Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (34 page)

Theologians and scientists should stay out of each others’ areas of expertise (an idea echoed a century later by biologist Stephen Jay Gould — see
Chapter 8
)

In 1950, Pope Pius XII opened the door a crack, saying evolution is “a legitimate matter of inquiry” on which “Catholics are free to form their own opinions.” But “they should do so cautiously,” he said, respecting “the Church’s right to define matters touching on Revelation.” They may not, however, consider the possibility that the soul itself evolved.

Call that the
restrained
freedom of thought.

Nearly half a century later, Pope John Paul II called evolution “more than a hypothesis,” saying that independent studies arriving at the same conclusion are “a significant argument in favor of the theory.” Once again, the Catholic Church reaffirmed that the soul can’t have evolved. On this the Pope and I agree.

Let me take a moment to offer a salute. Though the process is slow, self-contradicting, convoluted, and unclear, the Catholic Church goes further than many religions and denominations in recognizing that evolution can’t simply be tossed out the window. If they could just avoid saying, “Think all you want, so long as you don’t end up with different conclusions,”
I’d be really impressed.

Challenging the Religious Monopoly in Politics

The requirements to hold public office vary from country to country and even state to state in the United States — be a certain age, live in the place you’ll represent, and so on. It’s unusual for almost any country today to require someone holding a political office to profess a particular religious belief. Even theocracies like Iran and Utah have a few members of religious minorities in their legislatures. (You think I’m kidding about Utah, but the Utah State Legislature has about the same percentage of non-Mormons as the Iranian Consultative Assembly has non-Muslims. That’s just interesting.)

In countries founded since the 18th-century Enlightenment, protection from religious requirements is generally written into law. Here’s a clause from the US Constitution:

[All public officials] shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

It even includes the right to affirm rather than swear a religious oath — a nice touch. As the following sections explain, the United States was a full century ahead of the British on that one. But seven US states still have constitutions barring atheists from holding public office — not just in the 19th century, but in 2012. (Refer to
Chapter 14
for more on that.)

Whether or not a religious test exists in the United States, religious disbelief has long been a de facto obstacle to holding public office there. In the United Kingdom, a different obstacle was in place until the late 19th century — a requirement to swear an oath to God and the Sovereign in order to be seated in Parliament. These sections introduce Charles Bradlaugh, the first member of Parliament to challenge that requirement and Robert Ingersoll, whose promising political career in the United States was set aside — fortunately for an even more promising career as a public speaker.

Denying unbelief a seat at the table: The Bradlaugh Affair

Imagine being elected to the British Parliament, only to be told you can’t take your seat because of your beliefs. That’s what happened to Charles Bradlaugh (1833–1891), a journalist, political activist, and prominent atheist.

On his first day of work as a newly elected Member of Parliament for Northampton, Bradlaugh was asked to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen in the name of God. He couldn’t do that in good conscience, because he only believed one of them existed. So Bradlaugh claimed the right to
affirm
his loyalty rather than swearing a religious oath. Request denied, said the ruling Conservatives.

Fine, said Bradlaugh, I’ll take the religious oath as a matter of form. Request denied, said the Conservatives again. That wouldn’t be
sincere.
Bradlaugh attempted to take his seat anyway, a scuffle ensued, and he was briefly imprisoned in Big Ben before being released to go home.

The public outcry was immediate and fierce, especially from Northampton, the people who voted him in. (Most of them, it should be noted, were religious Christians themselves who elected Bradlaugh because he was the best person for the job and didn’t like Parliament nullifying their votes.) But his seat was declared vacant and a by-election called — which Bradlaugh won easily. His candidacy was invalidated, and another election was called — which Bradlaugh won easily. Four times over six years, Bradlaugh won re-election and wasn’t seated. He gradually won several prominent voices to his side, including former Prime Minister William Gladstone and the playwright George Bernard Shaw. In 1886, the Conservatives relented. Bradlaugh was finally allowed to affirm the oath, even though the existing law still technically forbade it.

In 1888, Bradlaugh led a successful effort to pass a new Oaths Act to permit affirmation as an alternative to the religious pledge — finally catching up the United Kingdom with the constitutional guarantee Americans have enjoyed since 1789. (The gloating so seldom flows in that direction, I just couldn’t help myself.)

