2014

I donated a draft copy to the "children's
library" at Sunday Assembly Seattle.

Friendly Atheism 

Today I was the guest speaker at Sunday Assembly Seattle. Sunday Assembly is a secular “church,” a celebration of life with singing and community. They asked me to talk on the topic of why atheists can act like jerks sometimes, based on my September 28th blog post. Today I’m addressing the topic in a less confrontational way and suggesting that atheists ought to achieve greater degrees of self-awareness, niceness, and humility. Here’s the vision of atheism that I talked about. 

Atheists ought to be self-aware. 

We don’t have any holy books or priests to tell us that our thoughts and feelings are right and true. If we’re proud or offended, we have no choice but to own those feelings. We can’t imagine that God is proud of us or that we are offended on his behalf. We don’t understand human reason to be a gift from God, nor can we expect reason to function objectively. We see ourselves as evolved animals with biased, self-serving minds.

Atheists ought to be nice. 

We know that this is our only life. We can’t look at starving people and tell ourselves that they deserve their lot because of sins they committed before they were born. We can’t overlook suffering in this life by looking forward to an afterlife. We can’t look at differences between races or genders and say that God wants it that way. We don’t have a holy book that glorifies killing infidels, apostates, gays or anyone else. We ought to be especially nice to the people who disagree with us. If people disagree with us, we never think that they’re being controlled by Satan, that they are committing blasphemy, or that they deserve to be tortured forever in hell. When we feel antipathy toward someone in an "enemy camp," we should be self-aware enough to be skeptical of our own negativity.  

And atheists ought to be humble. 

We know we’re not God’s chosen people, and we know our truths aren’t God’s truths. We understand ourselves to be biased and fallible just like everyone else. We know that humans are varied, both in their genes and in their experiences. We don’t think that the King of the Universe wants everyone to think the same way we do. We ought to be self-aware enough to recognize our feelings of self-righteousness as bias rather than rationality.

Where we’re at

Maybe one day evangelicals will say, “Those atheists are going to hell, but they sure are self-aware, nice, and humble.” My sense is that we’re a long way off. Honestly, we’re already behind. In a nation that has defined itself as religious, atheists are a distrusted, misunderstood minority. Meanwhile, atheist authors make big bucks by attacking religion with one-sided criticisms. This “anti-theist” contingent reinforces hostility and arrogance among atheists, and it reinforces the idea among believers that we’re a bunch of haters.

What next?

A number of different things are going on that seem to point to the rise of a more humane atheism. Authors such as Alain de Botton and Chris Stedman are showing a nicer side to atheism, while others, such as Robert Wright, Ara Norenzayan, and David S. Wilson are showing us the good that religion has accomplished historically. Christians don't talk about the good that atheism has done in the world, but we atheists are open-minded enough to talk about the good that religion has done. Our ability to see “them” more objectively is a big step forward. Sunday Assembly is a step forward of a different sort, giving secular people a way to gather and form community. Here in Seattle I’m working on setting up moderated dialogs that might help atheists address sensitive topics with greater sensitivity. The theory of evolution also offers us an opportunity to share a natural vision of the world and our place in it. In particular, natural selection explains why we are born into this world ready to form ourselves into “moral tribes,” as psychologist Joshua Greene calls them. Some people think these changes are big enough that we should leave the “atheist” label behind, associated as it is with us-versus-them thinking. All of these developments don’t add up to a movement, but maybe they are evidence of a shift in atheist culture. Or maybe the beginning of a shift.