Beyond Belief: Atheist Movement Helping Christians Turn Backs On God
Pastor Dale Morgan
Beyond Belief: Atheist Movement Helping Christians Turn Backs On God*
MICHAEL BACHELARD
January 16, 2010
Leanne Carroll and Joel Kilgour are part of a growing number worldwide
to openly acknowledge a lack of religious faith.
DAMIAN Coburn once lived in a cult-like Catholic offshoot in which
owning a new car was frowned upon as being too much like investing in a
graven idol. But Coburn bought one anyway, and called it the Golden
Calf. Anne Robinson was raised a Christian but as a teenager became a
pentacle-wearing witch who was in touch with the earth goddess Gaia and
performed magic spells to win love, or money. Aam grew up in a strict
Bangladeshi Muslim family, where marriages were arranged, the Koran
taken literally and a set of religious and cultural taboos were woven
together into a complete way of life.
These three Australians are united by a religious upbringing. But in the
past few years all have been united by something entirely different.
They've shucked off their faith and become part of a growing world-wide
movement - atheism.
What is driving this move is a matter for debate. Some say it's a
reaction against religious terrorism, fundamentalism. Others that the
habit of Kevin Rudd, Tony Abbott, Tony Blair and others of wearing their
religion US-style on their sleeves has prompted a backlash, with people
concerned about the political lobbying power of faith. Still others
believe the children of 1960s hippies have grown up without strong
childhood indoctrination and are now embracing rationalism and science.
The new atheism is bigger, more organised, and much more assertive than
ever before. It's based on the belief that science explains everything
we need to know about the world so there's no need for religion. Its
founding texts are by scientist Richard Dawkins and writer Christopher
Hitchens, and religion, in their eyes, is not just some harmless
illusion, it's a dangerous, immoral force in society.
The adherents of this new atheism are not simply out to proclaim their
own existence - they are proselytising, they want to convert the faithful.
''If this book works as I intend,'' Dawkins wrote in his 2006 best
seller, The God Delusion, ''religious readers who open it will be
atheists when they put it down.''
By legitimising atheism and speaking openly about it, Dawkins and others
have either brought thousands of people out of the closets of their
faith, or crystallised their inchoate feelings of unbelief into
something firmer. These people gather in online forums to talk -
Dawkins' forum at richarddawkins.net has 81,000 signed-up members, and
the relatively new Atheist Foundation of Australia has 704 and growing.
They vary from the mildly non-religious to the aggressively,
sarcastically anti-faith. And in March thousands of them will come to
Melbourne to attend the Global Atheist Convention, billed as the largest
gathering of non-theists in Australia, and perhaps the world. Here they
will listen to Dawkins as well as a number of international and
home-grown activists including Peter Singer, Phillip Adams, Catherine
Deveny and Robyn Williams.
There are two key questions about this new atheism. Firstly, as Adam is
reputed to have said to Eve on that first day in Eden, ''How big does
this thing get?'' And secondly, if it's a fully fledged movement, where
does it go? What does it do?
For both Hitchens and Dawkins, the ultimate goal is clear. They want to
reassure the religious waverers that it's OK not to believe and,
eventually, to rid the world of organised faith - in Hitchens' words, to
''transcend our prehistory and escape the gnarled hands which reach out
to drag us back to the catacombs and the reeking altars and the guilty
pleasures of subjection and abjection''. As even Hitchens admits,
though, the task remains enormous.
Two hundred years after the birth of Charles Darwin, Fairfax's recent
Neilsen poll on faith showed 23 per cent of Australians still believe
that God created all life in a week about 10,000 years ago. Another 32
per cent believe he guided a long process of creation over time. Only 12
per cent believe Darwin's theory of natural selection, the scientific
underpinning for much of the new atheism. More encouragingly for the
atheists, 24 per cent of Australians firmly believe there is no God, and
6 per cent are pretty sure. In the United States, by contrast, 92 per
cent believe in God.
FOR many who quit their religion, the seeds of unbelief are sown young.
