(This is an
edited transcript of a talk given at the Atheist Alliance conference
in Washington D.C. on September 28th, 2007)
To begin, I'd like
to take a moment to acknowledge just how strange it is that a meeting
like this is even necessary. The year is 2007, and we have all taken
time out of our busy lives, and many of us have traveled considerable
distance, so that we can strategize about how best to live in a world
in which most people believe in an imaginary God. America is now a
nation of 300 million people, wielding more influence than any people
in human history, and yet this influence is being steadily corrupted,
and is surely waning, because 240 million of these people apparently
believe that Jesus will return someday and orchestrate the end of the
world with his magic powers.
Of course, we may
well wonder whether as many people believe these things as say they
do. I know that Christopher [Hitchens] and Richard [Dawkins] are
rather optimistic that our opinion polls are out of register with
what people actually believe in the privacy of their own minds. But
there is no question that most of our neighbors reliably profess that
they believe these things, and such professions themselves have had a
disastrous affect on our political discourse, on our public policy,
on the teaching of science, and on our reputation in the world. And
even if only a third or a quarter of our neighbors believe what most
profess, it seems to me that we still have a problem worth worrying
about.
Now, it is not often
that I find myself in a room full of people who are more or less
guaranteed to agree with me on the subject of religion. In thinking
about what I could say to you all tonight, it seemed to me that I
have a choice between throwing red meat to the lions of atheism or
moving the conversation into areas where we actually might not agree.
I've decided, at some risk to your mood, to take the second approach
and to say a few things that might prove controversial in this
context.
Given the absence of
evidence for God, and the stupidity and suffering that still thrives
under the mantle of religion, declaring oneself an "atheist"
would seem the only appropriate response. And it is the stance that
many of us have proudly and publicly adopted. Tonight, I'd like to
try to make the case, that our use of this label is a mistake—and a
mistake of some consequence.
My concern with the
use of the term "atheism" is both philosophical and
strategic. I'm speaking from a somewhat unusual and perhaps
paradoxical position because, while I am now one of the public voices
of atheism, I never thought of myself as an atheist before being
inducted to speak as one. I didn't even use the term in The End of
Faith, which remains my most substantial criticism of religion. And,
as I argued briefly in Letter to a Christian Nation, I think that
"atheist" is a term that we do not need, in the same way
that we don't need a word for someone who rejects astrology. We
simply do not call people "non-astrologers." All we need
are words like "reason" and "evidence" and
"common sense" and "bullshit" to put astrologers
in their place, and so it could be with religion.
If the comparison
with astrology seems too facile, consider the problem of racism.
Racism was about as intractable a social problem as we have ever had
in this country. We are talking about deeply held convictions. I'm
sure you have all seen the photos of lynchings in the first half of
the 20th century—where seemingly whole towns in the South,
thousands of men, women and children—bankers, lawyers, doctors,
teachers, church elders, newspaper editors, policemen, even the
occasional Senator and Congressman—turned out as though for a
carnival to watch some young man or woman be tortured to death and
then strung up on a tree or lamppost for all to see.
Seeing the pictures
of these people in their Sunday best, having arranged themselves for
a postcard photo under a dangling, and lacerated, and often partially
cremated person, is one thing, but realize that these genteel people,
who were otherwise quite normal, we must presume—though unfailing
religious—often took souvenirs of the body home to show their
friends—teeth, ears, fingers, knee caps, internal organs—and
sometimes displayed them at their places of business.
Of course, I'm not
saying that racism is no longer a problem in this country, but anyone
who thinks that the problem is as bad as it ever was has simply
forgotten, or has never learned, how bad, in fact, it was.
So, we can now ask,
how have people of good will and common sense gone about combating
racism? There was a civil rights movement, of course. The KKK was
gradually battered to the fringes of society. There have been
important and, I think, irrevocable changes in the way we talk about
race—our major newspapers no longer publish flagrantly racist
articles and editorials as they did less than a century ago—but,
ask yourself, how many people have had to identify themselves as
"non-racists" to participate in this process? Is there a
"non-racist alliance" somewhere for me to join?
