AMERICAN ATHEISTS

AMERICAN ATHEIST
A JOURNAL OF ATHEIST NEWS AND THOUGHT

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AMERICAN ATHEIST
A Journal of Atheist News and Thought
1st Quarter 2018
Vol. 56, No. 1
ISSN 0516-9623 (Print)
ISSN 1935-8369 (Online)

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Pamela Whissel
PWhissel@Atheists.org
LAYOUT and GRAPHICS EDITOR In 2015, the White House held a Bisexual Community Public Policy Briefing, where
Rick Wingrove activists discussed the needs and challenges facing bisexual communities. Activist
RWingrove@Atheists.org
and author Camille Beredjick was in attendance. Selected excerpts from her new
COPY EDITOR book, Queer Disbelief: Why LGBTQ Equality Is an Atheist Issue begin on page 12.
Karen Reilly
RESEARCH ASSISTANT
Anthony J. Crincoli
PROOFREADERS
In This Issue
Gil Gaudia
Shelley Gaudia 4 Letter from the Editor| Pamela Whissel
Den Jackson
AMERICAN ATHEIST PRESS 5 Atheism’s Founding Fathers | Mark Kolsen
MANAGING EDITOR
Frank R. Zindler 8 Ensoulment | Hank Fox
Editor@Atheists.org
PUBLISHED BY 12 COVER STORY: Queer Disbelief | Camille Beredjick
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www.Atheists.org 21 POETRY: Greater Evil is Beyond the Imagination of Man
©2018 AMERICAN ATHEISTS INC.
22 God is a Slave Owner’s Best Friend | Brian Bolton
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1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 3

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
How to Prove the Non-existence of God
D uring the 1980s, students in quite a few Catholic
high school religion classes read The Secret of
Staying in Love by John Powell. The book was part of the
syllabus for a course with the lofty but well-intentioned title
of Life Preparation, and it was assigned for a unit on marriage.
Despite the paradox of its author being a Catholic priest, the
book was not irrelevant to the class. Its thesis, that first-rate
communication will keep two people in love, does have a place in
the realm of good relationship advice, even if it barely scratches
the surface of what’s necessary to be together happily for life.
What lies below that surface is different for each person, so
no two checklists are ever the same, except for that one item
that shows up on every one of them: communication. This
doesn’t necessarily mean frequent, lengthy conversations,
although it could. The definition of effective communication
will depend on the couple, who will always depend, one way or
another, on communication.
Beyond intimate relationships, good communication is the
life blood of all successful, interpersonal exchanges, from text
messages (think of the importance of an emoji to convey that
you’re joking) to peace negotiations (think of the importance
of an interpreter when the ambassadors of disputing nations
don’t speak a common language). Of course, all will be well
if you immediately text a follow-up wink emoji or even a
humble ; ) if it wasn’t in the original message. But the results
are catastrophic if the very best interpreters don’t show up for
the peace negotiations. Disaster can loom over us individually
as well if we’re not privy to the very best communication. No
patient wants a doctor who writes incomplete prescriptions, no
pilot wants a tongue-tied air-traffic controller, and no one on
trial for murder wants a lawyer who won’t say much in court.
That a priest had some decent advice for couples in love
isn’t the book’s only paradox. By clearly communicating his
case (would he present it any other way?), he lays out a great
argument for his God not existing. The God he worshipped
is a God of love who wants all of his sons and daughters to be
4 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
in paradise forever after they die. But in order to do that, they
must live the way he wants them to live and do his will in all
walks of life. God’s will is different for each person, so while
everyone has the same set of instructions in the Bible, it’s not
enough. They all must pray as often as they can (every waking
moment is the ideal frequency) in order to be open to hearing
what God has in store for them. Long stretches of silent prayer
are highly recommended.
So, given what we know about the effects of good
communication on peace, love, and happiness, it should follow
that God, who can teach you how to achieve the greatest
happiness of all—because he wants you to achieve it—would be
the most amazing coach ever. His instructions would be legible,
coherent, and lucid. He would communicate through words, not
the beauty of nature. They’d be written in your native language
and handed to you directly, not recorded by ancient desert
nomads who didn’t know where the sun went at night. Or, better
yet, he would take the form of a human being—not a burning
bush—and speak to you directly. And he’d stick around for as
long as it took to answer every one of your questions.
When you show up for practice every day (because
living on Earth is just a dress rehearsal for the afterlife), so
would a real coach. When you’ve made it known that you’ve
cleared both the room and your mind—just as you’ve been
instructed—to prepare for an important incoming message,
the caller would keep trying to get through to you if, at first,
he does not succeed. And once it did arrive, the message would
be conveyed in one session; you wouldn’t have to sit quietly for
thousands of hours over the course of your life to receive the
entire thing. Or, better yet, you’d be born with the instructions
planted in your brain.
Great things never happen without great communication,
so if God were really there, he would be really there,
unmistakably, in full sight. It wouldn’t be possible for him to
be the world’s worst communicator, which is what he is. So
this can only mean that he simply... isn’t.
Pamela Whissel
Editor-in-Chief
PWhissel@Atheists.org
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Atheism’s Founding Fathers
Disbelief in the supernatural is as old as the hills
by Mark Kolsen

