A reader writes:
I've been meaning to write in to The Dish about this for a long time and the post about "What Do Atheists Want?" and "Why Choose Agnostic?" finally got me to the keyboard. Pardon the length, but this has been building up for the last few years I've been following The Dish. As an atheist I love your conversations about faith and theology, but I often find the discussion of atheism wanting. I think the issue for me is similar to one you've complained about as a Catholic: that the loudest proponents of your religion do not represent your faith. The same is true for me and for most atheists I know. Allow me to make a few points to illustrate, in no particular order:
– Theism is the belief in a personified God, or Gods. Atheism is the lack of belief in a personified God, or Gods. That's really the only thing that unites us atheists – a lack of a belief in something. So when you ask "What does atheism want?" it seems to imply that the population of atheists shares some specific positive goal, when in reality we're just (non)sharing a generic, negative (non)belief.
– Sam Harris (e.g.) is a materialist, or physicalist. He believes only in things for which there is an identifiable physical process that can be observed via scientific means. While a materialist will surely be an atheist, an atheist is not necessarily a materialist. Many of us find the smug dogma of Harris' materialism to be just as off-putting as the righteous dogma of biblical literalism.
– I bet one of your readers has the actual stats, but let me just say that I believe the atheistic political regimes (Lenin, Mao, Stalin, etc) in the 20th century evened up the historical body count between atheists and theists. A history-aware atheist probably ought not be decrying religion as being an inevitable force for tyranny and suffering. There is a lot of bloody glass in the way of throwing those stones, folks!
– For a great many atheists, atheism is neither a reaction against religion nor a loss of faith. In my experience there are as many atheists who never believed in a religion as there are those who abandoned a religion and became atheists.
– As a result of not seeing religion and faith as the same thing, many of us atheists having no problem being faithful. We are looking for deeper meaning in community, in relationships, from spiritual texts (sometimes even religious texts), in mushroom visions, meditation, hiking, and all the rest. We may hold beliefs which are neither falsifiable nor observable in any sense, so they wouldn't pass muster for Dawkins or Harris, yet they are utterly without reference to God.
I suspect a lot more Americans are atheists of this sort than any one now realizes. Until the public face of atheism is pro-meaning (de Botton) instead of anti-faith (Hitchens, Harris, et al.), I suspect the faithful and/or spiritual among us non-believers will be underrepresented in the public discourse. As a deeply spiritual atheist, this situation is frustrating.
The TED talk you posted from Alain de Botton is the gem that stands out for me in recent coverage of atheists. That's what most of us are up to – looking for meaning and community, trying to get our needs met, experience some happiness, and achieve some fulfillment. This journey of being human is what theists and atheists have in common and it is more important than what we do not share. How much better would that conversation be compared to what we have now: "you're silly and bad for people!" VS "you're sinful and bad for people!"
The Dish 