Louise Bourgeois at her studio, New York, 1946. (Louise Bourgeois Archive)
In September of 1937, 25-year-old Bourgeois writes to her friend Colette Richarme — an artist seven years her senior yet one for whom she took on the role of a mentor — after Richarme had suddenly left Paris for respite in the countryside:
After the tremendous effort you put in here, solitude, even prolonged solitude, can only be of very great benefit. Your work may well be more arduous than it was in the studio, but it will also be more personal.
A few months later, Bourgeois reiterates her counsel:
Solitude, a rest from responsibilities, and peace of mind, will do you more good than the atmosphere of the studio and the conversations which, generally speaking, are a waste of time.
For Bourgeois, aloneness was the raw material of art — something she crystallized most potently half a century later, in a diary entry from the summer of 1987:
You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love. That is why geometrically speaking the circle is a one. Everything comes to you from the other. You have to be able to reach the other. If not you are alone…
Moral codes based on tribalism—defining the in-group and the out-group, whether by culture, religion or race—offer no solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict or any of the other wars wracking our world. The only path to peace is a morality based on empathy and universal humanity, yet it seems further from our grasp than ever.
Israel’s invasion of Gaza is raging across the Middle East like a wildfire. And like any other blaze, it’s sending up embers that fall back to earth, where they ignite new violence.
In Russia, bottled-up social pressure and discontent has found an outlet in the form of antisemitic hate. Last week, we saw terrifying video of an angry mob storming an airport in the Dagestan region, hunting for Jews on a just-arrived flight from Israel. They didn’t find any, but that’s all that stopped this from becoming a pogrom.
But we shouldn’t be so quick to look down on backward nations like Russia. In both the US and Europe, there’s been a rash of antisemitic attacks under the bigoted logic that all Jews everywhere bear collective responsibility for what the Israeli government does.
The government agencies that track such things report an uptick in both antisemitic and anti-Muslim bias crimes. Who should we sympathize with, when there’s ample evidence of persecution and victimization everywhere we look? Do we have to choose who to support based on who’s suffered the most, like some grotesque Olympics of pain?
Our moral codes weren’t built for this
What we need is a moral code built on recognition of our common humanity. We need an ethics that treats all people as fundamentally alike, and all deserving of equal rights, whatever their culture and whichever side of the border they happen to be standing on.
Most moral codes don’t do this. For the most part, the moral codes that guide us today come from times when the family or the village or the tribe was the only unit of society. They’re small and parochial, looking no further than the next hilltop. In those times, the outside world was a strange and frightening place. Banding together promised safety, and to be outside the group spelled doom.
This kind of thinking is the animating idea behind nationalism, religious orthodoxy, and cultural tribalism. These concepts of morality are different on the surface, but underneath, they’re fundamentally alike. They’re all about the in-group versus the out-group. The only thing that varies is the criteria for who’s in and who’s out.
This mindset splits the world into binary opposites. Everyone is either an ally or an enemy, a good person or an evildoer, a saint or a sinner. It’s appealingly straightforward, which makes it satisfying. Tribalism is one of those tendencies that just hits the right buttons in the human brain.
(We often conceive of justice as a set of scales, but I fear that metaphor can lead us astray into dangerously simplistic thinking. After all, scales tip one way or the other. There’s no outcome in between.)
But when we encounter a case that crosses those tidy lines, it creates uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. What happens when a person, or a people, is a genuine victim of persecution, but also an oppressor? What happens when “our side” is inflicting harm, or when there are kind, innocent people on the other side?
That doesn’t fit into a framework of right-or-wrong, in-or-out tribalism. So, these moral systems don’t try to account for it. Instead, they steamroll it into a convenient two-dimensional portrait. Whatever harm the bad guys commit is further evidence of their wickedness. Whatever harm the good guys commit is rational and justified (or alternatively, lies and propaganda made up by the enemy in a bid for sympathy).
The flattening tendency of tribalism obliterates nuance from every conflict. No one wants to be in the middle, where every side is lobbing bombs at you. Thus, everyone gets pushed to pick one side or the other, to join a team, to declare our allegiance and wave the flag.
And, the longer these debates go on, the more entrenched all sides become. The battle lines are drawn, positions harden, and resentment curdles. People start to believe, not just that they’re on the right side, but that the right side is obvious. They start to believe that everyone who doesn’t see the world the same way as they do is a puppet of imperialists, or an apologist for genocide, or a settler colonialist, or a secret Nazi.
Empathy gymnastics
Whenever I consider what’s to be done, I always go back to empathy. I said in my last column that it doesn’t offer an easy solution to this conflict. And yet, it’s the only guide we have. If there’s any way out, it will only be discovered by the embrace of mutual understanding. It will never be achieved by force of arms on either side.
Israel is the refuge of a people who were expelled from their ancestral homeland and endured centuries of brutal persecution. The Jews were scattered across the earth, forced to live among those who despised them. They were scapegoated by vicious conspiracy theories, prevented from owning land, often forbidden to practice their own religion. Ultimately, they were targeted for extermination in the worst slaughter of the 20th century.
You can’t understand Israel without grasping that bone-deep history of trauma. You can’t grasp the roots of this conflict without hearing the echo of “Never again” in the back of every Jewish person’s mind. They have very good reason to want to protect themselves, without ever having to rely on anyone else’s mercy or goodwill.
At the same time, Israelis need to understand that their current situation is of their own making. Israel will never be safe until it learns to live together in peace with its neighbors. Not only have they not done that, they’ve forced the Palestinians to live under hellish conditions.
If there’s ever going to be an end to these conflicts, the Palestinians need a realistic hope of a better future. Just as the Jews do, they deserve safety, stability, and the chance to control their own destiny. They can’t stay confined and oppressed forever, with no chance of things ever getting better for them.
Otherwise, no informed observer of human nature would expect them to respond with anything other than destructive nihilism and religious zealotry. Historically, the Jews rebelled many times against oppressive foreign rulers. How can they not expect others to do the same?
This is less a perspective flip than a perspective cartwheel. Whichever side you look at it from, it demands the overturning of sacred beliefs. It’s a gymnastic feat of empathy, and perhaps most people aren’t capable of it. But if we’re not capable of it, then this bloodshed will go on forever.
A crutch we no longer need
In the olden days, one could argue, tribalism was the only option. After all, belief in universal brotherhood was no good to anyone if the invaders from over the next hill didn’t share that view. When culture and language and religion were much deeper rifts that separated humans from each other, cleaving to the tribe was the only way to survive.
But that survival instinct is a crutch we no longer need. We live in a world where anyone can travel anywhere, learn about any culture, translate any language. We know more about each other than we ever have. We no longer have any excuse for treating other humans as aliens or dangerous creatures. By all rights, we should find it easier to get along.
Instead, millions cling fiercely to their tribalisms, even when we no longer have any need for them. Because of these imaginary distinctions, real human beings are hating each other, shedding blood, waging war, killing, and dying. It’s a tragic absurdity that should have no place in a rational world.
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary at the end of a long and illustrious life as she contemplated how solitude enriches creative work. It’s a lovely sentiment, but as empowering as it may be to those willing to embrace solitude, it can be tremendously lonesome-making to those for whom loneliness has contracted the space of trust and love into a suffocating penitentiary. For if in solitude, as Wendell Berry memorably wrote, “one’s inner voices become audible [and] one responds more clearly to other lives,” in loneliness one’s inner scream becomes deafening, deadening, severing any thread of connection to other lives.
How to break free of that prison and reinhabit the space of trust and love is what Olivia Laing explores in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone (public library) — an extraordinary more-than-memoir; a sort of memoir-plus-plus, partway between Helen MacDonald’s H Is for Hawk and the diary of Virginia Woolf; a lyrical account of wading through a period of self-expatriation, both physical and psychological, in which Laing paints an intimate portrait of loneliness as “a populated place: a city in itself.”