W hen the American War of Independence began, hereditary monarchs

could no longer justify their power as the natural “divine right of kings.”
Yet these monarchs still governed the colonists as they had governed England for
centuries. In early 1776, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense” convinced the
colonists that hereditary monarchy was not a natural form of government. He pointed
out that England had not been united under one king before the Norman Conquest in
1066 and that William the Conqueror used force, not elections, to establish his
dynasty. To Paine—and ultimately to many Americans—the “natural” form of
government was democracy, not hereditary monarchy.
Today, few Americans take monarchy seriously, yet many still think of
Christianity as our country’s “natural” belief system. Even while acknowledging
the nation’s religious diversity, Americans often think of their country as a
Christian nation, despite the founders being deists, not Christians.
Christianity itself had little influence before 312 C.E., when Emperor
Constantine suppressed atheism by using it to establish his own dynasty. In
Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World, Tim Whitmarsh, a professor
of Greek culture at Cambridge University, not only demonstrates that “disbelief
in the supernatural is as old as the hills,” but also that atheism’s rise in the last
two centuries is no historical anomaly. In fact, “viewed from the longer
perspective of ancient history, what is anomalous is the
global dominance of monotheistic religions and [their]
resultant inability to acknowledge the existence of
disbelievers.”
Acknowledging atheism’s long history matters,
according to Whitmarsh, “not just for intellectual
reasons . . . but also on moral, indeed political
grounds. History confers authority and legitimacy
. . . If religious belief is treated as deep and ancient
and disbelief as recent, then atheism can be
dismissed as faddish and inconsequential.”
Understanding atheism’s ancient roots is
ultimately “. . . about recognizing atheists as
real people deserving of respect,
tolerance, and the opportunity

