Generation Atheist

by Dan Riley

  I grew up in the South where people’s churches are their communities. Everyone goes to church barbecues. People go to other people’s communions and confirmations. Socially, it’s everything. There is a ready-made community for religious people of any denomination. That became a hurdle for me because I love to meet people. I love communities, and I love being a part of one. I realized that there wasn’t going to be a community like that for me at college, so I decided that I needed to create one. Luckily, I found, by and large, a group of people who agreed with me. We wanted a community of atheists where we could all get together, share our stories, and have a place to make friends with people who are like-minded.

  I know that there are stereotypes of atheists, that they’re emotionally distant, introverted, anti-religious, curmudgeonly, and anti-social. I’m not like that, and very few atheists that I know are like that. I think it’s often precisely because atheists have that image that most people decide not to explore atheism. When I was a kid, I didn’t know any atheists, but for some reason, assumed that they were depressed, sad, unfriendly people. That certainly isn’t the case. Our group’s goal was not to de-convert people, it wasn’t to ridicule religion, or even to encourage people to think about atheism. We wanted people to know that we are a group of happy atheists. We love our lives. If you want to be around us, if you want a community, if you need a community, we’re here for you. That was powerful for many people. I don’t think that I know of anyone who became an atheist because of our group, but I do know that we have changed the image of atheism on our campus because of our approach.

  I think that AHA! was 60:40 women to men, which is quite rare in atheist groups. That may have resulted from the fact that I am a woman, which perhaps made joining more comfortable for other females. I also think that it helped that we were friendly and accessible. We weren’t intimidating. We let people come to us.

  My parents started to hear a lot about my atheism because of my involvement in that group. They’re my best friends. I tell my mom everything. My atheism is not necessarily something that we frequently talk about, but both of my parents have expressed pride in me for starting the club. One day, I remember my dad and I were driving together. He had just picked me up from the airport at the end of my sophomore year. I was telling him how hard it had been to start my atheist group. It had taken a lot of time and energy out of my life, but I was so happy with it because it was so fulfilling. My dad said, “Lucy, I wish that I could start a club called ‘The Alliance of Fathers Who Love Their Happy Atheist Daughters.’” That meant so much to me.

  While I do have a desire to be understanding and friendly, I do still have some concerns about religion and dogma. One of my best friends is an amazing guy. He is one of the most quick-witted, clever people I know, and he is very religious. He has had some issues with religion because he is bisexual. But he doesn’t support gay rights. He doesn’t believe in evolution. He’s always been adamant that he believes in God and Jesus, in heaven and hell. These facts cam be very difficult for me because we spend a lot of time together.

  One day while we were traveling through Sweden together, he turned to me and asked, “Do you think that I am unintelligent or less intelligent than you because I have founded my beliefs on the Bible?” I responded, “That’s a really hard question for me. I really value people who have opinions that are based on evidence, opinions that are held because they went through a long process of asking themselves questions, logical, difficult questions, while seeking evidence in trying to answer them. I think when people get their answers from the Bible, they don’t necessarily go through that process. They simply look at its content and think, ‘Whatever this book says, I’m going to believe it.’” Despite our differences, we’ve remained close friends.

  I still find that I have very little interest in making other people atheists. As long as people do good for others, I really don’t care about their religious identification. I do value evidence-based critical reasoning, though, and I try to have as much compassion as I possibly can for people because I understand that religion is important in many people’s lives. But sometimes I have to step back and realize that a person I’m talking to has a vastly different way of viewing the world than I do. I try to encourage them to think as much as they can from many different angles. That’s really all I can do.

  For me, with what I’ve gone through, I certainly feel like I’m a different person now. I think more intellectually. I don’t hesitate to ask questions. I explore more. I try to be open-minded and gather information about everything before forming my beliefs. I think I like myself a lot more now.

  I also have a more naturalistic understanding of my life. Now, when I go outside and see the sunshine streaming through the leaves, I have the same feeling of incredible gratitude, of love for the world, that I did when I was religious. I get an intense feeling in my heart that swells up with happiness and joy. I’m so thankful that I can live in this beautiful world. I feel lucky. I have my family. I’m healthy. Now, however, my happiness comes from the fact that I realize that I’m a human being and that I am connected with other human beings, not from the presence of a God. My happiness comes from the beauty of the world as it actually is.

  My journey to atheism has been one of the most life-affirming, intellectually stimulating, wonderful experiences of my life. While I’m pretty sure there’s not an afterlife that I’m going to, I have a wonderful worldview that encourages me to take advantage of my life right here and now. In my own spiritual life, I could not be happier. I feel like such a strong person. Sometimes, I think, “Wow, I’m an atheist!” I just smile to myself.

  XIII.