After the sudden collapse of a romance marked by extreme elation, Laing left her native England and took her shattered heart to New York, “that teeming island of gneiss and concrete and glass.” The daily, bone-deep loneliness she experienced there was both paralyzing in its all-consuming potency and, paradoxically, a strange invitation to aliveness. Indeed, her choice to leave home and wander a foreign city is itself a rich metaphor for the paradoxical nature of loneliness, animated by equal parts restlessness and stupor, capable of turning one into a voluntary vagabond and a catatonic recluse all at once, yet somehow a vitalizing laboratory for self-discovery. The pit of loneliness, she found, could “drive one to consider some of the larger questions of what it is to be alive.”
She writes:
There were things that burned away at me, not only as a private individual, but also as a citizen of our century, our pixelated age. What does it mean to be lonely? How do we live, if we’re not intimately engaged with another human being? How do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or unblessed with beauty? And is technology helping with these things? Does it draw us closer together, or trap us behind screens?
Bedeviled by this acute emotional anguish, Laing seeks consolation in the great patron saints of loneliness in twentieth-century creative culture. From this eclectic tribe of the lonesome — including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Alfred Hitchcock, Peter Hujar, Billie Holiday, and Nan Goldin — Laing chooses four artists as her companions charting the terra incognita of loneliness: Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Henry Darger, and David Wojnarowicz, who had all “grappled in their lives as well as work with loneliness and its attendant issues.”
Photograph by Maria Popova. (Available as a print.)
She considers, for instance, Warhol — an artist whom Laing had always dismissed until she was submerged in loneliness herself. (“I’d seen the screen-printed cows and Chairman Maos a thousand times, and I thought they were vacuous and empty, disregarding them as we often do with things we’ve looked at but failed properly to see.”) She writes:
Warhol’s art patrols the space between people, conducting a grand philosophical investigation into closeness and distance, intimacy and estrangement. Like many lonely people, he was an inveterate hoarder, making and surrounding himself with objects, barriers against the demands of human intimacy. Terrified of physical contact, he rarely left the house without an armoury of cameras and tape recorders, using them to broker and buffer interactions: behaviour that has light to shed on how we deploy technology in our own century of so-called connectivity.
Woven into the fabric of Laing’s personal experience are inquiries into the nature, context, and background of these four artists’ lives and their works most preoccupied with loneliness. But just as it would be unfair to call Laing’s masterpiece only a “memoir,” it would be unfair to call these threads “art history,” for they are rather the opposite, a kind of “art present” — elegant and erudite meditations on how art is present with us, how it invites us to be present with ourselves and bears witness to that presence, alleviating our loneliness in the process.
Laing examines the particular, pervasive form of loneliness in the eye of a city aswirl with humanity:
Imagine standing by a window at night, on the sixth or seventeenth or forty-third floor of a building. The city reveals itself as a set of cells, a hundred thousand windows, some darkened and some flooded with green or white or golden light. Inside, strangers swim to and fro, attending to the business of their private hours. You can see them, but you can’t reach them, and so this commonplace urban phenomenon, available in any city of the world on any night, conveys to even the most social a tremor of loneliness, its uneasy combination of separation and exposure.
You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the loneliness that comes from living in a city, surrounded by millions of people. One might think this state was antithetical to urban living, to the massed presence of other human beings, and yet mere physical proximity is not enough to dispel a sense of internal isolation. It’s possible – easy, even – to feel desolate and unfrequented in oneself while living cheek by jowl with others. Cities can be lonely places, and in admitting this we see that loneliness doesn’t necessarily require physical solitude, but rather an absence or paucity of connection, closeness, kinship: an inability, for one reason or another, to find as much intimacy as is desired. Unhappy, as the dictionary has it, as a result of being without the companionship of others. Hardly any wonder, then, that it can reach its apotheosis in a crowd.
As scientists are continuing to unpeel the physiological effects of loneliness, it is no surprise that this psychological state comes with an almost bodily dimension, which Laing captures vividly:
What does it feel like to be lonely? It feels like being hungry: like being hungry when everyone around you is readying for a feast. It feels shameful and alarming, and over time these feelings radiate outwards, making the lonely person increasingly isolated, increasingly estranged. It hurts, in the way that feelings do, and it also has physical consequences that take place invisibly, inside the closed compartments of the body. It advances, is what I’m trying to say, cold as ice and clear as glass, enclosing and engulfing.
There is, of course, a universe of difference between solitude and loneliness — two radically different interior orientations toward the same exterior circumstance of lacking companionship. We speak of “fertile solitude” as a developmental achievement essential for our creative capacity, but loneliness is barren and destructive; it cottons in apathy the will to create. More than that, it seems to signal an existential failing — a social stigma the nuances of which Laing addresses beautifully:
Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person, as much a part of one’s being as laughing easily or having red hair. Then again, it can be transient, lapping in and out in reaction to external circumstance, like the loneliness that follows on the heels of a bereavement, break-up or change in social circles.
Like depression, like melancholy or restlessness, it is subject too to pathologisation, to being considered a disease. It has been said emphatically that loneliness serves no purpose… Perhaps I’m wrong, but I don’t think any experience so much a part of our common shared lives can be entirely devoid of meaning, without a richness and a value of some kind.
Loneliness might be taking you towards an otherwise unreachable experience of reality.
Adrift and alone in the city that promises its inhabitants “the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation,” Laing cycles through a zoetrope of temporary homes — sublets, friends’ apartments, and various borrowed quarters, only amplifying the sense of otherness and alienation as she is forced to make “a life among someone else’s things, in a home that someone else has created and long since.”
But therein lies an inescapable metaphor for life itself — we are, after all, subletting our very existence from a city and a society and a world that have been there for much longer than we have, already arranged in a way that might not be to our taste, that might not be how the building would be laid out and its interior designed were we to do it from scratch ourselves. And yet we are left to make ourselves at home in the way things are, imperfect and sometimes downright ugly. The measure of a life has to do with this subletting ability — with how well we are able to settle into this borrowed, imperfect abode and how much beauty we can bring into existence with however little control over its design we may have.
This, perhaps, is why Laing found her only, if temporary, respite from loneliness in an activity propelled by the very act of leaving this borrowed home: walking. In a passage that calls to mind Robert Walser’s exquisite serenade to the soul-nourishment of the walk, she writes:
In certain circumstances, being outside, not fitting in, can be a source of satisfaction, even pleasure. There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure. Sometimes as I walked, roaming under the stanchions of the Williamsburg Bridge or following the East River all the way to the silvery hulk of the U.N., I could forget my sorry self, becoming instead as porous and borderless as the mist, pleasurably adrift on the currents of the city.
But whatever semblance of a more solid inner center these peripatetic escapes into solitude offered, it was a brittle solidity:
I didn’t get this feeling when I was in my apartment; only when I was outside, either entirely alone or submerged in a crowd. In these situations I felt liberated from the persistent weight of loneliness, the sensation of wrongness, the agitation around stigma and judgement and visibility. But it didn’t take much to shatter the illusion of self-forgetfulness, to bring me back not only to myself but to the familiar, excruciating sense of lack.
Edward Hopper: Nighthawks (1942)
It was in the lacuna between self-forgetfulness and self-discovery that Laing found herself drawn to the artists who became her companions in a journey both toward and away from loneliness. There is Edward Hopper with his iconic Nighthawks aglow in eerie jade, of which Laing writes:
There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs.
[…]
The diner was a place of refuge, absolutely, but there was no visible entrance, no way to get in or out. There was a cartoonish, ochre-coloured door at the back of the painting, leading perhaps into a grimy kitchen. But from the street, the room was sealed: an urban aquarium, a glass cell.
[…]
Green on green, glass on glass, a mood that expanded the longer I lingered, breeding disquiet.
Hopper himself had a conflicted relationship with the common interpretation that loneliness was a central theme of his work. Although he often denied that it was a deliberate creative choice, he once conceded in an interview: “I probably am a lonely one.” Laing, whose attention and sensitivity to even the subtlest texture of experience are what make the book so wonderful, considers how Hopper’s choice of language captures the essence of loneliness:
It’s an unusual formulation, a lonely one; not at all the same thing as admitting one is lonely. Instead, it suggests with that a, that unassuming indefinite article, a fact that loneliness by its nature resists. Though it feels entirely isolating, a private burden no one else could possibly experience or share, it is in reality a communal state, inhabited by many people. In fact, current studies suggest that more than a quarter of American adults suffers from loneliness, independent of race, education and ethnicity, while 45 per cent of British adults report feeling lonely either often or sometimes. Marriage and high income serve as mild deterrents, but the truth is that few of us are absolutely immune to feeling a greater longing for connection than we find ourselves able to satisfy. The lonely ones, a hundred million strong. Hardly any wonder Hopper’s paintings remain so popular, and so endlessly reproduced.