Attaching a label to
something carries real liabilities, especially if the thing you are
naming isn't really a thing at all. And atheism, I would argue, is
not a thing. It is not a philosophy, just as "non-racism"
is not one. Atheism is not a worldview—and yet most people imagine
it to be one and attack it as such. We who do not believe in God are
collaborating in this misunderstanding by consenting to be named and
by even naming ourselves.
Another problem is
that in accepting a label, particularly the label of "atheist,"
it seems to me that we are consenting to be viewed as a cranky
sub-culture. We are consenting to be viewed as a marginal interest
group that meets in hotel ballrooms. I'm not saying that meetings
like this aren't important. I wouldn't be here if I didn't think it
was important. But I am saying that as a matter of philosophy we are
guilty of confusion, and as a matter of strategy, we have walked into
a trap. It is a trap that has been, in many cases, deliberately set
for us. And we have jumped into it with both feet.
While it is an honor
to find myself continually assailed with Dan [Dennett], Richard
[Dawkins], and Christopher [Hitchens] as though we were a single
person with four heads, this whole notion of the "new atheists"
or "militant atheists" has been used to keep our criticism
of religion at arm's length, and has allowed people to dismiss our
arguments without meeting the burden of actually answering them. And
while our books have gotten a fair amount of notice, I think this
whole conversation about the conflict between faith and reason, and
religion and science, has been, and will continue to be, successfully
marginalized under the banner of atheism.
So, let me make my
somewhat seditious proposal explicit: We should not call ourselves
"atheists." We should not call ourselves "secularists."
We should not call ourselves "humanists," or "secular
humanists," or "naturalists," or "skeptics,"
or "anti-theists," or "rationalists," or
"freethinkers," or "brights." We should not call
ourselves anything. We should go under the radar—for the rest of
our lives. And while there, we should be decent, responsible people
who destroy bad ideas wherever we find them.
Now, it just so
happens that religion has more than its fair share of bad ideas. And
it remains the only system of thought, where the process of
maintaining bad ideas in perpetual immunity from criticism is
considered a sacred act. This is the act of faith. And I remain
convinced that religious faith is one of the most perverse misuses of
intelligence we have ever devised. So we will, inevitably, continue
to criticize religious thinking. But we should not define ourselves
and name ourselves in opposition to such thinking.
So what does this
all mean in practical terms, apart from Margaret Downey having to
change her letterhead? Well, rather than declare ourselves "atheists"
in opposition to all religion, I think we should do nothing more than
advocate reason and intellectual honesty—and where this advocacy
causes us to collide with religion, as it inevitably will, we should
observe that the points of impact are always with specific religious
beliefs—not with religion in general. There is no religion in
general.
The problem is that
the concept of atheism imposes upon us a false burden of remaining
fixated on people's beliefs about God and remaining even-handed in
our treatment of religion. But we shouldn't be fixated, and we
shouldn't be even-handed. In fact, we should be quick to point out
the differences among religions, for two reasons:
First, these
differences make all religions look contingent, and therefore silly.
Consider the unique features of Mormonism, which may have some
relevance in the next Presidential election. Mormonism, it seems to
me, is—objectively—just a little more idiotic than Christianity
is. It has to be: because it is Christianity plus some very stupid
ideas. For instance, the Mormons think Jesus is going to return to
earth and administer his Thousand years of Peace, at least part of
the time, from the state of Missouri. Why does this make Mormonism
less likely to be true than Christianity? Because whatever
probability you assign to Jesus' coming back, you have to assign a
lesser probability to his coming back and keeping a summer home in
Jackson County, Missouri. If Mitt Romney wants to be the next
President of the United States, he should be made to feel the burden
of our incredulity. We can make common cause with our Christian
brothers and sisters on this point. Just what does the man believe?
The world should know. And it is almost guaranteed to be embarrassing
even to most people who believe in the biblical God.
