Translations of Doubt: A History, and a copy of The End of the Soul.
Look, I’m the sweet kind of atheist and I’ll tell you why. I’ve talked to a lot of gentle and sophisticated believers, people who believe the same things I do but like to call “love” by the name “God.” I can see the fun in that, the problem is it’s too easy to sometimes slide into using a magical definition, so that you can, say, ask for things in prayer. It’s not good if you don’t work out survival methods you actually believe in. This is not a God who can take much weight.
People hear my relatively sweet kind of atheism and wonder why I believe in love and poetry, but not God. I explain that not all nonmaterial things are created equally. I choose hope for humanity and nature.
“So what exactly don’t you believe in?” asked a young woman during the Q & A of my most recent talk. She chucked her chin up at me with more urgency than aggression.
“I don’t believe the universe has or is a brain,” I answered. “Brains seem to be squishy grey matter.”
I’m glad to report that she smiled. I left it there in the pressure of the moment, but I wanted to say more. I wanted to say that it matters because reality matters.
It matters because I don’t want advice about death from someone who doesn’t believe people really die.
Other people’s philosophies can do us great good, while other people’s delusions only slow us down. Everything doesn’t “happen for a reason,” rather, we are apes.
It matters. Now that politics has come to this level of threat to democracy, it is unacceptable that there are mythic supernatural dogmas guiding people. If we want to keep our Union we have to think about strengthening good elementary and high schools that teach the best knowledge we have on every subject, in every state.
It matters because we all vote for the same president. State’s rights should have our concern, but so should the separation of church and state.
Live and let live, man, the prime directive, and all that, but stay on your side of the fetus, I mean fence. If not then it becomes incumbent upon us to stop being quite so gentle and sophisticated about our unbelief. We have to normalize seeing religions for what they are.
I titled this letter “a Warning and a Way” meaning that if we don’t speak up things will only get worse. Whomsoever wins the coming crisis there are some fundamental divisions in this country that have to be addressed. Let secular schools and courts be part of our platform. Let freedom from religion be part of our platform.
People in politics need to say we don’t believe in that nonsense book anymore and it is absurd that anyone does. Okay, I don’t expect that in the USA anytime soon, but those of us not running for office have some responsibility to normalize reality in this country.
We have to get the ten commandments out of courts and schools. The general rules aren’t too bad—it’s that the God parts are red herrings. Red herrings with sharp teeth and a weird commitment to evangelize their elaborate beliefs.
As I’ve said before, I came to atheist activism much by accident. My dad was a professor of physics and I followed in the history of science. Choosing a subject for my Ph.D. dissertation I found a 19th century French group called the Society of Mutual Autopsy. They turned out to be atheists eager to forward brain science to show that the soul was not a needed hypothesis. Yes, after death they dissected each other’s brains. When I needed the usual contextualizing research, a good history of atheism wasn’t around.
I wanted a straight history and everything I found was too polemic, either arguing that all smart people through history were closeted atheists or that there has never really been an atheist until modern times. So while sending out the manuscript about the Society of Mutual Autopsy, and having it slowly, academically rejected a few times, I wrote the book that I had needed, Doubt: A History, a study of religious doubt and atheism throughout time, all over the world. I’m an atheist, but I let the people in my books do the talking.
The two books, Doubt: A History and The End of the Soul, both came out the same fall. Only then did I come to understand — through the invitations to write and speak that came in — that having written two books on atheism, and educated myself in this way, I now had a voice on the subject, and a voice is a responsibility.
Over the years, I’ve written many articles and given a lot of talks; and I’ve written a few more books offering support for atheism and unbelievers. There have been negative consequences to this, from the believing world, and also from the writing world, since not everyone thinks an atheist ought to speak out. Now I’m saying I need to step it up again, to write about it, and with a little heat. It matters.
When I see Conservatives backing the 2025 plan and calling the US a Christian nation, I want to point out all the historical reasons that No it is not. Great presidents like Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln were nothing like Christian believers and some minor ones seem not to have believed in God or any Christian dogma. Founders and early presidents like John Adams believed the country was fundamentally pluralistic when it came to religion.
Okay, a little more detail. Thomas Jefferson created a version of the Christian Bible with all the supernaturalist parts excised, including all of the Jesus miracles, and he casually called himself an Epicurean, a famously atheist strain of ancient thought. Also, in a surviving letter, Jefferson counseled a beloved nephew to doubt everything, “even God,” in the safe knowledge that if the young man should come to believe God does not exist, he will find reason to be virtuous in how virtue makes him feel.
In their letters, John Adams wasn’t as unbelieving as Jefferson, but he expressed critiques of organized religion and of the idea of a God with characteristics. As the second president Adams signed into law the Treaty of Tripoli (1797) which states that “the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” and that “The US is not a Christian nation any more than it is a Jewish or a Mohammedan nation.” It was carried unanimously by the Senate.
Abraham Lincoln sometimes used the word “God” in his homespun-style stories, but people closest to him said he never referred to any Christian beliefs whatsoever and had no belief whatsoever in an afterlife.
Perhaps I’ll add that early in the twentieth century Taft turned down the presidency of Yale University because, he said, he did not believe in the divinity of Christ, and when he ran for president he was repeatedly called an atheist—which he did not deny.
I keep thinking about the young woman I told you about above, who seemed so interested in the subject, but probably didn’t know the variety of nuanced unbeliefs that she might have found among her classroom lessons on presidents.
Clearly, I think this kind of history matters a lot. I think a lot of people care about these ideas. And worse than believers dedicated to keeping each other in the dark are those on the Right who cynically prey on believers. I’ll leave it there for now, I guess we’ll find out what you think.
Keep a’goin’ and I shall return to encourage you again. I’m so glad you are here. We’re not alone, we have each other. Thanks for your support. It matters.
love,
Jennifer