So, recently I stated that I’m not an anti-theist. Due to a host of reactions, it seems necessary to further clarify that I’m also not an anti-anti-theist.
I’m not entirely certain I’m an anti-anti-anti-theist. I’m probably not, although I realize that may not be a strong enough statement for any anti-anti-anti-anti-theists out there (my apologies).
But no, I’m not an anti-anti-theist. Let me explain why by going into more detail about where my head is at at the moment.
A while ago, I admitted that my atheism broke down for a few days and I prayed to someone I called “God.” Several have been confused by the point I made there, so let me make it more clear.
There are atheists who pray. I’m not alone in doing this.
Take, for example, atheist Sigfried Gold:
Each morning and night, Sigfried Gold drops to his knees on the beige carpeting of his bedroom, lowers his forehead to the floor and prays to God.
In a sense.
An atheist, Gold took up prayer out of desperation. Overweight by 110 pounds and depressed, the 45-year-old software designer saw himself drifting from his wife and young son. He joined a 12-step program for food addiction that required — as many 12-step programs do — a recognition of God and prayer.Four years later, Gold is trim, far happier in his relationships and free of a lifelong ennui. He credits a rigorous prayer routine — morning, night and before each meal — to a very vivid goddess he created with a name, a detailed appearance and a key feature for an atheist: She doesn’t exist.
While Gold doesn’t believe there is some supernatural being out there attending to his prayers, he calls his creation “God” and describes himself as having had a “conversion” that can be characterized only as a “miracle.” His life has been mysteriously transformed, he says, by the power of asking.
“If you say, ‘I ought to have more serenity about the things I can’t change,’ versus ‘Grant me serenity,’ there is a humility, a surrender, an openness. If you say, ‘grant me,’ you’re saying you can’t do it by yourself. Or you wouldn’t be there,” said Gold, who lives in Takoma Park.
Now, I disagree with Sigfried Gold on a heap of things (and I think the 12-step program has serious problems). But I think I understand him here. And I hesitate to tell him he has to stop praying to God. It obviously helps him, so I hesitate to rip that away.
Another example is Hafidha Acuay, who states:
I’m an atheist, but it doesn’t bother me that others aren’t. Diversity — whether we’re talking about ecosystems or the human brain — is, in my view, a fundamental part of life. Once I became an atheist, no one ever pressured me to pray, but I was troubled by the idea of ignoring pleas for prayer.
I don’t ask for prayers (except in a facetious way about my favorite World Cup teams, for example) but when someone is really hurting and bothers to ask me to pray for them, what am I going to say? “Sorry, I don’t pray for people, but I hope you’re all right?”
I don’t know, but I couldn’t reconcile that in my heart. Praying for those who ask for prayers is a way for me to participate in the lives of my believer friends and family.
Now, I’m not sure all would feel that’s necessary. But…I dunno. Maybe in her situation this does more good than harm. Sure, the family may be inconsiderate of her atheism…but also, maybe by praying Acuay is connecting to and influencing her family more positively, in her specific situation, for her own emotional health, than she would be if she didn’t. So…I kinda get it. Maybe that connection does more good than bad, for her, although this may not be the case elsewhere.
Another atheist who prays is Californian research scientist Ripudaman Malhotra, who writes:
I am an atheist because I do not accept the notion of a super-natural God who, having created the universe, guides our destiny, which to me is essential to being a theist. Under this literal definition of theism, I suspect there are many more atheists than people willing to call themselves as such.
So why do I pray? Why do I recite the liturgy that refers to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob? Not because I ascribe any authority to the words of the Torah but because the ideas expressed in them-and in prayers from other traditions-resonate with me. Stripped of the reference to God, prayers are expressions of wonderment, of our aspirations and desires, and of contrition. This world is awesome and amazing, and I am thankful to experience it. I have aspirations. I wish I could be kinder, more loving, and less prone to anger. I wish the world were a more peaceful place. Occasionally when I find these ideas expressed in certain passages of liturgy, I get goose bumps. The feeling is real, and I want to experience it every time.
Friends have argued that this feeling is evidence of God’s presence. But that feeling cannot be a proof of God’s existence. It is just me wishing that God exists; and such an expression is a prayer.
