Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (47 page)

Many local and national freethought groups have begun building alliances and working cooperatively with religious groups in their communities. The Secular Student Alliance does a lot of this, which makes sense, because young atheists and humanists tend to be much more open to reaching across the aisle than nonbelievers in their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

Moving beyond words

Books, blogs, speeches, debates, discussions — for most of its history, atheism and humanism have been about exchanging ideas. Words, words, words. This suits a lot of us just fine (see
Chapter 14
for more information).

But a large and growing number are looking for something more, including a greater sense of belonging, of fellowship, of common purpose. They’ve had groups for years. But what they’re looking for are
communities.

The early 21st century has seen a rapid rise in humanist communities of many kinds, as well as related efforts to put humanist values to work in the world. These sections explore the ongoing experiments in building humanist communities and putting them to work beyond words.

Building a new kind of community

Church communities at their best can satisfy a lot of human needs, including

Social connection to others

Building a framework for meaning and purpose

Providing mutual support

Coming together to be inspired and to do good

In recent years, a growing number of communities have started popping up that try to satisfy those human needs without the overlay of supernatural beliefs. Unitarian Universalism, a fascinating denomination that’s built around values and principles, not shared beliefs is one such group. Ethical Culture is another. They have rituals and symbols, they inspire, and they come together to make the world a better place. All good things, and none that require a God.

Countless others are also coming from different directions but working toward the same goal of building meaningful communities, including several I mention in
Chapter 18
. But they’re often disconnected from each other, doing their own thing, which keeps them from learning from each other what works and what doesn’t. The Harvard Humanists have launched a Humanist Community Project for the specific purpose of helping these diverse humanistic communities connect with each other, sharing ideas and hard-won experiences.

As church attendance in the United States continues to drop by as many as three million people per year, I’m glad these folks are doing the hard work of figuring out what comes next. The human needs don’t go away just because you walk out of those church doors.

Seeing humanism at work

As these new communities form, they’re finding that active humanism — including compassionate action to help others — is an effective and satisfying glue for nontheistic communities.

Groups that struggled to attract and keep members when their programming consisted of monthly meetings with a speaker and discussion are growing by leaps and bounds as soon as they start to address their members’ social and emotional needs. They’re as likely to have a barbecue as a lecture now, and when a member is ill or having a hard time, the group becomes a community of support. Community volunteering is becoming a more regular part of what atheist and humanist groups do. And simple things like childcare at meetings or humanist “Sunday schools” to learn about ethics have helped make the movement more family-friendly and multigenerational.

In other words, atheist and humanist groups in the 21st century are finding that they can come together as a result of their shared atheism, but that doesn’t have to define what they do together. All that’s needed is to be humans together.

Part III

Reading the Great Works of Atheism

Chapter 10

Uncovering Lost, Secret, Censored, and Forbidden Works

In This Chapter

Finding traces of lost works from ancient times

Tracking secret atheist manuscripts in early modern Europe

Censoring Charles Darwin

Self-censoring by Mark Twain

B
efore the authors known as the New Atheists topped the bestseller lists, before abolitionists and feminists decried the unhelpful role of religion in their struggles, even before the broadsides of the Enlightenment, history was sprinkled with tiny, tantalizing fragments of atheist and agnostic thought.

In the struggle to be heard, religious doubt was saddled with plenty of disadvantages. Fear kept most of the doubters quiet in the first place, and whatever they did write had only the tiniest chance of surviving beyond its own era. If people don’t like what a book says, they’re much less likely to pass it along to the next generation. It’s that simple. And if an idea was only spoken rather than written down, it’s even less likely to be passed on.

Such a selective process can end up painting a pretty inaccurate and frankly boring picture of what life was like in a given place and time. Imagine if only a few of the most popular movies in a given decade were passed on to future generations. We’d end up with a really narrow and distorted view of that era.
Harry Potter
movies are great, but do they capture the breadth and depth of filmmaking in the first decade of this century? Hardly. But if people pass only those films down to future generations from that decade, those future folks will think we were a pretty one-note culture.

That’s exactly what happens when an era packs only a few favorite ideas in the care package it sends to posterity. It gives the false impression that everybody in that time and place thought and believed the same. It’s misleading
and
boring.

The nonmainstream books that do survive are often scrubbed of their unorthodox religious opinions — by editors, by family members, and sometimes even by the authors themselves. And nothing is scrubbed out quite as thoroughly as atheism.

In this chapter I give a quick and selective tour of some books that don’t survive the process, at least not in one piece — books that are lost, secret, censored, or forbidden.

Speaking Volumes in Two Sentences: Protagoras’s On the Gods

Protagoras of Abdera, a fifth century BCE Greek philosopher often called the first agnostic, challenged religion, fled Athens under a death sentence, and died in a shipwreck. (Refer to
Chapter 4
for more on his life.)

Before he endured these ordeals, Protagoras wrote a book. I’d really like to read this book, but it’s not going to happen — the fickle roller coaster of history rolled into modern times with an empty seat where Protagoras’s most important book used to be.

The title of the lost book doesn’t say much about its importance. Like countless others written at the time, it’s simply called
On the Gods.
But the first two sentences — the only ones that have survived — are anything but common:

Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be. Many things prevent knowledge, including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.

That passage may not look too shocking from your comfy seat in the 21st century, but it was shocking enough in ancient times to keep philosophers buzzing about Protagoras throughout the Classical period and down through the centuries.

The Athenians may have been successful in erasing the book from history, but Protagoras’s agnosticism, trapped in the amber of those two memorable, sensible sentences, survives to this day, quoted in the works of others.

Hearing Echoes of the Lost Sutras of Cārvāka

Cārvāka was the name of one of the strongest schools of atheist materialism in ancient India. It burst into the conversation of that fascinating culture as early as the sixth century BCE. Cārvāka was one of the earliest philosophies to spend time working out the implications of materialism, a simple but powerful idea.

Materialism
is the idea that everything in the universe is made of matter or energy, or derives from them. Materialists don’t believe that souls, spirits, ghosts, deities, and any other nonmaterial entities you can think of are real.

Disbelieving in ghosts and souls and such doesn’t mean that something like human consciousness isn’t real. It obviously is. Materialism just says it doesn’t have an existence independent of the matter that creates it — a human brain. My consciousness — my “me” — results not from an immortal soul that can outlive my body, but from the natural activity of my material brain. Just as the music is over when the band stops playing, materialism says I will cease to be when my brain stops “playing” me into existence.

I’m not thrilled about that idea, and I doubt the followers of Cārvāka were either. But as far as I can tell, none of us gets a vote, and I am as convinced as they were that it’s true.

Like many Indian schools of thought, Cārvāka created little books called sūtras to sum up their point of view. A
sūtra
is a text that captures complex ideas in a collection of short, pithy sayings. Sutra-like texts from various cultures outside of India include

Benjamin Franklin’s
Poor Richard’s Almanac

Mao’s
Little Red Book

The
Analects
of Confucius

Even
Chicken Soup for the Soul
by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen