I am a member of the most feared, hated and despised religious minority in the United States. I am an atheist. For years I never talked about it…because I’ve always been an atheist; I never thought there was anything particularly noteworthy about it.<\/p>\n
But a few days ago I got into a conversation with an old friend who was in favor of tax-funded prayer in the public schools, and I “came out” as an atheist to him. The subsequent back-and-forth was long and deeply unsatisfying, and reminded me anew of the amazing array of our society’s misconceptions and fears about what atheists believe, about who we are, about what we’re like.<\/p>\n
Well…<\/p>\n
I grew up in a family of atheists, and most of the people I’ve been close to over the course of my life have been atheists, agnostics, secular humanists and Hindus. This article was originally written for the “Atheist Digest” series at Daily Kos, and I wanted to write it because one of the questions that is always asked about atheism is, more or less, “What shall we tell the children? How do we teach them ethics and morality without God?”<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I was one of those children.<\/p>\n In which I discuss being a child in a family of atheists. My mother\u2019s parents gave my brother and me Bibles one Christmas. I was then (and have always remained) a voracious reader, so I read the Bible, cover to cover. Most of it was incomprehensible, but I trudged on, because that was what you did with books: read them from cover to cover. Later on, in my teens, I found some lovely poetry in Ecclesiastes, and there’s a blue denim jacket in my closet with a verse from that chapter incorporated into a lot of hippie embroidery on the back.<\/p>\n The quote reads, “Better is a handful of quietness than two hands full of toil and a striving after wind.”<\/em> One of these days I’ll start teaching my daughter to embroider.<\/p>\n But from the point that I understood myself to be anything in the frothing confusion of religious identity, I understood myself to be an atheist. My parents were atheists, and when I asked them questions about important things, their answers made sense. I never felt a need to rebel against a deity or a religious tradition, because there was nothing for me to rebel against. I didn\u2019t rebel against atheism, either, because my parents never forced it on me. They just worked and played and did the best they could bringing up two boys in a suburb of Boston while the cultural storms of the 1960s swirled around us.<\/p>\n The house was full of books, and full of discussion. Most of my school friends found our family dinners to be unnerving; conversation was incessant and filled with philological digressions. Often I was the designated looker-upper; when a point of argument hinged on the correct meaning of a word, I would have to get up and go to the nearest dictionary and provide the main and supplementary definitions along with etymology and any interesting tidbits of usage \u2014 following which, dinner would continue. My parent\u2019s friends were scientists; we did not to my recollection know any people who were overtly religious.<\/p>\n I encountered religion peripherally. The Pledge of Allegiance is one such instance. The lyrics to songs like \u201cAmerica the Beautiful\u201d are another. At some point I must have asked my parents what this stuff was that I kept hearing, about \u201cGod.\u201d My mother recalls:<\/p>\n We were sitting in the living room, and having a discussion about religion…and [I told you about] how, long ago, when people didn\u2019t have as much scientific knowledge as we did, and they needed answers to big questions, they made up gods. Gods were their answers, and it was unscientific because…they didn\u2019t have science, and these were their answers. And you took that very seriously.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n My father had this to say when I asked him recently for his view of religion:<\/p>\n …religion in my view is a particular variety of self-deception, and I think it stems from a primitive by-product of the central nervous system which makes people want to know why<\/em>. Given primitive ignorance of anything other than “if you hit a dog with a club you can knock him over, if you drop a stone, it falls…”<\/em> from the point of view of what the nature of the world is, all these phenomena have to have causes…“why does the stone fall, why does the sun shine?”<\/em><\/p>\n …If you don\u2019t know, the need for rationale requires that you invent a cause, and my feeling has always been…that the modern religions are really the manifestation and crystallization of cumulated irrelevant explanations, coupled with deep brutality toward people who have different explanations. In other words, people fell in love with their own unfounded explanatory statements, and therefore had to fall out of love with anyone who suggested something different…and I think it\u2019s still going on. With that, we have religious wars in which people do everything that violates all the tenets of their religion. The Catholics at one time had the inquisition, and the extension of Islam by the sword is reasonably well documented…but all of these were to defend the causal charade, because it was more troubling for people to be told that their explanation is wrong than to be put in the position where they had to cut the heads off of other people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Both my parents were psychologists, in consequence of which my brother and I yearly accompanied my parents to whatever city was hosting the annual convention of the American Psychological Association. While most of the talks and presentations were over our heads, I remember vividly a film on some aspect of the commune movement (this was during the sixties, remember!) that ended with a few seconds of the commune\u2019s members, arms linked, singing a long-drawn-out OM. The sound mesmerized me; it lodged itself in my imagination where it remains to this day. Indeed, when I have optimistic thoughts about what will happen to me when I die, I find myself hoping that I can simply rejoin the Great Hum of the Universe.