and spiritual bullying not your poison? What about the entirely sincere, justified (in the minds of the killers) murder of abortion doctors, or just as perniciously the outright hostility to certain promising avenues of medical research, namely the ban on stem cell research? Research! On cells? I mean, these are cells, people, not human beings! Don’t even get me started on so-called “creation science”! And finally, there’s my personal favorite, the environmental policy of Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of the Interior: “We don’t have to protect the environment, the Second Coming is at hand”!

Mind you, not all religious people are nuts. Most believers are perfectly nice, well-intentioned, and at least outwardly sincere. Some are even quite tolerant. A blessed few may even go so far as to admit the subjectivity of their own beliefs, the inevitability that others of no less moral value will come to entirely different beliefs. Others may even look the Ultimate Question in the eye and choose to turn away, succumbing instead to the comforts of familiarity. But these individuals become more and more rare as we move down the list, and none of these descriptions in any way imply the correctness of faith itself.

Rather, faith, by definition, is the opposite of reason. One cannot, without some degree of inward insincerity or simple lack of intellectual fortitude, reconcile faith with reason, because faith is believing something without evidence, in spite of reason. Therefore, while faith usually seems harmless in the form of the individual church-goer, it is by its very nature opposed to the principles of science. Faith is the mind-killer.

(Dawkins, you devil! My long-dormant hostility toward religion has been rekindled.)

As a public school teacher in an enormously conservative religious community, my beliefs and principles are placed in delicate balance. Even my time in Africa did not prepare me for this, because there it was always someone else’s country, and besides, that was the Third World, anyway. (More to the point, there were no fundamentalists to speak of in Namibia.) But here, this is America! My America, too! We live under the same Constitution. Yet, here, we see that community standards are actually stronger than the Constitution itself, because in order for a practice to be stopped, someone with standing to bring suit must first cry fowl. Granted, the religion at my school is really not so egregious as it is in most of the Delta. Even so, I find myself seriously pondering whether or not to request, privately, that we stop opening required school staff meetings with prayer. Even I, steadfastly and courageously atheist as I am, hesitate to stick my neck out, even that far!

The even more delicate point is how I relate to students. How should I answer when a student innocently asks about my religion? To state my position without elaboration, when asked directly, is almost certainly within my legal rights. But is it right, right? I prudently decline to discuss the matter whatsoever, but doing so leaves me feeling dishonest and bullied by the majority. I am well aware of the conservative Christian hatred for atheism, and so for good reason, I am wary of putting my beliefs on display in the context of my adopted (for now) community. I am assumed, like everyone, to be Christian, and because of my position, I am all but precluded from stating my contrary, exceedingly unpopular opinion. The silence fills me with loathing.

Trickier still, to what extent should I exert editorial influence, as a teacher, over the religious expressions of my students? In one instance, during some free time after testing, I asked a student to erase a religious message he had written on the board. In another example, however, I tacitly approved a student who had written a religious message on a poster assignment, influenced admittedly by this student (one of my favorites) clearly seeking my approval. I have reflected on both of these cases and alternated between which (or both) I believe to be right. Yes, students have the right to hold and profess whatever beliefs they want. They are merely citizens, whereas I am an employee of the state. However, no teacher is under any obligation to provide students with a platform to promote their religious views in class, and arguably any editorial discretion allowing a student to do so in an academic, public school setting is an implied state endorsement. The First Amendment case law about religion is very confusing and often conflicting, but it seems to me both stances are within the foggy gray cloud of the probably legal. But what is right?