A Is for Atheism
Sermon | July 23, 2023| Lisa Jebsen
Almost a year ago during my first official sermon as minister, I talked a bit about my own spiritual journey – which included growing up in a Lutheran church and my atheist rebellion as a high schooler. This period in my life I was, how shall I put it? Strong willed? Argumentative? High spirited? Opinionated? Whatever adjective you want to use to describe 16 year old Lisa, at that time in my life, I identified as an atheist. And I was as preachy – for lack of better words – in my new found non-belief as any born-again Christian could hope to be!
This was the mid 80s so I couldn’t go down an internet rabbit hole to satisfy my curiosity. I had to go to an actual library and look up the subject in a card catalog.
Small tangent – am I the only one who misses those days? I didn’t really hit my stride and fully appreciate the power of a library until college but man, oh man, did I love the hunt!!! I’ll pull myself back from a full-blown rant with one “in my day!” so I can move on.
Fortunately, I had another resource at the time. In Columbus, you could make a local call to 294-0300 AKA: Dial-An-Atheist. By calling that number for a message from scholar, Dr. Frank R. Zindler – he has had a lengthy career in academia spanning topics including biology, medicine, languages and from 1984-86 he was on the State Board of Directors of the Ohio division of The American Civil Liberties Union, which earns him more points in my assessment.
Another little tangent: back when I was talking about college with my parents they tried to discourage me from pursuing a degree in theatre with the argument that I’d make an incredible lawyer. I shut that argument down pretty quickly with my dad who was a little conservative at that time by stating I’d only become a lawyer for the ACLU.
Did I mention I was argumentative?
At any rate, from 1984-93 Dr. Zindler also hosted a weekly program on Columbus Cable-Access called “American Atheist TV Forum.” Sadly, I was unaware of this show but I was a regular caller into the atheist hotline. In preparing for this sermon, I attempted and failed to get a copy of a book of the hotline’s greatest hits. I’m not giving up though – stay tuned for another sermon centering on that book.
Meanwhile, I sought inspiration elsewhere and found an excellent article by Jonny Thomson on bigthink.com with a thoughtful exploration of the topic called “What Are the DIfferent Types of Atheism” where he breaks down it into 3 categories: the nonreligious, the nonbelievers and the agnostic.
Although the number is hard to pin down, it is thought that there are around 10,000 religions in the world today. Of course we have talked here at UUCOM about the major ones… Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on — but there are millions who follow folk, traditional, or tribal faiths.
Mr. Thomson continues this train of thought…
Theologians, anthropologists, and sociologists are very good at classifying religions. People devote their entire lives to delineating between the tiniest, most esoteric of differences. Iconography, creed, ritual, worship, prayer, and community serve to draw the borders between these faiths.
But this misses something. Outside of the churches, mosques, temples, and pagodas is a shifting, enigmatic, indefinable mass: the group of people who belong to some type of atheism. It is no small fringe, either. Over a billion people do not follow a religion. They make up roughly a quarter of the U.S. population, making it the second largest “belief.” Roughly 60% of the UK never go to church, and there are now more atheists than believers in Norway.
Notably, not all atheism is the same. The various types of atheism deserve greater examination.
The first issue is that statistics like these don’t tell the whole story. A classification of “non-religious” is too broad, noting that words like “secular, agnostic, atheistic, humanistic, irreligious, or non-religious” are not interchangeable. This is not just semantics – for one billion people who are one particular type of atheist, the difference is critical.
It is no easy task to delineate these belief systems, not least because a vast number of them balk at being defined as “believers” at all. Some suggest it is better to describe non-religion as a scale (such as the 1-7 “likelihood of God” scale Richard Dawkins suggests in The God Delusion). But this, too, puts the cart before the horse. Not all religion is about probability, certainty, or assent to various truth claims.
Broadly speaking, atheists can come in three varieties: the nonreligious, the nonbelievers, and the agnostic. This list is not intended to be exhaustive, and the types of atheism often overlap.
So the first type of atheism means not subscribing to a “traditional” religion.
In China for example – a survey in world population review shows that, 91% of adults could be labeled atheist. However, demographic surveys like this rely on “self-identification” by respondents which becomes an issue when we know that many today understand religion in a particular way – with things like identifiable formal creeds or well known practices of the “big” religions – like attending church, praying to Allah five times a day, or belief in the Four Noble Truths. At the risk of assuming, I think we know through our explorations here – the definition of religion is much broader than that.
