God Is Not One

by Prothero, Stephen

  Most atheists do have a code of ethical conduct. In fact, one of the most frequent claims of the New Atheists is that they are the moral superiors of the old theists. One dissenter here is Onfray, a self-described hedonist who after suffering a heart attack famously told a dietician urging a better diet on him that he “preferred to die eating butter than to economize my existence with margarine.”25 Following Nietzsche, who argued that God’s death would free true atheists from the shackles of conventional morality, Onfray is convinced that Anglo-American atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins are still in the thrall of Christian ethics. So he urges them to trade in their “Christian atheism” for his “atheistic atheism”—to convert from Christian values centered on compassion to “ethical hedonism” focused on pleasure. “To enjoy and make others enjoy without doing ill to yourself or to others,” he writes, “this is the foundation of all morality.”26

  Although most atheists go it alone, some gather into communities. There is a network of summer camps for atheist children called Camp Quest. Other prominent atheist organizations include Atheist Alliance International, American Atheists, British Humanist Association, Humanist Association of Canada, and the Germany-based National Council of Ex-Muslims. In the Boston area, over a dozen different humanist, atheist, and secularist groups sit under the umbrella of the Boston Area Coalition of Reason. A U.S. group known as the United Coalition of Reason ran a billboard and bus campaign with ads that read, “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone.” Though intended to raise the visibility of atheists in the American public square, this campaign also trumpeted the availability of atheist communities, not least the United Coalition of Reason itself.

  Using this functional approach, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in 1961 that secular humanism functions like a religion, so secular humanists merit the same sorts of First Amendment protections that religious practitioners enjoy.27 In 2005, in a decision that irked atheists and Christians alike, a lower U.S. court held that, because atheism walked and talked like a religion, judges should treat it like one.28

  Onfray, the most radical and, after Hitchens, the most gifted New Atheist writer, detects the stench of religion in much atheism today, and he wishes for a stiff breeze to blow it away. “The tactics of some secular figures seem contaminated by the enemy’s ideology: many militants in the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy,” he writes. “Unfortunately, contemporary freethinking often carries a waft of incense; it sprinkles itself shamelessly with holy water.”29 Here Onfray seems to be channeling at least some of the spirit of German philosopher Arnold Ruge, a friend of Marx who refused to jump on the atheism bandwagon not because it was too radical but because it was too traditional: “Atheism is just as religious as was Jacob wrestling with God: the atheist is no freer than a Jew who eats pork or a Mohammedan who drinks wine.”30

  Are human beings homo religiosus? Is it human nature to grasp after the sacred? Yes, say those biologists who find evolutionary advantages in religious beliefs and practices. If they are right, if religion is an inescapable part of being human, then atheism would seem fated to take on the form of religion. But not all atheists are religious. Some take their atheist creed with a shrug, steering clear of the cultus, codes, and communities of their atheist kin. For others, however, atheism is, in the words of German theologian Paul Tillich, an “ultimate concern.”31 It stands at the center of their lives, defining who they are, how they think, and with whom they associate. The question of God is never far from their minds, and they would never even consider marrying someone outside of their fold. They are, in short, no more free from the clutches of religion than adherents of the Cult of Reason in eighteenth-century France. For these people at least, atheism may be the solution to the problem of religion. But that solution is religious nonetheless.

  Friendly Atheists

  One of the mistakes observers of religion often make is imagining that all religious people are hard core. We pay far too little attention to ordinary Christians who read their Bibles with a shrug (or never crack them at all). And so it goes for atheism. The village atheist was a gadfly, not a bomb thrower, and most atheists today are far less dogmatic than the high priests of the New Atheism.

  A Web site called “Friendly Atheist” defines this kinder, gentler type as someone who “can talk to a religious person without invoking an argument,” “questions his/her own beliefs as much as others’ beliefs,” and “does not think someone is inferior for believing in God.”32 In a book called Losing My Religion (2009), William Lobdell, a former Los Angeles Times religion writer, tells of his journey from evangelicalism to Catholicism to atheism. It’s a deconversion narrative, but this “reluctant atheist” isn’t trying to deconvert anyone else, and his tone is more wistful than angry. Of the New Atheists, Lobdell writes that “their disbelief has a religious quality to it that I’m not ready to take on.” “With all that’s happened to me,” he adds, “I don’t feel qualified to judge anyone else.”33 Letting Go of God by the former Saturday Night Live comic Julia Sweeney is a similar project. This one-woman play also proceeds via storytelling rather than argument and steers clear of New Atheist vitriol. Another friendly atheist is Nica Lalli, a Brooklyn-based writer and self-proclaimed “pink atheist” who observes in an essay called “Atheists Don’t Speak With Just One Voice” that atheists come in all shapes and sizes. Most of the angry and argumentative atheists are men, she writes, and their old-boys network doesn’t speak for her.34

  At an atheism rally I attended at Harvard University in 2009, I heard two very different arguments. The first was the old line of the New Atheists: Religious people are stupid and religion is poison, so the only way forward is to end the idiocy and flush away the poison. The second was less controversial and less utopian. Advocates of this perspective present atheism not as the infallible truth but as a valid point of view deserving of a fair hearing. Their goal is not a world without religion but a world in which believers and nonbelievers coexist in a spirit of mutual toleration.