Bradlaugh continued his secular activism throughout 11 years in Parliament. And though his rejection of religion was unique in the Parliament of 1880, more than 100 nontheistic members of Parliament make up the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group in 2012.

Waxing eloquent in unbelief: Robert Green Ingersoll

Aside from canned campaign addresses by politicians, which other people usually write so the politician can deliver on a TelePrompTer, the whole idea of public speeches is unfamiliar today. But in the 19th century, before television and the Internet began to pile unfiltered opinion neck-high in every home, the average person looking for commentary on the issues of the day, or just some thoughtful entertainment, could attend a lecture by a traveling orator. Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Sojourner Truth were among the speakers traveling the United States and United Kingdom on lecture circuits in this era. But one orator in particular was guaranteed to draw and hold the attention of a standing-room-only crowd for up to two hours straight — Colonel Robert Green Ingersoll, “The Great Agnostic.”

Ingersoll was a former Illinois state attorney general who was famous for his humor, his knowledge — he was allegedly able to recite entire Shakespeare plays verbatim — his courage, his decency, and his generosity. But his religious and political views made him unelectable to actual public office. Well, they would have, anyway, if his views had been known. After he served as attorney general, the Illinois Republican Party urged him to run for governor but wanted him to hide his agnosticism. He thought it would be unethical to conceal information from the public and refused. Good man.

But leaving politics didn’t mean people wouldn’t come out to listen to him speak — and that’s just what they did, by the thousands, hearing Ingersoll on subjects from education to politics to women’s rights to religion. And far from being a hindrance, his outspoken and eloquent critiques of religion were mostly responsible for his enormous popularity.

Creating a Religion without God: Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture

When Rabbi Samuel Adler sent his son Felix to Germany in 1870 to continue his rabbinical studies, he forgot to tell him not to talk to any neo-Kantians. But Felix did just that, absorbing two ideas that would shape the course of his life:

That the existence of God can’t be proven or disproven

That morality has nothing to do with religious belief

He returned to New York at age 23, knowing he wouldn’t be a rabbi but still carrying all the passions that first drove him to consider that profession — a love of humanity, a deep interest in ethics, and a desire to help others find meaning and purpose in community. A teaching position at Cornell gave him the freedom to think about and eventually act on a revolutionary idea — a religion based not on beliefs, but on values and ethics, one that united all of humanity in moral social action. He began a series of weekly Sunday lectures, and in 1877, created the Society of Ethical Culture based on “deed, not creed” — on actions instead of statements of belief.

The society quickly became much more than a lecture series, applying Adler’s ideas to compassionate action in the community. It created a visiting nurse service to provide healthcare for the indigent of New York and worked to improve conditions in the tenements of the city. The society also opened the first free kindergarten in the United States, as well as the Fieldston School, with a curriculum built around courses in ethics and moral philosophy, as well as active community service.

That first Ethical Culture Society is still very much there, a thriving community on Central Park West in Manhattan, and is still making tremendous contributions to the city and beyond. And the movement has spread to more than 30 Ethical Societies in cities across the United States.

I have a very warm place in my heart for Ethical Culture, and I’d love nothing more than to see an Ethical Culture Society in every city. Like Thomas Jefferson taking scissors to the New Testament (see
Chapter 11
), Ethical Culture keeps the good parts of religious community and leaves the outworn, outdated, and outgrown parts behind.

Chapter 8

Growing Up in the Tumultuous 20th Century

In This Chapter

Getting corrupted by absolute power

Midwifing modern humanism

Experimenting with creedless religion

Reconciling science and religion…or not

T
he 20th century was an era of colliding “isms,” from the arts (surrealism, expressionism, and minimalism) to politics (Fascism, Communism, and Zionism) to philosophy (existentialism, relativism, and post-modernism).

Atheism is no exception, playing a much larger role in politics and culture in the 20th century. And like any “ism” released into the wild, the results are mixed. As Ethical Culture demonstrates (refer to
Chapter 7
), it was no more difficult to behave ethically without belief in God than with it, but atheism also doesn’t guarantee good behavior any more than religion does. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely” applies no matter what a person’s worldview is, and the 20th century includes tragic examples of corruption and immorality in positions of unchecked power, both by atheists (such as Mao Zedong in China, Joseph Stalin in the USSR, and Pol Pot in Cambodia) and theists (such as Adolf Hitler in Germany, Francisco Franco in Spain, and Idi Amin Dada in Uganda).

