Varieties of Atheism

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Ministers are always receiving books. I have been given self-help books that folks said would improve me, political books that were supposed to make me more woke, classics I somehow missed. (A congregant once gave me War and Peace and, about a week later, asked when we could get together and discuss its various meanings.) But this was different. It had been gifted to me by my son-in-law: The Age of the Atheists, by British author, journalist, and historian Peter Watson, is basically an intellectual history of the Western World for the last hundred and forty years, i.e., since 1882.

That was the year the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche published a popular book, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which a madman runs wildly into town screaming, “God is Dead.” He goes on to add, “We have killed him.” This was not the first time Nietzsche had issued a divine death warrant, but Zarathustra’s terse, popular style attracted lots of attention. There were at that time many other cultural influences—modern Biblical criticism, and the theory of evolution among the strongest—but somehow 1882 was a turning point. Belief in God—the literally interpreted God of the Jewish and Christian scriptures, had been declining for centuries… and for some, had never made sense. But following Zarathustra, openly declaring one’s disbelief became socially acceptable.

Making sense of life, on the other hand, finding one’s existential bearings with some joie de vivre and opportunities for meaningful endeavor, continued to attract human attention. God or no God, people are hard-wired to make sense of life. Peter Watson’s book outlines the leading secular philosophic traditions of the last 140 years: since disbelief started being respectable and, over the decades, more and more publicly shared.

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Now Dan Siskind, my scientifically trained son-in-law, is himself kind of an atheist. So was my humanities-trained mentor in liberal ministry, Paul Sawyer. But just as there are many kinds of believers, there are many, many kinds of atheists. Paul Sawyer consulted the Chinese Book of Changes or I Ching every day, read the poets (was himself a poet), maintained longstanding spiritual practices, and had a strong mystical streak. Paul told me that Frederic Spiegelberg, who taught World Religions at Berkeley’s Starr King Seminary (and who is among those reviewed in Watson’s book), taught Paul and a generation of UU ministers that if you did not visualize God with a human face, then you were an atheist. So, there are a lot of kinds of atheism.

Six hundred pages worth, in Watson’s book: focusing on about 100 serious Western culture-makers, poets, artists, scientists, writers, psychologists, and philosophers, and also on who influenced which others leading to various schools of thought—all of them celebrating life and offering deep meaning without recourse to a deity.)

Frederick Nietzsche was himself an atheist. He was not, however, without hope. Nor was he a nihilist. His prescription for the world without God in which he and all of us find ourselves, was to live in a Dionysian grand style, seeking an intensity of daily experience so invigorating, that you’d do it again and again with no misgivings. Sort of like the late Rock ‘n Roll musician Jim Morrison of The Doors, it seems to me, or Janice Joplin: living always on the edge, pushing the envelope.

Some of Nietzsche’s contemporaries agreed, becoming the modern-day Dionysians who gave birth to Modern Dance. At Ascona, a picturesque village in the Italian Alps a community sprang up in that very spirit. Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, and others including the Californian Isadora Duncan, who succinctly exclaimed their aim: “to forget the form and dance the reason why.” D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Herman Hesse, and Carl Jung were all Ascona habitués. The curriculum was mostly kinesthetic, dance, and movement-oriented, but also and more intently, it was about finding “the reason why” and marshaling the courage to live that reason every day. For this was one of Frederick Nietzsche’s main points: the need, in a godless universe, to focus far less on content and more on expression—especially self-expression. And in the realm of self-expression, feelings are as important as facts.

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Among the many other schools of atheistic thought reviewed by Peter Watson, one he pays a lot of attention to is phenomenology and the phenomenological approach:

Rudolf Otto, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger…

Phenomenology: understanding life as an inexhaustible number of experiences, appreciating their individuality and concreteness. Kind of what poets do!)

Another: psychology and the whole psychological approach:

William James M.D., Harvard Professor of Psychology and later Philosophy 1880-1910. Pragmatism. (Pragmatism is kind of a secular equivalent of faith in God; pragmatism = faith in the human community and its evolving institutions.) A quote from James’ Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

“Our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. We may go through life without suspecting their existence, but apply the requisite stimulus and at a touch they are there in all their completeness: different types of mentality which probably somewhere have their field of application and adaptation.

“No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. How to regard them is the question for they are so discontinuous with ordinary consciousness. They may determine attitudes, though they cannot furnish formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map.

“At any rate, they forbid our premature closing of accounts with reality.”

Peter Watson repeatedly suggests that for most modern people, psychology has replaced religion as the key to understanding what’s really happening in our lives… Freud C.G. Jung Otto Rank Viktor Adler

Carl Jung’s psychology bloomed into a fully developed mystical understanding of human identity.

