Atheists Should Speak Out: Religion is Hurting the World

This is the long version of what I wrote for my local Redlands Daily Facts newspaper They could accept only 750 words This has about 1600 words. Enjoy!
An Atheist’s Perspective on Life by Jane Roberts
On Mother’s Day, May 13, 2012 I happened to glance at a paid obituary in the Redlands Daily Facts for Mary Russo McCormick, born in 1934, died on May 6, 2012. She had penned it herself. “Mary did not have a courageous battle with anything and did not pass on, go to join anyone, or go to a better place. She died.” After recounting her life and love of family, friends, and travel she continued: “A convinced atheist she wanted a private and unceremonious cremation. She had a truly interesting life, and she enjoyed it, which is all anybody can hope for.” My letter printed in the Facts stated that I found McCormick’s obituary utterly engaging, full of humor, and honest and that it had made me smile and even giggle with delight.
Perhaps I came out as an atheist in that letter. Believers believe that God created mankind. Atheists think that mankind created gods/God to explain the unexplainable. To me atheism is the only philosophical position that makes sense. I understand perfectly what death is. I didn’t exist for the first fourteen billion years of the universe’s existence and I didn’t miss a thing. Well, I won’t miss a thing after I die either. While I’m alive (maybe 10 more years if I’m lucky) I lament this human condition. Would I love to live forever, loving my family, enjoying my friends, doing “good” as I see it, reading great books and playing golf twice a week? You bet. I really don’t want to die, to lose all consciousness completely and forever. But one thing I will say for sure, I want to be living or dead, but not dying. I might want a little help at the utter end. There is no reason for suffering at the end of life.
Human suffering that is a part of all conscious life, whether it be hunger, disease, whether caused by natural events, wars, accidents, or by intentional cruelty perpetrated by our own species (genocide, gendercide, rape, murder, torture) is much too pervasive to be part of any loving creator’s plan. There is no way to rationalize suffering although theologians have made heroic but ultimately failed efforts to do so.
We know much more now than people knew at the time of the founding of the world’s monotheistic religions. If any church, synagogue or mosque tells you something is true because it’s in the Bible or the Koran, it might be true or it might not. If it is threatening your children with eternal damnation if they don’t believe or do this or that, I consider that child abuse.
Every culture has a creation myth—a story of how life began. The story of Adam and Eve is a myth. There is overwhelming evidence that human life did not come into being in a single event six to ten thousand years ago. We know how evolution works and that over 4 billion years here on earth, we humans have evolved from older life forms. Humans and chimps share more than 98% of their DNA, suggesting that they are descended from a common ancestor. Lately, we’ve discovered that we share some genes with Neanderthals, a species that has been extinct for 28,000 years. As I stated in my February 12, 2014 letter to the Facts asking people to give a nod to science on the anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, we know that modern human beings have existed for about 200,000 years. And our amazing brains have allowed us to study and wonder at the myriad forms of life on earth.

When our daughter had a science class at what was then Cope Junior High in 1989, the teacher skipped the chapter on human evolution no doubt to avoid controversy. I registered a mild complaint. This still happens frequently today to the detriment of our young people and to scientific literacy which is in an abominable state in our country. We should not sacrifice the teaching of science on the altar of some people’s religious sensibilities.
A growing number of scientists believe we are living in a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene where human beings are changing Earth’s life support system. Please see http://Anthropocene.info. I believe that in the next fifty years we are going to see humanitarian and environmental disasters that prayer will do nothing to mitigate.
Presently, in the United States we are witnessing a time when agnostics and atheists are speaking out. This is an historical “second coming”. Robert Ingersoll (look him up on Wikipedia) was a great orator of agnosticism in the late 19th century. He often drew large enthusiastic crowds while saying things like “The notion that faith in Christ is to be rewarded by an eternity of bliss, while a dependence upon reason, observation, and experience merits everlasting pain, is too absurd for refutation, and can be believed only by that unhappy mixture of insanity and ignorance, called faith.” Ingersoll made people laugh too. “With soap, baptism is a good thing.” (He was referring of course to baptism by immersion.) Mark Twain also had some anti-faith zingers and several of the prominent women’s rights and women’s suffrage advocates were skeptics.
