Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (31 page)

2 Catholics

2 Methodists

2 Lutherans

Then it gets even more mixed. Thomas Paine was a non-Christian Deist, Franklin was a Christian Deist, and historian Gregg Frazer classifies Washington, Jefferson, and Madison as “theistic rationalists.”

Maybe it wasn’t an interfaith summit, but it was a pretty diverse bunch religiously. So it makes sense that they founded a country where the freedom of religion was guaranteed, up front, in the first amendment of the Bill of Rights. That means it wasn’t a Christian nation, but a nation in which citizens would be absolutely free to believe as they wished.

The Constitution contains only one reference to religion — and that was a specific ban on any religious requirement to hold office. God gets not a single mention in the whole Constitution. It’s the first time a nation was founded entirely on a social contract between humans without pretending God had signed off on it.

This doesn’t make the document atheistic, and it doesn’t make the founders atheists. It just establishes a secular government, one that’s entirely neutral on questions of religion.

American citizens of all persuasions should be grateful that the founders didn’t push their own beliefs on the country. People today may all imagine their own worldview would come out the winner, but given the variety of the Founders’ actual beliefs, it would have been like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates — you never know what you’re gonna get. It’s much better that they left the decisions to each individual.

Chapter 7

Opening a Golden Age of Freethought

In This Chapter

Connecting freethought and feminism

Humbling humanity with a dose of science

Challenging the religious monopoly in 19th-century politics

Creating a religion without God

T
hink of the history of human ideas as a kind of wrestling match between head and heart, thinking and feeling, reason and faith. A surge of religiosity followed the heyday of reason in ancient Greece and Rome after the collapse of the Roman Empire and into the Middle Ages. The Renaissance sparked a . . . well, a
Renaissance
of reason that carried straight through the American and French Revolutions.

As the 19th century began, the pendulum swung back, as the art, literature, and even philosophy of the early 19th century returned to an emphasis on feeling over thinking, including a resurgence in religious fervor. But before the century ended, a golden age of freethought bloomed in the United States and Europe, driven in part by such scientific discoveries as Darwin’s theory of evolution. By the end of the century, Friedrich Nietzsche declared that “God is dead” — then wondered how humanity would deal with the “shadow” of God, the lingering belief that was guaranteed to remain long after it stopped making sense.

Even as Nietzsche asked what was next, a “Great Agnostic” traveled the United States describing a world without gods, and a social reformer in New York founded a religion that’s not about gods. This chapter traces the progress of the idea of atheism through one of its most formative centuries.

Killing God: Atheist Philosophers Do the Crime, a Pantheist Writes the Eulogy

Despite that heading, atheist philosophers didn’t really kill God. (He was like that when we got here, I
swear.)
And though philosophy has been pounding away at religious assumptions for centuries now, science ended up putting those assumptions on life support.

An atheist philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), finally took the pulse of God and declared an end to the whole idea. When he said God was dead, it wasn’t the jubilant
whoop!
most people think it was. On the contrary, he captured the despair many poets and writers expressed during this time of slipping religious faith:

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? . . . Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

Ignore that last part about turning ourselves into gods — that’s just Nietzsche being Nietzsche. Don’t try this at home.

Thomas Hardy finished what Nietzsche started by laying Jehovah to rest in a poem titled, appropriately enough,
God’s Funeral.
A traditional Anglican believer for most of his life, Hardy eventually lost his Christian belief, adopting instead a kind of pantheistic view of the universe (see
Chapter 2
). And like Nietzsche, Hardy didn’t express the feeling of freedom and elation that some others did, especially in later centuries. For Hardy, the loss was too fresh. It was a kind of bereavement.

The poem describes a solemn procession across a half-lit plain, carrying a dead figure. At first it “seemed manlike,” then changes form, becoming a cloud, then seeming to sprout enormous wings, capturing the changes in people’s concept of God as they struggle to make it work. As the procession slowly passes, Hardy remembers the history of this “man-projected Figure” — first jealous and fierce (Old Testament), then just and blessed (New Testament). Needing solace, humanity deceived itself as long as it could, he says, until reality made it too hard to believe at all.

In the middle is a wonderful bit of empathy for those individuals who continue to believe. Incredulous believers are chasing after the funeral procession in angry denial, calling it a mockery and a lie, shouting, “Still he lives to us!” Hardy doesn’t call them fools: “I sympathized / And though struck speechless, I did not forget / That what was mourned for, I, too, long had prized.”

I love it when someone without belief shows a little empathy for the believer. Search online for Hardy’s poem. You should easily be able to find it.

Freethinking with Early Feminists

Almost every traditional religion puts women in an inferior or even degraded role compared to men. Nearly all bar women from serving as clergy. Women were (and often still are) held responsible for humanity’s fall from grace in the Old Testament, told to stay silent and submissive in church in the New Testament, and relegated to a servant’s role in the Qur’an. Hinduism instructs wives to worship their husbands as gods, even if said husbands lack a single good quality and sleep around. Even Jainism, my personal favorite (see
Chapter 4
), has one of its two main sects calling women “intrinsically harmful” and saying they can’t achieve nirvana without first being reborn a man.

Aw, Jainism . . .
really?

It does make sense that religions born more than 2,000 years ago would pick up the norms and values of their time. But when their scriptures carried bad ideas forward through the centuries along with the good, refusing all edits, until they collided with modern Enlightenment ideas like equality — that’s when they needed a change. And change was exactly what the first wave of feminists in the 19th century demanded.

Outraged by the role religion had played in keeping women in submission, many feminist leaders of this early movement identified as atheists and agnostics. Those early feminist leaders include the following:

Frances Wright:
When not visiting Thomas Jefferson or other movers and shakers of her time, agnostic feminist Frances Wright (1795–1852) traveled the United States giving public lectures in favor of women’s rights and the abolition of slavery. And she directly —
very
directly — condemned religion as the main problem in both areas. Doing so took incredible courage, in part because Wright was the first woman to speak publicly to an audience of both men and women in the United States, the first to publicly suggest that women should be equal to men, and the first to openly criticize religion. In a situation of multiple firsts, most people (myself included) would have been walking on eggshells, but not Wright. Her reward was to be assailed by clergy and press alike as “the great Red Harlot of Infidelity” and the “Whore of Babylon.” After many of her own lectures, she had to flee through the back door to avoid being pummeled by the crowd.