<\/p>\n In which I decide that I am a pacifist.<\/strong><\/p>\n My mother\u2019s brother was also an atheist. Once I asked why, if he was an atheist, he had a small Buddha on the dashboard of his car. My mother said it was because when he lived in India, he was aggravated and angered by the superstitions he encountered, and the statue was to remind him of this. That doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense, but it\u2019s what I remember.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know how I encountered the notion of pacifism, but by the fifth grade I had decided that I was a pacifist and would not fight. I jokingly announced that I was a Buddhist, but this was a joke; I knew nothing of Buddhism beyond the fact that Buddha was a pacifist.<\/p>\n What I do remember about becoming a pacifist, however, was that it seemed to make people angry<\/em>. Kids would beat me up… for the reason that I would not fight them. And the teachers who were in charge of recess would say things like, \u201cwell, Warren, you should stand up for yourself.\u201d <\/em> Even at that age, I recognized this as a senseless response; I was<\/em> standing up for myself \u2014 those playground bullies weren\u2019t going to make me fight<\/em> (bigbangit!).<\/p>\n Now, to be fair, I suppose a real pacifist would have acted to defuse the violence of the bullies<\/a>; my grade-school agenda was more in the nature of deliberately provoking a violent reaction so that I could assert moral ascendancy over my peers. I may have been nonviolent, but I was also obnoxious<\/em>.<\/p>\n Nevertheless.<\/p>\n I remember in seventh or eighth grade reading a line in one of Nat Hentoff\u2019s young adult novels, in which a character quotes Cesar Chavez saying, \u201cI am not a nonviolent man. I am a violent man who is trying to be nonviolent.\u201d<\/em> That impressed me deeply; I have many strong emotions that demand physical outlet, but the notion of violence against another human shocked me then and it shocks me still. Since fifth grade I have raised my hand to another person a total of twice; the memory of both occasions brings me sorrow and shame to this day.<\/p>\n In high school kids found out that I was a pacifist. I remember one big guy coming up to me and asking, \u201cHey, is it true that if I hit you, you won\u2019t hit me back?\u201d<\/em> I replied, \u201cYes.\u201d<\/em> Whereupon he hit me. Hard. High school was a dreadful experience (it was for most of us, of course…but for a long-haired self-professed pacifist two years younger than anyone else in the class, high school was really and truly teh suck<\/em>).<\/p>\n My mother discussed my pacifism with me, approvingly. This was in the mid-sixties, and I was too young for the draft, but she told me about \u201cconscientious objector\u201d status. I thought this was wonderful, for if ever there was a conscientious objector, it was I. But she told me that in the event that I ever became eligible for the draft I would probably have to be part of a church or religious organization, because their imprimatur was almost always essential for CO status to be granted. I did not know what to do; fortunately the war ended before I had to face this question.<\/p>\n In which I find a personal hero.<\/strong><\/p>\n When I was in 8th grade my parents gave me Irving Stone’s wonderful book, “Clarence Darrow for the Defense.” I read it over and over, absorbing the details of Darrow’s life and legal career<\/a>. One day my mother brought me home a slender paperback book: Lawrence and Lee’s great play, “Inherit The Wind<\/a>.” I knew the story of the Scopes trial from Stone’s book, and the play enthralled me completely. One moment in particular struck me with great force: just after Henry Drummond (Darrow) calls Matthew Harrison Brady (William Jennings Bryan) to the stand, and Brady states his willingness “…to sit here and endure Mr. Drummond’s sneering and his disrespect.”<\/em> In those days we didn’t have VCRs, much less DVDs, so it was another couple of years before I watched the film (when I was in high school) \u2014 but here’s the scene for your viewing pleasure. Brady asks “Is it possible that something is<\/em> holy to the celebrated agnostic?” Drummond’s response never fails to touch something very deep in me.<\/p>\n
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\nI have never prayed.
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\nI didn’t pray when I was growing up. I went to church when we visited my mother\u2019s parents, typically once or twice a year. I never spoke the prayers out loud, and never sang the hymns. In school, I left out the phrase \u201cunder god\u201d from the Pledge of Allegiance, and in Boy Scouts I omitted “God” from the \u201cGod and my Country\u201d phrase from the Scout oath (I confess I didn\u2019t last long in the Scouts anyway, although it was a longer tenure than that of my brother, who got tossed out for giving the scout salute with the outer two fingers omitted).<\/p>\n