Reading his halting confession, one begins to see why his work is not just compelling but also consoling, especially when viewed en masse. It’s true that he painted, not once but many times, the loneliness of a large city, where the possibilities of connection are repeatedly defeated by the dehumanising apparatus of urban life. But didn’t he also paint loneliness as a large city, revealing it as a shared, democratic place, inhabited, whether willingly or not, by many souls?
[…]
What Hopper captures is beautiful as well as frightening. They aren’t sentimental, his pictures, but there is an extraordinary attentiveness to them… As if loneliness was something worth looking at. More than that, as if looking itself was an antidote, a way to defeat loneliness’s strange, estranging spell.
David Wojnarowicz by Peter Hujar (Peter Hujar Archive)
For the artists accompanying Laing on her journey — including Henry Darger, the brilliant and mentally ill Chicago janitor whose posthumously discovered paintings made him one of the most celebrated outsider artists of the twentieth century, and the creative polymath David Wojnarowicz, still in his thirties when AIDS took his life — loneliness was often twined with another profound affliction of the psyche: loss. In a passage evocative of Paul Goodman’s taxonomy of the nine types of silence, Laing offers a taxonomy of lonelinesses through the lens of loss:
Loss is a cousin of loneliness. They intersect and overlap, and so it’s not surprising that a work of mourning might invoke a feeling of aloneness, of separation. Mortality is lonely. Physical existence is lonely by its nature, stuck in a body that’s moving inexorably towards decay, shrinking, wastage and fracture. Then there’s the loneliness of bereavement, the loneliness of lost or damaged love, of missing one or many specific people, the loneliness of mourning.
But this lonesomeness of mortality finds its antidote in the abiding consolations of immortal works of art. “Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness,” philosopher Alain de Botton and art historian John Armstrong wrote in their inquiry into the seven psychological functions of art, and if loneliness is, as Laing puts it, “a longing for integration, for a sense of feeling whole,” what better answer to that longing than art? After all, in the immortal words of James Baldwin, “only an artist can tell, and only artists have told since we have heard of man, what it is like for anyone who gets to this planet to survive it.”
Looking back on her experience, Laing writes:
There are so many things that art can’t do. It can’t bring the dead back to life, it can’t mend arguments between friends, or cure AIDS, or halt the pace of climate change. All the same, it does have some extraordinary functions, some odd negotiating ability between people, including people who never meet and yet who infiltrate and enrich each other’s lives. It does have a capacity to create intimacy; it does have a way of healing wounds, and better yet of making it apparent that not all wounds need healing and not all scars are ugly.
If I sound adamant it is because I am speaking from personal experience. When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.
But as profoundly personal as loneliness may feel, it is inseparable from the political dimensions of public life. In a closing passage that calls to mind Audre Lorde’s clarion call for breaking our silences against structural injustice, Laing adds:
There is a gentrification that is happening to cities, and there is a gentrification that is happening to the emotions too, with a similarly homogenising, whitening, deadening effect. Amidst the glossiness of late capitalism, we are fed the notion that all difficult feelings — depression, anxiety, loneliness, rage — are simply a consequence of unsettled chemistry, a problem to be fixed, rather than a response to structural injustice or, on the other hand, to the native texture of embodiment, of doing time, as David Wojnarowicz memorably put it, in a rented body, with all the attendant grief and frustration that entails.
I don’t believe the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.
Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.
This is the third of nine installments in the animated interlude season of The Universe in Verse in collaboration with On Being, celebrating the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry. See the rest here.
THE ANIMATED UNIVERSE IN VERSE: CHAPTER THREE
To be human is to live suspended between the scale of glow-worms and the scale of galaxies, to live with our creaturely limitations without being doomed by them — we have, after all, transcended them to unravel the molecular mystery of the double helix and compose the Benedictus and land a mechanical prosthesis of our curiosity on Mars. We have dreamt these things possible, then made them real — proof that we are a species of limitless imagination along the forward vector of our dreams. But we are also a species continually blinkered — sometimes touchingly, sometimes tragically — by our own delusions about the totality around us. Our greatest limitation is not that of imagination but that of perspective — our lens is too easily contracted by the fleeting urgencies of the present, too easily blurred by the hopes and fears of our human lives.
Two centuries ago, Maria Mitchell — a key figure in Figuring — understood this with uncommon poetry of perspective.Portrait of Maria Mitchell, 1840s. (Maria Mitchell Museum. Photograph: Maria Popova)
America’s first professional female astronomer, she was also the first woman employed by the federal government for a “specialized non-domestic skill.” After discovering her famous comet, she was hired as “computer of Venus,” performing complex mathematical calculations to help sailors navigate the globe — a one-woman global positioning system a century and a half before Einstein’s theory of relativity made GPS possible.
When Maria Mitchell began teaching at Vassar College as the only woman on the faculty, the college handbook mandated that neither she nor her female students were allowed outside after nightfall — a somewhat problematic dictum, given she was hired to teach astronomy. She overturned the handbook and overwrote the curriculum, creating the country’s most ambitious science syllabus, soon copied by other universities — including the all-male Harvard, which had long dropped its higher mathematics requirement past the freshman year.
Maria Mitchell’s students went on to become the world’s first class with academic training in what we now call astrophysics. They happened to all be women.
Maria Mitchell, standing at telescope, with her students at Vassar
Science was one of Maria Mitchell’s two great passions. The other was poetry.
At her regular “dome parties” inside the Vassar College Observatory, which was also her home, students and occasional esteemed guests — Julia Ward Howe among them — gathered to play a game of writing extemporaneous verses about astronomy on scraps of used paper: sonnets to the stars, composed on the back of class notes and calculations.
Mitchell taught astronomy until the very end of her long life, when she confided in one of her students that she would rather have written a great poem than discovered a great comet. But scientific discovery is what gave her the visibility to blaze the way for women in science and enchant generations of lay people the poetry of the cosmic perspective.
It was this living example that became Maria Mitchell’s great poem, composed in the language of being — as any life of passion and purpose ultimately becomes.
“Mingle the starlight with your lives,” she often told her students, “and you won’t be fretted by trifles.”
And yet here we are, our transient lives constantly fretted by trifles as we live them out in the sliver of spacetime allotted us by chance.
A century after Maria Mitchell returned her borrowed stardust to the universe that made it, the poet Pattiann Rogers extended a kindred invitation to perspective, untrifling the tender moments that make a life worth living.
Straight up away from this road, Away from the fitted particles of frost Coating the hull of each chick pea, And the stiff archer bug making its way In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair, Up the stem of the trillium, Straight up through the sky above this road right now, The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes. I try to remember that.
And even in the gold and purple pretense Of evening, I make myself remember That it would take 40,000 years full of gathering Into leaf and dropping, full of pulp splitting And the hard wrinkling of seed, of the rising up Of wood fibers and the disintegration of forests, Of this lake disappearing completely in the bodies Of toad slush and duckweed rock, 40,000 years and the fastest thing we own, To reach the one star nearest to us.
And when you speak to me like this, I try to remember that the wood and cement walls Of this room are being swept away now, Molecule by molecule, in a slow and steady wind, And nothing at all separates our bodies From the vast emptiness expanding, and I know We are sitting in our chairs Discoursing in the middle of the blackness of space. And when you look at me I try to recall that at this moment Somewhere millions of miles beyond the dimness Of the sun, the comet Biela, speeding In its rocks and ices, is just beginning to enter The widest arc of its elliptical turn.
Previously on The Universe in Verse: Chapter 1 (the evolution of flowers and the birth of ecology, with Emily Dickinson); Chapter 2 (Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and the age of space telescopes, with Tracy K. Smith).
[First Published August 2022] I’ve written three books to educate believers on how to honestly seek the truth and defend it: 1) The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion is True. In it I show honest believers how to approach their faith consistently without any double standards or special pleading.