The second reason to
be attentive to the differences among the world's religions is that
these differences are actually a matter of life and death. There are
very few of us who lie awake at night worrying about the Amish. This
is not an accident. While I have no doubt that the Amish are
mistreating their children, by not educating them adequately, they
are not likely to hijack aircraft and fly them into buildings. But
consider how we, as atheists, tend to talk about Islam. Christians
often complain that atheists, and the secular world generally,
balance every criticism of Muslim extremism with a mention of
Christian extremism. The usual approach is to say that they have
their jihadists, and we have people who kill abortion doctors. Our
Christian neighbors, even the craziest of them, are right to be
outraged by this pretense of even-handedness, because the truth is
that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless
human misery, than Christianity has been for a very, very long time.
And the world must wake up to this fact. Muslims themselves must wake
up to this fact. And they can.
You might remember
that Thomas Friedman recently wrote an op-ed from Iraq, reporting
that some Sunni militias are now fighting jihadists alongside
American troops. When Friedman asked one Sunni militant why he was
doing this, he said that he had recently watched a member of al-Qaeda
decapitate an 8-year-old girl. This persuaded him that the American
Crusader forces were the lesser of two evils.
Okay, so even some
Sunni militants can discern the boundary between ordinary crazy
Islam, and the utterly crazy, once it is drawn in the spilled blood
of little girls. This is a basis for hope, of sorts. But we have to
be honest—unremittingly honest—about what is on the other side of
that line. This is what we and the rest of the civilized, and the
semi-civilized world, are up against: utter religious lunacy and
barbarism in the name of Islam—with, I'm unhappy to say, some
mainstream theology to back it up.
To be even-handed
when talking about the problem of Islam is to misconstrue the
problem. The refrain, "all religions have their extremists,"
is bullshit—and it is putting the West to sleep. All religions
don't have these extremists. Some religions have never had these
extremists. And in the Muslim world, support for extremism is not
extreme in the sense of being rare. A recent poll showed that about a
third of young British Muslims want to live under sharia law and
believe that apostates should be killed for leaving the faith. These
are British Muslims. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel that
their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted,
and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists should be
brought to justice. These people don't have a clue about what
constitutes a civil society. Reports of this kind coming out of the
Muslim communities living in the West should worry us, before
anything else about religion worries us.
Atheism is too blunt
an instrument to use at moments like this. It's as though we have a
landscape of human ignorance and bewilderment—with peaks and
valleys and local attractors—and the concept of atheism causes us
to fixate one part of this landscape, the part related to theistic
religion, and then just flattens it. Because to be consistent as
atheists we must oppose, or seem to oppose, all faith claims equally.
This is a waste of precious time and energy, and it squanders the
trust of people who would otherwise agree with us on specific issues.
I'm not at all
suggesting that we leave people's core religious beliefs, or faith
itself, unscathed—I'm still the kind of person who writes articles
with rather sweeping titles like "Science must destroy
religion"—but it seems to me that we should never lose sight
of useful and important distinctions.
Another problem with
calling ourselves "atheists" is that every religious person
thinks he has a knockdown argument against atheism. We've all heard
these arguments, and we are going to keep hearing them as long as we
insist upon calling ourselves "atheists. Arguments like:
atheists can't prove that God doesn't exist; atheists are claiming to
know there is no God, and this is the most arrogant claim of all. As
Rick Warren put it, when he and I debated for Newsweek—a reasonable
man like himself "doesn't have enough faith to be an atheist."
The idea that the universe could arise without a creator is, on his
account, the most extravagant faith claim of all.
Of course, as an
argument for the truth of any specific religious doctrine, this is a
travesty. And we all know what to do in this situation: We have
Russell's teapot, and thousands of dead gods, and now a flying
spaghetti monster, the nonexistence of which also cannot be proven,
and yet belief in these things is acknowledged to be ridiculous by
everyone. The problem is, we have to keep having this same argument,
over and over again, and the argument is being generated to a
significant degree, if not entirely, over our use of the term
"atheism."
So too with the
"greatest crimes of the 20th century" argument. How many
times are we going to have to counter the charge that Stalin, Hitler,
and Pol Pot represent the endgame of atheism? I've got news for you,
this meme is not going away. I argued against it in The End of Faith,
and it was immediately thrown back at me in reviews of the book as
though I had never mentioned it. So I tackled it again in the
afterword to the paperback edition of The End of Faith; but this had
no effect whatsoever; so at the risk of boring everyone, I brought it
up again in Letter to a Christian Nation; and Richard did the same in
The God Delusion; and Christopher took a mighty swing at it in God is
Not Great. I can assure you that this bogus argument will be with us
for as long as people label themselves "atheists." And it
really convinces religious people. It convinces moderates and
liberals. It even convinces the occasional atheist.
