Jewish Atheist

“Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”

Mark Twain

On Blasphemy Day 2009, I thought it appropriate to re-publish the following manifesto, for those who first happen upon the site.

A cartoon shows two people standing on a front porch, showing the homeowner a handful of pamphlets, which are blank. One of them explains, “We’re atheists.”

To increase the social acceptance of secular humanism beyond the present miserable poll numbers (only 9% of Americans don’t believe in God), we’ve got to work on its negative image — as being “not-something.”

Something vs. nothing

You’ve heard that atheists don’t believe in anything. But that’s wrong. It is not secular humanist/atheists who believe in nothing. It is religious believers who believe in nothing.

This reversal of the traditional logic deserves some explanation, though it should be obvious – and would be, were it not for the all-consuming propaganda of religious believers…and the resulting fear in unbelievers and doubters.

Religious believers really do work hard at believing in nothing. At first I kept my options open. As a child, I kept waiting for God to make an appearance and do some of the things he did in the Bible, but he never did. Nobody home. Verdict: no God.

Mutual fantasy

It took me decades to come to the next realization: that religious believers are acting out a mutual fantasy, fake for some, but very real – albeit subjectively – for others.

They are pretending someone is listening, pretending their prayers are heard, pretending their texts are sacred and literally true (or true with lots of spin, as in the case of liberal clerics) pretending that old or seemingly-old ritual objects are other than what they are, pretending, pretending, pretending.

Yes, the hard truth is that it is religious believers who believe in nothing. What is faith, if not belief in nothing? Even believers describe it as “belief without proof.” Faith is the unquestioning attitude of the infant who has not learned to ask “Why?” This is the emotional and spiritual age at which religious belief fixes us.

Believing in something

On the other hand, a humanist believes in something. In fact, four things.

(1) Humanity: We ain’t much, but we’re all we’ve got.

I believe in the richness of human experience and the lessons to be drawn from it. That’s how we know that honesty, dignity, courage, tolerance, charity, and other virtues are the ones that we should practice.

Science and reason tell us how to understand the world — but we have emotions too. We accept ourselves as the flawed beings that we are. And we keep trying. We are our own salvation.

(2) The real world

I believe in the physical (and, admittedly, in some respects, very indirectly physical) world, insofar as we can determine it. That is to say, I believe in a certain way of knowing: the Way of experience, testimony, replication, documentation. That’s why humanists are comfortable when the truth keeps changing. As Einstein said, “I don’t care so much whether I’m right – I just want to know what is right.” Contrast this with the infallibility of the Pope.

Science tells us that the vastness and complexity of creation, from strings to black holes to alternate universes, defy our imagination and are many times more awe inspiring than the simple, seven-day setup project described in the Book of Genesis.

The cosmos that science reveals to us is perhaps complex beyond our understanding. The more we learn, the more strange things seem. We may never know how consciousness works – how neurochemistry becomes subjectivity. But this is the world in which we live: the world of experience, testimony, and documentation. It’s the only way we’ll ever find out.

(3) We can grow up.

Similarly, we believe in the gradually evolving (though not infinite) capacity of the human mind to inquire, to know the world, and to know itself (we do not worship human beings, so let me dispose, right here and now, of that vicious slander). That’s as close as a humanist comes to faith.

Reason has made fitful progress over the centuries. It seems today to be making no progress at all. In fact, reason and the other humanistic ways of thinking are under attack and in retreat in the face of perhaps two billion hard-nosed, intolerant fundamentalist Christians and Muslims (Jews, too, but they’re a small minority with a low birth rate).

It is hard to have faith that humans will let their better natures prevail before they kill themselves off. But I do.

(4) Talking straight

A humanist believes in the veracity of language. This is a tough one, but as a linguist, I’m well qualified to explain it.

We’ve got to distinguish “fact” from “song.”

First, fact: The word testify comes from two ancient words, one of which means ‘two,’ the other ‘sit’ or ‘stay.’ In other words: you’ve got to have two people there in order for there to be perceived factual validity. Even the Torah requires that.

So a fact is the verbal representation of experiences in the world outside the body-mind that another can simultaneously experience, whether he/she is inclined to do so or not. This last proviso is very important, because it is consensus between people that allows subjective phenomena like God, angels, devils, heaven, hell, saints, immortals, and all manner of imaginary phenomena to exist simultaneously in the minds of people.

So “Perlman is now speaking into a microphone connected to a computer” is a fact inasmuch as it’s verifiable by very simple means. But “Perlman is going to hell because he’s a secular humanist” is not fact because not all of the words in this sentence correspond to things that people can agree on.

There’s no reason to believe that hell is anything other than an imaginary place like Wonderland or Oz.

Fact and song

“Fact” is different from “song,” which I define as speech or writing (or chanting/singing) that is grammatical but doesn’t really say anything that people can agree on, though it sure sounds good and leaves us to imagine what it might refer to.

“Song” is characterized by the liberal use of figurative language — so liberal at times that one wonders whether the speaker has gone beyond metaphor and is referring only to his/her own subjective realities, because there’s nothing identifiable that the words can refer to.

“Songs” includes not just song lyrics but also literature, prayers, most advertising copy, and most political speech.

So that’s what I mean when I say humanists believe that language must not be used deceitfully to talk about things that don’t exist – like gods, angels, souls, and other metaphysical (i.e., imaginary) phenomena – as if they did.

So let me sum it up:

(1) Humanity: We ain’t much but we’re all we’ve got.

A secular humanist believes in the richness and reality of human experience and the lessons to be drawn from it. We give ancient texts their rightful respect, and we move on. We expect no Messiah, no Rapture. If we want life on earth to get better, we’ll have to do it ourselves.

(2) The real world

A secular humanist believes in physical reality — in the vast, mysterious, perhaps multi-dimensional cosmos, which continues to amaze us with its complexity.

We believe in the scientific way of knowing – the Way of experience, documentation, verifiability, replicability, and honesty (unfortunately, scientists sometimes fake their data).

Those are the only ways in which human beings have ever made progress, not by torturing or killing those who disagree with the prevailing religious fantasy. And certainly not by prayer and worship.

We don’t believe something is true unless there’s a reliable chain of experience and/or evidence that it is. Single-source testimony (as with the Bible) is inherently open to question.

(3) We can grow up.

We believe in the competence and potential of the human mind. We believe in the gradually evolving (though not infinite) capacity of the human mind to inquire, to know the world, and to know itself. I have faith that this competence will fully be realized, though it is now clear that religious belief is a major threat to our becoming fully human…to our growing up.

(4) Talking straight

Humanists believe that language must be used honestly, not to enslave people with images, to divide them, and to keep them in a perpetual state of ignorance and childhood, as religious belief invariably does.

Never let someone tell you that a secular humanist believes in nothing. It is religious believers who believe in nothing.

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Alan M. Perlman is a secular humanist speaker and author — most recently, of An Atheist Reads the Torah: Secular Humanistic Perspectives on the Five Books of Moses. For information, go to www.trafford.com/06-0056. He is also the founder of PHI (Positive Humanists International)©.