Leanne Carroll is typical of the new atheist in Australia. Now 46, this
eloquent Melbourne medico-legal transcriptionist was schooled by nuns in
1970s Kew, ''where too much Mass was never enough''. But at the age of
about eight, she started asking questions the sisters were not equipped
to answer, such as ''what's heaven like?''. A conscientious girl,
Carroll tried hard to get her head around the Trinity (''it breaks your
brain'') and lay frightened in bed at night because she thought God was
watching. But then, as she grew and her faith wavered, she remembers
testing the Lord by saying ''bloody'' out loud in the playground,
waiting to be smited for disrespecting His wounds. She was not. At 12,
tired of fabricating sins to mention in confession, Carroll stopped
turning up.
Apart from dabbling in New Age spirituality as an adult, she went no
further with religion. But it was not until she found Richard Dawkins'
BBC documentary The Root of All Evil? on the internet that she was able,
finally, to apply the label ''atheist'' to herself. ''I thought, 'That
is what I am!''' Carroll says. ''I had a word to describe me. It's not
true that I had a Dawkins conversion - he just crystallised it for me …
So I went on the website and met tonnes of people. Then I started
reading his books … I discovered an innate interest in and a love of
science.''
Her experience of adolescent doubt is a common theme. Melbourne HR
consultant Joel Kilgour, 31, was a member of a ''very Christian''
Uniting Church family who had his first argument with his Sunday school
teacher over Creation at the age of about 12 or 13: ''I couldn't
understand if God created the world in six days, why not in one, in one
second - that's when I started to ask a lot of questions.''
He lapsed into apathy before he went to university and studied science.
But he did not consciously acknowledge that he was an atheist until he
read the recent spate of books on the subject.
Anne Robinson, a 29-year-old public servant from Perth, also started off
a Christian but at the age of 11 had a ''sudden epiphany'' about a
multi-faith world: ''Kids were being raised in India as Hindus, and I
was raised Christian, it made no sense to me that my religion was right
and theirs was wrong,'' she said. ''Also, I couldn't get that sex was so
wrong.''
This insight led her on a spiritual quest familiar to many Western
seekers. She looked firstly to the East, dabbling in Buddhism, but at
the end of high school she ''stumbled across my perfect religion'' -
paganism and Wicca. It was earth and female-centred, and embodied a
healthy attitude to sex. The magic was ''all very intriguing as well -
the whole New Age idea that you can think positively and things will
happen for you''. But after years of practising positive visualisation,
celebrating the solstice and equinox and reading tarot cards and star
signs, Robinson began to realise that she was looking at the world
''through a curtain'' that made things more complex than they needed to be.
''I think it was sort of creating a gap there that wasn't really there,
and trying to fill it with religion … it seems so much stronger to look
at the world and see what's physically there rather than imagining
things into it.''
Others have come to atheism after much deeper indoctrination in
religion, and much tougher roads. Aam is a former Muslim, brought up in
a Bangladeshi family in Sydney. Aam is not his real name: his parents
took his atheism badly and are still exposing him to fire-breathing
sermons in an attempt to draw him back.
He was brought up as a strictly observant Muslim, but felt the seeds of
disillusionment at the age of 14, as he listened to the imams preach at
his school. He simply could not believe their message about the
subjugation of women and the alleged scientific proofs in the Koran.
It was not until he studied logic and philosophy at Sydney University
and then was caught by his parents after drinking alcohol at a picnic
that he ''proclaimed'' his atheism to them. This was two years ago. He
is now 20, and his parents have stopped speaking to him because they
have caught him drinking again.
But when living in a community where religion is so deeply embedded in
every aspect of the culture, atheism is a difficult stance to adopt.
''A lot of the celebrations we have are religious. The custom is to go
over to other people's house and eat, and my family and friends seem to
enjoy it. And part of me feels I'm on the outside looking in,'' Aam
says. ''But I guess I'd rather not be a part of it.''
Damian Coburn, 44, knows all about the community of the religious. He
lived in an enclave of his co-communicants from the Disciples of Jesus
Covenant Community in Canberra, an offshoot of the Catholic Church.
Coburn was a prayer leader in what he describes as an ''almost cult-like
… happy clappy, praying-in-tongues group which supplements regular
church with pentecostal-style prayer meetings''.
Like many cults, it had inner and outer circles, with those in the inner
circle privy to ''special knowledge'', and the rest suffering
''second-class expectations''. According to Coburn it made high demands
for time spent in prayer and was also controlling, misogynistic,
homophobic and emotionally manipulative.
