All Posts Tagged With: "atheism"

Check out this video promoting the Center for Inquiry. (h/t: Break the Terror)

Via Andrew Sullivan, I read the following quote taken from an interview with Steve Schalchlin in the San Francisco Sentinel (Schalchlin has produced several successful musicals in SF):

Gay people who are raised in a religious environment, a conservative religious environment, are basically told, “You’re not good enough / you don’t belong here / you need to change / you need to be something else.” And so, in a lot of our lives, we end up leaving the church and hating god or hating religion or hating the whole nine yards. But an inherently spiritual person doesn’t really lose the core of their being. So it’s going to come out somewhere.

I think that what we discovered is that it comes out of theatre, because theatre and church are essentially the same thing. They are story-telling, they are inspirational, and they are true. Theatre brings an even higher truth sometimes. Church basically repeats the same old story over and over again. I often wonder if that’s not one of the reasons so many gay people wind up getting into theatre. We’re always told that the reasons are because we’re used to hiding and wearing masks and being somebody else. But I think there’s something more profound.

As a gay man and an atheist, the quote captured my interest and got me thinking about the nature of religious belief. Here are my rather long-winded thoughts.

A while ago, I found myself in a conversation with Billy, Augur, and Jon about the truth and value of religion. It was an interesting conversation, perhaps because of the various positions represented: Billy the committed believer, Jon the agnostic, myself the atheist, and Augur representing a somewhat amorphous “religion is useful” position. In the course of the discussion, Augur argued that without religious belief, it becomes difficult to maintain a “sense of purpose” in one’s life.

The knee-jerk atheist reaction to this argument is to ask “who cares?” since it quite obviously provides no reason to believe religion is true, only perhaps that it is useful. Nevertheless, any atheist who wishes to persuade others should not ignore the power of this kind of reasoning. Whether it is intellectually honest or not, many people are religious believers because their faith helps them to organize their lives. Faith can help to resolve certain unanswerable or difficult-to-answer questions, from “How did the universe come into being?” to “What happens after I die?” to “Is there such a thing as moral rightness?” to perhaps the most psychologically fundamental question of all: “Does my life have meaning and purpose?”

And so it is rather important to squarely confront the “religion is useful” argument. Two of the most common responses to this argument are, in my view, entirely true but also somewhat evasive. First is the argument I’ve already mentioned: whether religion is useful has nothing to do with whether it is true. Second is the argument Christopher Hitchens relies upon: far from being useful, religion actually “poisons everything.” This position has been discussed ad nauseam, including on this blog.

But here’s the central problem atheists face: neither of these arguments can truly sway the man who says, essentially, “I believe God exists because I couldn’t face a reality in which he doesn’t.”

Atheists can use such believers to mock religion as nothing more than a psychological crutch, and while I think they’d be right, I also think their point is useless and often counter-productive. While atheists are good at a great many things, they have not so far been successful in finding a way to make atheism “warm and fuzzy,” so to speak, and it is this fatal flaw that until corrected will continue to make atheism wholly unappealing to a great many people.

And so I return to gay people and the theater. Schalchlin’s point in the quote above is quite sound. While obviously not all gay people turn to the stage, it has been seldom indeed that I have encountered a gay person who has not either (1) reconciled their faith with their sexuality or (2) created some other temple for their spiritual expression, whether the theater, the runway, the courthouse, or the Capitol. Rare is the homosexual who does not at least have an avid interest in either entertainment or politics, if not both. (The exceptions, of course, are many, most notably in those gay men and women whose spiritual exile has led to lives of little meaning beyond sexual promiscuity, or worse, who have surrendered their search for meaning and ended their own lives.)

This almost certainly helps to explain why the gay community is disproportionately useful to society (being on average better educated, wealthier, and more powerful), but more importantly, it helps to shed light on how exactly atheists can squarely respond to the assertion that without religion, it is too difficult to find meaning and purpose in the world. In reality, it is surprisingly easy to do so, and provides a more solid foundation upon which to live a productive, happy, and important existence. True meaning does not take form by making God a placeholder for all our gaps in understanding, and atheism does not open the door to nihilism, but rather to a universe of spiritual expression that is far more satisfying than can be found in any church or ancient text. We need to start saying so, and making a convincing case for it, or no matter how sound our arguments are, we will always find ourselves on the losing side of history.