2) How to Defend the Christian Faith: Advice from an Atheist. In it I show Christian apologists how to correctly defend their faith, if it can be defended at all. Apologists should read it before writing another sentence in defense of their faith. In it I challenge apologists to stop doing what they’re doing if they’re honest about defending their Christian faith. The risk is that if they stop it they cannot defend their faith at all. But the risk is worth it if they’re serious about knowing and defending the truth.
3) Unapologetic: Why Philosophy of Religion Must End. In it I show philosophers of religion and other intellectuals how to properly discuss and debate religious beliefs. What I cannot teach however, is to desire the truth. That comes from within. Taken together these three books are the antidote to the faith virus. The problem is almost none of them desire the truth, comparatively speaking. Here’s hoping a few honest believers are reading who desire the truth.
Other words come to mind as well: indifferent, complacent, gullible. Quite bluntly: There is a lack of curiosity. If the church says that the Bible was inspired by a god, isn’t that good enough? In fact, it is one of the great ironies in the ongoing debate between believers and atheists that the Bible is one of Christianity’s biggest embarrassments. Atheists—anyone outside the faith, for that matter—can point to countless passages in the Bible and ask, “Is that really the god you believe in? Why do you follow/adore/worship Jesus when so much of his advice in the gospels is so bad?” Professional Christian apologists work very hard to make the Bible look good—make it look like it came from a divine author. But the huge problem is that so much of the good book is just awful.
But then there’s the process that created the Bible—as it exists in gleaming splendor on church altars, or the plain copies the devout have in their homes. How did dozens of ancient documents, written in languages that most laypeople today don’t know, end up in a book so widely revered?
The last stage of this process is translation—and that has produced substantial confusion. There are dozens of different English Bible translations, many of them turned out by different translators with their own faith-based agendas. In a posting here a few days ago, 16 October 2023, titled Dr. Hector Avalos on Mistranslating the Bible, John Loftus showed a few pages from Avalos’ book, The End of Biblical Studies.
[For those who follow this blog, be sure to check it every Monday. Loftus has announced his intention of posting especially value material—drawing largely on the content from the past—on a weekly basis.]
Christian apologist Bible translators take on the task of disguising what the Bible actually says, and Avalos offers examples.
It took a long time—as the Bible documents were being written over the centuries—for the concept of ONE powerful god to emerge as orthodox. But this wasn’t the case in Deuteronomy 32:8-9; Avalos quotes the Catholic New American Bible:
“When the Most High assigned the nations their heritage, when he parceled out the descendants of Adam, He set up the boundaries of the peoples after the number of the sons of God; while the LORD’s own portion was Jacob, his hereditary share was Israel.”
Avalos comments: “Most readers will miss the fact that ‘the Most High’ and the ‘LORD’ are two different gods, among many different gods, here. The term translated as ‘the Most High’ is probably the name of a god, pronounced as Elyon, and the term translated as ‘LORD’ corresponds to the Hebrew name we pronounce as Yahweh, ancient Israel’s main god.” (p. 43, The End of Biblical Studies)
The same translator trick, Avalos notes, is used in Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning when God created…”
“The word ‘God’ is probably best translated as the name of the specific god named ‘Elohim.’ If one were to be even more literal, one might note that Elohim is actually a plural noun, which could be translated as ‘gods’.” (p. 45, TEBS)
Since humans began imagining gods thousands of years ago, deities were given names. And the god who eventually stood out as the primary god of the Hebrews was Yahweh. Christians pay homage to this practice with the common formula, “In Jesus’ name we pray”—and even in the opening of the Lord’s Prayer, “…hallowed be thy name…” I suspect, however, if we asked Christians what their god’s name is, most would draw a blank. Yahweh wouldn’t be the first thing that comes to mind—primarily because translators have disguised it. Whenever we see the word Lord—in the Old Testament—in all caps, i.e., LORD, this is their substitution for Yahweh. Perhaps pious translators suspect that their god having a name makes him look like other gods.
Just beyond the pages Loftus included in the 16 October post, we find a section titled Sugarcoating Jesus—that also in a project of translators, as Avalos explains:
“Christianity often markets itself as more inclusive and loving than the religion of the Old Testament and Judaism. However, this has required using mistranslations to hide or suppress some of the darker discontinuities between what Jesus taught and what current versions of Christianity want their audiences to think Jesus taught.” (p. 50)
He refers specifically to the infamous Luke 14:26, in which Jesus states that hated of family, and even life itself, is required of those who want to be his disciples. Avalos adds, “According to this text, Jesus acts more like a cult leader who actively attempts to transfer allegiance from the believer’s family to himself.” (p. 50)
And he shows the efforts of some translators to disguise the plain meaning of this text; they want to deflect attention from alarming cult flavor of this quote. For an exhaustive analysis of this verse, see the 39-page chapter, “The Hateful Jesus, Luke 14:26” in Avalos’ book, The Bad Jesus: The Ethics of New Testament Ethics. The pious scholars who oversee translations have a cherished, idealized Jesus firmly embedded at the center of their faith. They can’t let even the Bible get in the way.
Some translators/editors go so far as to print the words of Jesus in red—even Luke 14:26! —to assure readers that these are the real words of Jesus. More deception. There is no way whatever to verify that the Jesus-script in the gospels is based on words that Jesus actually spoke. Churchgoers are inclined to trust their Bibles; the use of red ink for Jesus-script is a violation of that trust.
The beginning of the Bible-assembly process is also problematic, for those who are so sure that the Bible was divinely inspired. The blunt fact is that we don’t have any of the original Bible manuscripts. The traditional names of the gospel authors—Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—were added later to these anonymously written documents. The very first manuscripts of these authors have been lost. So how do we know exactly what they wrote? The invention of the printing press didn’t happen until well more than a thousand years later, so the manuscripts were copied by hand—in an era before electric lighting and eyeglasses. If the author of what we call Mark’s gospel handed his freshly finished document to three copyists, it is inevitable that each copyist would have made different errors—and those errors were repeated in copies made from those copies. So what do we have? Hundreds or even thousands of gospel copies that contain countless errors. There are scholars who devote their careers to careful examination of the old manuscripts, trying to discover the wording of the original.
Here’s another factor: copyists sometimes added words that reflected their own theologies—or if they felt something was missing. Hence we have the fake ending of Mark’s gospel, i.e., 16:9-20, which isn’t in the earliest manuscripts of the gospel. What a strange text is included here (vv. 17-18), Jesus-script promising believers:
“…by using my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues;they will pick up snakes and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
Many modern translations put 16:9-20 in a footnote, but in two old versions of the RSV that I own, even in the footnote, vv. 17-18 are printed in red. Why would modern Christians want to be assured by Jesus that they can pick up snakes and drink poison? The translators/editors use another trick as well. The footnoted material is credited to other authorities. How do manuscripts cluttered with errors and additions qualify as authorities? Isn’t this an attempt by these pious scholars to disguise the mess that exists in the ancient manuscripts?
What are the implications of this state of affairs for the claim that the Bible was divinely inspired? Is it even remotely credible that the Christian god who took the trouble to guide the minds of New Testament authors—to write the truth—couldn’t be bothered to protect the manuscripts from error and corruption? How does that make sense? It is even more embarrassing that the first complete manuscript of the New Testament dates from the fourth century; how many errors/additions/corruptions does it contain? How far removed is it from the content of the original manuscripts? One of the things that scholars argue/speculate a lot about is the presence of interpolations, i.e., texts that may have been inserted by copyists. There are hints that a verse or two, here and there, look out of place. What a sloppy, haphazard process. Bible god seems to have been asleep on the job.
It’s hard to argue convincingly that the Bible is the Word of God. It’s not a stretch to say that the Bible you hold in your hand today in processed Word of God. Or more correctly, the Bible is processed word of men who were confident they were somehow in tune with the divine and wrote accordingly. So much in the Bible betrays its obvious human origins: the author of Luke’s gospel—whoever he was—included the hate-your-family verse. Who wants to argue that this was divinely inspired? There is so much in the Bible that falls far short of great moral teaching—there is so much that is frankly horrifying—and this is not hard to figure out, even for ordinary churchgoers who make the effort to read/study the Bible. Which most don’t bother to do, hence far too many of the laity appear to remain clueless.