He lived within it despite a high-powered job in the Canberra public
service and the kind of sardonic personality that allowed him to drive a
car called the Golden Calf, and to volunteer at the AIDS Action Council
because his son was gay. ''It took a long time to admit to myself that I
didn't believe in God. And there were two stages - a lack of belief in
God's existence, then dealing with a heck of a lot of guilt,'' he says.
To him, religion's rules are of two kinds - ''the golden rule about how
to treat people'', and then all the taboos about sex, food, dress,
''which tend to screw people up''.
In Australia, most of the damage done by religion, he believes, is not
due to the violence, war and doctrinal tribalism that mars so many other
societies, but the ''day-to-day miseries'' - the suppression of people's
sexuality, conformity, discouragement of questioning, the oppression of
women - ''all these things that restrict people's lives and that lead to
misery and guilt''.
WRITER and former editor of Arena magazine Guy Rundle, an atheist,
believes the Dawkins-Hitchens version of atheism is ''the most
shatteringly empty creed to come along for many a year''. It misses the
point, he says, goes out of its way to hurl insults, misunderstands how
belief systems work, uses straw man arguments and is boring because it
''takes the least sophisticated form of theism and beats it around the
head''. It also fails to grapple with sophisticated theologians such as
Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth; and it is blind to the fact that,
when science (quantum physics and cosmology) try to explain the origins
of the universe, its materialist, atheist account is as mysterious and
improbable as that of any religion. New atheism also, he says, refuses
to concede that many people have feelings of transcendence that must be
expressed.
It's a criticism echoed by the religious. ''All that Dawkins can offer
is a revival of old-fashioned secular humanism, whose hopes and
aspirations are summarised in John Lennon's insipid 1971 composition
Imagine,'' theology professor Tom Frame wrote last year. Melbourne
Catholic auxiliary archbishop Peter J. Elliott says the new atheism
should be respected, and welcomed into dialogue, and could even play an
important role in ''correcting religious fanaticism'', on which score
''many religious people would agree with them''. But he echoed the
concerns of a number of religious people that this movement was in
danger of becoming a faith in its own right. ''It's when they slide into
a kind of fundamentalism themselves, and become dogmatic, that's when we
have a problem with them.''
Dawkins has responses to all these arguments, and lays them out in the
paperback edition of The God Delusion. For example, to the accusation
that he beats up fundamentalists while ignoring the moderates, Dawkins
writes that, unfortunately, ''understated, decent, revisionist religion
is numerically negligible''.
But it's to the accusation that they are establishing a new,
fundamentalist faith called atheism that the unbelievers react most
strongly. They are free thinkers. Individualists. They will change their
mind if the evidence changes. The only thing atheists agree on, says
David Nicholls, the president of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, is
the lack of a God, ''everything else is up for grabs''. ''Atheism itself
doesn't say what it's got to do … there's no push, or movement or
anything like that - it's certainly not anything like [the] women's
liberation movement. … [Atheists are] not good joiners, they don't mass
on ovals and wave copies of Darwin around.''
This makes for an odd lobby group. The most pressing questions regarding
religion and society in Australia are political ones - tax exemptions
for the religious, school funding, exemptions from discrimination law,
public funding, religion in state schools. The Atheist Foundation of
Australia and other humanist groups have long made their views known on
these subjects, but there's no evidence that more and louder atheists
have made any difference to their power - they could not, for example,
secure public funding for the March convention, even though the
Parliament of World Religions was given $4.5 million.
Dawkins says atheism needs first to gather ''critical mass'' and then,
like cats, become loud.
''Even if they can't be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a
lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.'' Which leaves the question of
transcendence. To the new atheists, the material world of physical
beauty and the wonders of science are all the spiritual fulfilment they
need. Dawkins writes that a ''proper understanding of the magnificence
of the real world … can fill the inspirational role that religion has
historically - and inadequately - usurped''.
Joel Kilgour refuses to describe himself as a spiritual person, but,
''if you ask if I have transcending moments, absolutely''. ''Sunset over
the ocean, holding the hands of families or friends, looking into the
face of my newborn niece … A lot of people claim spirituality for those
moments … but I think people just like to feel they are special, that
the universe was created specifically for them when, really, we're just
a speck of dust.''