My Atheism–and Why Should You Care?

I recently sang for an Easter worship service in our local community and then joined in communion. My partner responded to this news on my return home: “So, you’re not living up to your Atheist principals?” She understands me pretty well, so the teasing question didn’t worry me much, but it did cause me to think – well, just what are my atheist principals?

I hope no one stops reading at this point, but I know that many doctrinaire atheists will have been tempted to stop at this point, as participating in a church service would be as antithetical to some confirmed atheists as recognizing any validity in Buddhist or Islamic teaching would be impossible for some, but not all, Christians. Many would disavow any claim I make of being a true atheist, in the same way that some Christians would insist that what they term “New Testament” narrative and teaching, supported by what they accept from the “Old Testament” Jewish tradition, represents the only “true” way. After all, Jesus reportedly said “I am the way, the truth, and the light, and no one comes to the father except by me” – a pretty exclusive claim it would seem.

I’ve never sought either confrontation or misunderstanding, and for this reason I have delayed for a long time publicly declaring my atheist stance. Yet the road to self realization as an atheist has not come easily for me. In fact, it comes after a long and convoluted journey, some details of which I am not overwhelmingly proud. Suffice it to say; if you keep a lid on your authentic self for too long, hiding your true self even from yourself, the resulting explosion is bound to cause havoc. Authentic life cannot be indefinitely confined.

I’ve especially hidden my atheist identity from the small community in which I now live, going as far as, but no further than, calling myself Universalist. This term is perhaps more accurate a description of my beliefs than atheism alone, but it can be misleading when I allow it to mask my no longer exclusively Christian outlook. Declaring myself to be atheist is unequivocal: it declares my core stance, while my Universalist outlook speaks to my propensity to find value in all avenues of inherited human experience.

While I long for acceptance and understanding from my neighbors and friends, I do not wish to be less than totally clear about who I am and what I believe. There are undoubtedly more atheists living within any community than may be apparent to any of its members. Most remain quiet for somewhat the same reasons as mine. It would appear that atheists may receive more misunderstanding and mistrust from “people of faith” than any other group outside the perceived norm. A recent poll shows that a declared atheist presidential candidate would meet with more opposition than Islamic, Jewish, Mormon, or Roman Catholic candidates. And what value might this have as a fact? I think its only value is its exposure of how our collective national outlook remains White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, even though this portion of our population may now or soon will be no longer the majority.

Encountering this statistic several days ago made me acutely aware that my rather closet atheism would immediately disqualify me for public office in the minds of most people in my community. Being a liberal democrat was already sufficient in this particular locale, but adding atheism as an attribute would surely bar me from all consideration in most areas of the US. This fact is extremely interesting in light of the likelihood that many of our greatest leaders were atheists. Dwight Eisenhower joined a church only after beginning his presidential run, advised to do so by his campaign staff. Abraham Lincoln provides another possible example among many. In fact, our US founding fathers may have relied as much or more on Masonic teaching as Christian teaching when sculpting the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution.

Such a possibility would seem impossible to many “evangelical” Christians who find it necessary to define our national history within terms of their particular faith experience. This definition gives credence in their minds for their denial of the right of anyone else to be taught scientific theories of evolution in school, as opposed to their interpretation of biblical narrative, and to their refusal to allow women freedom of personal decision because of their insistence of irrefutable truth in their assertion that life begins at conception. They presently make a claim that liberals expound a view that government knows best, whereas, in fact, they are propounding their view that only they know best.

Atheists can be as “closed minded” as holders of any belief, and I would not wish to hold a contest to see which religious group can be the most intolerant. It may be that our communities can be effectively divided between those who strictly define all life in terms of their preconceptions and those who seek to expand their perceptions to embrace growing understanding. None of us is entirely one of these extremes or the other; however, we all have elements of each within us. It all depends on how much growth we are willing to embrace. Growth inevitably means change, and we have the term “growing pains” for more than physical reasons.

In short, one outlook resists change, refusing everything viewed as not conforming to traditional understanding, while the other outlook finds fulfillment in a growing perceptual horizon as each new concept is glimpsed, investigated and assimilated as appropriate for that particular experience. One view defines truth in terms of received teaching, while the other keeps awareness open to expanding possibilities, one unfolding upon another without fixed conclusion. I was fully me at five, then fifteen, then thirty-five, etc., until now at nearly 67, but I am still not defined as I still grow. Now, which outlook and how much of it do you want to have? That is beginning to respond to the question: “Why should you care?” about my atheism.

