“The plaintiffs, and each of them, have suffered, are suffering, and will continue to suffer damages, both physical and emotional, from the existence of the challenged cross. Named plaintiffs have suffered, inter alia, dyspepsia, symptoms of depression, headaches, anxiety, and mental pain and anguish from the knowledge that they are made to feel officially excluded from the ranks of citizens who were directly injured by the 9/11 attack and the lack of acknowledgement of the more than 1,000 non-Christian individuals who were killed at the World Trade Center.”

Give me a break. Of all the things to pretend to be offended by, they had to choose a couple of pieces of rebar?

Atheism got a big boost when the so-called Four Horsemen mounted their steeds and wrote the four books – God is Not Great, The God Delusion, The End of Faith and Breaking the Spell – that defined The New Atheism. It’s hard to recommend any of those books to someone who is not already pretty secure in their disbelief though and, of the four, only Richard Dawkins is neither shouty nor weird. They are all polemics of one kind or another.

A polemic (pronounced /pəˈlÉ›mɪk/) is a variety of argument or controversy made against one opinion, doctrine, or person. [...] The word is derived from the Greek polemikos (πολεμικός), meaning “warlike, hostile”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polemic

The most interesting writings about atheism are personal stories – like Russell’s – that answer the question, “Why Don’t you believe in God?” Here are three of my favourite stories.

Ricky Gervais has a masterpiece in the genre in the Wall Street Journal today. Ricky has his eight-year-old self figuring out the answer.

But anyway, there I was happily drawing my hero when my big brother Bob asked, “Why do you believe in God?” Just a simple question. But my mum panicked. “Bob,” she said in a tone that I knew meant, “Shut up.” Why was that a bad thing to ask? If there was a God and my faith was strong it didn’t matter what people said.

Oh…hang on. There is no God. He knows it, and she knows it deep down. It was as simple as that. I started thinking about it and asking more questions, and within an hour, I was an atheist.

Wow. No God. If mum had lied to me about God, had she also lied to me about Santa? Yes, of course, but who cares? The gifts kept coming. And so did the gifts of my new found atheism. The gifts of truth, science, nature. The real beauty of this world. I learned of evolution -– a theory so simple that only England’s greatest genius could have come up with it. Evolution of plants, animals and us –- with imagination, free will, love, humor. I no longer needed a reason for my existence, just a reason to live. And imagination, free will, love, humor, fun, music, sports, beer and pizza are all good enough reasons for living.

Julia Sweeney turned her story into a monologue – Letting Go of God – that she performs on stage. Here’s the first act, performed at Ted.

You can watch a full performance of Letting Go of God on YouTube but be forewarned: in between the laughter, there will be tears. Keep a box of tissues handy.

The last story that I like to recommend is Bart Ehrman’s essay that forms the introduction of his book Misquoting Jesus.

“When I was in seminary, I was taking a class devoted to the interpretation of the Gospel of Mark. At that time, I would have called myself a strong evangelical Christian. I thought the Bible had no mistakes. The first time I realized it did was Mark, Chapter Two. The disciples are walking through a grain field with Jesus, and the pharisees object to them eating grain because it’s the Sabbath. Jesus asks them if they haven’t read the passage in scripture when David went into the temple of God and ate show bread that wasn’t supposed to eaten. He says it happened when Abiathar was the high priest.

For the term paper, I decided to write on this passage; it contains a famous historical problem. The Book of Samuel says that Abiathar was not the high priest at that time; it was his father, Ahimelech. I wrote a 35-page paper explaining why this can’t be a mistake. It was based on the interpretation of the Greek words. The grammar is tricky in the passage. My professor was a very devout Christian, who I respected very much. He gave me an A on the paper but at the end he wrote ‘Maybe Mark just made a mistake.’

Even though it was a tiny little detail, it exploded the whole thing for me. Once I realized there could be a mistake in the Bible, I started finding them all over the place. The first thing it did was made me realize the Bible is not an inerrant revelation from God. It’s a human book with errors. I stopped being evangelical and became a liberal Christian. I eventually became an agnostic. There’s no way I would have leaped from fundamentalist to agnostic. It required a lot of transition. And the first thing to go was the inerrancy of the Bible.”

Professor Ehrman’s is a little more scholarly than Ricky Gervais and is book is not a light read by any means. It’s a good read though, and examines the history of some famous bible passes – like the story of the woman accused of adultery – and when they were added to the bible.

But this, in a Guardian-hosted discussion – Is religion a force for good or would we be happier without God, struck me as new and insightful.

“But a liberal, secular democracy is the best protector of religious freedom, because it says that we need to guarantee the absolute freedom of belief. There is no theocracy that has ever provided for religious freedom, let alone emancipation of women and equal rights for gay people.”

The whole discussion was enjoyable and Harris and Grayling made some good points – even if they have been made a thousand times before.