I think what’s interesting is that he says that he suspects “there are many more atheists than people willing to call themselves as such” under his definition (I had a similar sentiment in reaction to my own prayer). But even when the belief in God is gone, he still prays, and says that in that prayer he feels a yearning for God’s existence (although, clearly, many and perhaps most atheists don’t). I personally would not tell him he should not feel that, even though he — and others who may share his outlook but not, as he puts it be “willing to call” themselves atheists — refers to “God” when feeling these feelings.
If I tell him, or those he “suspects” who don’t call themselves “atheists,” that he cannot refer to God without embodying the worst forms of theism, then am I giving him an ultimatum? Am I saying that they have to follow a dangerous theistic God in order to have the comfort of praying to God, or lose that comfort altogether? I don’t want to do that. So I am fine with him praying to a nonexistent God, so long as he’s not hurting anyone. But the curious aspect here is why he wants God to exist — why he yearns for God, while he is an atheist. Is that yearning bad? What are the components of it? These are interesting and, to me, possibly even important questions.
Another atheist who prays is JD Moyer, whose philosophical theory on it includes this:
When we pray, we don’t feel alone, because (once again) we are talking to someone. Atheists, like myself, don’t believe this someone actually exists, but this shouldn’t prevent us from taking advantage of a psychological exploit that can give us emotional reassurance, guidance, and insight when we most need it.
When I pray, I don’t believe any sort of conscious entity is hearing my thoughts. So who am I addressing? I like to think of it as the “externality construct.” I might give it a name, like “The Universe,” or “All-That-Is-Not-Me,” or “Layer Zero,” or even “God,” but the name doesn’t matter. The entity I’m addressing exists in my mind — a construct. But it feels like I’m addressing someone outside of myself — an externality.
I’ve felt that myself. And that feeling — I’m sorry, but I’m having a hard time saying it’s evil. I know not everyone’s experienced it. But I think there’s a lot more to the value of the feeling than the messed-up creeds of the Bible. So that’s kinda what I’m saying. I’m interested much more in attacking the creeds and the harm than that feeling. Because I suspect that if I attach my attack on the creeds directly and irrevocably to the feeling, in all circumstances, then some people more hesitant to give up the feeling may cling more stubbornly to the much more dangerous creeds. For example, if I consistently insist that people can’t pray to their God without being homophobic, then there’s the possibility that some of these people might connect being homophobic strongly with praying to God. While some might give up God and homophobia together (I did this), others (like people I actually know) may actually have a harder time separating from the feelings they label “God” and continue to be homophobic to preserve those feelings. In the interests of diminishing homophobia, I wonder whether this is healthy.
When I said in a previous blog that I prayed, for about a week, I broke down and went from wishing a God existed to, I think, believing in a panentheistic personal God. For a few days, I was worried the change would be permanent. But after that time passed (as I said in my original blog post) I became a hardcore atheist again. This was another piece of a lot of evidence that in some circumstances, connection to a God-concept might be the best available option for some people, as long as it doesn’t harm others. And then also, maybe I was [insert uncomplimentary word here] for giving in and believing in a God for a short time. That’s entirely possible. I’ve had people tell me as much, and it’s possible that what I went through was so trivial (and really my own fault) that what needed to happen is that I just took care of business and realized that was the correct route without giving in to praying.
OK, point taken. But, with all due respect, in looking at my story and those of other atheists…I am not certain that such connections necessarily hurt people. In some cases, they might help. Not just as a subjective measure, either. But it seems to be an objective fact to me (whatever you think of me, personally) that, in the moment I prayed and the moments that followed, the net good outweighed the net evil that seemed to happen.
If I am a humanist, does anything else matter outside of that simple mathematical equation of harm and pleasure? I mean, the facts matter, certainly. But facts just provide a map. The desire to avoid harm and encourage pleasure seem to be the qualities that dictate where we go on said map. So if I’m plotting a direction on the map, I look at where it’s possible to go, and I also calculate the possible harm and pleasure entailed in traveling those places. Make sense? So if that decision to go to a certain ideological destination results in more pleasure and less harm for those concerned, both in the short run and the long run, then in my mind it may be the best option.