Iceland is a fascinating place for reasons geologic, geographic, linguistic, and cultural. Add to the list that it’s one of the least religious nations on Earth.
Unlike most of secular Europe, this isn’t a recent development. Prominent Icelandic expressions of nonbelief extend nearly a thousand years into the past. To gaze into the soul of a culture, look at their legends, the stories they tell about themselves. For Iceland, that would be the Sagas of Icelanders.
Consisting mostly of refugees from Norway in the 9th century, the earliest Icelanders brought Norse paganism along with them. The official religion became Christianity, though many of the settlers retained their pagan beliefs. And whenever two prominent religions cohabitate, a third strain of nonbelief is usually found nestling between them.
The first of the Sagas were written in the 13th century, at the tail end of a period wracked by violence and political uncertainty, and describe life in Iceland from the earlier period just after the Norse explorers had settled it. Among the most popular is the Saga of Hrafnkell.
13th-century Icelandic manuscript. Public domain.
Hrafnkell’s Saga tells of a warrior chief, Hrafnkell, who worships Freyr, the Norse god of such lovely things as wealth, sunshine, and sex. Hrafnkell gives Freyr his best offerings and constant devotion, even building a grand temple to the god. Despite all this devotion, Hrafnkell is attacked by an enemy, his temple burned, and he and his people enslaved.
“It is folly to believe in gods,” he says, vowing never to perform another sacrifice. Stories of lost faith in hard times are easy to come by, and you can usually count on the hero to experience a sudden epiphany that leads him back to the fold before the closing credits. But Hrafnkell’s Saga takes an unexpected turn: He escapes slavery, spares the life of his captor in exchange for freedom, and lives his life in peace and contentment without gods.
The most famous contributor to the Icelandic Sagas was the wonderfully-named Snorri Sturleson. In addition to leading the nation’s parliament and writing history, Snorri was a mythographer, a gatherer of myths and beliefs. And interestingly, Snorri came to precisely the same conclusion as the mythographer Euhemerus of Crete about the origin of god belief: Human warrior chiefs and kings were venerated in life, then venerated in death, then gradually became venerated as gods.
The more contact a person has with human mythmaking, the more he or she seems to see the man behind the curtain.
It’s unsurprising that Hrafnkell remains among the most beloved and widely-read of the Sagas of Icelanders among Icelanders today. Though most are nominally Lutheran, fully 60 percent of Icelandic respondents in a 2011 Gallup poll said religion is unimportant in their daily lives. It’s a number that is certain to have increased since then, making Iceland one of the least religious countries on Earth.
Kate Cohen’s excellent essay about the importance of atheists being open about their atheism is exactly right. But maybe we need to extend that sentiment even further.
I’ve been in both situations: a onetime Pentecostal who saw Christianity as the default setting for humanity, and an outsider who was no longer part of the tribe.
Recently, Kate Cohen wrote a moving opinion piece for Washington Post concerning atheism. In her essay, she speaks of a number of reasons why atheists should—if they can—be vocally atheistic. All of them sound perfectly fine. I’d like to add one more: the essential nature of diversity in a society that values human rights and civil liberties. That diversity destroys dysfunctional authoritarians’ perceived base of power even as it opens the door to dialogues between different people.
I learned that lesson myself at a very tender age when I got my first taste of being a despised majority.
Set your Wayback Machine for about 1990. Grunge was taking over the world, and yet Princess Di still owned our hearts. The best Total Recall adaptation came out that year, along with The Hunt for Red October. One of the most popular songs that year was “U Can’t Touch This” by MC Hammer.
As far as I knew, though, we were damn near 100% of the count.
That year, I was in college and newly married to my Evil Ex Biff. One day, he announced that he would be starting a prayer group on campus with a weird new-convert friend of his named James. Mainly, this was James’ idea, but Biff loved it.
We attended a very large state-funded university that was very generous to student groups. Thus, it cost Biff nothing whatsoever to start this group. They’d give us meeting rooms, audiovisual materials of all sorts almost upon demand, and even a small allowance we could use for campus events. All they really required in exchange for that largesse were three officers who were actively-enrolled students there, and for us to actually use what we requested from them.
Eventually, the group ran afoul of both requirements.
First of all, there simply weren’t three Pentecostals on campus willing to act as active officers of the group. James wasn’t even enrolled anywhere. And I’m female and therefore was ineligible (in our flavor of Christianity) for any leadership over men, even if my demanding school schedule allowed me to be active in any group. After some fuss, Biff discovered a friend from church who attended our school, then calmed his misogyny long enough to ask me to sign me up anyway. With Tim and me willing to pretend to be officers at least, Biff could file the startup paperwork for the group. He titled it PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS. Yes, in all caps. Of course. Before its first meeting, Biff had already drawn up a logo with impressively sharp, gleaming, sword-like edges to the words.
We officers represented the entire membership of the group. Nobody ever joined for what now seem like obvious reasons.
Undeterred, Biff reserved rooms for our group to use for prayer five days a week.
Now, why did three or four individual Christians need a whole meeting room reserved for prayer? Why couldn’t they just pray anywhere in our school’s expansive, garden-like campus that they liked? Or even, dare I mention, at the school’s beautiful nondenominational chapel?
Because our university printed campus-group meeting schedules every day, then posted them all over the place. Biff wanted everyone to see PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS prominently figuring in those schedules.
This desire of Biff’s had nothing to do with evangelism. Maybe that motivated James, but not Biff, who never once mentioned soulwinning as a motivation. What Biff actually said at the time was that he wanted people to see the name and know that TRUE CHRISTIANS™ were on campus.
Biff’s special calling was apparently to combat atheism on campus
In evangelicalism as well as in other flavors of Christianity, Christians believe that Jesus has created every person with a special role to play in his divine, ineffable plan for Earth. They call this role their divine calling. It represents their main purpose in life. It’s the reason they exist, the mission for which they were born.
At some point, Biff got the idea that his calling involved converting atheists and defeating atheism on our college campus. He very mistakenly thought that tons of atheists attended our university, making atheism a valid enemy to Christians like himself.
Being in Texas, most students there were Christian. But there were some outspoken atheists among the student body, and Biff glommed right onto them.
He’d been unsuccessfully evangelizing atheists for two years by the time we married and he started PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS.
Something strange was happening on campus, though. People did notice the group. They just weren’t reacting as I’d expected. Biff, I think, expected all of the reactions he ever got. He was an experienced RL troll (what people sometimes more graciously term a provocateur and less graciously a chain-yanking asshole). But I sure wasn’t, and so I didn’t.
What it’s like to grow up in a cultural bubble
I grew up before everything, it feels like: Before nearly ubiquitous home computers, before the internet, before cell phones, before smartphones, before AI, before the internet of things. For the first two decades of my life, most libraries used card catalogs with actual typed-up 3×5″ cards in long drawers to keep track of their books. Local-area dial-up Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) barely began to pop up in major cities when I was in my teens.
Making my world even more insular, I was also a military brat. My family lived on military bases sometimes, in regular houses other times, but we always tended to center our lives on my dad’s work.
So my entire world was Christian. I didn’t need to attend parochial school to be fully immersed in that bubble!
Everybody I knew was Christian. Everything in my world centered around Christianity and its rituals, its myths and folklore, its rules, its culture, its entire worldview. The only real question to ask was what flavor of Christian someone was, not whether they were Christian at all. We all already knew the answer to that.
(This is how I suspect Southerners picked up the habit of asking newcomers to their communities what church they attend. They still do it. Long ago, it was a legit question. Nowadays, it’s much more of a veiled interrogation.)
Until I went to college, I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t at least nominally Christian. If I ever ran into anyone who wasn’t, I didn’t even think about them. They were exceptions; they fell out of my mind and memory. Confirmation bias ensured that.
Nowadays, you’ve got to be a religiously-homeschooled evangelical kid with particularly controlling parents to come even close to this level of insularity. Back then, though, it was normal for kids in my area and circumstances. We just didn’t have any counterpoints or other frames of reference.
Well, college fixed that for me in a hurry.
