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Atheists are people, too

Many people have their little rituals to start the new year. Televangelist Pat Robertson is no exception. Each January, he goes off on a little "prayer retreat," in which he talks to God and God talks to him. He returns from his Mount Sinai experience to share with his television audience the prophecies the Almighty has imparted to him.

This year was a dandy. The good reverend announced that America would be struck by terrorists in 2007 and millions would die. Yes, it sounds pretty grim, but before you go looking for a cave to crawl into, you should understand that Robertson's record in the prophecy business is not very good.

In 2006, Robertson said Jehovah had promised to strike the Pacific Northwest with a tsunami. In 2004, he said that George W. Bush would win reelection to the White House in a landslide. "I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election," he said. If 50.8 percent of the popular vote is a blowout, then chalk one up for the old reverend.

For the three percent of Americans who declare themselves atheist, agnostic, or secular humanist -- and for the seven percent who remain in the closet -- there are no collective rituals for starting a new year. They just try to make the best they can of a crazy world in which George W. Bush is still in the White House; Christian fundamentalists are setting health-care policy and denying condoms to teenagers and people in AIDS-ravaged African nations; Islamic fundamentalists have pledged to destroy the Great Satan called America; and Jewish fundamentalists will not be satisfied until they have sparked another war in the Middle East.

Yet in the midst of this plague of religiosity, one can feel a subtle but strong current moving in the opposite direction. Atheism is more popular today than it has been in many years, making the covers of major magazines and appearing on bestseller lists.

Richard Dawkins, the Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University, is author of The God Delusion, which has been riding high on the New York Times and Amazon best seller lists.

Two years ago, Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the End of Reason, which focused public attention on the dangers of religious extremism and sold a quarter-million copies. Now he is back with Letter to a Christian Nation, a polemical blast at religion as the source of most of humankind's misery.

And then there is Daniel Dennett, the dean of the new wave of nontheists and director of Tufts University's Cognitive Studies Center, whose Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, continues to spark controversy nearly a year after publication.

Why the sudden interest in atheism in this country, where 90 percent of adults profess belief in some form of Supreme Being? Why would anyone wish to be identified as an atheist when a University of Minnesota study published last April reported that atheists are the least-trusted minority in America? In that study, researchers found that 39.6 percent of people selected atheists from a list when asked which group doesn't share their vision of American society. Atheists beat out Muslims (26.3 percent) and homosexuals (22.6 percent). One of the researchers theorized that the "findings seem to rest on a view of atheists as self-interested individuals who are not concerned with the common good."

Intolerance of atheists rivals that of homosexuals in this country. Asked if he recognized "the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists," the first President Bush answered, "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

Atheists may get a bad rap, but in the age of George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden, religion has gotten a bad name as well, and some say that there is a straight line between the moderate religious observances of billions of Christians, Muslims, and Jews and the kind of fanaticism that threatens the very foundations of civilization.

"As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers," Dawkins writes in The God Delusion.

This "New Atheism," as it is called, was the subject of a cover story in the November Wired magazine, where contributing editor Gary Wolf wrote, "The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it's evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there's no excuse for shirking."

Herb Silverman couldn't agree more. Silverman is the founder of Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry (http://www.lowcountry.humanists.net) and has the distinction of being South Carolina's most outspoken atheist. (See story, p. 23.)

"Tolerance enables fundamentalism," Silverman says, sitting in his office at the Department of Mathematics at the College of Charleston. "All holy books have horrendous violence and intolerance, as well as love and peace. The fundamentalists will always seize upon the dark side of religion .... Why should we give ludicrous beliefs a pass?"

Silverman and Dawkins both see the New Atheism as taking the critical step from "mere philosophy" to a political movement. Dawkins said this in the Wired story: "I'm quite keen on the politics of persuading people of the virtues of atheism .... The number of nonreligious people in the U.S. is something nearer to 30 million than 20 million. That's more than all the Jews in the world put together. I think we're in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people who had the courage to come out. I think that's the case with atheists. They're more numerous than anybody realizes."

Silverman also goes for the gay analogy: "Forty years ago, I thought homosexuals were just child molesters, because I didn't know any homosexuals. That is, I didn't know any who were open about their homosexuality. They were all in the closet. Today it's possible to know gays as individuals and that's what I want for atheists. It's time to come out of the closet."

"Coming out of the closet" is a pleasantly innocuous term. In the hands of Richard Dawkins, the New Atheism takes on a harder edge. "Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists ... Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. It just doesn't add up. Either they're stupid, or they're lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they've got a motive! Everyone knows that an atheist can't get elected."

