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ATHEISM
A Sermon Given by
The Reverend Roger Fritts
on February 11, 2001
at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church
Bethesda, Maryland
Sermon
I define myself as a theist, but I understand the perspective of an atheist. Almost daily, I hear comments about a God that rewards some and condemns others to terrible suffering.
A woman who lives in a lush, luxury apartment building in Bethesda with high ceilings, leather sofas, and book-lined shelves said, "Every morning I thank God for waking up in such beautiful surroundings." I wonder: What does God have to do with her comfort?
A minister said to a sorrow-stricken congregation at the funeral of a nine-year-old who drowned in Rock Creek "God needed this child in Heaven." I wonder: How does he know that?
A fifteen-year-old girl, a singer in a popular teen group called "Dream" said, "How did my singing career fall into place? It has to be God." I wonder: Why would God care about teenage pop music?
A father of a child killed in the conflict between Jews and Arabs said "God gave me this son and God took this son." I wonder: How can he believe in a God that is so cruel?
I understand the perspective of an atheist. Almost daily, I hear the strange comments about God's activity.
A monk in Sri Lanka explained why the country's bloody ethnic civil war between Hindus and Buddhists had not reached his temple. "It is very, very peaceful here due to the effect of the Hindu god." Who would worship a God that permits war in one village and peace in another?
A civil engineer who was helping direct the rescue work after the earthquake in India said "This tragedy shows us there is nothing we can do against God's will. We imagine we are so great with all our technology, but in 30 seconds, God has destroyed all the technical calculations of man." Who would worship a God that uses its power to kill tens of thousands in an earthquake?
The Secretary of State in Florida said that only a broken voting machine or "an act of God" would be acceptable reasons for doing a hand-count of the votes. Who would worship a God that manipulated the outcome of a Presidential election?
According to the newspaper God has a special interest in sports.
A writer, in commenting about the difficulties a tennis player struggled with over the past ten years before wining the Australian Open, said "pain really is God's way of making us more perfect."
A Baltimore quarterback said after the Super Bowl win, "This last month, I've meditated on a verse in the Bible--'Everything is possible for he who believes.' And I really thank God for our win."
A University of Colorado basketball coach, after ten members of the Oklahoma State Basketball staff were killed in a plane crash while returning home from a game in Colorado, said "Tragedies catch you off guard and by surprise. But, you know, I put my faith in God, so every time we board the planes I think it's his will whether or not we make it back safely."
I wonder: Who would worship a God that gives a football victory to one team and on the same day kills ten members of a basketball staff in a plane crash? I understand the perspective of an atheist.
A newly appointed Bishop said to a congregation "What I am really grateful for is that the Lord has sent me to the people to love and care for them, and to guide them." For many clergy, God is the master--whose wishes are known only by the Pope, the Bishops or the minister. It is primitive magic.
A Boy Scout Leader explained why avowed homosexuals could not be Scouts. He said that Scouts pledge their "Duty to God" and God teaches "that sexual relations should occur only within the bonds of marriage." For many community leaders, God is the authority used to support their prejudice, their fear and their ignorance. It is a crude manipulation.
Most politicians, both democratic and republican end their speeches with the words "God Bless America." God is the authority used to endorse their economic policies, their moral leadership and their military build-ups.
Over the centuries there have always been a few people who have used reason, logic, and experience in evaluating claims about God. In ancient religious texts, negative references to those who don't believe give us evidence that there have always been sceptics. In the Old Testament, for example, Psalm 14 says, "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" About three thousand years old, this passage is one of the first written evidence record of the existence of atheists. Two thousand five hundred years ago atheist views begin appearing in China, India, and Greece. In China, Confucius taught what was essentially an
atheistic philosophy. In India, Buddha taught a philosophy that omitted any belief in God. In Greece, the philosophy of materialism taught that everything in the universe was composed of tiny units of matter called atoms. In this view, all the movements of life and nature are accounted for in the movements of atoms. The root word atheos or "no god" was of Greek origin.
In Europe, for over a thousand years, Christianity ruled supreme. Atheists may have existed during the spread of Christianity but since the church strictly controlled all writing we have little record of them. It was not until the Reformation, Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Age when atheism began to surface again.
Historians tend to classify modern atheists into four philosophical groups: the Rationalists, the Marxists, the Idealists, and the Existentialists--with many branches in all directions. Indeed, if allowed to grow, atheists multiply as rapidly as Christian denominations. And like Christians, atheists do not present a united front.
Starting in the 18th Century there were gentle atheists known as Rationalists. Rationalism means that all of human knowledge comes through our use of our natural abilities without the aid of supernatural revelation. Reason, for the Rationalist, stands opposed to many of the religions of the world, including Christianity, which have held that the divine has revealed itself through inspired persons or writings.
The Rationalists view the elimination of God as a sign of progress. If God was necessary in the primitive stages of history, God is irrelevant to an enlightened civilization. What is the need of faith and religion when armed with reason and science? Today, in the form of the Humanist Manifesto, Rationalists are hopeful intellectuals who see no God in the cosmos.
In the 19th century, Karl Marx developed an understanding of religion based on the theory of the class struggle. Religion, both consciously and unconsciously, was an instrument of exploitation. Marx wrote:
The real happiness of the world demands that religion be suppressed, because the happiness it gives the people is [an illusion] illusory. It justifies slavery. It teaches the necessity of a dominant class. It preaches laziness, abasement, servility. God is a chain!