Going back to China, while 91% could claim to be “atheist,” studies have shown that 70% of the adults practice ancestor worship. 12% self-identify with folk beliefs, and the vast majority practice “traditional medicine” which can be considered a spiritual or religious practice.
For a lot of people, “atheism” means not believing in this or that formal religion. For others, the word might bear closer resemblance to its etymology, in which “a-theism” means anti-theistic belief (allowing Buddhism, for instance). Many in this category we might describe as “mystics” — that is, they do not think any image or idea of God(s) is right, but they feel that there is some kind of spiritual reality.
It is a curiosity seen all over the world. An “atheist” might also believe in angels, fairies, karma, a divine plan, a soul, ghosts, spirits, or Ouija boards. None of these, alone, make up an organized belief, but they are beliefs of a sort.
As for the second type of atheism – it’s the type that most people are familiar with: the nonbelievers, the type of atheist who argues against or rejects certain belief statements. It can also be an atheist who defines religion (for better or worse) as a “set of creeds, beliefs, and quasi-factual statements that they call false”. This sounds a lot like me in highschool, to be honest!
These atheists will say that statements like “Jesus rose from the dead,” “Yogic flying is possible”, or, “The Angel Jibril spoke to Muhammed” can be disproven and should be disbelieved. Pointing out inaccuracies, contradictions, or absurdities of what various religions teach IS the point. Examples of this type of atheist include David Hume, John Stuart Mill, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and almost all of the messages on my beloved Dial-An-Atheist hotline.
This argument against Christianity was right in my sweet spot as a teen. Right now I’m having a flashback to an argument I got into with a Bible thumper on High Street one Friday night. If I could talk to teenage me, I’d tell her to not waste her time – walk on by!
But this was a big part of the appeal of atheism for me at that time… Thomson describes this type of atheist as someone who attacks religious values or even the religious themselves, claiming that religion is what leads to intolerance, prejudice, racism, misogyny, genocide, violence, cruelty, superstition, ignorance, and so on, so it must be rejected out of hand.
Agnosticism is the third type of atheism and I was initially surprised to see it fall under the atheist umbrella. Although I always considered it to be separate from atheism – I like the case that Thomson made for the classification.
If we define atheism as a belief statement — namely, “I am 100% sure God(s) do(es) not exist” — then there are very few atheists. A lot of the “nonbeliever” types concern themselves with probabilities and verifying belief-claims. But, with many of religion’s claims being supernatural, it is impossible to rule them out entirely.
Humans are physical beings, with fallible senses and variable intelligence. As such, very few people will claim certainty about the metaphysical and infinite. A lot of those who call themselves atheist are actually agnostic. They might be those who think religion is very, very unlikely to be right (as Dawkins does) or who accept that there is some varying degree of possibility. Others might suspend judgment — there is no (accessible) data either way, so why commit?
In the William James essay “The Will to Believe” he notes his preference for the word “skepticism” when describing this type of atheism. In fact, the avoidance of the exploration or consideration of religion is a religion in a sense. “The difference between agnostics and atheists is simply an epistemological one. For both, religion simply is not important.”
Thomson concludes his exploration of the three types of atheism with these thoughts on learning to talk about disbelief:
Talking about belief (or the lack thereof) is something we could all be better at. Half of U.S. adults “seldom or never” talk about religion with people outside their family. In the UK, former spin doctor for Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, once said, “we don’t do God”. His point was that religion is a personal (and often unpalatable and awkward) conversation topic for most British people.
Yet, so much is lost in the process. Our beliefs, religious or otherwise, are the most important things about who we are. Sharing and discussing them with others not only helps us understand ourselves more but brings us all closer together. Conflict is often born of misunderstanding and ignorance, and a lot of discord could be avoided by dialogue that seeks to elucidate people’s beliefs.
Examining the types of atheism also reveals another exciting topic: disbelief. All of us have beliefs, but we also all have disbeliefs. Even theists reject the existence of some gods.
Of course, as Unitarian Universalists, I don’t think we have issues about discussing belief or disbelief – our faith is founded on the dedication to those conversations. Nevertheless, I hope that these thoughts on atheism have been as interesting to you as they have been for me. I look forward to continuing the discussion and the exploration with you.
Blessed be.
SOURCES
https://bigthink.com/thinking/types-of-atheism/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41681808?seq=9#metadata_info_tab_contents