What some religions call sin is just biology and/or brain chemistry. Homosexuality would be in that category. Human sexuality has as many variations as there are people on the planet. Marriage and monogamy are both good ideas. Promiscuous sexual activity is not a sin, it’s just stupid. Let us worship common sense.
People who know me know that I have fought for equality for women and girls for my entire adult life. Gender inequality is the moral scourge and the moral challenge of the age, so vast in its reach and implications as to be almost impossible to comprehend. Violence against women and girls is so pervasive in our religiously infused world that one in three women worldwide has suffered from at least one of its myriad forms. If you google “Gender Based Violence: An Expanded Definition and a Pessimistic Assessment”, you can read my article on the subject. If you want my thoughts on gender equality you can read “Let’s Envision Gender Equality: Nothing Else is Working” in the Solutions Journal.
In my book “34 Million Friends of the Women of the World” I state: “There has been a willful denial of girls’ and women’s full humanity by individuals, governments, religions, cultures, and customs.” In point of fact gender inequality is woven into the fabric of the three main patriarchal religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. In the Catholic Church only men can be priests. Its admonition to the world’s most vulnerable and most powerless often illiterate women to eschew contraceptives in order to please God is psychological terrorism and results in ill health, misery and death for countless women and children. In the Bible several chapters and verses make the man the head of the household to whom wives should submit. How about equal status for both? Prominent Senegalese imams are right now condemning all birth control as against God’s plan. Based on the Koran, Muslim clerics in Pakistan and Iraq are defending child marriage and I mean CHILD! If “sin” were not a religious term, I would use it to describe the role of religion in the absolute second hand status accorded to the women and girls of the world, the givers and keepers of life itself.
Do I realize that many religious people are absolutely wonderful people who feel at home with their belief and who, inspired by their belief, do good works all over the world? Of course. They also find in their belief comfort in times of loss and a sense of community within their church, temple or mosque. But I, as a freethinker and atheist, also feel at home with my philosophical stance, with my worldview and with my efforts to do “good” just because it’s the right thing to do. Common sense!
Susan Jacoby’s book “Freethinkers” is a wonderful historical portrait of free thought in America. I have read it twice. From Amazon.com: “At a time when the separation of church and state is under attack as never before, “Freethinkers” offers a powerful defense of the secularist heritage that gave Americans the first government in the world founded not on the authority of religion but on the bedrock of human reason. In impassioned, elegant prose, celebrated author Susan Jacoby traces more than two hundred years of secularist activism, beginning with the fierce debate over the omission of God from the Constitution. Moving from nineteenth-century abolitionism and suffragism through the twentieth century's civil liberties, civil rights, and feminist movements, “Freethinkers” illuminates the neglected achievements of secularists who, allied with tolerant believers, have led the battle for reform in the past and today.”
In a word, secularists have been, more often than not, on the right side of history. They have been good without God. I am proud to follow in that tradition.
The small stuff is important. As a firm believer in the total separation of church and state, I never say “under God” during the Pledge of Allegiance, an addition signed into law in 1954 at the height of the cold war and the struggle against “godless” communism. When required in public schools, often on a daily basis, the pledge amounts to religious indoctrination. To be true to myself, I don’t bow my head at religious invocations at dinner meetings of service or social organizations. Think of the countries where for criticizing religion, one can be arrrested for blasphemy.
My husband and I subscribe to Free Inquiry magazine. I’m a member of the American Humanist Association and contribute to the Freedom from Religion Foundation which supports the constitutional separation of church and state. The bedrock values of us non-believers are as precious to us as believers’ bedrock values are to them.
The Facts invited me to write this column. It is important for atheists like myself to speak out in order to free others to do so. We atheists are everywhere, millions of us all over the world. We have figured it out. It’s time we said so in whatever way feels right to us. I thank the Facts for this invitation to express what is certainly not the majority view.