When I finally realized I was an atheist, it was a relief. For years I had tried to figure out what my position was on God, in which I assumed I believed but could never quite accept how or why. As I began reading more about skepticism, the overlap with atheism started me considering whether in fact I simply didn’t believe in a god at all, and the more I thought about it, the more right it felt. Instead of finding a way to make my belief feel natural, I found it more natural to admit to myself that I didn’t believe at all.
I wanted to begin this blog with a certain expression of who I am, especially on subjects I planned to talk about a lot. So when I learned about The Out Campaign, I thought it was an interesting and useful way to shorthand that aspect that informs my worldview and this blog. At the time I didn’t know anything about “the new atheists” or any controversies involving Richard Dawkins; I placed the A on the blog for about the same reason that there’s cats playing videogames on the banner.
As I’ve mentioned before, I’d be considered an accommodationist by many who identify as atheist. There are situations where I don’t have a problem with the existence of religion. A lot of this has to do with my hesitancy to judge religious people who use their faith as a lifeline. For example, many chronically ill people who have nothing else in their lives hang on to their belief in Jesus as a way to cope. Some atheists would want those people to let go of that delusion and live only in reality. But unless they’re undergoing religious treatments for a real illness, or something like that, I’m apt to be happy that they have something to keep them going. Similarly, many people complained when priests were sent to Haiti after the devastating earthquake. As long as those priests came along with food, medical supplies and doctors, I didn’t have an argument with it. The people of Haiti are very religious; who am I to sit back all comfy in my first-world house and declare that their spiritual needs are irrelevant?
Some atheists are defensive because of prejudice against us. Maybe it’s 36 years of being a Jew, but I can’t manage to get overly worked up over any but the most galling instances of that. For example, when atheism keeps people from being able to be Boy Scouts, I lose all interest in that organization until they change that shit. But I do that with groups that don’t allow LGBTQ members either (again, hello, Boy Scouts!); it’s a protest against exclusion, even if I don’t happen to belong to the group being excluded. So some closed-minded believers think atheism and secularism are going to ruin this great nation of ours. Have you heard what a lot of those same people say about the Jews? Understand I’m not saying this isn’t a legitimate cause for outrage. By all means it is, when religious lunacy invades our school boards and our laws. Just for myself, I’ve been leery of organized religion for as long as I can remember, as well as learning about and watching Jewish people face homicidal bigotry; becoming an atheist simply didn’t spark any new impetus.
The Surly A, by Amy Davis Roth
I’d like to explore what it means to live my life without religion and without belief in a higher power. Am I a secular Jew? A humanist? Something else? But in the end, I’m much more fascinated by the realm of skepticism, and if I’m going to be an activist about anything, it’ll be about that. Skepticism opens debates that I find interesting, whereas I don’t really find the question of whether there’s a God to be interesting. To me, there isn’t one, so I’d rather move on to what’s happening in pseudoscience.
Richard Dawkins and/or his followers (it seems to depend entirely on your point of view) have become well known for a style of atheism some people ridiculously call “fundamentalist,” but what is simply, unapologetically, rational. It’s the in-your-face part that grates on some, and again, it’s the part that I’m less interested in pursuing, personally. (And of course to many people, something as innocuous as a “Don’t believe in God? You’re not alone” bus sign is offensive to the point of apoplexy, so “in-your-face” is highly subjective.) For a while I debated whether to keep the scarlet A, a symbol of activism that I don’t identify with, on this blog. I really questioned it when I was reading comments about the brief religious statement in Daniel Loxton’s Evolution. There was so much animosity towards that mild passage that I felt really alienated from my fellow atheists.
But the truth is, I’m thankful that there are atheist activists who are making religious people uncomfortable. I’m glad that Greta Christina, PZ Myers, and other people are waging unrelenting war on the anti-secularists and the religious lunatics. My style may never be theirs, but they and people like them will hopefully be the ones effecting change for the better. So in the end, I went back to my original reason for keeping the A, plus a little more: my respect for Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and every single atheist tweeter and blogger who is doing the work for a cause I believe in.
There is an atheist symbol that I’ve come to identify with, which I will talk about next time in part two.
