You may have wondered what I was thinking when I titled this sermon “I Was a Teenage Atheist.” At some level, I’m going to be talking about a range of books that have set the publishing world afire—the “four gospels” of the New Atheism: Sam Harris’s book, The End of Faith, and its coda, Letter to a Christian Nation; the English scientist and atheist Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion; Daniel Dennett, a professor at Tufts University, and his best-seller Breaking the Spell; and Christopher Hitchens’ new book, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. How many people have read any of those books that I’ve talked about? Pretty good, pretty good.
But this is not really a book review. It’s actually going to be a fairly personal sermon, and a very pastoral sermon. This sermon begins with the first lecture that Brandon Miller was delivering for us right here in this sanctuary not more than two months ago. During the question period, one person held up a hand and said, “I don’t believe in God!” Someone in the front enthusiastically added, “I don’t believe in God, either!” It was like a Hallelujah thing going on. I realized there’s a lot of pent-up energy out there. A lot of Unitarian-Universalists do not believe in God, so let’s put the word “God” out there, as something that we can look at and consider with as little neuroticism as possible today.
In many ways, the quandary of atheists within Unitarian-Universalism is real. I was once talking to a friend of mine who I knew was an atheist. I asked him why he is a Unitarian-Universalist. He said the holidays are better and the music is terrific—and he wasn’t kidding. On the surface it seems like a joke, but the reality is that he had found a place where the religious spectrum was broad enough that he could bring himself to church, and still hold (if you will) a strong, vibrant atheism.
I went out and bought this big stack of books, and one nice thing about having a back problem is that I sat and read every word of these books over the last two weeks. And you know what? I didn’t disagree with very much of what they had to say. I found myself going Yes, Right; checking that, saying I agree with that; Absolutely, Good point; I hadn’t though of that, but Yes, I agree with that. Their incendiary assertion of backing off from religiosity is actually, I think, pretty healthy. I’m glad that people are reading these books and getting galvanized, saying, “My gosh! Maybe after September 11, we need to be very, very careful about the dynamics, the dynamism, and the dynamite of world faiths.” I didn’t disagree with much I read. I wasn’t converted by it, necessarily; as a Unitarian-Universalist, quite frankly, I was already (as I’ve indicated) pretty familiar with a lot of the classic atheist arguments. I suspect you’re here this morning, or listening on the radio, not because you’re a philosophy major, but because you, too, have had severe questions about the childhood faith you were offered—and for some of us in this room, the childhood faith that you had crammed down your throat.
I once had a member of my first church come to me, saying, “Stephen, I appreciate the fact that you’re very open to your Christian roots; but I need you to understand something. When I come into this sanctuary, when I hear the word “Jesus,” I actually feel nauseous, because of what I experienced as a child. I know that’s hard for you to get.” And it is hard; I was raised in a mild, progressive, easy-going Episcopal environment. I didn’t have to deal with fundamentalism of any sort or variety, growing up. I didn’t have to wrench myself out of a faith that felt so constraining and so confining that if I didn’t free myself from it, I thought I might die. It was a rather easy and gentle evolution out of that faith and into something new. But I have learned through twenty-six years of ministry that this is very pastoral stuff. It isn’t just a seminar on theology. Some people, when they hear the word “God,” do not interpret it in what I sometimes say is the free and poetic manner in which I would use the word. They get a very different picture, and sometimes it’s a rather harsh and difficult one. What I’m talking about today, in talking about the New Atheism, is (as I said) not a book report. It’s rich stuff here, so go with me on it, for some provocative ideas, and maybe even some humor along the way.
I suspect that you, too, like these authors, have attempted to approach your faith in a reasonable, sane, balanced, and yet sometimes anguished way. The other experience that I had as I read these books is that it took me back to the person I used to be, before I had even discovered Unitarian-Universalism, in that period when I had left the church and had not yet discovered our free faith. It was about a six-year period when I was pretty much functionally an atheist. I had rejected the religion of my childhood; it didn’t make sense to me; I didn’t believe Jesus was the one sole revelation of God, and I really questioned the nature of God. I remember the moment when it happened. My parents had gone to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where there was a shopping center. It was about twelve miles away, through a winding country road along the Clinch River. I was sitting and reading at the Oak Ridge library, reading Bertrand Russell’s classic, Why I Am Not A Christian. Sitting in the car waiting for my parents to come back, I had a revelation. I had the classic Damascus conversion experience, but it was 180 degrees the other way.
Now, some people say to me in pastoral situations, “Stephen, when I lost my faith, it was devastating. It was hard. It took me years. Even now I have a sense of shame when I deal with my parents, and the folks who just can’t believe that somehow I have left the fold.” There’s some pretty painful stuff here; but many people have had the experience that I had that day as a high school kid, which was that I had a sense of liberation. I had a sense of a weight being lifted off of me. My gosh! (I nearly said My God!) There is no God! And I didn’t experience it as a problem; I experienced it as a relief, and a release, because it opened up so many quandaries that had been weighing me down. Why was there evil in a world where it was said that God controlled everything? Why did some people die and some people live, and then the survivors say, “God plucked me out”? Why were the religions of the world in conflict with one another, when they all proclaimed that they believed in love—a transcendent love that allowed them still to kill one another?