1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 5

The Christianization of the Roman Empire
put an end to serious philosophical
atheism for over a millennium.
to live their lives unmolested.”
The book introduces more than real people deserving
of respect. In this account of history, we are meeting
atheism’s founding fathers. In fascinating detail,
Whitmarsh also explains why, from the fourth through
eighteenth centuries, atheism seemed to “disappear” from
history. In the fourth century, Roman leaders needed
to “hold together a huge, diverse, multi-ethnic, and
multilingual territory.” They used monotheism as their
means of consolidation.
Atheism thrived in Greece, beginning with the Archaic
period (c. 800 B.C.E.) when twelve hundred Greek city
states each had their own cultures and localized religions.
People worshipped the same gods, but these gods had
different names in different locations, and religious
traditions, rituals, and priests were strictly local. Because
Greece had no political or religious hub, religion had no
political power or relevance in that world. The only role
of a priest was to perform sacrifices. Neither omniscient
nor omnipotent, the Greek gods themselves were thought
to live in this world, usually on distant mountains. In
this socio-political context, atheism became one of many
tolerated belief systems and an integral part of the cultural
life of Greece.
Atheism emerged with the Pre-Socratics, who “mark the
beginning of a journey leading ultimately to what modern
atheists call ‘naturalism’: the belief that the physical world
is the total sum of reality, that nature rather than divinity
structures our existence.” Fostered by “the absence of
state regulation of ideas and (relatedly) the absence of any
sense of sacred revelation or sacred text,” the Pre-Socratics
conceived ideas that still resonate today. The philosopher
Anaximander, for example, claimed primeval life emerged
from water, and Xenophanes of Colophon foreshadowed
“the claims of modern cognitive theorists who explain the
origins of religion in terms of a human desire to explain
the inexplicable in terms of the intentions of a human-like
figure.”
Hippo of Samos equated the soul with the brain, a
radical step that made him the first person to have gained
the reputation as an atheist. When Democritus said our
universe emerged by chance and was composed only
Atheism became one of many tolerated belief
systems and part of the cultural life of Greece.
6 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
of atoms, he was perhaps the first to ever offer such an
explanation. In the fifth century B.C.E., when Anaxagoras
was put on trial for arguing that all life is physical in origin,
and for denying the divinity of heavenly bodies, he may
have become the first person in history to be prosecuted
for heretical beliefs.
From 400-300 B.C.E., atheism progressed further in
classical Greece. In his History of the Peloponnesian
War, Thucydides depicted history as a product of human
nature, not divine intervention. Whitmarsh argues that
Thucydides’ book “can reasonably be claimed to be the
earliest surviving atheist narrative of human history.”
In On the Gods, Protagoras cautioned against believing
that non-visible things exist. This book “was almost
certainly a discourse attacking the assumption that gods
have an objective existence.” Prodicus of Ceos, in On
Piety, suggested, as Democritus did, that religion was
“the invention of early humanity as it emerged from a
state of nature . . . a cultural invention.” Through his
characterization of Sisyphus the mythical son of Aeolus,
Critias (a member of Protagoras’ circle) depicted religion
as the creation of a “shrewd man who sought to impose
order on naïve people” who could then subject citizens’
thoughts to moral scrutiny.
Even Greek theater ref lected atheist beliefs. Oedipus
Rex “seriously explores the idea of a world without
divine determination,” and the characters in the plays of
Euripides “deliver sophisticated attacks on traditional
religion.” For example, a line in Bellerophon reads,
“Someone says that there really are gods in heaven? There
are not, there are not—if you are willing not to subscribe
foolishly to the antiquated account.” The play ref lects the
logic that if gods preside over justice but injustice is not
always rectified, then there can be no gods.
During the Hellenistic period (338-31 B.C.E.),
atheism was fostered by kings like Philip the Great and
Alexander III, whose godlike public images eroded the
line between the mortal and immortal. The charismatic
skeptic Carneades, head of the Academy founded by
Plato, argued that the divine can never be separated
from the non-divine, so theism was therefore illogical.
In his book On Atheism, Clitomachus built on the ideas
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 Neither omniscient nor omnipotent, the
Greek gods themselves were thought to
live in this world.
of Carneades and “may have invented the idea of atheism
as a coherent movement with its own deep history.” The
skeptic Sextus authored 180 dense arguments against the
existence of gods. “His catalogue . . . is arguably the most
important evidence for a sustained, coherent attack on
the existence of gods in antiquity.”
Also during this time, the Roman poet Lucretius wrote
“On the Nature of Things,” in which Epicurus crusades
against oppressive false beliefs about the afterlife to
articulate the view that gods have no inf luence over our
lives. The scholar Stephen Greenblatt credits the poem’s
rediscovery in the fifteenth century as the foundation of
European secularism and the Renaissance.
While atheism was evolving in classical Greece, so
was religious orthodoxy. Athens passed a law allowing
public impeachment of those who did not recognize
the gods. The name for the crime was asebeia, which
means impiety. Whitmarsh details four prosecutions,
including that of Diagoras, “the first person in history
to self-identify in a positive way as an atheist.” He was
banished from Athens for writing Arguments that Knock
Down Towers, an explicitly atheist tract. Some of these
prosecutions were politically motivated, but in The Laws,
Socrates further justified the repression and punishment
of atheists by claiming theism to be an essential part of a
just society.
Atheism’s fortunes further deteriorated after the Punic
Wars (246-146 B.C.E.). Having destroyed Carthage, Rome
became a superpower of an interconnected, centralized,
and bureaucratized empire. Religion “provided the most
powerful mechanism of symbolic integration.” Stoics
encouraged the belief that divine providence had ordained
the Roman Empire, and loyal subjects worshipped the
emperor. Under this new political order, however, atheism
still existed. In his Natural History, Pliny wrote, “I think
of it as a sign of human imbecility to try to find out the
shape and form of a god….whoever ‘god’ is—if in fact he
exists at all.” He believed gods to be human constructions,
born of our desire to elevate ourselves.
Atheist writers now had to fear “the boots above their
head” and usually wrote books that presented arguments
both in favor of, as well as against, believing in the gods.
Roman leaders used monotheism to hold together a
huge, diverse, multi-ethnic, and multilingual territory.
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Whitmarsh thus struggles to tease genuine atheist beliefs
out of the literature of the time.
The big blow came in 312 C.E., when Constantine
defeated Maxentius and re-established the principle
of dynastic succession, thus paving the way for the
Christianity as a state religion. Political and theological
authority became closely interlinked under Constantine,
and in 380 C.E., Theodosius I decreed Christianity to be
the official religion of the Roman Empire. Anyone not
believing in Christ’s divinity was a heretic to be exiled.
This decree completed “the alliance between absolute
power and religious absolutism,” and atheism effectively
became invisible as “the Christianization of the Roman
Empire put an end to serious philosophical atheism for
over a millennium.”
Except during the Dark Ages, atheism has f lourished
throughout history. In Greece, where the clergy did not
monopolize learning, atheism was one of many schools of
thought dedicated to making sense of the natural world.
Whitmarsh notes that “no war was ever fought for the
sake of a god, no empire was expanded in the name of
proselytization, no foe was crushed for believing in the
wrong god.”
In Rome, however, atheism was pushed underground
when monotheism became a tool of the emperor, who
claimed for himself the authority of an all-powerful,
universal Christian God. It “was a shrewd exercise in
branding for an emperor concerned to hold together a
worryingly fissile realm.” But in the eighteenth century,
atheism assumed a new role, and in today’s “advanced
capitalist economy based on technological innovation, it
has been necessary to claw intellectual and moral authority
away from the clergy and reallocate it to the secular
specialists in science and engineering.”
As the authority and inf luence of science grow, so will
atheism’s.
Mark Kolsen recently retired from teaching high school in
Wheaton, Illinois. He is an avid fan of the Four Horsemen, the late
Victor Stenger, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and strives to understand all
facets of scientific cosmology and evolutionary biology.
AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 7
Ensoulment
An Idea Whose Time Has Gone