My worldview takes a roundhouse to the jaw
I attended a couple of prayer meetings myself, but very soon I became entirely too busy for it. (I had also gotten weirded out at how non-divine prayer looked and felt when performed in a corporate meeting room.) That was fine, though. The entire idea was really the Biff and James Show, live every weekday at 12:00 noon.
One day while relaxing in a student lounge, I opened our campus newspaper. I was (and still am) a readaholic who must read All. The. Words, so I started with the letters to the editor. A minor funding squabble had erupted on campus over an increase in student fees covering campus groups, so most letters addressed that subject. One in particular stood out to me: A student making the point that that fee covered all students, even those with groups diametrically opposed to the views of any one particular student, and that this was a good thing because it encouraged diverse opinions in an educational setting.
She used PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS as a specific example of what she meant in her own case.
I just stared at that letter for a long time. My brain had gone into vapor lock. My entire worldview had just tilted on its ear and divided by zero.
It’s not like I hadn’t recognized the group’s name as an attention-seeking tactic from my supremely narcissistic then-husband. But the way that student talked, she wasn’t even Christian at all.
Atheism is part of the human situation
By then, I’d been in college for two years. However, I still perceived Christianity as the default state of humanity. When I considered the overall arc of human history, I still put Christianity front and center. Though I’d met any number of atheists and pagans and Muslims (oh my!) by then, I still generally perceived them as pre-Christian. Even the other Christians I met got judged by my own doctrinal beliefs, even if I wasn’t arguing with them for anywhere near as long as Biff did.
Yes, I was exactly that Christian kid in the iconic “Jesus is so lucky to have us!” cartoon:
“Isn’t Jesus lucky to have us!” Tom’s Doubts #14, by Saji
As if by magic, that student’s letter pulled me out of my entire way of thinking. Perhaps it was because I didn’t have any idea who she was. She could have been any woman I walked past on campus. Any woman I walked past on campus, in other words, could be thinking that PRAYER WARRIORS FOR JESUS was dumb, irrelevant, and utterly counter to her own worldview. For that matter, any person period could be thinking that.
With that, my perception of myself began to subtly alter. The arrogance and privilege of my presumptuous placement of Christianity as the default began to fade. It could not survive my sudden realization that lots of people lived in this world and all had their own ideas about religion.
I suspect most people learn similar lessons in childhood. Somehow, I’d avoided that one until I was twenty. But better late than never. My world became a tapestry of living colors as if I was an extra in the movie Pleasantville.
Just a couple of years later, when my slow-burn deconversion began in earnest, I still didn’t know anyone who’d deconverted. For a long time, I thought I was the literal only person in the history of Christianity who’d ever believed what we called the full gospel and then realized it wasn’t true. I didn’t meet another ex-Pentecostal for a long time, and when I did, she had thought the same about herself!
We ex-Christians had to forge a path from scratch, just about, on an individual basis with each one of our deconversions. Nowadays, that’s nowhere near as common a story. There’s such a painful sense of sheer isolation when you’re positive you’re the only one who ever.
It’s not just atheism. The world needs everyone who can do so to be vocal about who and what they are.
As Kate Cohen notes in her essay, lots of people even in America aren’t free to express their beliefs/nonbelief. Anyone who’s done hard time in the Deep South likely knows this truth painfully well. It can be risky to declare one’s status as out-of-step with the lockstep march that evangelicalism in particular demands.
Insular religious communities like those are risky precisely because the members of the perceived majority like it that way. They like there being no other options besides the one they offer. There’s way less chance of someone veering out of step that way.
When someone isn’t keeping the beat, it’s glaringly obvious to everyone else. That poor schmuck stands out! As a result, it doesn’t take much effort from the rest of the group to get that person back into line. Social freezing-out, nasty comments, loss of customers, maybe trouble fomented at school or a little “evandalism” of the black sheep’s possessions: it’s minor stuff that functions as a prelude to the big guns: mysteriously losing one’s job, marriage, kids, and community standing.
But if a solid 25% of the marchers lose step and start veering off-course, the majority suddenly has a whole bunch of problems. Now there are too many targets for the tribe’s usual methods of retaliation. They can’t focus properly on any one person, much less on all of the people requiring their Christian love.
It’s like adding another person to the safety net’s edges to hold it out for the others
Oh, but matters get still worse for the majority. Thirty years ago, a whole bunch of Christians didn’t even know anyone who wasn’t Christian. Now, with so many more non-Christians floating around in the mix, Christians can’t help knowing at least one person who isn’t like themselves. In fact, they probably know a lot of non-Christians by now.
The tribe’s party line about outsiders can hold only when there aren’t a lot of ’em around. The more Christians learn about outsiders, the more they’ll realize the party line isn’t correct at all. Once one false belief gets shaken, let me tell you from painful personal experience along exactly these lines, it’s a lot easier to shake the rest.
Those false beliefs have lasted for many years precisely because the majority group heard next to no pushback about them. The sort of Christians who want to rule over everything, in particular, tend to assume that if they don’t hear any pushback, then whatever they’re doing is A-OK.
So if it’s safe for anyone to start being vocal and open about their worldview, that makes the waters just a tiny bit safer for every other person who wants to do the same, but can’t right now.
(In other words, don’t ever wonder why it’s those Christians who viciously fight against diversity and anti-racism measures.)
Whether someone is simply an ex-Christian, a None, an agnostic, an atheist, a pagan, or whatever else, they have a part in this glorious multicolored tapestry that depicts the human situation. With every new, colorful thread woven into it, it becomes progressively more difficult for the one-time majority to go back to their monochrome world.
The more hands we can get on deck, the better it’ll get for those who must watch quietly from the shore.
I like to say that my kids made me an atheist. But really what they did was make me honest.
I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.
I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time.
Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations:
The Greek myths are obviously stories. The Norse myths are obviously stories. L. Ron Hubbard obviously made that stuff up. Extrapolate.
The holy books underpinning some of the bigger theistic religions are riddled with “facts” now disproved by science and “morality” now disavowed by modern adherents. Extrapolate.
Life is confusing and death is scary. Naturally, humans want to believe that someone capable is in charge and that we continue to live after we die. But wanting doesn’t make it so.
Child rape. War. Etc.
And yet, when I was younger, I would never have called myself an atheist — not on a survey, not to my family, not even to myself.
Being an “atheist,” at least according to popular culture, seems to require so much work. You have to complain to the school board about the Pledge of Allegiance, stamp over “In God We Trust” on all your paper money and convince Grandma not to go to church. You have to be PhD-from-Oxford smart, irritated by Christmas and shruggingly unmoved by Michelangelo’s “Pietà.” That isn’t me — but those are the stereotypes.
And then there are the data.Studies have shown that many, many Americans don’t trust atheists. They don’t want to vote for atheists, and they don’t want their children to marry atheists. Researchers have found that even atheists presume serial killers are more likely to be atheist than not.
Given all this, it’s not hard to see why atheists often prefer to keep quiet about it. Why I kept quiet. I wanted to be liked!
But when I had children — when it hit me that I was responsible for teaching my children everything — I wanted, above all, to tell them the truth.
Their first atheist lesson was completely impromptu. Noah was 5, Jesse was 3, and we were sitting on the couch before bed reading from “D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths,” a holdover from my childhood bookshelf. One of the boys asked what a “myth” was, and I told them it was a story about how the world works. People used to believe that these gods were in charge of what happened on Earth, and these stories helped explain things they didn’t understand, like winter or stars or thunder. “See” — I flipped ahead and found a picture — “Zeus has a thunderbolt.”
“They don’t believe them anymore?” No, I said. That’s why they call it “myth.” When people still believe it, they call it “religion.” Like the stories about God and Moses that we read at Passover or the ones about Jesus and Christmas.
The little pajama-clad bodies nodded, and on we read.
That was it — the big moment. It was probably also the easiest moment.
Before one son became preoccupied with death. Before the other son had to decide whether to be bar mitzvahed. Before my daughter looked up from her math homework one day to ask, “How do we know there’s no God?”
Religion offers ready-made answers to our most difficult questions. It gives people ways to mark time, celebrate and mourn. Once I vowed not to teach my children anything I did not personally believe, I had to come up with new answers. But I discovered as I went what most parents discover: You can figure it out as you go.
