A Manual for Creating Atheists (18 page)

This may not be the advice you want to hear, but in my opinion the most important thing is to be comfortable with ignorance. I still struggle with this. Religion offers answers. When you embrace reason and make the decision to be rational, reasonable, thoughtful, and honest when examining your life, you will quickly come to the conclusion that you don’t have all of the answers. How do we teach people to be comfortable with uncertainty? I don’t have an answer that will satisfy everyone. I do know that the *attitude* of being comfortable with uncertainty is key, but as to the road to get to this place in your life, well, I’m still thinking about it. I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. As long as you maintain a sincerity with regard to belief, and an honesty with yourself, and truly examine your own life, then this alone may help you to be comfortable with not knowing. But I doubt it. I only know that I know nothing. That is my only certainty.

The Muslims will tell you to repeat the name of Allah until you come to believe. The Christians will tell you to open your heart to Jesus to find true belief. These are easy answers that bend you in the direction of your initial starting point. This isn’t the case with reason. When you form beliefs on the basis of evidence, no conclusion will be guaranteed. Everything will be up for grabs. There’s no book that can teach you how to do this; it is not just a skill set, it is an attitude.

So, my suggestions: Be genuine and sincere with yourself and with others. Everything else will take care of itself. I’m sorry I can’t offer you more than this.

I’m free to chat. Anytime.

pete

This chapter is brief because of a lack of peer-reviewed literature on the subject, and because my primary focus is to help people abandon their faith and not to offer them a “plan of recovery.” Those who have come to terms with doubt have most often spent years in recovery—intellect was their guide, honesty and a hunger to know their motivation, and the discovery of new courage their therapy. Unlike God’s spokespersons—the rabbi, the priest, the imam—I would never presume to tell someone which path is best for them. That kind of paternalism and arrogance are the behaviors that contribute to people turning their backs on religion.
¹

One of my roles is to provide support information to those who recover from faith. Beyond this, I wouldn’t presume to tell Street Epistemologists there is something you should or shouldn’t tell your clients. There are just too many variables (personal history, faith tradition, education, cultural heritage, psychological disposition, relationships, life context, etc.) for universal dos and don’ts.
²

This chapter contains post-treatment advice, followed by broad goals to help create a culture in which people value those dispositions crucial to allowing reason and rationality to flourish. It ends with two brief dialogues.

EMBRACE THE VAST SKEPTICAL COMMUNITY ONLINE AND IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD

You’ve created a cognitive space, exposed a flawed epistemology, helped someone on a journey out of their faith, now what?

After an intervention, don’t leave the subject hanging. Be prepared to provide names, contact information, and resources that can help. Initially the abandonment of faith can be both liberating and traumatic, especially when one “comes out” to unsupportive friends and family. Those who have abandoned their faith need to know there are support groups ready to help them. Always be prepared to furnish resources at the end of your intervention, and also have that information on hand just in case you run into a subject at a later time. I keep phone numbers and Web addresses of local resources (Center for Inquiry–Portland, Humanists of Greater Portland, Meetups, and the Portland State University FreeThinkers) on cards in my wallet.

If you have time, try and make yourself available for post-treatment relationships. I invite people to “friend” me on Facebook where they’ll at least have online support. I also invite the formerly faithful to lunch or dinner, to office hours, and even to my jiu jitsu class—I’ve become friendly with many people I’ve helped.

Another advantage in forming personal relationships is that you can introduce people to new communities and new friends who use reliable epistemologies. Forming new relationships is important because these interactions mitigate the risk of recidivating and falling back into faith communities. Disrupting one’s interpersonal milieu by providing supportive relationships and communities has the potential to cement new values and new, more reliable epistemologies—this is especially crucial in early stages (precontemplation, contemplation, preparation) when one begins to question one’s faith.
³

INSTITUTIONALIZING THE VALUE OF WONDER

“We live in a society where people are uncomfortable with not knowing. Children aren’t taught to say ‘I don’t know,’ and honesty in this form is rarely modeled for them. They too often see adults avoiding questions and fabricating answers, out of either embarrassment or fear, and this comes at a price. To solve the world’s most challenging problems, we need innovative minds that are inspired in the presence of uncertainty. Let’s support parents and educators who are raising the next generation of creative thinkers.”

—Annaka Harris (
Secular News Daily
, 2012)

Faith has fallen. What goes in its place? Wonder.

Wonder, open-mindedness, the disposition of being comfortable with not knowing, uncertainty, a skeptical and scientific-minded attitude, and the genuine desire to know what’s true—these are the attributes of a liberated mind. Let’s observe, let’s document, let’s carefully describe, and let’s be open to discomforting conclusions. Inquiry and wonder must replace dogmatism and certainty. The long-term goal is to create conditions that turn the dispositions of inquiring and wondering into culturally trumpeted virtues.
⁴

One of the most disappointing realizations for an unseasoned Street Epistemologist is understanding the degree to which wonder and inquiry are prisoner to social values. Like the boy in James Agee’s tragic novel,
A Death in the Family
, who is robbed of curiosity and hope, often reason and wonder are extinguished by pernicious forces in society (Agee, 2009, pp. 54–55). Interrupting the relationship between wonder and those institutions and forces that put down free inquiry will require the creation of a potent social and intellectual movement—a New Enlightenment—that will enable individuals to adopt the disposition toward reason en masse.

In chapter 9, I suggest that we borrow tools from the civil rights movement to nudge people away from certain values and dispositions and toward the use of reliable epistemologies.