  These competing approaches could not be further apart. One is an invitation to a duel. The other is a fair-minded appeal for recognition and respect. Or, to put it in terms of the gay rights movement: One is like trying to turn everyone gay and the other is like trying to secure equal rights for homosexuals.

  This Harvard rally included a series of white male speakers preaching to the choir, taking potshots at Christians as their congregation snickered on cue. There was one female speaker, however, and she spoke in a very different voice. Amanda Gulledge is a self-described “Alabama mom” who got on her first plane and took her first subway ride in order to attend this event. Although Gulledge stood up on behalf of logic and reason, she spoke from the heart. Instead of arguing, she told stories of the “natural goodness” of her two sons who somehow manage to be moral without believing in God. But the key turn in her talk, and in the event itself, came when Gulledge mentioned, in passing, how some neighborhood children refuse to play with her boys because they have not accepted Jesus as their Savior.

  The New Atheism stands at a crossroads. Until now it has been spearheaded by the sort of white, male firebrands that led the charge for evangelicalism during the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century. But there is a different voice emerging—call it the new New Atheism—and with it a very different agenda from the “Four Horsemen” of the angry atheist apocalypse (Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, and Dennett). This friendlier atheism sounds more like a civil rights movement than a crusade, and it is far more likely to issue from the lips of friendly women than from the spittle of angry men.

  If the hope is to pummel into submission every theist from Salt Lake City to São Paulo to Sydney, then the atheist movement has about as much of a chance as an evangelical revival in the National Assembly of France. But if the hope is for a world in which children can play with other children without regard for the religious (or nonreligious) beliefs of their parents, then this is a wave that
many Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus would happily catch. I wouldn’t walk around the block to hear Christopher Hitchens take cheap shots at Christians. But I’d get on the subway, and maybe even a plane, to hear Amanda Gulledge tell me why her kids are good people too.

  Conclusion

  It is easy to imagine that the task of the great religions is to transport and transform us. The world is not our true home; being human is not our true calling. We are stuck in the muck and mire of sin or suffering or illusion, so it is religion’s job to convey us to heaven or nirvana or moksha. Along the way we will be transformed from caterpillar to cocoon to butterfly: Christianity will transfigure us into saints, Buddhism into bodhisattvas, Hinduism into gods.

  The world’s religions do promise the magic of metamorphosis, but the metamorphosis on offer is often less dramatic than spinning golden gods out of human straw. Even in traditions of escape from the sin and suffering of this world, religion works not so much to help us flee from our humanity as to bring us home to it. “The glory of God,” wrote the second-century Catholic bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, “is a human being fully alive.”1 Or, as a contemporary Confucian puts it, “We need not depart from our selfhood and our humanity to become fully realized.”2

  Of course, we are in a sense born human beings, but only in the most trivial sense of genus and phylum and DNA. Often our humanity lies out ahead of us—as achievement rather than inheritance, and a far from trivial achievement at that. Yes, Christianity tells us we are sinners and calls us to be something else, but Jesus did not take on a human body just to save us from our sins. Among the purposes of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation is to show us how to inhabit a human body and to demonstrate along the way that being human can be sacred too. Other religions can also be understood in this light. In Islam, the fact that Muhammad is emphatically not divine does not prevent him from serving as the model for humanity. In Daoism, the sages show us how to act as we really are, which is natural, spontaneous, and free.

  One of the greatest stories ever told is also one of the oldest: the ancient Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu. Gilgamesh is a god/man, king of Uruk, a city dweller and guardian of civilization. Enkidu is an animal/man, a forest dweller and threat to civilization who dresses in animal skins and runs with wild beasts. The story of these two men—a sort of On the Road for the third millennium B.C.E.—gets going when, during their initial encounter, they wrestle to a draw and become fast friends. Soon they are casting themselves onto the sorts of adventures virile young men have forever imagined that only forests and monsters can bring. And when one of those monsters comes bearing death, Gilgamesh goes on a quest for immortality.

  Like any classic, Gilgamesh is many tales tucked into one, but it is preeminently a meditation on how to become a human being. As the story opens, Gilgamesh the god/man thinks himself superior to other humans, while Enkidu the animal/man thinks himself inferior. As the story progresses, each becomes a human being. Enkidu seems to become human by having sex with a woman, who then washes and shaves his hairy body, while Gilgamesh seems to become human by watching his friend die and grieving his passing. Eros and thanatos, as Freud might say: the sex urge and the death urge—two sides of being human.