The century also had some good news. An atheist committed to nonviolence led a newly independent nation, and atheists and theists alike worked together to build a global infrastructure of peace and to improve the human condition.

This chapter explores the highs and lows (and even some of the middles) of atheism in the 20th century, from the violent and immoral suppression of religion by Stalin to the courageous support of human rights, equality, and religious freedom by pioneering atheists and humanists including Corliss Lamont and Goparaju Ramachandra Rao (more commonly known as Gora).

Clashing at the National Levels: Atheism and Religion

Governments telling individuals what they can and can’t believe is a bad idea, a violation of human rights so fundamental that the United Nations includes “freedom of thought, conscience, and religion” in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (see the nearby sidebar for more information).

But several governments in the 20th century responded to centuries of religious domination by forcing atheism in its place, entirely missing the lessons of history. These sections look at some atheists who abused power at the national level.

Encountering violence and intolerance in the Soviet Union

Like many revolutions, the October Revolution that created the Soviet Union in 1917 swept a new group into power whose first order of business was to destroy any hint of the previous one. Everything to do with the old Russia was suddenly, and simply, bad.

Religion was high on the list of what the Bolsheviks considered bad influences from the past. The new Soviet Union was officially atheistic, and religion was targeted for complete elimination. “Religion is the opium of the people,” said Vladimir Lenin, and is used by the cultural elites to exploit and stupefy the people. “This saying of Marx is the cornerstone of the entire ideology of Marxism about religion.”

Marx was unfortunately dead by this time — otherwise I picture him smacking Lenin silly, because Lenin had almost completely missed Marx’s point about the “opium of the people” (check out the nearby sidebar). A few years later, Stalin put the antireligious drive into brutal high gear, confiscating religious property, harassing the faithful, and teaching official atheism in state schools. In one four-year period, more than 1,200 bishops and priests of the Russian Orthodox Church were rounded up and executed as enemies of the state.

Provoking the Cristero Rebellion in Mexico

Most people in the global North think of the global South as 100 percent religious. Although Christianity does have a strong hold on the South, including Catholicism in the former colonies of Spain and Portugal, a healthy presence of doubt actually exists there as well, and it sometimes reaches the open air — or even into the halls of power.

Just as in other places and times, the presence of the Catholic Church in Mexico was as much political as religious, and resentment about its power and influence started to boil over in the early 20th century, especially concerning progress in human rights and individual social freedoms. In 1917, after nearly a decade of civil war, Mexico ratified a new Constitution. It was an impressive one for human rights, including mandatory and free education, free speech, individual religious freedom, and clear rights for the accused.

But those in power wanted to curtail the huge political influence of the Catholic Church, which had found its way into nearly every aspect of Mexican life. The new Constitution included a massive backlash against the Church. Education was now to be completely secular in public
and
private schools. The Church had no official legal status in the country anymore, and the government seized all church property. Priests couldn’t own property or hold public office. Worship services were to be held only in church buildings, and the government was now in control of the number and location of priests throughout the country.

The harsher of these restrictions were largely ignored until 1924, when an atheist named Plutarco Calles was elected president of Mexico. Under his leadership, the government enforced the restrictions and created strong penalties. Priests wearing their clerical garb in public were fined 500 pesos (more than $4,000 today). Any priest criticizing the government received up to five years behind bars. Church property was seized, all monasteries, convents, and religious schools closed, and all foreign priests deported. Chihuahua enacted a law allowing just one priest for the whole state, which is a little bigger than Great Britain. By 1934, the number of priests in Mexico had been reduced from 4,500 to 334, and more than half of the Mexican states had no priest at all.

Most historians now agree that the Calles government had overreached, and the response was predictable. A peasant revolt known as the Cristero Rebellion raged against the government for more than two years. In 1934, a new president rolled back the penalties Calles put in place, and an uneasy truce was restored between God and country in Mexico.

Examining the horrors of a Cultural Revolution in China

Chinese history just boggles my mind. I’m sure the Westernness of my brain doesn’t help, but China seems like a complicated collision of kingdoms and dynasties and philosophies rising and falling and merging and splitting over the course of more than 4,000 years. It’s completely fascinating, but I just can’t wrap my head around it. Even when it comes down to a single era, like the Cultural Revolution of the 20th century, the complexity stuns me, but that period is important to this discussion.