When Wonder Isn’t Enough

In the span of two weeks, my mother had a heart attack, renal failure, sepsis, and a mass discovered in her uterus. The mass turned out to be cancer, which spread to her bowels and bones. A dynamic, vibrant, generous, irreverent, and unbelievably funny and loving woman suffered a slow, painful end. On October 27, 2012, she died at home, surrounded by those who deeply loved and respected her.
⁵

My mother was raised Catholic, though she was not particularly religious, or at least she never showed me that side of herself. She never went to church or, as far as I knew, never prayed or spoke of faith in a Catholic God. Yet when she went into heart surgery she clutched a small statue of baby Jesus on a manger. During her hospital stay, she asked my father to bring it to her, which he did every single day.

I don’t think my mother was scared of death. I do know she lived for her grandchildren and she desperately wanted to see them grow up. Even aside from all of the pain she experienced in her final months, knowing she’d never see the children again was by far the most agonizing thing of all.

When I reflect back, and think about my mother making the sign of the cross with the small figure of Jesus, I know offering her wonder was not enough. Not nearly enough. She needed something else … maybe the news that her grandchildren were safe and doing well … maybe to know that my dad and I were with her, holding her hand, and that we loved her so completely. Or maybe something else entirely?

What can we offer people like my mother in their most trying moments? I’ve thought about this question for quite some time, and the answer is as disconcerting as it is disparaging. Perhaps nothing. Once one has been indoctrinated and infected by faith, there may be nothing we can offer those in need that would grant them the same psychological and emotional comfort offered by their misplaced trust in the unknowable.

However, at the same time we know we’re all going to die. Though a life without certainty can engender upon some a level of despair, there is hope in the idea that every human being is now equal in death. The human species is made stronger by the fact that in the end we’re all going to die.

Faith’s greatest appeal may be solace—comfort and peace of mind in impossibly difficult times. Even the reward of seventy-two virgins in the afterlife falls short of the promise of eternal bliss with loved ones.
⁶
What comfort does reality-based reasoning offer someone suffering or facing death? I don’t know. During these difficult times, if we can offer anything at all, it is our physical presence. Being at my mom’s deathbed and holding her hand was both incredibly difficult and lovely, and I knew that simply being there helped ease her suffering. When I asked if I could sit on the edge of her bed and hold her hand, she mumbled, “Yeah, sure,” and then smiled. Those were the last words she ever said to me.

I’m aware that my lack of action goes against the thesis of this book, but I was unable to even engage my mother about her faith in the last days of her life.

The Next Generation and the Revaluation of Values

Our hopes rest on the next generation. We need a targeted, comprehensive campaign, in the K–12 school system across multiple scholastic disciplines, in summer camps, in libraries, in discussions with the faithful in front of their children, on TV and radio, in Internet chat rooms, and any and everywhere we can reach children. The thrust of our message must be that there are things we don’t know and it’s okay to not know—even in death. Not claiming to know something you don’t know isn’t a character flaw, it is a virtue.

Helping people, especially children, to be comfortable with not knowing, yet at the same time encouraging the development of curiosity, of wonder, and of a zest to explore the world, is a crucial and indispensable undertaking. New books and lines of literature about how to make children comfortable with not knowing and how to develop reliable epistemologies must be written, widely circulated, and read ubiquitously. To start we must create the
value
of being comfortable with uncertainty, particularly with regard to life’s ultimate questions. In other words, not only do we need to devalue an existing paradigm (faith), we also need to revalue an underappreciated one (reason).

Among the valuable lessons I learned from teaching prison inmates is that books alone aren’t enough. We need to get a message to children who can’t read, who would never open a book, and particularly to those in sheltered religious communities. These are often the greatest challenges—reaching the otherwise unreachable: The pastor’s daughter, the youth who’s recruited to be an altar boy, the children who commiserate about being in Sunday school (then, in awe, falsely attribute the church’s architectural splendor to Jesus and not to the skilled laborers who painstakingly constructed it), teenagers in alcohol and drug twelve-step recovery programs, kids in Islamic and Hasidic youth programs, and economically disadvantaged children who have no access to reading material and are stuck in a failed school. The vulnerable, the indoctrinated, and the hardest to reach children are where we should place the lion’s share of our efforts.
^7
8

Intervention

I ran into one of my former students (FS) while waiting in line at a popular sushi restaurant. He had taken two of my philosophy classes, but I didn’t recognize him as my classes have between 70 and 130 students. He was with his girlfriend (GF), who looked wholesome and in her midtwenties and who wore out-of-place cowboy boots. I was typing on my phone when he enthusiastically greeted me.

FS
: Pete! Pete! What are you doing here? Oh my God! Pete!

PB
: Hey man.

FS
: Do you know who I am?

PB
: Nope.

FS
: That’s cool. I was in your Critical Thinking class, and your Science and Pseudoscience class.

PB
: Right on. How’d those classes go for you?

(We chatted for a few minutes. FS introduced me to his girlfriend. Then he told me he abandoned his faith and it had become an issue in their relationship.)

PB
: You two must really love each other.

GF
: We do.

PB
: Well that’s great. And you’ve obviously listened to each other and really discussed FS’s embrace of reason, right?

GF
: Yeah. But …

PB
: Go ahead, it’s okay.

(Long pause)

PB
: If you’re comfortable I’m all ears. If not it’s all good.

(Pause)

GF
: But I’m scared for him. For my family. For us, you know. It’s been a really hard time.

PB
: Yeah. I can totally understand that. Life after faith can be scary.