Certain Atheists: still looking for pot of goldA newly released survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life reveals all kinds of things we already knew—lots of American are religious, Pentecostalism is on the rise, faith and politics are closely linked—and a few fairly shocking revelations.  For instance, 21% of people who identify themselves as atheists believe in God. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Moving on, 12% of atheists believe in heaven and 10% believe in hell, which leads me to wonder what exactly that even means? Why would you call yourself an atheist if you believe in God, heaven, and hell? Is this some bizarre way of covering bases? I don’t believe in God, but I kind of do? I only believe in God on Tuesdays, Fridays and alternate Mondays?  They're asking a lot of these same questions over at Hot Air, where they notice 10% of atheists pray once a week.

If I’m doing my math correctly, that’s about 120 atheists who said they believe in God (35,556 respondents, 1.6% identified as atheists, 21% of those believe in God). There’s a word for people who opt out of religion but still feel connected to some kind of spirituality: agnostic. (More than 850 respondents identified as agnostic.)  This atheism confusion is almost as upsetting as the revelation that one in five Christians speaks or prays in tongues from time to time. Holy shit. Or should I say Baholloy Gutoirily Falswatahlisa?

I heart this article from last week in the Washington Post:

Believers in Community
Atheists Enjoying Social Benefits of Church Even if They Don't Believe in Religious Rituals

By Jonathan Mummolo

Omar Latiri is an atheist. But the former Muslim has begun going to church and even decorated a Christmas tree, albeit a plastic one, this year.
Humanist Judaism: makes sense to me
"I don't believe," said Latiri, an Air Force reservist who is a member of a Unitarian Universalist church in Bethesda with his wife. "But that doesn't mean I don't see the benefit of something that is from the Bible in terms of humility, caring for other people, forgiveness, charity."

In a society filled with religious references -- the Pledge of Allegiance with its "one nation under God," weddings, funerals and other events -- some atheists such as Latiri attend houses of worship and enjoy the traditions and sense of community they provide, minus the sacred interpretations. Other atheists have adopted alternatives to rituals such as baptisms.

"I was looking for a place with a sense of community without any animosity toward people of other faiths," Latiri, 32, of Silver Spring said.

Latiri, and atheists like him, are choosing to personalize religion rather than abandon it. They like the congregations, the moral codes and the food and festivities that religious communities offer. They say that just because they can't accept the idea of God, they don't see the need to throw the rest away.
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"Sometimes if the atheist looks upon what's going on as a cultural experience, it's more palatable,'' said Carole Rayburn, a psychologist in Silver Spring and former head of the American Psychological Association's division that researches the role of religion in people's lives. "Intellectually, one could disagree . . . but could say that emotionally, this has a certain appeal."

Brenda Platt, 44, a Takoma Park atheist of Jewish ancestry who was raised secular, is a member of Machar, the Washington Congregation for Secular Humanistic Judaism, a nontheistic group that retains Jewish culture, education and celebrations.

The group, which she joined about seven years ago, has a cultural school, holds monthly Shabbat services and celebrates High Holidays, although a deity is never invoked.

Platt said she has found simple but meaningful benefits: "The food, the music, the dancing and the feeling that that's my heritage, that's my tribe, that's my blood."

Full Story

I think this is completely awesome. For a long time I’ve been saying that my biggest beef with atheism is that it leaves people without a network to fall back on in times of crisis and joy, and these people have said, “Okay, I think this whole God thing is a crock, but I want a community, and I want to have something in my life reinforcing humanistic values, so here’s how I’m going to get those things without praising any Almighty anything.”

I mean, of course I believe in God pretty intensely, but I think it’s really great that people have come up with a way to embrace their heritage (in the case of Machar) and/or to embrace values like “humility, caring for other people, forgiveness, charity” without feeling like they have to sign on to a theology they don’t believe in.

Finally, some solid options! Also check out this article from Time magazine about atheist Sunday schools.

I’ve kind of abandoned our regularly scheduled posts this week in favor of Hanukkah coverage, but Ariela M left such a good comment that we have to honor it with comment of the week:

Tamar,

I usually love what you write, but here I feel like your response to Hitchens's piece was a bit wimpy.  Let's be up-front here:  the Hitchens essay attacking Hanukah is a load of crap.  He introduces his point by glorifying epicurean culture, which is a bizarre move coming from someone who is quick to see the worst in any contemporary religious culture.  But the Maccabean critique of epicurean Hellenism was totally legitimate.  The epicureans glorified pleasure and physical beauty.  It was about eating whatever you wanted to the point where you got sick.  It was about worshipping perfect naked bodies, and considering physically flawed people to be worthless.  It was about maximizing the pleasure of powerful male heads of household at the expense of just about everyone else -- women, male slaves, etc.  They weren't exactly concerned about the widow and the orphan.

