The Blessings of Atheism
By
SUSAN JACOBY
Published: January 5, 2013
IN
a recent conversation with a fellow journalist, I voiced my
exasperation at the endless talk about 
faith
in God as the only consolation for those devastated by the
unfathomable murders in Newtown, Conn. Some of those grieving
parents surely believe, as I do, that this is our one and
only life. Atheists cannot find solace in the idea that dead
children are now angels in heaven. “That only shows
the limits of atheism,” my colleague replied. “It’s
all about nonbelief and has nothing to offer when people are
suffering.”
This
widespread misapprehension that atheists believe in nothing
positive is one of the main reasons secularly inclined Americans
— roughly 20 percent of the population — do not
wield public influence commensurate with their numbers. One
major problem is the dearth of secular community institutions.
But the most powerful force holding us back is our own reluctance
to speak, particularly at moments of high national drama and
emotion, with the combination of reason and passion needed
to erase the image of the atheist as a bloodless intellectual
robot.
The
secular community is fearful of seeming to proselytize. When
giving talks on college campuses, I used to avoid personal
discussions of my atheism. But over the years, I have changed
my mind because such diffidence contributes to the false image
of the atheist as someone whose convictions are removed from
ordinary experience. It is vital to show that there are indeed
atheists in foxholes, and wherever else human beings suffer
and die.
Now when students ask how I came to believe what I believe,
I tell them that I trace my atheism to my first encounter,
at age 7, with the scourge of polio. In 1952, a 9-year-old
friend was stricken by the disease and clinging to life in
an iron lung. After visiting him in the hospital, I asked
my mother, “Why would God do that to a little boy?”
She sighed in a way that telegraphed her lack of conviction
and said: “I don’t know. The priest would say
God must have his reasons, but I don’t know what they
could be.”
Just two years later, in 1954, Jonas Salk’s
vaccine began the process of eradicating polio, and my mother
took the opportunity to suggest that God may have guided his
research. I remember replying, “Well, God should have
guided the doctors a long time ago so that Al wouldn’t
be in an iron lung.” (He was to die only eight years
later, by which time I was a committed atheist.)
The first time I told this story to a class, I was deeply
gratified when one student confided that his religious doubts
arose from the struggles of a severely disabled sibling, and
that he had never been able to discuss the subject candidly
with his fundamentalist parents. One of the most positive
things any atheist can do is provide a willing ear for a doubter
— even if the doubter remains a religious believer.
IT is primarily in the face of suffering,
whether the tragedy is individual or collective, that I am
forcefully reminded of what atheism has to offer. When I try
to help a loved one losing his mind to Alzheimer’s,
when I see homeless people shivering in the wake of a deadly
storm, when the news media bring me almost obscenely close
to the raw grief of bereft parents, I do not have to ask,
as all people of faith must, why an all-powerful, all-good
God allows such things to happen.
It is a positive blessing, not a negation of belief, to be
free of what is known as the theodicy problem. Human “free
will” is Western monotheism’s answer to the question
of why God does not use his power to prevent the slaughter
of innocents, and many people throughout history (some murdered
as heretics) have not been able to let God off the hook in
that fashion.
The atheist is free to concentrate on the fate of this world
— whether that means visiting a friend in a hospital
or advocating for tougher gun control laws — without
trying to square things with an unseen overlord in the next.
Atheists do not want to deny religious believers the comfort
of their faith. We do want our fellow citizens to respect
our deeply held conviction that the absence of an afterlife
lends a greater, not a lesser, moral importance to our actions
on earth.
Today’s atheists would do well to emulate some of the
great 19th-century American freethinkers, who insisted that
reason and emotion were not opposed but complementary.
Robert Green Ingersoll, who died in 1899
and was one of the most famous orators of his generation,
personified this combination of passion and rationality. Called
“The Great Agnostic,”
Ingersoll insisted that there was no difference between atheism
and agnosticism because it was 
impossible
for anyone to “know” whether God existed or not.
He used his secular pulpit to advocate for social causes like
justice for African-Americans, women’s rights, prison
reform and the elimination of cruelty to animals.
He
also frequently delivered secular eulogies at funerals and
offered consolation that he clearly considered an important
part of his mission. In 1882, at the graveside of a friend’s
child, he declared:
“They
who stand with breaking hearts around this little grave, need
have no fear. The larger and the nobler faith in all that
is, and is to be, tells us that death, even at its worst,
is only perfect rest ... The dead do not suffer.”
Today’s
secularists must do more than mount defensive campaigns proclaiming
that we can be “good without God.” Atheists must
stand up instead of calling themselves freethinkers, agnostics,
secular humanists or “spiritual, but not religious.”
The last phrase, translated from the psychobabble, can mean
just about anything — that the speaker is an atheist
who fears social disapproval or a fence-sitter who wants the
theoretical benefits of faith, including hope of eternal life,
without the obligations of actually practicing a religion.
Atheists may also be secular humanists and freethinkers —
I answer to all three — but avoidance of identification
with atheism confines us to a closet that encourages us to
fade or be pushed into the background when tragedy strikes.
We must speak up as atheists in order to take responsibility
for whatever it is humans are responsible for — including
violence in our streets and schools. We need to demonstrate
that atheism is rooted in empathy as well as intellect. And
although atheism is not a religion, we need community-based
outreach programs so that our activists will be as recognizable
to their neighbors as the clergy.
Finally, we need to show up at gravesides, as Ingersoll did,
to offer whatever consolation we can.
In his speech at an interfaith prayer vigil in Newtown on
Dec. 16, President Obama observed that “the world’s
religions — so many of them represented here today —
start with a simple question: Why are we here? What gives
our life meaning?” He could easily have amended that
to “the world’s religions and secular philosophies.”
He could have said something like, “Whether you are
religious or nonreligious, may you find solace in the knowledge
that the suffering is ours, but that those we love suffer
no more.”
Somewhere
in that audience, and in the larger national audience, there
were mourners who would have been comforted by the acknowledgment
that their lives have meaning even if they do not regard death
as the door to another life, but “only perfect rest.”
Susan Jacoby
(b. 1946)
is an American author. Her 2008 book about American anti-intellectualism,
The Age of American Unreason, was
a New York Times best seller. Her book Freethinkers:
A History of American Secularism was named a
notable book of 2004 by The Washington Post and The New York
Times. It was also named an Outstanding International Book
of the Year by the Times Literary Supplement (London) and
The Guardian. Wild Justice: The Evolution of Revenge
(1984) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Ms Jacoby is
the author of the forthcoming book “The
Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought.
She
is an atheist and secularist. Jacoby graduated from Michigan
State University in 1965. She lives in New York City and is
program director of the New York branch of the Center
for Inquiry.
o
many get reformed through religion. I got reformed through Dogs."