So Marx promoted a new system, hoping to break people free of all the chains that are obstacles to liberty. For a time his system spread to half the world, and it still has influence. "God is not here," reported the first Russian cosmonaut. "I do not see God."
The Idealists are a diverse group of followers of Immanuel Kant. Kant taught that space and time are the forms or filters in which our brains understand the world and the universe, but that things as they exist in themselves do not exist in space or time. Therefore, because of the filters through which we view reality, we can never know things as they exist in themselves. We can never, therefore, prove the existence of God.
One of Kant's follower's was Friedrich Nietzsche. In the 1880s Nietzsche proclaimed that God was dead. He said: "To give everyone every chance of becoming truly great, we must strenuously proclaim the death of God. We are God's assassins, and now we can be Gods ourselves."
Influenced by the tradition of Kant and Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre described himself as an Existentialist atheist in the 1940s. He declared that:
There is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. . . . Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of Existentialism. . . . God is a useless and costly hypothesis, so we will do without it. . . .
Sartre's radical atheism constructed a humanist ethic emphasizing freedom and individuality.
What the Rationalists, the Idealists, the Marxists and the Existentialists hold in common is the proclamation that God does not exist, that all formulations of God are an illusion.
Today in many countries atheism is the belief of a significant minority. Seventeen percent of people living in the Netherlands say that they "Do not believe in God." In France, the number is 19 percent; in Sweden, it is 17 percent. In the Czech Republic and in Russia, 20 percent are atheists. In Japan, 11 percent concur with the statement I "do not believe in God," and in Canada the number is 9 percent.
But in America atheists number only about 3 percent of the population. It is not easy to be an atheist in America. Our culture is saturated with pious sentiments and godly pronouncements. For example:
January 20, the Presidential inauguration opened with the words ;
"Blessed are you, O Lord our God. Yours, O God, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in Heaven and Earth is yours," and ended with the words "Almighty God, the supply and supplier of peace, prudent policy and nonpartisanship, we bless your holy and righteous name."
February 3, the Virginia House of Delegates passed a bill requiring all public schools in Virginia to post the national motto, "In God We Trust," in a prominent place.
And this is not just Republicans. Last June when the sequencing of the human genome was announced President Clinton said that scientists had succeeded in "learning the language in which God created life."
In America atheists feel under siege. One atheist wrote in a letter to the Los Angeles Times:
You hold the mistaken idea that atheists and agnostics live miserable or self-centered lives "of unremitting emptiness and despair." But all the atheists I know think life is a magnificent wonder. They too love sunsets, the Grand Canyon, the promontories of Big Sur, all the more miraculous for having been created solely from the laws of nature, no Supreme Being required.
A high school student in Michigan wrote:
As an atheist, I feel I have endured persecution for my beliefs. I believe that the only outcome of any increase of religion in the schools would be an increase in anger directed against those students who are either not of the dominant religion or lack religion at all.
Last fall, [wrote this student] I tried to form an atheist club in my high school as an alternative to a Bible study group that already existed. The school made it difficult for me to do so, saying I didn't have a teacher-sponsor.
I threatened to sue the school with legal help from Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. Only then did the school say I could not be prevented from forming the club.
The reaction of some of my fellow students to the club was even worse. Immediately after I formed the group, a few of them seemed to take it upon themselves to intimidate me. Signs promoting the club were torn down, and people scribbled insults like "Burn in Hell" on them. Students would come to our meetings and yell, simply to be disruptive. And after the shootings at Columbine, a friend told me that a teacher had told his class that my club was the same thing as the trench coat mafia.
And, writing in the New York Times, the newspaper's science writer, Natalie Angier, herself a self-proclaimed atheist, said:
In an age when flamboyantly gay characters are sitcom staples, a Jew was but a few flutters of a butterfly wing away from being in line for the presidency and women account for a record 13 percent of the Senate, nothing seems as despised, illicit and un-American as atheism. Again and again the polls proclaim the United States to be a profoundly and persistently religious nation, one in which faith remains a powerful force. . . . Every year, surveyors like Gallup and the National Opinion Research Center ask Americans whether they believe in God, and every year the same overwhelming majority, anywhere from 92 to 97 percent, say
yes.
Why are people condemned for their atheism? Is it not because the condemners are weak and uncertain in their own faith? Is it not a fearful insecurity?
The discrimination, the hostility, the taboo, against atheists in our country is a crime. Some of my best friends are atheists. They don't believe in God. They never pray. And yet they are good, caring, honest people, sensitive to the needs of others, generous with their time, their love, their wealth. I have known the kindness, the sincerity, and the thoughtfulness of many atheists. Their friendships have enriched my life and their insights have added to my understanding.
So to all the atheists within the sound of my voice, I say: belief in God is not a requirement of membership in this religious community. Theists and agnostics are no more noble or more honest than atheists, and I have never met a person who could be judged solely on the basis of a theological position. To all atheists, I say that you are welcome and that your presence enriches the life of our religious community.
In proclaiming their views atheists help free us from the chains of illusion. They say to us:
Use your mind!
Question everything!
Make reasonable judgments!
Dig for more insights!
Examine the evidence!
Think for yourself!
And to this I say (if you will pardon a word from the Christian tradition), Amen!
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