Hebrew culture, by contrast, offered some different values.  Instead of stuffing any old thing that looked good into your mouth, the Hebrew or Jew was supposed to think about each bite that went in and where it came from -- was it killed in a proper manner (kashrut), was it tithed to support the important institutions of society (truma and ma'aser), were corners of the field left for the poor (leket, shichecha, etc.)?  Instead of treating slaves and the poor as though they were sub-human, the Hebrew or Jew had serious constraints on the ownership of slaves and had important responsibilities to the less fortunate in society.  Instead of worshiping physical beauty, the Hebrew or Jew was taught the value of "Physical grace is deceptive and beauty is empty" (from the Woman of Valor verses).

 Besides ignoring the valid reasons that the Maccabees had for resisting being coerced to become Greeks, Hitchens also dismisses Greek imperialism by jumping to the fact that the Hasmonean regime that emerged was corrupt and brutal.  But how does this excuse Greek imperialism or establish that the Jews should have succumbed to it?  As my preschooler would say, two wrongs don't make a right.  As someone older than a preschooler might note, the eventual excesses of the French Revolution are no reason to stop celebrating the Revolution and its motivating ideals.  Similarly, we don't stop celebrating July 4th just because the American revolutionaries tarred and feathered their enemies (but maybe Hitchens thinks we should?).

Hitchens next parts ways with sanity altogether when he blames the Maccabees for creating Christianity in a bizarre twist on the old saw of blaming the Jews for killing Jesus.  For good measure, he pins the rise of Islam on the Jews as well.  So according to Hitchens, the Jews DID "cause" September 11th.

On a more serious note, Hitchens completely ignores what Hanukah has been for the past two thousand years of rabbinic Judaism.  The appeal of a story in which a small band of Jews stood up to a large, powerful empire that wanted to destroy them is not hard to understand for a people who spent much of the last 2000 years living as a small band of Jews dominated, oppressed, and terrorized by large powerful empires of Christians throughout Europe.

Finally, I can't help but point out Hitchens's fundamental misunderstanding of the First Amendment.  The First Amendment does not privilege "enlightenment" over "faith," as he fantasizes.  On the contrary, the First Amendment, had it existed in ancient Greek Palestine, would have protected the right of the Jews to continue to practice their religion freely, eating their kosher food and worshiping in their temple, free from any coercion by the Greek majority.  Granted, it would also have protected the right of the Hellenizing Jews to assimilate to Greek culture, but it most certainly NOT have protected the Greeks' right to defile the temple and ban Jewish practices.

Finding things to criticize about the texts and actions of people from more than 2000 years ago does not take a genius.  It's easy.  It's cheap shots.  What's challenging is finding continued worth and value in ancient texts and rituals, which is one of the reasons I usually enjoy reading your column.

I have to run to get ready for Shabbat now, so I can’t give the lengthy response that I want to except to say that I dropped the ball here.  My post was written in response to Steve Almond’s piece on Jewcy, and I just added in the line about Slate right before publication, without spending the appropriate time analyzing Hitchens’s writing.  Ariela is right about everything she says here, though I still hesitate to side with the Maccabees with such zeal.  I think Jews should be held to a higher standard, and that should mean an absence of brutality which is just not evident in the Maccabees’s behavior.

At any rate, more on this on Monday.  Shabbat Shalom and Happy Chanukkah to all!

Recent polemics by proud and angry atheists have gotten many of us—faithful and skeptical alike—thinking better of belief in God. Books like Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and most recently, Christopher Hitchens’s God is Not Great argue that it is simply unreasonable to believe. Science can debunk the historical or biological claims of any sacred text, they say, and religious morality contradicts the modern zeitgeist. Even when the scriptures do present us with a moral innovator, faith alone rarely compels believers to live accordingly. These angry atheists reserve some of their sharpest criticism for religious moderates, arguing that a reasoned and critical respect for religion simply provides comfort to the enemy. The slope between Jimmy Carter and Jerry Falwell—or, for that matter, between Reza Aslan and Osama bin Laden—is simply too slippery.

On Monday I wrote about how frustrated I am with people who consider themselves too smart to believe in God. Today I want to bring things in another direction. A very Jewish direction.
This is Jack Sasson: He teaches Judaic studies and he rocks
What happens when you want to be religious, but your own academic pursuits are presenting you with a number of real difficulties when you try to believe what you read in the Torah? This, of course, is a normal dilemma for hundreds of Jewish experts in the Judaic studies. Multiple authors of the Torah, traditions and stories that can be traced back to other nations, and archaeological digs cast huge amounts of doubt on a book that is supposed to be Divine, created from nothing by the word of God. What’s a nice Jewish girl (or boy) to do with all this blasphemous evidence?