But there are some kinds of atheism which have little to do with dance or art or inner mystical communion of any kind. Author Watson writes at length on the Bolshevik crusade for Scientific Atheism, under the leadership of Comrade Stalin and carried out by his ruthless apparatchiks. Far more chilling: the atheistic Nazi Religion of Blood. Reading these chapters I kept thinking that sophisticated Westerners may have grown used to the idea of a godless universe, but the Stalinists and Nazis clearly believed in a loveless universe as well: what atheism—in its starkest form—may ultimately devolve into.

In the wake of WWII and with the awareness following that war of the horrible atrocities it had unleashed, belief in God was further eroded. As Nobel Prize winning author Elie Wiesel put it, “My God died when I got off the train at Auschwitz.” (Wiesel’s faith did not completely die, however; like the Biblical patriarch Jacob, he wrestled the long night through… and for the rest of his life. And throughout those sixty years his ideas about life, the cosmos and about God continued to evolve.) It was about this time that the philosophy of Existentialism emerged, espoused most prominently by the French writers Antoine de Saint-Exupery, Albert Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Be responsible, wrote the Existentialists. Enjoy the warmth you manage to create. Essentially: be an artist in your own life.

Another atheistic development is well known and was lived through by many Unitarians here on the West Coast. In the mid-’60s, Cal State Professor Theodore Roszak wrote The Making of a Counterculture, in which he outlined three key elements in then-contemporary popular culture here in America:

• New techniques in therapy
• Humanistic Psychology: Abraham Maslow
• Victor Frankl Logotherapy
• Erich Fromm The Art of Loving, etc.
• Rollo May Carl Rogers Virginia Satir…
• Drugs to search for alternative consciousness
• Music (Rock ‘n Roll; Jim Morrison, et al)

Watson goes into modern art a lot: Impressionism’s ways of helping us recognize everyone’s unique viewpoint; and later, Abstract Expressionism’s focus on how a work of art makes us feel.

Over the last fifteen to twenty years, we’ve heard a lot from evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. Their use of combative language can be off-putting, but it comes out of the sincere belief that the Theory of Evolution is the big idea of our time and people who miss its significance are missing everything. So, they come off as evangelists for Darwin. I have been given books by all three authors. They are OK, but one wishes Dennett and Harris (Dawkins is far better at this) would read the phenomenologists and put as much energy into understanding their approach as they want everyone else to put into understanding science. It’s also interesting to me how each of these brilliant scientists finds all kinds of meaning in science and repeatedly expresses their awe at the sublimity they see everywhere. But, hey, they’re scientists. Scientists love science just as English majors love poets like William Butler Yates, Rainer Maria Rilke and Virginia Woolf: all of them atheists according to The Age of Atheists author, Peter Watson.

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There is so much one can say about this subject. We have no time this morning to do more than scratch the surface. So much has happened and so much has been learned in the last 140 years! It’s worth noting that while all these budding ideas have emerged regarding our godless universe and how people fit into it—ideas about life without God—ideas about God have also been changing, in some cases quite radically. Modern theologians have, for instance, suggested that God may not be omniscient after all, or all-powerful, or always wholly good, or wholly perfect, or always paying attention. Theirs is not the God of Billy Graham, that’s for sure! But it was the God of my favorite seminary professor, Bernard “Bernie” Loomer, a Process Theologian who left the American Baptists for the Unitarian Universalists. Professor Loomer believed all the qualifying attributes of God that I just listed, but still considered himself a theist—even if Process Theology itself came entirely out of the work of Alfred North Whitehead—another who, according to Watson, was a full-blown atheist.

My main point this morning is not to convince anyone to become an atheist. Or abandon that stance. My point is that among Unitarian Universalists it’s less important what you believe than that you keep wrestling with these ideas and keep trying to refine your thinking. Unlike the orthodox of every other tradition, we ask that you risk confessing your faith to each other. That means that first you must risk finding it. This is the search of one’s lifetime: integrally and courageously wrestling God (or whatever you currently think is God) to the ground and telling us in the morning who won. I am not propounding atheism. I am asking you to abandon easy, blind beliefs and dare to discover your own questions. This is, admittedly, a lot to ask. And it’s only the ante. But that’s what you’re signing up for when you become a Unitarian Universalist.

So? What do you believe? How does the concept of deity fit into your worldview? I intend to lead an Adult Program this spring on Ritual in Our Lives to help people frame these questions and come up with more coherent understandings of what they believe. Classes like this help each person who enrolls come to their own self-expressive poetic take on it all, God or no God. Integrative coherence? Or none?

As Unitarians we are challenged to build our own theology. To come to our own individual way of putting things together but guided by the liberal beacons that have been touchstones of our faith: beauty, wisdom, and truth, care and sensitivity, love, and comradery. Whatever your current understanding of deity, let us recommit to these values and to these touchstones of loving, wholesome relationships….

So may it be. Amen. Shalom.

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