There were many very rich questions to my high-school mind; and Bertrand Russell pried them open, and gave me a great sense of freedom—that I could stand, that I didn’t need to be cowed by any religion, that I could be an individual, that I could make my own way. In a strange way, that’s how we began the service today with the hymn: I will not be afraid, I will be a pilgrim. I was to be a pilgrim for my own assertion of will and independence. It was a great experience; I remember it to this day as one of the most powerful moments of my life. Bertrand Russell goes on:
… every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery … has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world.
The fact is, organized religion fought progress every inch of the way. Let’s face it: the religions of the world have often earned their unbelievers; and they’ve done it the old-fashioned way, by intolerance and by a closed compassion. I cannot argue with these claims that Dennett and Dawkins and Hitchens and Sam Harris put forward, because they are so self-evidently true, if you think about it. Every religion in the world today has a history; and if you want to know whether that religion is true, it’s not about the savior or the holy book or the creed. It is only made true by the compassion of its believers. That is the sole and single test of whether it is true at all. Has it made its believers more compassionate? Has it changed the world to be a more humane place? Has it offered a vision that gave people a sense of their own liberation? If it hasn’t, then every argument of the New Atheists is exactly right, and I can’t argue with them a bit.
This isn’t a sermon about my arguing with them. My theology is quite different now from what it was then; but I do not only preach from what I believe as a 52-year-old man; I also preach to that 18-year-old kid who I used to be. The very first sermon that I ever delivered (and Liz’s parents had the misfortune of being there that day) was entitled “Jesus Would Have Made a Terrible Roommate.” In that sermon, which I gave before darkening the door of Harvard Divinity School, I proclaimed that we needed, in our own spiritual maturity, to give up the word “God.” If you’ll notice, in prayers from this pulpit, we occasionally use the word “God.” I’m not closed to the word “God.” In fact, if I’m anything, I am probably a theist; but this isn’t a sermon about what I believe. It’s a sermon about that vast spectrum that allows an atheist to comfortably be a Unitarian-Universalist; and not only comfortably be one, but to be an essential element of that spectrum, that rainbow coalition that we are. If any people who are nonbelievers decide they have no place within Unitarian-Universalism, then we are doing something wrong, because we are precisely the place where atheists need to come to have friendships, to memorialize death, to celebrate a birth, to have a wedding, to do social justice, to hold a vision of this world as such a beautiful place and so desperately under siege from the actions of humanity. We need everybody here—everybody.
Yes, there are nonbelievers among us, and there are days I am a nonbeliever too, absolutely. I remember a coffee hour with Wallace Fiske, who had been minister emeritus of West Hartford Church for twenty-six years. He was talking with some people, and they were really pressing him hard about the craziness of being a Unitarian-Universalist: they didn’t believe in God, and why would anyone go to a Unitarian-Universalist church? Wallace, bless his heart, just stared at them. I thought the guy was going to deck them; but he didn’t, because he was a compassionate and warm minister, and we’re not supposed to deck people. Wallace stared at this guy. He said, “Excuse me. I want you to tell me, what is the God you believe in, that I’m not supposed to believe in?” It’s a great question. They didn’t know what to say.
If you ask me if I believe in the Christian triune God of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to that God I’m an atheist; I don’t believe in that God. If you ask about the Old Testament, the Hebrew scripture God, the Deuteronomy guy, that desert sky-father God, I am reminded of a great routine by George Carlin; maybe you’ve heard it:
Religion has actually convinced people that there’s an invisible man living in the sky who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever until the end of time, because he loves you.
I don’t believe in that God. I am an atheist to that God.
If you say to me that the nature of divinity is in the Buddhist elements of nirvana, bodhisattva, and the endless recycling of the Buddhas, who come into this world one after another, I don’t believe in that God either. Nor do I believe in the Hindu pantheon of Shiva and Krishna and all of the other hundreds of thousands of gods. I’m a Hindu atheist!
The reality is that this is an old, old story. The ancient Greeks also had their heretics, their atheists. Aristophanes, the ancient Greek writer of comedies, said:
Shrines! Shrines! Surely you don’t believe in the gods. What’s your argument? Where’s your proof?
What sort of God is Zeus? Why spread such rubbish? There’s no such thing as Zeus.
And you know what? I’m a Greek god atheist too. I don’t believe in Zeus! This atheism goes back a long way, and I’m going to tell you how far it goes back. The first Christians were called, by the Romans, atheists. And do you know why? Because they didn’t believe in the Roman civic gods. So the early Christians were atheists, too.
First of all, tell me which God you don’t want me to believe in. It’s a pretty powerful question.
