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True Non-Believers
(Taos, NM, 2004)
by Arthur Durkee
When I was working as a typesetter in Madison, WI, I was the regular typesetter for the monthly newsletter of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It was mostly news articles, legal updates on the cases they were undertaking for their legal defense fund (many of which I supported, as they were about separation of church and state, and many of which overlapped with ACLU cases of a similar nature), with the occasional opinion or op-ed piece. Typesetting the monthly newsletter was always a treat for me, and often made me laugh out loud.
The FFRF was founded and is still led by Dan Barker, if I recall his name correctly, and the core group is the Barker extended family. It was at that time, and may still be, a non-profit dedicated to atheist principles and activism.
Now, Barker had been a born-again hellfire and brimstone preacher prior to his embracing atheism. (Apparentally it was a quasi-religious conversion experience for him. Ironic.) What was most interesting and fun about the FFRF newsletter was that the rhetoric was still very over-the-top and apocalyptic--but now the cause was atheism rather than born-again Christianity. The Cause was still the Cause, only the subject itself had changed.
Frankly, the only thing difference between Dan Barker the tent revival born-again fundamentalist preacher, and Dan Barker the crusading atheist, was the subject matter. The man had apparentally changed one belief-structure for another, but his personality and style had altered not a whit.
So, if Mao was right about religion being the opiate of the masses, how is this not a clearcut case of one addiction being substituted for another? (Just as most twelve-step groups substitute an addiction to a quasi-religious system for an addiction to a chemical substance.) Barker now spends 100 percent of his time fighting for atheist causes. But the rhetoric still has exactly the same tone, the same sense that "anyone who believes differently than me is an idiot." The Cause is still the Cause.
So, personally, I have never seen much difference between atheists and non-atheists. The mindsets are often identical. Both seem to me to be identically emotionally and mentally committed to their positions. At their worst, they both maintain rigid stances with zero flexibility, and no one really convinces anybody of anything, because everyone is too busy shouting their own positions at deafening volume. Trus discourse and dialogue is pretty much nonexistent.
Matthew Fox, among others, who include such notable free-thinking scientists as Rupert Sheldrake, describe "scientific rationalism" as a quasi-religious belief system that has many of the functional earmarks of a religion, including: received dogma that may not be questioned; an aura of reverential Mystery around the pursuit of knowledge (which in this case means lab-coated researchers rather than frocked theologians); the worship of saints, many of whom were theoreticians and technologists (Darwin, Einstein, Edison, etc.); the de facto practice that its own internal belief-system is right while everyone else is wrong; and so forth.
The biggest mistake that scientific rationalism makes is to place itself in the position of being the One True Faith--which is exactly like when a born-again Christian becomes a born-again atheist and continues to fulminate his views as the Only Truth--and it is in these circumstances that atheism itself seems most similar to a religious creed itself. Functionally, atheism IS a religion.
Madelyn Murray O'Hair (who I met when in elementary school) struck me as being a true fanatic; she had given up everything for her cause, and devoted her total existence to the cause. It was an irrational pursuit of an extreme form of rationalism. (The delicious irony of this struck me even at age 8 or 9.) Eric Hoffer made the point brilliantly in his short book "The True Believer," that one may become a fanatic regardless of content, that fanatics of all faiths and causes have remarkable psychological and emotional similarities. (BTW, "The True Believer" is a wonderful little mind-bomb; it puts into perspective virtually every form of extremist belief-system that one might encounter in one's daily life. Truly a brilliant exegesis.)
Pretty much the only people who still keep open minds any more, in my experience, are agnostics and mystics. Mystics tend to explode all dogmas, and their belief systems tend to be based primarily on their personal experience, and very much not on received wisdom. This is why most mystics are condemned as heretics in most of the world's organized religions. Mystics are chimera, not sheep.
As the Monty Python skit says, I've always said there isn't anything an agnostic can't do if he really isn't sure if he believes in anything or not.
Speaking as a mystic: There's nothing to prove, and belief is irrelevant. As the song goes, Isn't faith believing that all powers can't be seen?
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