Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (95 page)

Share memories of the loved one who is gone and talk about the impact he or she had.

If there was a painful illness, mention that the pain is over.

None of this is rocket science. It’s the time-tested way all people endure what seems unendurable — by turning to each other.

A mutual support group called Grief Beyond Belief was formed in 2011 to provide a safe place for nonbelievers to discuss and express grief — one of the few resources of its kind. The well-moderated Facebook group currently has more than 6,000 likes and provides an atmosphere free of the supernatural consolations that dominate most grief forums.

Doing Good Together

That Harvard/Wisconsin study I mention at the beginning of the chapter (the one that found churchgoing has more to do with social connection than a God connection) also found another big benefit: People get a huge boost from doing good together, and their communities grow stronger as a result.

Obviously doing good has a benefit for whoever you’re doing good
for.
If you volunteer at a food pantry, people get to eat. But it turns out that the community that’s doing the good also receives a big benefit. Meeting a group of friends on a regular basis to do meaningful, positive things together acts as glue for the group and boosts the well-being of its members.

Volunteering through a church certainly qualifies — but so does volunteering through your local community group, service club, or humanist group. And sure enough, atheist and humanist groups around the country are making community service and volunteering an ever-larger part of what they do. And in the process, many are finding that their members are more likely to keep coming and to be active when doing good together is a bigger part of the group’s identity. It’s yet another example of taking the best of the church experience and leaving the rest behind.

Asking Whether Anything is Sacred

Reframing traditionally religious rituals and practices in secular terms can be pretty disorienting for someone who sees church and religion as being about God first and foremost. It might seem that the nonbelievers have stripped out everything sacred. What could possibly be left of any value?

I’d humbly suggest that all the things that I’ve tried to separate from God in this chapter are all still “sacred” things:

Community

Connection

Common purpose

Belonging

Inspiration

Coming together to do good

Not sacred in that untouchable, unquestionable way, of course. Question them all you want — they can take it. These things are sacred in a fully natural and human way, meaning special, awe-inspiring, and deserving of respect.

And that list goes on and on, including things that all humans regardless of beliefs can hold sacred by this definition. God and religion work just fine as frames, and they’ve done so for many centuries. But when they put themselves in place of things that are genuinely sacred, like life, integrity, knowledge, love, a sense of purpose, freedom of conscience, and more, and make themselves sacred in that inflexible, thought-stopping, “hands off” meaning of the word — well, that’s when you’ve started loving frames more than pictures. That’s the kind of sacred I’d say everyone can all do without.

When every idea is open to discussion and nothing is trapped in the amber of an ancient age, “sacred” becomes a matter of human consensus. Suddenly believers and nonbelievers can talk to one another on common ground, even as they go their separate ways on the question of God. That’s the future, and it’s looking bright.

Part V

The Part of Tens

Chapter 19

Ten Surprising Things about Atheists and Other Nonbelievers

In This Chapter

Finding atheists in your own backyard . . . and in foxholes

Getting beyond stereotypes

Raising freethinkers, not atheists

Cooperating with religious people

T
his chapter focuses on ten things that you may not know about atheists, agnostics, and other nonbelievers.

They’re All Around You

Even without some visible clue, you may assume that everyone around you — every neighbor on the block, everyone cheering in the stands at the soccer game, even everyone in our own families — is part of the religious majority. After all, most people assume that all the atheists are somewhere “out there,” massed together in New York and Hollywood, while all of the people around them hold conventional religious beliefs.

In fact, every country, every state or province, and every community in the world has nonbelievers, just as they all have people who are gay, dyslexic, or left-handed. Recent research reports that more than 50 million nonreligious people live in the United States. For every person wearing unbelief on his or her sleeve or Facebook page, many more choose to keep it to themselves. You can even find many of them bowing their heads at the dinner table or sitting in a church pew every Sunday. I should know — I was an atheist attending church out of family obligation for more than 20 years.

They’re Growing in Number

The fastest growing “religious identity” in the developed world is people who have no religion. They’re sometimes referred to as “Nones.”

In fact, traditional religious belief has been rapidly declining in Europe. Since the 1950s, 19 European countries have gone from majority belief in God to majority nonbelief. In the United Kingdom, just 38 percent of the population still holds belief in God. France is at 34 percent, Sweden is 23 percent, and Estonia brings up the rear in traditional religious belief at 16 percent.

Irreligion is growing more slowly in North America, but it’s still the fastest growing worldview. It’s harder to measure in Canada, because 33 percent of Canadian Catholics and 28 percent of Canadian Protestants also say they don’t believe in God. The most recent Pew Forum study in the United States shows that “no religion” grew from 1 in 12 in 1990 to 1 in 5 in 2012.

Even in Latin and South America, nonbelievers are growing rapidly in number. Five percent of Mexico, 8 percent of Brazil and Ecuador, 11 percent of Argentina, and 17 percent of Uruguay consists of nonbelievers.

They Know an Awful Lot about Religion

The more a person knows about religion, the less likely he or she is to be religious. This isn’t always true, but as a general observation, it holds up.

The United States is extremely faithful but mostly uninformed. People
do
religion, but they don’t know much
about
religion. Europeans are the opposite — they know a lot about religion and tend not to believe it. The more a person learns about religion in detail, the less religion seems to hold up.

The US Religious Knowledge Survey asked 32 questions to assess the religious knowledge of respondents. Protestants on average correctly answered 16, which was also the average for Americans overall. Catholics brought up the rear with 14.7 — below the US average.

Top honors went to atheists and agnostics, with an average of 20.9 correct. Not surprising, really. Most atheists would say that they didn’t decide to learn about religion after they were atheists; it was the learning that led them to
become
atheists.

They Tend to Behave Themselves

You may assume that atheists, being free of the watchful eye of God, are fixtures on the Naughty List. This assumption is especially insulting to believers, because it implies they’d be racking up felonies if only God weren’t so darn attentive.

Atheists are the ironic proof that this insult to believers isn’t true. As I note in
Chapter 15
, nonbelievers tend to behave ethically by almost ever measure you can think of. The fact that those who specifically identify as atheists are 3 to 5 percent of the US population but only 0.09 percent of the federal prison population seems to support my claim. And as I note in
Chapter 15
, the least religious countries on Earth also have the lowest rates of violent crime and the highest rates of international aid to poor countries.

The real breakthrough comes when a religious believer discovers which of the many moral, ethical people in his or her life are atheists. Just like finding out someone you know and love is gay, personal experience trumps all the stats in the world.

They Have a Lot in Common with Everyone Else

Picking an atheist out of a lineup is harder than you’d think. And as “Nones” continue to grow and diversify, they resemble the general population even more in race, education, income, and politics. In the United States:

Seventy-two percent of nonreligious Americans are white (69 percent of the US population overall is white).

Eight percent of nonreligious Americans are black (compared to 11 percent of the United States overall).

Twelve percent of nonreligious Americans are Hispanic (compared to 13 percent of the United States overall).

In 1990, the nonreligious were a little more likely to have gone to college than the general population (51 to 41 percent). By 2008, that gap had almost disappeared (55 to 52 percent).