  A few years ago, when “What Would Jesus Do?” bracelets were colonizing evangelical wrists across America, a friend started making “What Would You Do?” bracelets. Forget what Jesus would do. What would Joseph or Katie do? Inside the packing boxes for these bracelets she tucked sayings from various thinkers about finding and following your own path. In almost all religions there is at least the intimation that what God or Heaven wants for us is simply to become ourselves:

  When the eighteenth-century Hasidic rabbi Zusya reaches the next world, God will not ask him, “Why were you not Moses?” but “Why were you not Zusya?” 3

  ‘ “The Tao has ten thousand gates,’ say the masters, and it is up to each of us to find our own.” 4

  To explore the great religions is to wander through these ten thousand gates. It is to enter into Hindu conversations on the logic of karma and rebirth, Christian conversations on the mechanics of sin and resurrection, and Daoist conversations on flourishing here and now (and perhaps forever). It is also to encounter rivalries between Hindus and Muslims in India, between Jews and Muslims in Israel, and between Christians and Yoruba practitioners in Nigeria. Each of these rivals offers a different vision of “a human being fully alive.” Each offers its own diagnosis of the human problem and its own prescription for a cure. Each offers its own techniques for reaching its religious goal, and its own exemplars for emulation. Muslims say pride is the problem; Christians say salvation is the solution; education and ritual are key Confucian techniques; and Buddhism’s exemplars are the arhat (for Theravadins), the bodhisattva (for Mahayanists), and the lama (for Tibetan Buddhists).

  These differences can be overemphasized, of course, and the world’s religions do converge at points. Because these religions are a family of sorts, some of the questions they ask overlap, as do some of the answers. All their adherents are human beings with human bodies and human failings, so each of these religions attends to our embodiment and to the human predicament, not least by defining what it is to be fully alive.

  Religious folk go about this task in very different ways, however. Confucians believe we become fully human by entwining ourselves in intricate networks of social relations. Daoists believe we become fully human by disentangling ourselves from social relations. For Muslims, Muhammad’s three core human qualities are piety, combativeness, and magnanimity.5 The Buddha may have been magnanimous, but he was far from pious. In fact, he did not even believe in God. And Jesus may have been magnanimous, too, but when combat called, he turned the other cheek. If the Dao has ten thousand gates, so do the great religions. And it is up to each of us to find our own.

  For those who find such a path, it is tempting to lapse into the sort of naive Godthink that lumps all other religious paths into either opposites or mirror images of your own. The New Atheists see all religions (except their own “antireligious religion”) as the same idiocy, the same poison. The perennial philosophers see all religions as the same truth, the same compassion. What both camps fail to see is religious diversity. Rather than ten thousand gates, they see only one.

  Godthink is ideological rather than analytical—it starts in the dense clouds of desire rather than with a clear-eyed vision of how things are on the ground. In the case of Hitchens and the New Atheists, it begins with the desire to denounce the evil in religion. In the case of Huston Smith and the perennialists, it begins with the desire to praise the good in religion. Neither of these desires serves our understanding of a world in which religious traditions are at least as diverse as our political, economic, and social arrangements—where religious people make war and peace in the name of their gods, Buddhas, and orishas. It does not serve diplomats or entrepreneurs working in India or China to be told that all Hindus and all Confucians are equally idiotic. It does not serve soldiers in the Middle East to be told that the Shia Islam of Iran is essentially the same as the Sunni Islam of Saudi Arabia, or that Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Israel do not disagree fundamentally on matters of faith or practice.

  Of course, there are people who stress the difference between, say, Islam and Christianity in order to make the theological point that Islam is the one true path or that Jesus is the only way, the only truth, and the only life. More dangerously, others stress religious differences in order to make the political point that religious civilizations are fated to clash. Most dangerously, there are people who stress religious differences in order to justify going to war against their theological enemies. And holy war is precisely what both the New Atheists and the perennialists are, to their credit, trying to avoid.

  I too hope for a world in which human beings can get along with their religious rivals. I am convinced, however, that we need to pursue this goal through new means. Rather than beginning with the
sort of Godthink that lumps all religions together in one trash can or treasure chest, we must start with a clear-eyed understanding of the fundamental differences in both belief and practice between Islam and Christianity, Confucianism and Hinduism.

  Some people are sure that the only foundation on which interreligious civility can be constructed is the dogma that all religions are one. I am not one of them. Every day across the world, human beings coexist peacefully and even joyfully with family members who are very different from themselves. In New York, Mets fans and Yankees fans have learned to live and work alongside one another, as have partisans of Real Madrid and FC Barcelona in football-loving Spain. And who is so naïve as to imagine that the success of a relationship depends on the partners being essentially the same? Isn’t it the differences that make things interesting? What is required in any relationship is knowing who the other person really is. And this requirement is only frustrated by the naïve hope that somehow you and your partner are magically the same. In relationships and religions, denying differences is a recipe for disaster. What works is understanding the differences and then coming to accept, and perhaps even to revel in, them. After all, it is not possible to agree to disagree until you see just what the disagreements might be.

  Until quite recently, interfaith dialogue proceeded only among those for whom the doctrines and narratives of their traditions ran far behind the ethical imperative to get along with their neighbors. In other words, it was a game for religious liberals; religious conservatives need not apply. Today, however, young people are forging a new path—Interfaith Dialogue 2.0—that is open to traditional believers, and to nonbelievers as well, precisely because it recognizes that genuine dialogue across religious boundaries must recognize the existence of these boundaries and the fundamental difference between the lands they bisect.