  ______________

  Mark Hatcher: From Child Missionary to Black Atheist

  “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.

  Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.”

  — Richard Dawkins

  Roughly 94% of Howard University’s undergraduates and 85% of its graduate students are African American. While statistics are not available, it’s reasonable to believe that a similar number are theists. It’s surprising, given his childhood inclinations, that the school’s most visible atheist, Ph.D. candidate Mark Hatcher, has become a public advocate for secularism and atheism. He was quiet, reserved, and unsure of himself as a kid, and his family thought that he would become a pastor — a prestigious role in the black community — because of his propensity to lead his family in prayer. He had believed that in order to be a good person, he needed to be an active member of his church.

  Mark’s education has always shaped his perspective of the world. A high school class on the world’s religions taught him about faiths other than Christianity, and his first evolutionary biology class his freshman year at the University of Maryland described the natural creation of life on Earth. While he admits that it can be quite lonely to be a black atheist, he’s happy to have his worldview, for its accuracy and the loving secular community he has found.

  I was born into a family with a mother who was Catholic and a father who was Baptist. My mother’s family, her brothers and parents, were pretty devout. My family went to church, and I grew up going to Catholic and Baptist private schools. My religious schooling lasted through high school. In retrospect, I don’t think that my parents were particularly religious. They put me into religious private schools so that I would go to church during the week, meaning that they wouldn’t have to go on Sunday.

  I was quite religious when I was young. I considered myself to be a missionary, and I would often ask people i
f they had been saved. I was very into the Bible, reading it and learning the stories. I had an aunt who was a Jehovah’s Witness, and she gave me some of The Watchtower materials. I read them as though they were part of mainstream Christianity.

  As a child, I was quiet and reserved. I was the kid in the corner, unsure of myself. I always liked people, but I also often didn’t take a date to the dance. I wasn’t popular, at least I didn’t think so. I liked to sit in my room and learn music. I didn’t think that anyone was paying attention to me.

  Religion was very ingrained in me. In my youth, at family gatherings, I would say the prayer. Everyone said that I would be a preacher, a pastor. In a black family, that’s the same as being a doctor or lawyer.

  Going into high school, I was still religious, but I began to have some doubts. I couldn’t quite make sense of the seemingly impossible stories of the Bible, like the one about Jonah and the whale. I rationalized that the reason that I couldn’t understand the mysteries of the Bible was because I was young and didn’t know enough at that point, that I would figure out its mysteries later in my life.

  The biggest reason that I was so religious growing up was because I believed that morality was inherent in religion. If I wanted to be a good person, if I wanted to meet a good woman, then I believed that I needed to go to church and ask Jesus or God to show me how to do that. My religiosity wasn’t so much the result of the content of what I read in the Bible as much as it was related to the implication of how I would be viewed in my community, how I was going to present myself as a positive person to my family and friends.

  I’ve always found significant differences between black churches and most other American churches. In black communities, religion is less about following the actual words of the Bible and more about an individual’s relationship with and interpretation of God. Damn near of all the music directors in black churches are flamboyantly gay, but nobody says anything because the emphasis within the church community is on their personal walk with the Lord.

  Two high school classes, one about the history of Christianity and the other on the world’s religions, were hugely influential on me. I began to learn about the contradictions in the Bible, which led me to start asking questions. Additionally, before taking these classes, I hadn’t realized the very real differences between other religions. I had known about Muslims, but I had thought that they prayed to God and to Jesus in a different way than Christians. I didn’t know that many of the claims made by different religions are mutually exclusive. I found it very interesting that the number of people from other religions outnumbered the number of people from my own faith. I thought, “Well, there can’t be that many bad people out there. How do non-Christians stay good people while not following Jesus?” That set me off on a path asking questions about the relationship between morality and religion. I began to see that the two don’t necessarily go together hand-in-hand. I started to realize that the Good Book was a good book because it said it was a good book.

  After I began to explore the Bible, I learned that there are things in it that I hadn’t been taught as a child, instructions from God that people would now find abhorrent. I remember reading that the punishment for homosexuality is death. I couldn’t adopt that belief because I had wonderful gay friends. I began to think that perhaps Jesus was revolutionary when it came to defying authority, being nice to those who didn’t have material wealth, not forgetting about the little guy. I thought that maybe he was a figure like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.

  Perhaps more than religious ideology, my faith in God hinged on the belief that humans are here on Earth because something intentionally created us. That seemed like common sense to me. Then, I took my first evolutionary biology class. Because I had grown up in faith schools, this was the first time that I was introduced to the concept of evolution. I had taken all of the biology, physics, and chemistry classes at my high school, and evolution wasn’t mentioned once. My first evolutionary biology class explained how life can evolve naturally, without a divine hand. That, looking back, was the true death blow to my faith. For a while, I hung on to an amorphous idea of a God or a higher being, but toward my junior year of college, I realized that I was an atheist.