He's probably right, but Wendy Kaminer warns against hubris in the New Atheism movement. Kaminer is an attorney and former Guggenheim Fellow and the author of seven books of social criticism, including Sleeping with Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety and Free for All: Defending Liberty in America Today.

Kaminer was in town last month to address the annual American Civil Liberties Union banquet and took the opportunity to speak to the monthly meeting of Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry at the Unitarian Church.

She reminded the 40-plus in attendance that great intellectual traditions have come out of religion, including the Jesuits and Talmudist scholars. Furthermore, great social reforms have been spawned from religious ethics. In the United States, these would include the abolition and civil rights movements. The great slaughters of the 20th century were committed not in the name of religion, she said, but in the name of nationalism and secular ideologies. "Human nature is the problem, not religion."

She quoted Mary McCarthy in saying, "Religion is good for good people."

(Curiously, Kaminer said that she does not think there is more religiosity today than in earlier times, but the way the Republicans have gerrymandered electoral maps and use religion as a wedge issue has given religious voters more power today than at any time before.)

The challenge, Kaminer says, is to replace contempt with compassion and to preserve the ethics of religion, including the concept of sin and moral condemnation.

Silverman agrees. He has no use for religious ritual, though he tries to keep the ethics of religion in his own life. "It's the latter that are important to me," he said, "not the former ... I try to do the right thing because it is the right thing."

Deeds, not creeds, are the measure of a person's morality, Silverman says.

To those who say that people without religion would be released to commit mayhem, Silverman responds, "I do not consider it morality if you act purely out of rewards or punishments ... Morality is what you do when no one is watching." In a Universe without a God, that would be most of the time.

Another popular attitude that Silverman confronts at every opportunity is the sound bite, "Freedom of religion does not mean freedom from religion." This was a slogan of Sen. Joe Lieberman, a conservative Jew, during his vice presidential campaign in 2000.

"How can you have freedom of religion without having freedom from religion?" Silverman asks. "To defend only freedom of religion implies you must have some religion." Silverman prefers "freedom of conscience" as the proper understanding of religious tolerance.

Silverman does not think that atheists and agnostics will ever be a majority in this country, but he would like to see them receive the respect now accorded Jews, who were a safe object of public ridicule only a half century ago. He is not aware of any self-identified atheists holding elective office in this country but is working for the day when atheists can be elected to public office as readily as Jews.

Atheists and agnostics have an agenda for the new year. They want to raise awareness, reframe the issues, and change the language. More than 30 years ago, homosexuals redefined themselves and their movement by calling themselves "gays." As Richard Dawkins has written, "Gay is succinct, uplifting, positive: an 'up' word, where homosexual is a down word, and queer, faggot and pooftah are insults."

Why couldn't atheists -- another oppressed and closeted minority -- come up with their own word, which could do for them what "gay" did for homosexuals?

That's what Sacramento atheists Paul Geisert and Mynga Futrell set out to do a few years ago. They were looking for a word, like gay, which they could steal from common English, an adjective they could transform into a noun with its original meaning changed -- but not too much. Like gay, it needed to be catchy, positive, warm, cheerful. It needed to be ... bright. And so "bright" it was.

Bright is the new noun many atheists have chosen for themselves. Brights are coming out of the closet and standing up. Brights are tired of being the target of cheap shots by politicians and religious demagogues.

Are you a bright and don't know it? How many readers of City Paper are brights? How many school teachers, doctors, politicians, police officers, businesspeople? Do you know any brights? You surely do, whether you recognize them or not. The website http://www.celebatheists.com suggests numerous intellectuals and other famous people are brights.

According to Dawkins, brights constitute 60 percent of American scientists; a stunning 93 percent of scientists elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences are brights.

As Daniel Dennett has written, "We are your sons and daughters, your brothers and sisters. Our colleges and universities teem with brights. Among scientists, we are a commanding majority. Wanting to preserve and transmit a great culture, we even teach Sunday school and Hebrew classes. Many of the nation's clergy members are closet brights, I suspect. We are, in fact, the moral backbone of the nation: brights take their civic duties seriously precisely because they don't trust God to save humanity from its follies."

The new word isn't for everyone. Herb Silverman does not use it to describe himself because some people take the word to be an adjective and assume it to be a denigration of theists. The mild-mannered atheist does not wish to offend or affront -- even accidentally. But brights are here to stay, by whatever name. They even have their own website (http://the-brights.net), and for millions of nonbelievers, 2007 is shaping up to be a bright new year.