While the equation may be the same, the outcome may differ here based on contextual variables, including time and place. For example, in Iran belief in God may be doing much more serious damage. In that case, if a possible course of action is to disabuse people of belief in God as much as possible, and that seems to be the best way to maximize pleasure and minimize harm in the short and long term, then that is the direction that should be taken, overall. Complicating this, of course, is the prospect that there may be smaller situations that create specific contexts where the general rule may have exceptions, but I’m willing to admit that, in that country for many atheists, attacking God may be the best general plan of action.
But where I’m at now, at this point, in my context…let me explain it this way:
Let’s say God is a concept on the map of ideas. Any positive aspects of the God-concept are in a certain box. Let’s say this box holds several items. Maybe it holds peace. A deep feeling of inner importance or value. A sense of motivation to get through life. Happiness. Etc.
So let’s make this God-concept a “treasure” (OK, you might not think it’s a “treasure,” but I’ll keep going anyway, for the analogy’s sake) on the map of ideas. How do you access the God-concept/treasure?
Well, the ways have differed over the years. Some of them have been bloody. Some of them have been thoroughly destructive. And most ways seem to hurt people.
This is something I saw. It made me an anti-theist.
But sometimes…sometimes I saw people going to interact with that God-concept and saw that, as they were travelling there, they were making a lot of people happy, including themselves. And few people sad. And I felt, because I was the anti-theist sheriff, almost as if it was my job to stop them, or at least work towards stopping them.
But as I saw more of what seemed to be these paths that made people happy — a glimpse here, a glimpse there, a few years over there — I began to have doubts. So eventually I thought, “I’ll try just working on the places where people are being harmed or seem as if they will get harmed, instead of automatically trying to stop every single person who seems to feel a need to connect to the God-concept.” But once I did that, I couldn’t label myself as someone who was against people accessing the God-concept. My issue was the harm many people caused along the way.
That’s the deal. Now, it might be the case that there is no way to access the God-concept on the map of ideas without hurting a bunch of people. We need critics to check us, to argue with us, to show how unhelpful, possibly, the idea is. And from some locations, in some contexts, perhaps the God-concept may be terrible for everyone.
But…I’m not sure. That’s all I’m saying. I’m not sure. I’m also not sure enough I was wrong about anti-theism to stop all the anti-theists from doing their thing. But I am looking more closely at the paths and seeing whether it would be more efficient (in the interests of minimizing harm) to focus on harm than on pulling people away from the God-concept. It might be incidental to pull them away when they are walking right into doing some harm for other people, but I’m not focused on keeping them away from the God-concept anymore. The focus here, for me, is on diminishing the harm people seem to cause as they try to connect to the benefits they get from accessing the God-concept.
I’ve talked to some liberal theists and read some liberal theists who indicate to me that the God-concept might, potentially, be accessed without harming people as I’ve often seen it harm people. I’ve also seen people in certain countries and contexts where the God-concept does enormous damage. And I’ve noticed that attitudes towards religion among atheists often range from largely indifferent in places with more liberal views of God to outraged with the concept of God in the latter. Which makes sense. The more harm people trying to access the God-concept cause on the way, the more healthy and efficient it is to keep people from accessing it.
So I’m not necessarily against other people doing that. If you are an anti-theist, there’s some things you know, in your studies and experience, that give you a different path to travel than I have. But yes, I do supect now that, possibly, people might be able to access the benefits of the God-concept without increasing the degree of harm they do to others. That’s a major interest for me now. But maybe I’m wrong. I’m largely agnostic on the matter, but I’m not actively anti-theisting, so I don’t feel I can label myself an anti-theist.
However, if you, in your situation, see injustice happening constantly in the name of God and need to fight against it know that, insofar as that concept of God is hurting you, I’ll work to fight with you. My fight is against the harm that is being done in your life, first and foremost, and in remedying that in the most effective way possible. So I’m not against you. There’s a fork in the road, so to speak, and I’m exploring another path, but I’m not really interested in burning your side.
For more on how I got there, check this out.
Thank you for reading.
P.S. I have a Patreon, if you want to help me do what I’m doing.