Establishing a habit of honesty did not sap the delight from my children’s lives or destroy their moral compass. I suspect it made my family closer than we would have been had my husband and I pretended to our children that we believed in things we did not. We sowed honesty and reaped trust — along with intellectual challenge, emotional sustenance and joy.
Those are all personal rewards. But there are political rewards as well.
My children know how to distinguish fact from fiction — which is harder for children raised religious. They don’t assume conventional wisdom is true and they do expect arguments to be based on evidence. Which means they have the skills to be engaged, informed and savvy citizens.
We need citizens like that.
Lies, lying and disinformation suffuse mainstream politics as never before. A recent Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 29 percent of Americans believe that President Biden was not legitimately elected, a total composed of those who think there is solid evidence of fraud (22 percent) and those who think there isn’t (7 percent). I don’t know which is worse: believing there to be evidence of fraud when even the Trump campaign can’t find any or asserting the election was stolen even though you know there’s no proof.
Meanwhile, we are just beginning to grasp that artificial intelligence could develop an almost limitless power to deceive — threatening the ability of even the most alert citizen to discern what’s real.
We need Americans who demand — as atheists do — that truth claims be tethered to fact. We need Americans who understand — as atheists do — that the future of the world is in our hands. And in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.
Fortunately, there are a lot of atheists in the United States — probably far more than you think.
Some people say they believe in God, but not the kind favored by monotheistic religions — a conscious supreme being with powers of intercession or creation. When they say “God,” they mean cosmic oneness or astonishing coincidences. They mean that sense of smallness-within-largeness they’ve felt while standing on the shore of the ocean or holding a newborn baby or hearing the final measures of Chopin’s “Fantaisie-Impromptu.”
So, why do those people use the word “God” at all? The philosopher Daniel C. Dennett argues in “Breaking the Spell”that since we know we’re supposed to believe in God, when we don’t believe in a supernatural being we give the name instead to things we do believe in, such as transcendent moments of human connection.
Whatever the case, in 2022, Gallup found that 81 percent of Americans believe in God, the lowest percentage yet recorded. This year, when it gave respondents the option of saying they’re not sure, it found that only 74 percent believe in God, 14 percent weren’t sure, and 12 percent did not believe.
Not believing in God — that’s the very definition of atheism. But when people go around counting atheists, the number they come up with is far lower than that. The most recent number from Pew Research Center is 4 percent.
What’s with the gap? That’s anti-atheist stigma (and pro-belief bias) at work. Everybody’s keeping quiet, because everybody wants to be liked. Some researchers, recognizing this problem, developed a workaround.
In 2017, psychologists Will Gervais and Maxine Najle tried to estimate the prevalence of atheism in the United States using a technique called “unmatched count”: They asked two groups, of 1,000 respondents each, how many statements were true among a list of statements. The lists were identical except that one of them included the statement “I believe in God.” By comparing the numbers, the researchers could then estimate the percentage of atheists without ever asking a direct question. They came up with around 26 percent.
If that’s true or even close, there are more atheists in the United States than Catholics.
Do you know what some of those atheists call themselves? Catholics. And Protestants, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. General Social Survey data back this up: Among religious Americans, only 64 percent are certain about the existence of God. Hidden atheists can be found not just among the “nones,” as they’re called — the religiously unaffiliated — but also in America’s churches, mosques and synagogues.
“If you added up all the nominal Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. — those who are religious in name only,” Harvard humanist chaplain Greg M. Epstein writes in “Good Without God,”“you really might get the largest denomination in the world.”
Atheists are everywhere. And we are unusually disposed to getting stuff done.
Iused to say, when people asked me what atheists do believe, that it was simple: Atheists believe that God is a human invention.
But now, I think it’s more than that.
If you are an atheist — if you do not believe in a Supreme Being — you can be moral or not, mindful or not, clever or not, hopeful or not. Clearly, you can keep going to church. But, by definition, you cannot believe that God is in charge. You must give up the notion of God’s will, God’s purpose, God’s mysterious ways.
In some ways, this makes life easier. You don’t have to work out why God might cause or ignore suffering, what parts of this broken world are God’s plan, or what work is his to do and what is yours.
But you also don’t get to leave things up to God. Atheists must accept that people are allowing — we are allowing — women to die in childbirth, children to go hungry, men to buy guns that can slaughter dozens of people in minutes. Atheists believe people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better.
That’s right: Atheists take more political action — donating to campaigns, protesting, attending meetings, working for politicians — than any other “religious” group. And we vote. In his study on this data, sociologist Evan Stewart noted that atheists were about 30 percent more likely to vote than religiously affiliated respondents.
We also vote far more than most religiously unaffiliated people. That’s what distinguishes atheists from the “nones” — and what I didn’t realize at first.
Atheists haven’t just checked out of organized religion. (Indeed, we may not have.) We haven’t just rejected belief in God. (Though, obviously, that’s the starting point.) Where atheism becomes a definite stance rather than a lack of direction, a positive belief and not just a negative one, is in our understanding that, without a higher power, we need human power to change the world.
I want to be clear: There are clergy members and congregations all across this country working to do good, not waiting for God to answer their prayers or assuming that God meant for the globe to get hotter. You don’t have to be an atheist to conduct yourself as if people are responsible for the world they live in — you just have to act like an atheist, by taking matters into your own hands.
Countless good people of faith do just that. But one thing they can’t do as well as atheists is push back against the outsize cultural and political power of religion itself.
That power is crushing some of our most vulnerable citizens. And I don’t mean my fellow atheists. Atheists, it’s true, are subject to discrimination and scapegoating; somehow we’re to blame for moral chaos, mass shootings and whatever the “trans cult” is. Yes, we are technically barred from serving as jurors in the state of Maryland or joining a Boy Scout troop anywhere, but we do not, as a group, suffer anything like the prejudice that, say, LGBTQ+ people face. It’s not even close.
Peel back the layers of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, though, and you find religion. Peel back the layers of control over women’s bodies — from dress codes that punish girls for male desire all the way to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade — and you find religion. Often, there isn’t much peeling to do. According to the bill itself, Missouri’s total abortion ban was created “in recognition that Almighty God is the author of life.” Say what, now?
And when religion loses a fight and progress wins instead? Religion then claims it’s not subject to the resulting laws. “Religious belief” is — more and more, at the state and federal levels — a way to sidestep advances the country makes in civil rights, human rights and public health.
In 45 states and D.C., parents can get religious exemptions from laws that require schoolchildren to be vaccinated. Seven states allow pharmacists to refuse to fill contraceptive prescriptions because of their religious beliefs. Every business with a federal contract has to comply with federal nondiscrimination rules — unless it’s a religious organization. Every employer that provides health insurance has to comply with the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate — unless it’s, say, a craft supply store with Christian owners.
You don’t have to be an atheist to worry about the structural integrity of Thomas Jefferson’s “wall of separation between Church & State.” You don’t have to be an atheist to think that religion should not shape public policy or that believers should have to follow the laws that everyone else does. You don’t have to be an atheist to see that Christian nationalists are using “religious liberty” to perpetuate much of the discrimination Americans suffer today.
But atheists can do one thing about the country’s drift into theocracy that our religious neighbors won’t: We can tell people we don’t believe in God. The more people who do that, the more we normalize atheism in America, the easier it will be — for both politicians and the general public — to usher religion back out of our laws.
Okay, but should you say you’re an atheist even if you believe in “God” as the power of nature or something like that?
Yes. It does no one any favors — not the country, not your neighbors — to say you believe in God metaphorically when there are plenty of people out there who literally believe that God is looking down from heaven deciding which of us to cast into hell.
In fact, when certain believers wield enough political power to turn their God’s presumed preferences into law, I would say it’s dangerous to claim you believe in “God” when what you actually believe in is awe or wonder. (Your “God is love” only lends validity and power to their “God hates gays.”)
So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?
If you answer “no,” you’re an atheist. That’s it — you’re done.
But if you go further: You’ll be doing something good for your country.