Most of the time when someone brings information about Biblical exegesis and archaeological evidence that contradicts the Bible I just shrug. I am not a literalist, and neither are most Jews I know. It’s no surprise to me at all that no one has turned up the Ten Commandments, or any proof that the Nile river once turned into blood. I don’t go to synagogue because I think every thing that it says in the Bible definitely happened. And I don’t keep Shabbat because I think God created the world in seven days. I do these things because I like doing them, I love the community of other people who do them, and because I think that there is some element of truth in the Torah. I can’t explain it, and I have no interest in fighting with anyone about it, since no one can bring anything other than hot air to the table. But this is what I do, and I’m happy with it.

That’s all well and good, but what about when I’m the person saying, “You’re too smart to believe that, aren’t you?” Because if I’m honest, that is part of what I thinking when I’m talking to a brilliant Ultra-Orthodox scholar. And I’m not the only one. Last year I wrote a fiction story that mentioned an Orthodox rabbi who had a PhD in Judaic studies, and when I showed it to my friend Adam he said that no one who had a PhD in Judaic studies would be an Orthodox rabbi. His point was that the critical and historical look at Judaism that scholarship provides could never sustain the la-la-land of Orthodoxy.

As far I know, that is basically true. I’ve yet to meet an Orthodox scholar of Judaic studies. But I have met plenty of scholars who respect tradition and community in the same way I do, and who negotiate Jewish law with varying levels of respect and awe.

I don’t want to get into a debate about whether or not Judaic studies proves or doesn’t prove there is a God, or whether the Jewish idea of God is the right one. I just wanted to point out that there are people who deal with this kind of crisis of faith on a daily basis and often in a professional environment, and somehow they are able to come away without calling anyone an idiot. They may think people are idiots, but they don’t usually shout about it at coffee shops. Which is why I will always like Judaic studies professors who make Kiddush on Friday night more than I like frum atheists.

There’s this guy that I see at the coffee shops that I frequent, he’s always working on his laptop and he’s cute and every once in a while we kind of nod and smile at each other in a way that suggests one day we’ll flirt but not today when we have 3000 words to write in the next four hours. Anyway, recently I saw him at one of my favorite haunts, and just next to him was a table of three attractive girls who were drunk. I don’t know what they were doing at a coffee shop, but that’s not the point. They were drunk, and they were talking about Jesus, which is fairly typical in Nashville. If you recall, everyone in Nashville seems to be talking about Jesus all the time.
Frum Atheists are so Annoying: But so is this sign
I wasn’t paying any attention to their conversation both because they were obviously smashed, and because I had a lot of work to do. But my coffee shop buddy apparently was listening to them, because eventually he turned to them and said, “Come on girls, you’re too smart to believe that.” Then the girls started drunkenly defending the Bible, and my buddy just shakes his head and says, “We know none of that is true. It’s just an old story. You don’t need to get hung up on an old story just because someone told you it has meaning.” I don’t remember what the girls said to that, but I do remember that what I thought was, “Asshole.”

I’ve hung around a lot of academic institutions, and these “too smart to believe in God” guys are all over the place, sneering haughtily at everyone who can list the first five books of the Bible. I think if you’re an atheist or you’re an agnostic, that’s fine. I don’t actually care, but I expect you to be at the very least equally passive and apathetic about my practices if I’m not preaching to you or breaking any laws. Not every religious person in the US is a registered member of the Republican Party, and I’m annoyed by the assumption that because my politics are liberal, I couldn’t possibly be doing anything as dumb-ass as observing the Sabbath.

I have no interest in convincing anyone that I’m right about God, that I know the Plan and that I can direct anyone, even myself, in any definitely good direction. And these days, when zealous atheists (my friends and I call them frum atheists) give me their typical shpiel about how there’s really no way that there could possibly be a God, or no way that Moses got the Torah directly from God, or no way that the Exodus actually happened, all I can think is, “Shut up, man. You really don’t know any better than I do. That’s why it’s called faith.”

I’ve been thinking about it today because there’s an article on Jpost called Atheism is Not the Answer, about, well, why atheism isn’t the answer. And while I think it’s convincing in some ways, it certainly leaves much to be desired on an intellectual level.

Happily, scholarship and religion meet in a series of interviews published in the Biblical Archaeoloy Review about how scholarly research has effected the faith of a bunch of Biblical archaeologists. That is, people whose job it is to determine whether or not what it says in the Bible really happened. The interviews are definitely worth a read, but a lot of what’s said is that religion serves a larger and more important function than just dogma. Which is a great point.

I have at least 600 more words of rant on this subject, which I will save for later this week, but I’m wondering if there are other people out there who have something they always say when presented with the whole, “But you seem too smart to be religious…” argument. Anyone got some heavy ammo for the frum atheists?

CNN sucks, but yes, Deborah Schlussel really is an ignorant slu-.