“Atheism for Lent”: The Spiritual Practice of Doubt

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February 17, 2014
By Carl Gregg

A few months ago, I wrote a post on “Poetically Dwelling on the Earth as a Mortal,” which was in honor of my favorite undergraduate philosophy professor, James Edwards. Dr. Edwards was the most well-known, articulate, and matter-of-fact of atheist at my college. And suffice it to say that in the late 1990s in South Carolina there were very few “out” atheists. I had a few good friends in high school that were self-professed agnostics, but Dr. Edwards was — if not the first atheist I knew well — then certainly the first atheist I met who made atheism seem like a serious, well-considered worldview that a healthy, thoughtful, compassionate adult could choose.

A decade after I first met Dr. Edwards, the climate for atheism in the United States began to shift. In 2004, Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, which became a major New York Times bestseller. Two years later saw another major bestseller with Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. That same year Daniel Dennett published Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. Another major atheistic bestseller appeared in 2007: Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

There are other important representatives of the contemporary atheism movement, but in particular, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and the now-late Christopher Hitchens have been jokingly referred to as “The Four Horsemen of the Non-apocalypse.” I should probably also hasten to add that what is most significant about these so-called “New Atheists” is not anything particularly original about their ideas (their ideas are, for the most part, contemporary updates of perspectives that can be traced through more than 2,000 years of free thinkers in various cultures); rather, what is new and significant is a growing public interest in atheist arguments, creating multiple, major popular bestsellers about atheism. As a result, many individuals and groups are feeling more emboldened to privately and publicly question traditional religious claims. One symbol of this shift is a large scarlet red “A,” playing on Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, but intended here in the twenty-first century to mark not a shameful “A” for adultery, but a proud “A” denoting that one is “out” as an Atheist.

Where, then, do we find ourselves a decade after Harris’ first book in what became the unexpected trend in bestselling books on atheism? In October 2013, the Pew Research Center reported that, “2.4% of American adults say they are atheists when asked about their religious identity, up from 1.6% in 2007.” Importantly, though, what self-identified atheists mean with the label “atheist” varies. For instance, “14% of those who call themselves atheists also say they believe in God or a universal spirit.” My best guess at explaining that discrepancy is that those poll respondents are saying that they are an atheist in regard to disbelief in the God of traditional theism, who (to be frank) can sound a lot like an old bearded white man — like Santa Claus or Zeus — sitting up there on the other side of the sky looking down on us. At the same time those 14% of “atheists” do potentially believe in “God” as a universal spirit. (For similar reasons, many UUs feel more comfortable substituting the word God for words like “Spirit of Life,” “Spirit of Love and Mystery” — or simply “the Sacred” or “the Divine.”)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/carlgregg/2014/02/atheism-for-lent-the-spiritual-practice-of-doubt/

http://pyrotheology.com/practices/atheism-for-lent/theory/