  My evolutionary biology professor at the University of Maryland-College Park would say, “If you can find something that proves evolution wrong, please bring it to me because I need that in order to be a good scientist.” That method of reasoning — demanding evidence for beliefs — had so much of an impact on me that I decided to make a career as a scientist. The scientific method invites people to have an adult discussion; it is an invitation for open dialogue. As I was being taught science in college, I didn’t feel as though I needed to resist its methodology because science wasn’t taught as an us-versus-you game. The focus was on having a discussion to determine the theory or idea that best explains what’s going on in the world. Because I was approached in such a professional way, I didn’t instantly resist the challenge to my preconceptions and religious ideas. Nobody was trying to fight me, which is why I was so open to new possibilities. Now, as a secularist, I feel that that approach is extremely important in reaching out to creationists and believers in intelligent design.

  Evolution has become such a tremendous unifier of knowledge for me. I was raised in a pretty great family, in a great neighborhood. I have not experienced a whole lot of craziness in my life. I was a very happy child and a very happy teenager. My father did pass away a couple of months before I went to college, but I understand that death is a part of life. The concept of evolution was able to explain why so many bad things happen to great people; religious ideas and theories couldn’t. I thank Catholics for teaching me about the suffering in the world; my archdiocese in Washington was very active with the poor, so I got a lot of first-hand contact with how hard life is for so many people. But the suffering of innocents is not a minor detail that religions should be able to brush under the carpet. In truth, the reason for suffering is due to the fact that there’s no one at the wheel of the universe. In a very real way, evolution — and its revelation that we’re all literally family — has increased my empathy.

  A lot of people believe that evolution took place long ago in some far-distant past. That’s true, but it is important to understand that evolution happens all the time. There now exists a bacterium that has evolved to be able to digest nylon, a material that has existed for only 75 years. This particular species of bacteria has evolved a way to survive on nylon because bacteria can multiply at high rates, with many mutations occurring from one generation to the next. That evolutionary adaptation, seen here in bacteria, is a central mantra of biology and is crucial for developing new and effective medicine. When a doctor, for example, tells his or her patient to continue to take antibiotics, that instruction is given because bacteria can evolve resistance to drugs. That’s all part of the evolutionary process, and understanding that process is vital for decreasing human suffering.

  As I became a budding scientist in college, I began to look at the existence of God scientifically in order to see whether the existence of a God could stand on its own weight. If the idea were correct, I reasoned, then that fact wouldn’t need me to believe in it in order for it to be true, like gravity. Ideas that become scientific facts make accurate predictions about the world around us. The Bible’s predictions, I found, were often wrong, and when their inaccuracies were discovered, people were very often instructed to ignore those inaccuracies under the guise of faith.

  I began to be committed to believing in things only if they stood on their own merits. I didn’t know how I could be a Christian and laugh at the medicine men in African tribes. How could I chuckle at Wiccans? It was a powerful moment for me when I let go of mysticism while maintaining my curiosity and staying humble. It was such a liberating feeling, such a powerfully elegant solution to how to look at the world. I began to apply that mindset to all areas of my life, to my relationships with my family and friends and to my academic and
research career too. I started to realize that there are facts in this world that are just waiting to be uncovered once I get smarter and discover their truth.

  Still, for a while, I did have a hard time accepting that I was starting to lose my faith because so many things that I had done in life were centered around my religious beliefs. As a black man, once I say, “I’m an atheist, I don’t believe in God,” I’ve cut myself off from 95% of the black female population. That was a hard thing to accept at age 21. It was scary, and I had no idea what was going to happen. At the same time, I felt awesome. I was on an absolute thrill ride and, in a way, I’m still on it.

  Like many of the things that I had been taught as a child, I realized that I had to let go of certain beliefs; I had to grow up. I needed to find my own voice and my own identity. I craved my newfound reality-based, evidenced-based thinking and was able to pursue it without losing a sense of awe and a sense of spirituality. Over time, I realized that I wasn’t alone, that I wasn’t a bad person for losing my faith, that there was still a lot of love in the world without a divine supreme being. In fact, I now feel even more capable of giving and receiving love because I don’t have a middleman. I know that the love that I get from others is not the result of a divine being who allows me to receive that love. I receive love because the people I love love me back. It’s their fault that I’m loved so much. I’ve come to view the people around me as my Gods and my Goddesses. They are my saviors. They are the ones who keep me when I need them. They are there for me when something’s wrong. And when nobody’s around and I get through difficult situations by myself, that gives me a renewed sense of confidence in who I am and what I’m capable of doing.