by Hank Fox

O ne of the many things that worries

me about present-day atheism is,
perversely, one of its successes: the
sense of accomplishment individual atheists can come
to feel. Those of us who free ourselves from our home
religions—admittedly, a task so difficult it should come
with a medal—often tend to think we’re done, we’re
there, that gaining our own little bit of enlightenment is
the whole job. Hey, we’re free! Victory! But that isn’t even
half the job. You don’t just escape from quicksand and
walk away from all the others still being sucked under.
As far as that goes, you don’t just rescue as many as possible
from the quicksand. No, the real job is to get rid of the quicksand
so those yet to pass this way don’t fall into it. The quicksand in
our case is not just churches, not just religion. It carries forward
with mysticism and superstition, with languages that grew out
of millennia of religious thinking, and with countless beliefs
so natural, so much a part of our everyday thinking and doing,
that we completely fail to notice them. Remnants of religion
and superstition can be out in plain sight yet still invisible to
us. Rather than seeming faith-related, they’re just plain ... The
Way Things Are.
Unfortunately, being familiar and being harmless aren’t the
same thing. If you have something buried down in the bedrock
of your civilization, something that looks everyday-acceptable
but is in fact harmful, you’re stuck with whatever bad effect it
produces. If you never recognize the damage, never grapple
with the thing as the source of that damage, it continues to do
what it does without resistance or impediment.
If you do see a problem arising out of it, but you think the

