Confession is good for your soul. And the world.
Even if you don’t believe in God.
Earlier this month, Washington Post columnist Kate Cohen offered an article titled, ‘America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists.’
Them’s fightin’ words, for any religious folk who might be fighters.
Luckily, I’m a lover, not a fighter. (To quote Michael Jackson). And I’ve fallen in love with Kate Cohen. Not because she’s an atheist, but because she’s apparently become fearless. She confessed that, all her life, she had avoided telling people she didn’t believe in God, because being an atheist entailed so much work, if you were going to do it right.
You have to go to school board meetings and complain about the words “under God’ in the Pledge of Allegiance. You have to spend time applying a Sharpie marker to your paper money, to block out the words “In God We Trust”. You have to find Christmas irritating.
She wrote:
I was raised Jewish — with Sabbath prayers and religious school, a bat mitzvah and a Jewish wedding. But I don’t remember ever truly believing that God was out there listening to me sing songs of praise.
I thought of God as a human invention: a character, a concept, a carry-over from an ancient time. I thought of him as a fiction.
Today I realize that means I’m an atheist. It’s not complicated. My (non)belief derives naturally from a few basic observations…
Maybe it’s easier being an atheist if you’re Jewish? I can’t say, because… well, I’m not Jewish. One thing, if you’re Jewish, it’s probably easier to find Christmas irritating.
But being an atheist is a lot safer now, than it was back in, say, 1258, when telling someone you didn’t believe in God could get you burned at the stake.
Unless you lived in, like, China, where you could die an agonizing death for a variety of other reasons, but not for being an atheist.
Nowadays, though, here in America… I have no idea how things are in China… but nowadays here in America, we have sort of put God on the back burner. God used to do all kinds of amazing miracles. He made the sun rise and set. He controlled the tides. He brought the rain when we needed it. He answered prayers for healing and financial gain. He killed our enemies.
But now, thanks to our scientists, we know that all those things happen due to natural laws. The sun doesn’t actually rise and set. That’s an illusion. Actually, the earth is rotating on its axis… and has been, for 4 billion years.
The tides ebb and flow because of the moon. The rains happen because of El Niño or some other Spanish weather pattern. We get sick because of viruses and germs, and we get healed because we were smart enough to get vaccinated.
Financial gain? You can pray all you want, but that’s not even a thing for most of us. (Believe me, I’ve tried.)
Killing our enemies: that’s something we still have to handle ourselves. We don’t expect God to get involved.
My point is, it’s easy to ‘not believe in God’ compared to in 1258, because the world now seems to be on ‘auto-pilot’. Everything is happening because it can’t not happen. And also, it’s less dangerous, because you probably won’t get burned at the stake for confessing that you’re an atheist. Even in a Washington Post article.
Of course, there’s still that “under God” problem in the Pledge of Allegiance. But the school board was never going to listen to you anyway.
In 2017, two clever psychologists, Will Gervais and Maxine Najle, estimated the prevalence of atheism in America using a technique called “unmatched count”. They asked two groups, of 1,000 respondents each, how many statements were true among a list of statements. The lists were identical except that one of them included the statement “I believe in God.” By comparing the numbers, the researchers estimated the percentage of atheists, without ever asking a direct question. They calculated that around 26 percent of Americans did not believe in God.
A very interesting statistic.
In her article, Kate Cohen found that 26 percent number to be reassuring. No one wants to be the only atheist in town. We would prefer to be surrounded by atheists. Millions of atheists.
(I’m not going to get into the problem of believing in statistics, although I think we ought to have a word for people — like me — who don’t believe in statistics.)
Ms. Cohen thinks it would be healthy for America, if everyone who is actually an atheist would confess their true beliefs, to their family, friends and community. They might find out that everyone is an atheist.
Can you imagine? If we all knew how many of us there are? It would give everyone permission to be honest with their kids and their friends, to grapple with big questions without having to hold on to beliefs they never embraced.
And it would take away permission, too. Permission to pass laws (or grant exemptions to laws) based on the presumed desires of a fictional creation. Permission to be cruel to fellow human beings based on Bible verses. Permission to eschew political action in favor of “thoughts and prayers.”
I understand that, to many people, this might sound difficult or risky. It took me years to declare myself an atheist, and I was raised Reform Jewish, I live in the Northeast, I’m White, I work at home, and my family and friends are a liberal bunch. The stakes were low for me. For some, I fully concede, the stakes are too high. If you think you’d lose your job or put your children at risk of harassment for declaring your atheism, you get a pass. If you would be risking physical harm, don’t speak out. If you’re an atheist running for school board somewhere that book bans are on the agenda, then feel free to keep it quiet, and God bless.
But for everyone else who doesn’t believe in God and hasn’t said so? Consider that your honesty will allow others to be honest…
So I’m going to be completely honest. Here, today. My confession.
I don’t believe in statistics.