Do you wish to accept the challenge of change and embrace experiential reality in all its aspects as far as you can, or do you prefer to reject nearly all you find incompatible with cultural and religious teachings? This, to me, is the essential question. We can try to avoid it by trying not to engage, but I do not think the question is in fact avoidable. We will encounter this question even if unaware.

I find that the scope of our humanity depends upon our ability to embrace the entire particularity and totality of the human experience. In the Easter service , I sang the spiritual: “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord.” The question of whether my singing this spiritual as a professed atheist is hypocritical is unavoidable. My response will never erase all possible contradictions, yet my singing it and feeling it as I sang expresses a greater truth to me than all contending arguments and all assertions that the song relates only to a specific, one-time salvific experience.

“Please, Daddy, Mommy, how did the world begin?” You could substitute so many specifics for this child’s question about life and the nature of things and still have an apt example of what I am about to unfold here. Any narrative we recount may point to the heart of, but does not completely sum, the entire experience. We can only approach the mystery of life through metaphor, a way of expressing the inexpressible, a way of encapsulating the incomprehensible. As a Christian, be brave enough to ask yourself the question: Does “I am the way, the truth and the life!” necessarily refer only to one individual representation of universal truth expressed within a single cultural and historical context? Or, to significantly broaden the question: “Is universal truth so restrictive as to represent itself exclusively through a single outlet?

Each of us experiences our Sun’s life-giving light and warmth, regardless of our beliefs, our culture or our economic or social status. The life-giving light of our Sun is thus universal in its beneficence to us all. Can you now imagine true Godliness as being anything less? Why would the essence and source of all truth and love wish to hide its presence from any being? If you come up with reasons to support divine exclusivity, then I ask you to consider whether you are really considering the nature of ultimate truth or your own exclusivity. We humans love being part of a club. We tend to identify and value ourselves in terms of those we see as ideal and like what we wish to be. We tend to support this sense of identity through excluding those we perceive as different – exaggerating or even creating differences where there are none in effect.

The experience of Jesus is, to me, a universal experience, shared by all humanity through a wide range of story and event. In a mythic sense, Jesus represents an archetypal presentation of the “dying and rising deity” – reviving life in all creation through voluntary acceptance of divine participation at the heart of the process. The deity inevitably experiences real suffering through this process and is therefore not immune from the pain of creation. Jesus represents this pattern, this story, in extremely human terms with which we can all readily identify. I therefore experience the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in an intensely personal way, as I know many others do as well. I do not identify myself as “Christian” however, simply because I see the Jesus experience as a meaningful one, but not the only meaningful representation of the core energy behind universal life transformation.

Our Western tradition, expressing itself through Greco-Roman myth, Jewish tradition and ultimately the Christian experience has fully explored and continues to explore the nature of God in human terms. This is a powerful and intense story collection, rich in meaning and powerfully true. It represents some, but not all, the divine sunbeams that strike our spiritual earth. Islam carries on from the Judeo-Christian revelation of God through human experience by focusing on the power of revelation. Hindu-Buddhist traditions, in contrast, bring forward universal truth as found through the accumulated wisdom of experience, emphasizing the ultimate enlightenment of all being. These descriptions are hardly adequate for any of our traditions. They are intended only to show that humanity approaches ultimate wisdom in many ways and ultimate truth also showers itself in abundance and without restriction on all being.

Finally, for me, to deny the truth and power of the Jesus story is to deny the compassion I feel within myself when I encounter and experience the story in all its aspects. In short, it is to deny something elemental to who I am. Our humanity is inextricably intertwined with our feeling of compassion for all being and all circumstances. I feel the Jesus story as though I were there as Jesus and also as each individual who responded or did not respond in any way. Let us not forget the underlying assumption that ordinary life went on as usual within Jerusalem on that particular day. Ordinary activities of daily life still go on while we remain unaware of transcendent events all around us. We are constantly in the presence of God and all the power, pain and wondrousness of that experience, yet we treat nearly every day as ordinary and sometimes even boring.

So this is the atheist that I am. I ask you to care, not because of anything to do with me but because I ask you and me also to become evermore conscious of the profound reality undergirding our everyday, often humdrum experience. I ask you to allow this experience of profound truth to define you more than you allow yourself to define it. I ask you to celebrate, embrace and grow to understand the differences between you and others, rather than to exclude others because of differences you may find difficult to understand. I ask you – and me – to let the universal truth – what we describe as “God” – to flow through us and make us truly different – truly new beings in truth.

This is why I am glad to have sung “Were You There” on Easter Sunday and why I am so glad my partner asked me the question she asked.

Doug Robinson