Grayling:

“What we think of as distinctive of western morality has its roots in the non-religious secular tradition of ethics that comes from classical antiquity.”

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.

From The Times via Secular Right.

When the guru’s initial efforts failed, he accused Mr Edamaruku of praying to gods to protect him. “No, I’m an atheist,” came the response. The holy man then said he needed to conduct a ritual that could only be done at night, outdoors, and after he had slept with a woman, drunk alcohol and rubbed himself in ash.

This is the first video of thirteen. Everyone one of them is a masterpiece. Listen to it with your children.

I am sensing that one of our viewers has a torn meniscus but God says it’s gonna be fine.

and

The viewer with a mass in your stomach that you think might be cancerous…you just need to pray some more and God will make it right.

I don’t know what that’s about but I just got through reading a huge thread in which two communities of atheists are arguing whether Richard Dawkins is intellectually lazy because he attacks a strawman version of religion, the hypothetical adherents of which believe in a personal God who intervenes in our lives. Apparently no one believes in that kind of God any more and Dawkins should address more sophisticated conceptions of the divine.

The accommodationist atheists also say it’s rude to point out that people like Pat Robertson might not be telling the truth.

[The argument happens way down in the comments of a post claiming that the New Atheists are right-wing, foreign policy hawks. I read it so you don't need to. ]

More often though, I’ll run across someone else who did  better tear down than I could ever write.

Read Taibblog’s – more than half crazy himself – tear down of Stanley Fish’s nonsense review of Terry Eagleton’s new book. He captured both the points that annoyed me so – and then some.

First, Fish’s/Eagleton’s claim that God is not a knowable thing:

Eagleton:

For one thing, of course, God differs from Unidentified Flying Objects or the Yeti or the Tooth Fairy in not being even a possible object of cognition… it’s not just we cannot see Him, it is as it were that our not seeing him is inherent to God Himself, which is presumably not true of the Yeti.

Taibblog:

Got that? It’s not that we can’t see God — it’s that God is inherently unseen! Take that, atheists!

Second is the claim that science doesn’t have all the answers therefor we need religion.

Eagleton:

Reason dismisses faith because faith lacks the certainty of knowledge.

But, reason alone has been proven to be completely inadequate to solve the problems of the world, and has proven especially feeble at providing man with the answers to his questions about the nature of existence.

Therefore, reason was wrong about faith.

Taibblog:

The whole premise recalls Woody Allen’s famous syllogism: “Socrates is a man. All men are mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.”

When Christopher Hitchens declares that given the emergence of “the telescope and the microscope” religion “no longer offers an explanation of anything important,” Eagleton replies, “But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place. It’s rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov.”

Is it really true that Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything? A great deal of recent apologetics in response to atheist criticism has taken the form those atheists are missing the point. No true Christian believes in <idea>. Where <idea> is, variously,

• a personal God
• a God who intervenes in the world
• biblical claims about actual events and truths about the world

I suspect that if Eagleton were correct and Christians have stopped believing what the bible says, there would be less calls for atheists to assert themselves.

But I suspect that Eagleton is wrong and, outside a handful of Christians in academia, the vast majority believe in exactly those things.

I gave up listening to atheist vs believer debates a while back as they never seem to move the argument forward in any meaningful way – there are only so many times you can hear that religion gave us the Inquisition and that morality without God is not possible. I decided to risk one more encounter because I thought the Bloggingheads format might lead to a more enlightening discussion and because I enjoy reading both Ross Douthat’s and Heather MacDonald’s writings.

I was not disappointed.

Heather MacDonald was magnificent. I wish she were getting Ross’s spot on the NYT Op-ed page. It’s great that Kristol is gone and it’s great that a non-crazy, non-partisan conservative is getting his spot – but it would be sooo much more fantastic to have smart, secular conservative who does not argue in ALL CAPS in such a prominent seat.

I have never seen such polite passion as Heather’s in a debate and she has the BEST debate winning technique – if I ever go on BlogggingHeads, I am so gonna get me one of those web cams that will hyper-zoom at the most intense moments so I can go all googley-eyed on my opponent. I don’t know how Ross was able to withstand the pressure.

Ross seemed to be on his best behavior and didn’t fling any of the wild accusations that believers usually fling at non-believers.

Heather made fantastic point after fantastic point – so many I lost track. I don’t know if she had prepared notes but her soundbites could not have been better had she rehearsed them in the mirror beforehand.

Here are a few I remember:

The sermon on the mount is not necessarily a defence of unfettered capitalism.

I don’t think many of us would want to have lived during a time when the church was at the peak of its power.

Humans are endowing Christianity with values that comes from ourselves. not from God.

If you want to posit “God” as a placeholder for ignorance of the first cause, fine, but I will not grant you the Christian version of God as loving and just.

Ross did an admirable job under the googley-eyed circumstances but didn’t quite hold his own. His best defence was to fling non sequiturs whenever Heather landed a particularly powerful shot.