We choose this unlikely belief in souls

over an understanding of real death
because soul-belief simply hurts less.
8 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org 1ST QUARTER 2018
 War and the death penalty are easier to
contemplate in a social matrix of soul-belief.
source of that problem is something else, whatever solution you
apply pretty much has to fail. Working from the wrong model
of the problem, you get right answers only by accident. If you
continue to try to fix things with solutions aimed at some other
imagined cause, you’ll fail every time … possibly thinking you
just need to try harder.
We not only accept these hidden beliefs, we question
the need to question them. Owing to the fact that we live—
sometimes happily, often comfortably—in the civilization that
grew out of such beliefs, we can’t see any noteworthy effect. We
have no way to measure possible impacts.
But because they’re tied to actions, beliefs have
consequences. If you sleep in because you believe it’s Sunday,
but it’s really Monday and you were due an hour ago at the
stockholders’ meeting, you didn’t just believe something, you
did something with that belief. You acted as if it were Sunday,
and a real-world result—being reprimanded or possibly even
fired—grew out of that action.
Sooner or later, every belief has some sort of real-world
consequence. Whether or not we are able to recognize it in a
moment of scrutiny—in the life of an individual or in the well-
being of an entire civilization—something real eventually
takes place as a result of unsubstantiated beliefs.
Here’s one such belief most of us seldom really think about:
Ensoulment. The idea of souls.
What It Is
Ensoulment is the idea that your meat-and-bones body
is a mere vehicle. There’s a “real” you—a separate, ethereal
spirit—which rides in your body for as long as you’re alive.
Immortal and indestructible, it enters your body when you’re
conceived, departs when you die, but then easily continues
to exist apart from your body, preserving your essential
memories and selfness. This spirit survives not only death, but
even catastrophic physical injuries. An individual might suffer
severe brain injury and yet rebound to full-spirited selfness
after death, probably with perfect skills of language, thought,
and awareness.
Ensoulment is one of humanity’s most cherished ideas.
It permeates every society and culture. We’ve probably
had it longer than we’ve had civilization, and it has infused
every moment of human history. It appears in literature, art,
The problem with religious ideas
is that they’re simple, whereas
the real world is complex.
1ST QUARTER 2018
entertainment, everyday conversation, even holidays. It’s
embedded in our language, such that its truer alternative is
difficult to describe or think about.
Too bad it’s about one-hundred-eighty degrees wrong.
The problem with religious ideas is that they’re simple,
whereas the real world is complex. Ensoulment is so simple
kids can understand it: “Grampaw’s watching over you from
Heaven, honeybunch.”
The alternative is a complicated, multi-level mess we’re still
trying to figure out. But it’s something like: A Homo sapiens is
born as a blank slate of experiences but with a certain amount
of innate programming—just like every other animal. It comes
with or develops what other people recognize as a distinct
personality that continues to learn and grow and to be shaped
by life events, milestones and traumas, and eventually comes
to think of itself as “me,” becoming its own—your own—
conscious, adult Self.
You progress through life, initially healthy and young,
until you reach various physical and mental peaks. You enter
an extended middle period of continuing health and fitness,
then eventually begin to age and grow less fit in another
extended period of gradual decline. At some point, one or
more critical systems of “your body” fail and you cease to
exist. Those around you may carry vivid memories of you or
see the reminders of your visible achievements, but nothing of
you—neither awareness nor conscious intent—survives the
event of your death. Your Self, which is wholly a property of
biochemical and neurological processes, permanently ceases
when those processes lose coordination or stop altogether.
The complexity of consciousness, and the functioning of
those processes that produce it, cannot be imprinted onto
an invisible, indetectable “soul” any more than it can be
imprinted onto a pile of leaves or a section of concrete wall—
first because there is no such thing, and second because
there is no conceivable way to reproduce the exact ongoing
processes of conscious self without the same biochemical/
neurological matrix that produced them originally. When
the biochemical/neurological processes cease, the individual
simply ends.
To add to the complexity, “Self ” for an unensouled
being isn’t just one thing. Beyond certain persistent traits of
personality, the “you” which you and others imagine you to
AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 9
 It’s not hard to see why a belief in
life after death is so persistent.
be changes from year to year as you gather experience and
knowledge, reacting to others and the changing situations
of life. “You” can be different even moment to moment,
depending on health, diet, stress, physical injury, emotional
trauma, periodic hormonal variations, the effects of drugs,
or the simple difference of consciousness or sleep. Serious
injuries, especially brain injury, can result in a permanently
diminished or dramatically different “you,” with the original
“you” unrecoverable or non-reproducible.
Death is the ultimate brain injury, with nothing of “you”
remaining. “Dead” is not some alternate state of existence, it
is absolute non-existence, a permanent end, akin to the fate of
data on a computer hard drive melted for scrap.
The Why of Ensoulment
One reason we accept ensoulment over its alternative is
that this latter view—which just took me five paragraphs to
describe, probably badly—is surprisingly hard to think about,
whereas ensoulment is easy to visualize and understand.
You simply trade the image of your loved one standing there
colorfully alive and solid with that same loved one standing
there looking … well… translucent.
Of course, there’s more to it than that. We choose this
unlikely belief in souls over an understanding of real death