Emerson once said, “The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next.” This is very true of religions; but I wonder if it is totally true of the religious instinct. Daniel Dennett, in his book Breaking the Spell, posits that the religious instinct is pretty much hard-wired into our brains, and I don’t disagree with that. I think it’s pretty true that there is something in the evolutionary purpose of faith. Human beings would not have been so creative in the creation of so many world faiths unless there was something in it for us in our evolution as a species. But we certainly don’t need to worship a Hebrew God Yahweh, any more than the ancient Greek Zeus. Here’s where it gets tricky, and here’s where the rubber hits the road. We’re living in a time where Thomas Jefferson could doubt if there was a God, and where John Adams in his treaty with Tripoli could expressly say, in a treaty that was passed in the early United States Senate without a dissenting vote,
The government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian Religion.
We are living in a time where 70% of people in a recent Gallup poll said that they thought that if they met an atheist, they would have a highly negative impression of that person. Could an atheist become president of the United States today? It’s a tough question; I think the answer is No. We’ve come a long way, and it’s not been progressive, since our early founding fathers. More than 50% in a recent poll said that they had this negative or highly negative view of anyone who is an atheist.
The week before September 11, the polemicist Dennis Prager was interviewing Christopher Hitchens, and he said something like this.
Prager: I want to prove to you that people of faith are better than atheists, and here’s the test. If you’re walking down the street in an urban center, and you see a group of men coming at you, would you be frightened?
Hitchens: Well, I might well be.
Prager: But if I told you that they were just leaving prayer meeting, wouldn’t you be less frightened?
Hitchens: Well, as a matter of fact, no. Particularly if we consider—and just confine ourselves to the letter B—Belfast, Beirut, Bombay, Belgrade, Bethlehem, and Baghdad. I wouldn’t feel better if they were coming out of a prayer meeting.
As a matter of fact, for Belfast he quoted the remark that an Irish atheist was asked whether he was a Protestant or Catholic atheist.
John Buchan, an English novelist, said that an atheist is “a man who has no invisible means of support.” Atheism is as broad and varied as the religions themselves; and we don’t often pay attention to that. There is soft agnosticism, which says the world is a marvelous place; it is transcendent; it is mystical; it is mysterious; I will never know if there is a God or not; but that’s OK, because the nature of my faith is spiritual and experiential, and I don’t need to know if there is a God or not. Then there’s hard agnosticism, which says from a sort of scientific viewpoint that we can never get the information to decide; it will never be defined; we’ll never know for sure, so it’s a pointless question; I don’t know whether I believe in God, because we’ll never know. Finally, there is the nonbeliever, the atheist proper, who believes that the supreme supernatural being does not exist. Now, that person doesn’t necessarily lack spiritual feelings, and moments of transcendence, and wonder, and appreciation of beauty. It doesn’t mean that person does not weep when a loved one dies; but that person does not believe in a supreme supernatural being. And then, just to make it more wonderfully complex (because, as I said, there are as many kinds of unbelief as there are of belief), there is the non-theist, who says that the whole question is unimportant to the development of humanity. There are pantheists who believe that all of creation, all of the cosmos, all of the expanding universe, is God. Certainly, as a Unitarian-Universalist, I have heard from hundreds of people in my work and pastoral counseling who say, “For me, I don’t know whether I believe in God; but if I did believe in God, it would be that God is love,” that wonderful saying from the gospel of John; God is love, or God is my rock, or God is nature, or God is emerging energy, or God is the universe; and God help us, there are those people who then say that God is their projection of hopes and fears and sometime neuroses on the vast cosmic screen.
You know what? Atheism in this sense, in one of the grand ironies of human thought, is in the end a faith statement. I know this because of the great philosopher Woody Allen, who said, “There’s no way to prove there is no God. You just have to take it on faith.”
And the fact is that there isn’t enough information. This isn’t a philosophical proposition, and this isn’t a scientific question. In the end, faith, whether faith in not believing in God, or faith in believing in some sort of God, is more of a story, more of a feeling, more of an emotion, more of an instinct, more of a resonance with our past. The authors of the New Atheism would say that this past has its negative qualities, and I cannot disagree with them; but there are positive elements as well. In the end, our Unitarian-Universalist spiritual spectrum is sufficiently wide and vast and accepting. It’s not indifferent to what you believe, or how you believe; but we do mean it when we say you do not have to think alike to love alike. How and why you define your stance toward the life and mystery in creation is endlessly fascinating to me, and it is fascinating for us to each other. We need everyone on this vast religious and sometimes nonbelieving spectrum.
Martin Buber, the great Jewish leader, once said
The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God.
I believe this. I know it is true. It has never been clear to me that religion necessarily makes better people than nonbelievers; in fact, I’ve often experienced demonstrably the opposite. Here’s the test, and I leave you with it today: If you want to know someone’s true religion, ask about their goodness, not their Godness. Amen.