Why should we fall
into this trap? Why should we stand obediently in the space provided,
in the space carved out by the conceptual scheme of theistic
religion? It's as though, before the debate even begins, our
opponents draw the chalk-outline of a dead man on the sidewalk, and
we just walk up and lie down in it.
Instead of doing
this, consider what would happen if we simply used words like
"reason" and "evidence." What is the argument
against reason? It's true that a few people will bite the bullet here
and argue that reason is itself a problem, that the Enlightenment was
a failed project, etc. But the truth is that there are very few
people, even among religious fundamentalists, who will happily admit
to being enemies of reason. In fact, fundamentalists tend to think
they are champions of reason and that they have very good reasons for
believing in God. Nobody wants to believe things on bad evidence. The
desire to know what is actually going on in world is very difficult
to argue with. In so far as we represent that desire, we become
difficult to argue with. And this desire is not reducible to an
interest group. It's not a club or an affiliation, and I think trying
to make it one diminishes its power.
The last problem
with atheism I'd like to talk about relates to the some of the
experiences that lie at the core of many religious traditions, though
perhaps not all, and which are testified to, with greater or lesser
clarity in the world's "spiritual" and "mystical"
literature.
Those of you who have read The End of Faith, know
that I don't entirely line up with Dan, Richard, and Christopher in
my treatment of these things. So I think I should take a little time
to discuss this. While I always use terms like "spiritual"
and "mystical" in scare quotes, and take some pains to
denude them of metaphysics, the email I receive from my brothers and
sisters in arms suggests that many of you find my interest in these
topics problematic.
First, let me
describe the general phenomenon I'm referring to. Here's what
happens, in the generic case: a person, in whatever culture he finds
himself, begins to notice that life is difficult. He observes that
even in the best of times—no one close to him has died, he's
healthy, there are no hostile armies massing in the distance, the
fridge is stocked with beer, the weather is just so—even when
things are as good as they can be, he notices that at the level of
his moment to moment experience, at the level of his attention, he is
perpetually on the move, seeking happiness and finding only temporary
relief from his search.
We've all noticed
this. We seek pleasant sights, and sounds, and tastes, and
sensations, and attitudes. We satisfy our intellectual curiosities,
and our desire for friendship and romance. We become connoisseurs of
art and music and film—but our pleasures are, by their very nature,
fleeting. And we can do nothing more than merely reiterate them as
often as we are able.
If we enjoy some
great professional success, our feelings of accomplishment remain
vivid and intoxicating for about an hour, or maybe a day, but then
people will begin to ask us "So, what are you going to do next?
Don't you have anything else in the pipeline?" Steve Jobs
releases the IPhone, and I'm sure it wasn't twenty minutes before
someone asked, "when are you going to make this thing smaller?"
Notice that very few people at this juncture, no matter what they've
accomplished, say, "I'm done. I've met all my goals. Now I'm
just going to stay here eat ice cream until I die in front of you."
Even when everything
has gone as well as it can go, the search for happiness continues,
the effort required to keep doubt and dissatisfaction and boredom at
bay continues, moment to moment. If nothing else, the reality of
death and the experience of losing loved ones punctures even the most
gratifying and well-ordered life.
In this context,
certain people have traditionally wondered whether a deeper form of
well-being exists. Is there, in other words, a form of happiness that
is not contingent upon our merely reiterating our pleasures and
successes and avoiding our pains. Is there a form of happiness that
is not dependent upon having one's favorite food always available to
be placed on one's tongue or having all one's friends and loved ones
within arm's reach, or having good books to read, or having something
to look forward to on the weekend? Is it possible to be utterly happy
before anything happens, before one's desires get gratified, in spite
of life's inevitable difficulties, in the very midst of physical
pain, old age, disease, and death?
