The Atheism Thing

Making Sense of the Chaos. Part Thirty-Six.

When I was about four or five my mother told me that we were atheists. We didn’t believe in God. A little older, I prayed to God to stop me having nightmares, but the nightmares continued. Am I an atheist now? You’ll have to read more of this to find out. But let’s get down to the nitty gritty about atheism.

Yes, it’s basically a Greek word loaned to English. The ancients spoke of being godless (atheos) but apparently the first top Greek atheist was a chap named Diagoras of Melos, who made a big deal of mocking the many worshipers of many gods that were all over the ancient world. Today, in our Global Village there are still worshipers of many gods; even Christians, though rock-solid monotheists, speak of a Holy Trinity.

Amazingly the English word “atheist” was first used by John Calvin in 1550, when he criticized the impious of his time. But let’s cut to the chase:

The First Amendment to the US Constitution states:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…

This became American law in 1791. Across the pond, in revolutionary France, they were trying to deal with the atheism issue, and found it not to be easy.

On August 4, 1789, the French National Assembly had abolished the privileges of the Catholic Church, including tithes and special taxation rights. Church property was declared national property and sold to support the new revolutionary currency.

By 1790, clergy had become state employees, bishops and priests were elected, and dioceses were reorganized to match administrative divisions.

Between 1793 and 1794 French revolutionary authorities had launched a campaign to suppress the Church and all forms of Christianity. Actions included destruction of religious symbols, closure or repurposing of churches, and the establishment of a secular “Cult of Reason.” When that flopped, they tried a “Cult of the Supreme Being,” which also gained little traction.

Meanwhile, back in the States, there was a genteel conflict between advocates of the religious Great Awakening, which evolved in stages, and Deists, who were not exactly atheists, but were not traditional Protestants, Catholics, or Jews. A significant factor was the fact that George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Chief Justice John Marshall, Paul Revere, John Hancock, and others were Freemasons, whose members acknowledge the existence of a Supreme Being, but avoid the sectarianism of established religions.

In the USA, the atheism-deism-religion issue resurfaced in the 1860’s because the Abolitionists, whose anti-slavery action led to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation (then to the Thirteenth Amendment, which in 1865 banned slavery in the USA) justified the legal equality of all humans on religious grounds.

But then there is the science thing. Science, in my never-humble opinion, is a tightrope. Lean too far to one side, and you fall off the tightrope into dogma. “Settled” science. Like Dr. Fauci during the COVID era. No masks, then masks, then mandatory masks. “Follow the science.”

But if you lean too far off the science tightrope to the other side, you have nihilism. Nothing is really true. Since scientists are constantly looking for evidence, and the evidence is always changing, you can end up in total Postmodern relativism. We in the West might support our “feminists” who disapprove of treatment of women as unequals, but, hey, if jihadists do that, well, that’s “their” reality. Who are we to criticize? Multiculturalism, y’know. Gender is just a social construct.

Today’s atheists, often on the side of Wrong-Wing Extremism, can simultaneously fall off both sides of the tightrope. That’s why we have an atheism thing, and that’s why I’m writing about it now.

Our word religion comes from Latin, meaning that which ties us together. As I’ve written elsewhere, human beings are story-telling social animals, and being social, they always tell stories of what ties them to other humans, and those stories often lead to scriptures, like the Bible, and the Bhagavad-Gita, and the Avesta, and the Quran, and the Mahayana and Theravada and Vajrayana texts of Buddhism, and many others. But to have a religion, it is not necessary to pick a particular scripture, nor is it necessary to wage a war against those who disagree with one’s preferred scripture.

And then there Karl Marx. “Religion is the opium of the people.” There’s that atheism thing again. And Mr. Marx was a very influential guy. You can be sold for your kidneys in China if you’re not atheist enough. Is religion illegal in China? Well, sort of.

But back to me. What about me? Am I an atheist now?

One thing that I’ve learned during the world’s ordeal with COVID and Wokeness, is that religion must be taken much more seriously than I had previously thought. You can’t just ignore it, hoping that maybe it will go away. It won’t. Is the Pope Catholic? Does anybody remember when that was a joke? Which Pope? What does it mean to be Catholic? And don’t get me started about Jews.

Okay, you did get me started about Jews. Can Jews eat pork? Does one have to have a Jewish mother to be Jewish? Are Jews white colonialists? Can Jews be anti-Zionist?

But let’s get back to me… am I an atheist? There was a Jewish philosopher, Baruch Spinoza, living in the Netherlands, whose family fled Portugal when Jews there were forced to convert to Christianity. Spinoza did believe in God. His theism was simple: Everything is God. Spinoza is said to have been a pantheist.

So am I a pantheist? Maybe. Maybe, everything is God, and I certainly believe that certain things exist, like the laptop on which I am writing this.

But is that too easy? Is it supposed to be easy to believe in God? I ask you non-pantheists out there that question:

I ask you Protestants, and you Catholics, and you Jews, and you Hindus, and Sikhs, and you neo-Pagans, and yes, you Muslims:

Is it supposed to be easy to believe in God?