Ross v Heather was worth a thousand  Hitchens v Mad Creationist debates. Bloggingheads FTW!

Church-going folk always seem delighted to welcome non-church-going folk. That pleasing fact makes me smile down deep inside. I sat discreetly in the most out-of-the-way spot I could find and was all alone until an older lady came and sat in the same pew. You tend to stand out when you don’t know the whole stand-up/sit-down ritual and my pew companion noticed the newcomer right away and tried to make me welcome.

She went and found me a copy of the missal so I could follow along with the reading and she made sure I always found the right hymn number. She nodded knowingly when I didn’t go up to receive communion but politely excused herself so that she could. More touching still, a friend, who I know only casually and rarely, spotted me and trekked the whole length of the church to exchange peace-be-with-yous.

My favourite bit of going to church is usually the bish’s sermon. The bish at the chapel we attended in New York put on a remarkably fine performance week after week and I always enjoyed his sermons immensely. But last night’s was poor. Even the readings seemed starkly shorn of significance given how important Maundy Thursday is to the Christian calendar. But what the occasion lacked in it profundity, it made up in ceremony.

I got to witness the foot-washing thing – another first for me. Perhaps because of the Judas and Mary song, I found the whole ceremony strangely intimate which, I guess, is the point. Even the unfamiliar parts of the ceremony are strangely familiar – like walking down fifth avenue for the first time and realizing you have been there a thousand times before. The only bit that seemed distinctly odd was the lap of the church that we did at the end. Not sure what that was about.

I have now been to catholic church many, many more times than I have been to the church of my childhood but the Book of Common Prayer still seems familiar and the catholic liturgy foreign. I can now predict when they will “Bring forth the Holy Condiments” or whatever is in those little bottles but I still don’t know all the call-and-response bits or when I am supposed to be standing or sitting.

Ethical dilemmas abound. How can I be true to my own beliefs without causing offence? Which parts of the ceremony signify 2000 years of tradition and which signify a sacred vow that I’d rather not take lightly?

Singing hymns? Easy! I love hymns. I love singing. I sing.

I skip the spectacles-testicles-watch-and-wallet stuff because it seems to have more meaning than I want to convey. Neither do I bow to the altar when I cross the aisle.

The Lord’s Prayer is trickier. It comes from a favourite passage in Matthew and transports me instantly back to assembly at Sidcup Hill Primary School but it says more than I want to say out loud in church. Not to mention that the Roman Catholic version misses out the best lines.

I would’ve liked the rest of the Clown family to come with me. Mrs Clown was going to come but changed her mind (leaving me with no money for the collection plate   luckily there was no collection for some reason).

The smallest Clown child loves ceremony (she made us celebrate our anniversary this year) but was doing something more important and I didn’t want to push it. Other child thinks it violates the Laws of Reason for an atheist to go to church – a not uncommon reaction, sadly.

So why did I go? Why did I suddenly choose to go yesterday? It may have been a reaction to a just published study showing an abrupt  increase in the number of non-believers – up 10% in two decades.

Europe seems to be doing a better job of transitioning from fervent belief to ceremonial deism. In Sweden, a large majority of the population is atheist but a similar number are members of the Church of Sweden. The proportions are probably not so different in England, Spain, France and Italy all nominally religious countries but far more secular than America in practice. Europeans stopped believing but continued following the traditions and teaching the mythology. That’s a good place to be.  Even myths have meaning.

In America, however, the gulf between belief and disbelief is too wide to straddle and once you cross that gulf you leave the other side behind. You either got faith or you got unbelief and there ain’t no neutral ground.

In the neutral ground of Europe, my kids would take part in nativity plays in school and sing songs of the risen Christ. Over here, if you want to expose your kids to religion, you have to hand them over to True Believers like the dudes teaching bible class at my littlest’s school; telling the story of Moses in the Bulrushes as though it were true and making it clear to them the horrible consequences of doubt. Their literal belief seems to blind them to the true meaning of their mythology.

I see myself as a tiny, weak link in a chain stretching back to the beginnings of western civilization. The chain is stretched taut in America. Five years ago, I feared the revivalist fervour flooding out of the South but, with hindsight, I now see that period as a last ditch attempt to hold back the tide of secularism. Europe has found a way to make the transition gracefully. If America does not, the chain will break.

STOP PRESS

By a pleasant coincidence Judith Warner in the Times has a This I Believe article describing a similar experience with her family’s Passover experience.

I am Jewish. But for nine years, from age 5 to 13, I attended an Episcopal school, went to chapel, sang in the choir. To this day, in good moods, my mind fills with hymns, and on a certain kind of spring day, a day that’s full of promise and hope, I see sunshine streaming in through stained glass windows, graceful specks suspended in the light over highly polished wood pews.

I would never call myself a Christian. But if you begin the Lord’s Prayer, I will join in, with feeling.

I enjoyed Judith’s story even more than I enjoyed writing my own.