This question, I
think, lies at the periphery of everyone's consciousness. We are all,
in some sense, living our answer to it—and many of us are living as
though the answer is "no." No, there is nothing more
profound that repeating one's pleasures and avoiding one's pains;
there is nothing more profound that seeking satisfaction, both
sensory and intellectual. Many of us seem think that all we can do is
just keep our foot on the gas until we run out of road.
But certain people,
for whatever reason, are led to suspect that there is more to human
experience than this. In fact, many of them are led to suspect this
by religion—by the claims of people like the Buddha or Jesus or
some other celebrated religious figures. And such a person may begin
to practice various disciplines of attention—often called
"meditation" or "contemplation"—as a means of
examining his moment to moment experience closely enough to see if a
deeper basis of well-being is there to be found.
Such a person might
even hole himself up in a cave, or in a monastery, for months or
years at a time to facilitate this process. Why would somebody do
this? Well, it amounts to a very simple experiment. Here's the logic
of it: if there is a form of psychological well-being that isn't
contingent upon merely repeating one's pleasures, then this happiness
should be available even when all the obvious sources of pleasure and
satisfaction have been removed. If it exists at all, this happiness
should be available to a person who has renounced all her material
possessions, and declined to marry her high school sweetheart, and
gone off to a cave or to some other spot that would seem profoundly
uncongenial to the satisfaction of ordinary desires and aspirations.
One clue as to how
daunting most people would find such a project is the fact that
solitary confinement—which is essentially what we are talking
about—is considered a punishment even inside a prison. Even when
cooped up with homicidal maniacs and rapists, most people still
prefer the company of others to spending any significant amount of
time alone in a box.
And yet, for
thousands of years, contemplatives have claimed to find extraordinary
depths of psychological well-being while spending vast stretches of
time in total isolation. It seems to me that, as rational people,
whether we call ourselves "atheists" or not, we have a
choice to make in how we view this whole enterprise. Either the
contemplative literature is a mere catalogue of religious delusion,
deliberate fraud, and psychopathology, or people have been having
interesting and even normative experiences under the name of
"spirituality" and "mysticism" for millennia.
Now let me just
assert, on the basis of my own study and experience, that there is no
question in my mind that people have improved their emotional lives,
and their self-understanding, and their ethical intuitions, and have
even had important insights about the nature of subjectivity itself
through a variety of traditional practices like meditation.
Leaving aside all
the metaphysics and mythology and mumbo jumbo, what contemplatives
and mystics over the millennia claim to have discovered is that there
is an alternative to merely living at the mercy of the next neurotic
thought that comes careening into consciousness. There is an
alternative to being continuously spellbound by the conversation we
are having with ourselves.
Most us think that
if a person is walking down the street talking to himself—that is,
not able to censor himself in front of other people—he's probably
mentally ill. But if we talk to ourselves all day long
silently—thinking, thinking, thinking, rehearsing prior
conversations, thinking about what we said, what we didn't say, what
we should have said, jabbering on to ourselves about what we hope is
going to happen, what just happened, what almost happened, what
should have happened, what may yet happen—but we just know enough
to just keep this conversation private, this is perfectly normal.
This is perfectly compatible with sanity. Well, this is not what the
experience of millions of contemplatives suggests.
Of course, I am by
no means denying the importance of thinking. There is no question
that linguistic thought is indispensable for us. It is, in large
part, what makes us human. It is the fabric of almost all culture and
every social relationship. Needless to say, it is the basis of all
science. And it is surely responsible for much rudimentary
cognition—for integrating beliefs, planning, explicit learning,
moral reasoning, and many other mental capacities. Even talking to
oneself out loud may occasionally serve a useful function.
From the point of
view of our contemplative traditions, however—to boil them all down
to a cartoon version, that ignores the rather esoteric disputes among
them—our habitual identification with discursive thought, our
failure moment to moment to recognize thoughts as thoughts, is a
primary source of human suffering. And when a person breaks this
spell, an extraordinary kind of relief is available.
But the problem with
a contemplative claim of this sort is that you can't borrow someone
else's contemplative tools to test it. The problem is that to test
such a claim—indeed, to even appreciate how distracted we tend to
be in the first place, we have to build our own contemplative tools.
Imagine where astronomy would be if everyone had to build his own
telescope before he could even begin to see if astronomy was a
legitimate enterprise. It wouldn't make the sky any less worthy of
investigation, but it would make it immensely more difficult for us
to establish astronomy as a science.
To judge the
empirical claims of contemplatives, you have to build your own
telescope. Judging their metaphysical claims is another matter: many
of these can be dismissed as bad science or bad philosophy by merely
thinking about them. But to judge whether certain experiences are
possible—and if possible, desirable—we have to be able to use our
attention in the requisite ways. We have to be able to break our
identification with discursive thought, if only for a few moments.
This can take a tremendous amount of work. And it is not work that
our culture knows much about.
One problem with
atheism as a category of thought, is that it seems more or less
synonymous with not being interested in what someone like the Buddha
or Jesus may have actually experienced. In fact, many atheists reject
such experiences out of hand, as either impossible, or if possible,
not worth wanting. Another common mistake is to imagine that such
experiences are necessarily equivalent to states of mind with which
many of us are already familiar—the feeling of scientific awe, or
ordinary states of aesthetic appreciation, artistic inspiration, etc.
As someone who has
made his own modest efforts in this area, let me assure you, that
when a person goes into solitude and trains himself in meditation for
15 or 18 hours a day, for months or years at a time, in silence,
doing nothing else—not talking, not reading, not writing—just
making a sustained moment to moment effort to merely observe the
contents of consciousness and to not get lost in thought, he
experiences things that most scientists and artists are not likely to
have experienced, unless they have made precisely the same efforts at
introspection. And these experiences have a lot to say about the
plasticity of the human mind and about the possibilities of human
happiness.
So, apart from just
commending these phenomena to your attention, I'd like to point out
that, as atheists, our neglect of this area of human experience puts
us at a rhetorical disadvantage. Because millions of people have had
these experiences, and many millions more have had glimmers of them,
and we, as atheists, ignore such phenomena, almost in principle,
because of their religious associations—and yet these experiences
often constitute the most important and transformative moments in a
person's life. Not recognizing that such experiences are possible or
important can make us appear less wise even than our craziest
religious opponents.
My concern is that
atheism can easily become the position of not being interested in
certain possibilities in principle. I don't know if our universe is,
as JBS Haldane said, "not only stranger than we suppose, but
stranger than we can suppose." But I am sure that it is stranger
than we, as "atheists," tend to represent while advocating
atheism. As "atheists" we give others, and even ourselves,
the sense that we are well on our way toward purging the universe of
mystery. As advocates of reason, we know that mystery is going to be
with us for a very long time. Indeed, there are good reasons to
believe that mystery is ineradicable from our circumstance, because
however much we know, it seems like there will always be brute facts
that we cannot account for but which we must rely upon to explain
everything else. This may be a problem for epistemology but it is not
a problem for human life and for human solidarity. It does not rob
our lives of meaning. And it is not a barrier to human happiness.
We are faced,
however, with the challenge of communicating this view to others. We
are faced with the monumental task of persuading a myth-infatuated
world that love and curiosity are sufficient, and that we need not
console or frighten ourselves or our children with Iron Age fairy
tales. I don't think there is a more important intellectual struggle
to win; it has to be fought from a hundred sides, all at once, and
continuously; but it seems to me that there is no reason for us to
fight in well-ordered ranks, like the red coats of Atheism.
Finally, I think
it's useful to envision what victory will look like. Again, the
analogy with racism seems instructive to me. What will victory
against racism look like, should that happy day ever dawn? It
certainly won't be a world in which a majority of people profess that
they are "nonracist." Most likely, it will be a world in
which the very concept of separate races has lost its meaning.
We will have won
this war of ideas against religion when atheism is scarcely
intelligible as a concept. We will simply find ourselves in a world
in which people cease to praise one another for pretending to know
things they do not know. This is certainly a future worth fighting
for. It may be the only future compatible with our long-term survival
as a species. But the only path between now and then, that I can see,
is for us to be rigorously honest in the present. It seems to me that
intellectual honesty is now, and will always be, deeper and more
durable, and more easily spread, than "atheism."