When I started raising my kids as atheists, I wasn’t particularly honest with the rest of the world. I wasn’t everybody’s mom, right? Plus, I had to get along with other people. Young parents need community, and I was afraid to risk alienating new parent friends by being honest about being — looks both ways, lowers voice — an atheist.
But, in addition to making me be honest inside our home, my children pushed me to start being honest on the outside. In part, I wanted to set an example for them, and in part, I wanted to help change the world they would face.
It shouldn’t be hard to say you don’t believe in God. It shouldn’t be shocking or shameful. I know that I’m moral and respectful and friendly. And the more I say to people that I’m an atheist — me, the mom who taught the kindergarten class about baking with yeast and brought the killer cupcakes to the bake sale — the more people will stop assuming that being an atheist means being … a serial killer.
And then? The more I say I’m an atheist, the more other people will feel comfortable calling themselves atheists. And the stigma will gradually dissolve.
Can you imagine? If we all knew how many of us there are?
It would give everyone permission to be honest with their kids and their friends, to grapple with big questions without having to hold on to beliefs they never embraced.
And it would take away permission, too. Permission to pass laws (or grant exemptions to laws) based on the presumed desires of a fictional creation. Permission to be cruel to fellow human beings based on Bible verses. Permission to eschew political action in favor of “thoughts and prayers.”
I understand that, to many people, this might sound difficult or risky. It took me years to declare myself an atheist, and I was raised Reform Jewish, I live in the Northeast, I’m White, I work at home, and my family and friends are a liberal bunch. The stakes were low for me. For some, I fully concede, the stakes are too high.
If you think you’d lose your job or put your children at risk of harassment for declaring your atheism, you get a pass. If you would be risking physical harm, don’t speak out. If you’re an atheist running for school board somewhere that book bans are on the agenda, then feel free to keep it quiet, and God bless.
But for everyone else who doesn’t believe in God and hasn’t said so? Consider that your honesty will allow others to be honest, and that your reticence encourages others to keep quiet. Consider that the longer everyone keeps quiet, the longer religion has political and cultural license to hurt people. Consider that the United States — to survive as a secular democracy — needs you now more than ever.
And the next time you find yourself tempted to pretend that you believe in God? Tell the truth instead.
Christian apologists are celebrating the supposed collapse of the atheist movement—but all that’s really happening is that a few formerly high-profile atheists have turned against recent developments in moral progress. They’re getting left behind, but the nonreligious population continues to grow and religion continues to dwindle and decline.
Did you hear? The New Atheism is defunct—and that must mean the time has come for a revival of Christianity!
Right?
Christian apologists are eager to argue this “if not A, therefore B” logic. Unfortunately for them, they’ve gotten out over their skis again. They’ve failed to recognize that they’re committing a massive fallacy of the excluded middle.
I knew something had changed when, in 2018, I received an unexpected email from atheist thinker Peter Boghossian. I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading.
At the time, Boghossian was a professor of philosophy at Portland State University. When he joined me for a podcast debate on faith in 2014, he had been as anti-religious as they come. His book A Manual For Creating Atheists (Pitchstone Publishing) was a set of strategies for talking religious people out of their beliefs, which he claimed were akin to a mental delusion.
However, four years later, when Boghossian responded to an invitation to a fresh dialogue, he told me that he was no longer participating in debates against Christians. Indeed, he now felt quite differently about people of faith: “You might be surprised at how much I have in common with you now”, he wrote.
…What had led to this dramatic change of tone? A few months later, it became clear.
Boghossian, along with two of his academic colleagues, were at the centre of a ruse, submitting hoax academic papers to peer-reviewed journals, in order to expose so-called “grievance studies”—critical theories in academia that placed gender, sexual identity and race at the centre of every subject.
The phenomenon that Brierly describes is real. However, the cause isn’t what he thinks.
What really happened is that the New Atheist movement, from the beginning, was hampered by an unrepresentative set of spokespeople—mostly male, mostly white, mostly elderly—and we’ve run into the limits of their progressivism. They were fine with questioning and critiquing religion, but they’ve proven unwilling to critique anything else.
Whether it’s feminism, transgender rights, identity politics, immigration, or war—as soon as the sword-point of skepticism was turned on one of their cherished assumptions, they became angry, hidebound cranks. They were only able to dish it out, never to take it. There was a time when they could claim to be on the vanguard of moral progress, but now it’s moved on and they’ve been left impotently sputtering in the rear view mirror. (Also, some of these figures—especially the “intellectual dark web” types—were never leaders of the secular community, except in their own minds.)
What comes after New Atheism
For these reasons, I’d agree that New Atheism, as a cultural force, is spent. But that doesn’t mean, as wishfully-thinking apologists assert, that Christianity is poised to come roaring back throughout the Western world.
On the contrary. As the one-time “thought leaders” fade further from relevance, a more enlightened, more diverse secular movement is quietly rising. Meanwhile, Christianity continues its slow, inexorable decline.
The decades-long rise of the nones — a diverse, hard-to-summarize group — is one of the most talked about phenomena in U.S. religion. They are reshaping America’s religious landscape as we know it.
… The nones account for a large portion of Americans, as shown by the 30% of U.S. adults who claim no religious affiliation in a survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
Other major surveys say the nones have been steadily increasing for as long as three decades.
So who are they?
They’re the atheists, the agnostics, the “nothing in particular.” They’re the “spiritual but not religious,” and those who are neither or both. They span class, gender, age, race and ethnicity.
While the nones’ vast diversity splinters them into myriad subgroups, most of them have this in common:
They. Really. Don’t. Like. Organized. Religion.
As Smith’s story makes clear, nonbelievers are a diverse bunch—from “secular homeschoolers in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas” to “college students who found their childhood churches unpersuasive or unwelcoming”—who have little in common. They have their own ethical codes, their own spirituality, and their own ways of finding meaning in life. They’re mostly young, mostly politically liberal, but they come from all walks of life.
However, one trait they do share is a distaste for organized religion: its cruelty, its antiquated and dogmatic morality, its power-obsessed politics, its hypocrisy, its greed. Those flaws have long been evident to those who have eyes to see. And once you see them for what they are, there’s no going back. Nobody is changing their mind about religion because some old white conservative who wrote a book about atheism twenty years ago now supports Donald Trump’s border wall.
The nones are now 30% of the U.S. population, and among younger generations, it’s more than 40%. And this trend shows no signs of slowing down. It’s only gathering momentum, as every generation is more secular than its predecessors.
Under the radar
Importantly, it’s not just the United States where this trend is playing out. It’s happening all over the world, including former Catholic strongholds like Italy:
In Italy, the cradle of Catholicism, new research suggests that only 19% of citizens attend services at least weekly, while 31% never attend at all—and it’s a trend already growing in some European nations. They’re called the “nones” and are growing in numbers every day.“Meet the ‘nones’: An ever increasing group across Europe with little to no religious affiliation.” Saskia O’Donoghue, AP, 8 October 2023.
It’s happening in Argentina, Pope Francis’ home country:
Most Latin Americans are Christian, and Catholicism remains the dominant religion; about two-thirds of Argentina’s 45 million people identify as Catholic. But the influence of the church has waned. There’s discontent following clergy sex abuse scandals and opposition to the church’s stances against abortion and LGBTQ rights.
… “The growth of those without a religion of belonging in the pope’s country is very striking,” said Hugo Rabbia, a political psychology professor at the National University of Cordoba.
He said the percentage of people who don’t identify with a religion in Argentina doubled within the last 15 years. That growth is in line with other parts of the world.
Christian apologists are celebrating prematurely because they’re confusing what gets reported on with what’s happening. They think of atheism in terms of famous individuals, and assume that what’s going on with them is reflective of the whole secular community.
But that’s not how it works. There’s no atheist pope whose decrees are binding on the rest of us.
The growth of the nonbelievers is gradual and statistical, and for that reason, it’s below the radar. But it’s proceeding regardless of figureheads who attract media attention by making inflammatory, controversial statements. Regardless of what some old sticks-in-the-mud are saying, congregations are still graying and dwindling, churches are still closing, and organized religion as a political force continues to lose power. The religious apologists who are prematurely celebrating the demise of atheism are going to be very surprised and disappointed.
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Richard L. Fricks 