2015

Chris Stedman advocates working 
with liberal believers. 

Who Cares If You Believe in God?

Atheists should stand up to the religious right to protect equality, liberty, and justice. The religious right is dangerous, the struggle is one that we can win, and opposing the religious right makes us look good. The same cannot be said, for example, for historical Jesus. Promoting the idea that Jesus never existed puts us on the wrong side of scholarship and makes us look biased. I’d like the atheist community to get past its affection for believing that Jesus didn’t found Christianity. I’ll go further. My dream is that atheists will become known as people who don’t care whether you believe in God. Why should we care? Modern culture is about letting people do their thing. But it’s obvious that we do care, and plenty of atheists disparage believers in just the same terms that believers use for atheists. What if atheists stopped caring? If that happened, young people would see that the believers judge people by their beliefs about God, but the atheists don’t. We’d look broad-minded, which is a win in modern culture. If my dream came true, it might also help believers hate us a little tiny bit less. But mainly it’s my dream because we atheists would actually have to become more broad-minded. Specifically, we’d have to tame our tribal instincts and stop gunning for the sacred symbols that the outsiders revere. In other words, we’d have to become more enlightened, and it’s an enlightened community that I want to be part of. 

The conflict is tribal. 

If you listen to atheists and believers describe each other online, you’ll learn that one side is populated by delusional fools who are lying to themselves, a menace to all that is good and true. Luckily for humanity, the other side is populated, with some admitted exceptions, by well-meaning, reasonable people who aren’t blind and can see what’s really going on in this universe. In fact, this second groups has a privileged, enlightened understanding, free of the illusions that most people throughout history have lived their lives under. The only disagreement between the two sides is which side is which. Is is the atheists who are the fools, or the believers? That’s the debate. The first thing to know about the heated conflicts between atheists and believers is that they’re tribal. Humans are naturally tribal, and we instinctively see things “our” way, to the detriment of “them” in the out-group. Believers have dogmatic reasons to believe that their religion-versus-religion conflicts represent cosmic truth, but we atheists can see these conflicts for what they are: political struggles among social apes.  

Humans excel at binary thinking, pattern matching, and taking sides in interpersonal conflicts. These traits lead believers to dislike atheists. Binary thinking says that if “we” believers are good then “they,” the atheists, must be bad. Pattern matching means that if one atheist hates religion then all atheists must hate religion. The human propensity to take sides means that believers intuitively develop negative judgments of us. Of course, the same process works in the other direction, with atheists automatically developing negative judgments of believers. The tribal nature of this conflict explains why it is so resistant to resolution. People get emotional and talk past each other, and debate leads nowhere. Since we atheists don’t have traditions, prophets, or scripture to limit our perspective, we ought to be the first to embrace the modern view of human cognition and to recognize our own tribalism.

Belief in God is the wrong target.

Because belief in God is a symbol of identity, its importance is exaggerated in the minds of both believers and atheists. In conflicts between groups, tribal symbols loom large: national flags, sacred images, distinctive clothing, holidays, God in various forms, and so on. But it’s costly for atheists to oppose belief in God, and the benefits of doing so are uncertain.  

Costs are high.

Opposing belief in God means we atheists come across as intolerant, as the Christmas billboards from American Atheists do. Even if more people become atheists as a result, the status of atheists goes down in the eyes of observers. Today in the States, there are plenty of people who don’t believe in God but won’t call themselves atheists. Some of that is due to the lies believers tell about us, but I bet our critical habits also contribute to that reluctance. Opposing belief in God also supports the idea that people can be evaluated based on whether they believe in God. The public’s opinion of atheists would get better if people stopped assessing others by their beliefs. Finally, opposing belief means not working with liberal believers who are at work resisting the religious right.

Benefits are iffy.

Anti-theists like to say that religious beliefs lead to bad behaviors, and they’re right. But it’s easy to exaggerate how powerful beliefs are. Christians and atheists go about their lives pretty much the same way, and they even face death with the same feelings of fear and sadness. Why don’t religious beliefs make a bigger practical difference? Because human lives run on feelings more than on ideas. People know they should exercise, but how many do? Of all the people who believe in astrology, few of them head to Las Vegas when the stars say they are lucky with money. If someone believes that President Obama is the Muslim Anti-Christ, they probably go about their lives pretty much like other people. Of all the people who believe that climate change is killing the planet, how many of us are really changing our lifestyles? Beliefs are not good motivators for behavior. A much better motivator is social proof. Seeing other people doing something is a great motivator for doing that behavior yourself. Even if belief in God should in theory lead to all sorts of bad behavior, most people can be counted on to not lead their lives in accord with their own ideals. 

Besides, even when belief does motivate people, is that always bad? Sometimes faith inspires people to do good things, as with Florence Nightingale or Martin Luther King. Belief in God, per se, doesn’t seem to be the problem. Problems are things the religious right wants to do, such as cut evolution from school curricula. Let’s fight those things directly.

Some atheists are likely to say that the world would be a better place if tomorrow everybody stopped believing in God. Suppose that were true. So what? That’s a magical hypothetical. The real question is which would serve humanity better, atheists opposing belief in God or atheists not caring about belief in God?   

Enlightenment is good for us.

The religious right, especially in Christianity and Islam, has created a secular backlash. To most people, secularism looks good compared to the religious right. One part of secularism is an enlightened view of personal liberty, including freedom of belief. Saying that we don’t care whether people believe in God means we are in line with secular ideals, as opposed to the extremists who want to limit what people can believe. 

My fellow atheists should see that it would be good for us if people cared less about belief in God. That idea lets us atheists off the hook. If you want to lay it on thicker, say “I don’t judge people by whether they believe in God.” No one wants to be judgmental. To my compatriots I might go so far as to say it’s un-American to judge people by whether they believe in God. Doing so is also against the spirit of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As long as people judge others by their beliefs about God, atheists are going to have a PR problem. So let’s stop. 

The best thing about not caring about theism is that it’s a powerful mental exercise for us. It’s natural for an atheist to oppose theism on some level, but if we can rise above our natural, us-versus-them instincts, then we are better people with a clearer view of the world. Atheists don’t have any supernatural beliefs to limit our view of the world. We know we’re not God’s chosen people, and we know that our truth is not guaranteed by any deity, scripture, or prophet. By rights, we ought to be the first people to embrace the new science of human identity and to check our own biases. Maybe one day believers will say, “Atheists are going to hell for sure, but you gotta admit that they’re broad-minded.” I suppose it’s biased of me to expect that my in-group should be above average in terms of self-awareness and tolerance. I can live with that.

- - -

See also Reading about religion: Books for atheists on the topic of religion, as well as tribalism in general.