because soul-belief simply hurts less. Who wants to accept that
their loved ones have died and passed forever out of reach?
More than six years after my Cowboy Dad’s death, even I
still have moments of unreality, instances when I think, Wait,
what? No way! The Old Man can’t be gone. He’s out there in
California right now, just waiting for me to call and say howdy.
Because I sat with him in the hospital for four days while he was
dying, I know that’s not true. But join that sense of unreality
with the idea that there’s an immortal essence to us, and it’s not
hard to see why a belief in life after death is so persistent.
We choose it, too, because most others around us believe
it. A number of my older friends and relatives still have no idea
that I reject the thought of being reunited with my Cowboy
Dad in some happy afterlife, and somewhat like the classic
grandmother quandary—“Would you tell your grandmother
on her deathbed … ?”—I’m not about to explain it to them.
Given that it’s the norm, with weighty momentum reinforced
in sociocultural rituals and practices, in language and the
thought it shapes, and in large social mechanisms such as
When the biochemical/neurological processes
cease, the individual simply ends.
10 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
churches and holidays, all of it reinforced at every death, that
belief takes significant effort to resist.
Consequences
I suspect ensoulment is at the bottom of a great deal
of what we consider acceptable to think and do. It affects
our view of war, population, the death penalty, drug use,
extreme sports, and other risky behaviors, even medical
research.
War and the death penalty are easier to contemplate in
a social matrix of soul-belief. Sure you’re killing people’s
bodies, but you’re not affecting their real selves. And if it’s
you who might get killed in war—hey, Heaven, right? Plus
there’s all that weepy adulation from friends and family,
which you will no doubt witness from the Other Side.
As for extreme sports, if you believed the real you
would be safe and whole no matter what physical injury
you sustained, you might feel more comfortable taking the
chance of wrecking that body you happen to own. Hey, it’s
not you getting smashed to f linders, it’s just your body.
With fitness, likewise, believing your body to be a mere
temporary shell, you’d likely take a much more cavalier
approach to eating and exercise than if you understood
that this body is you, that you only get the one, and that
everything you hope to accomplish depends on its health.
In regard to drug use: If you thought the real you was
an untouchable, unalterable ghost-thingy, you might feel a
great deal more casual about tossing chemicals of unknown
origin and concentration into your mere brain.
But here’s one instance where we know ensoulment has
real-world effects: abortion. And not just abortion, but almost
everything to do with reproduction. From the point of view of
anyone who believes in souls, opposition to abortion makes
perfect sense. If the soul—the Self part of you—enters the
baby-to-be at the moment of conception, then the organism
instantly becomes a person. Terminating an embryo at any
stage after ensoulment would be killing a person.
Further, assuming the implantation of these ghostly
inner selves is overseen by God, ending a pregnancy is
just about the worst of sins because it thwarts God’s holy
will. The condition of the mother—her age or health,
desperation or poverty—wouldn’t even come into it. She’s
already chosen her fate by getting pregnant.
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 Remnants of religion and superstition can
be out in plain sight yet still invisible to us.
Not only will soul-believers refuse abortion for
themselves, they don’t want others doing it. You don’t even
need to have an abortion to be guilty. If all you do is stand
by and allow abortion to happen, you’re every bit as hell-
bound. If you know about it, you have to intervene. Voting
against it would be a slam-dunk requirement, but no doubt
God smiles on any additional activism such as standing
outside Planned Parenthood and screaming at hapless
women coming in for reproductive care.
I once got into a discussion with an otherwise intelligent
woman who furiously rejected even the idea of contraception.
To her, it was the same as killing children. I tried saying,
“Imagine a couple who decide not to have kids, and they use
contraceptives to —” She interrupted with, “I just don’t know
how anyone could be okay with killing innocent babies.”
But look,” I said, “right now there aren’t any babies. They
don’t exist. The man and woman decide in advance not to
create them.” She answered, “I don’t care what you say. I’ll
never be okay with murdering babies.”
Gah. Crazy. But if you believe in a blanket fate regulated
by an all-knowing, all-seeing, all-wise God, and if you
clearly envision those cuddly, cooing, happy, living babies
out there in some timeless future moment, then you’ll also
believe that interfering with fertilization is the same sort
of sin as abortion. By preventing the arrival of a soul pre-
ordained to land on Earth … well, you might as well be
beating them to death with an axe handle.
People who believe in the full fantastic reach of
ensoulment would oppose not only abortion, even in the case
of a mother who’d die without it, but would also adamantly
oppose contraception, and probably even sex education. As
they do. Worse for the wider world, they oppose every least
suggestion of population control. You want to limit human
population?? You genocidal monster!
And the thing is, it’s not just deeply religious people
who oppose abortion. Plenty of the rest of us, out here in
wider society, also squirm at the idea. Because without even
thinking about it, we buy into the picture of an embryo
containing a Self—a soul. Rather than being a clump of
still-differentiating animal cells, an embryo at any stage
is a person who deserves the chance to be born and toddle
around on Earth, even an Earth with 7.5 billion of us already
eating it down to bedrock.
Ensoulment is the idea that your
meat-and-bones body is a mere vehicle.
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A “Real” Future
From the standpoint of individual intellectual freedom,
there’s a very important bit here: The idea of souls, of life
beyond death, is one of religion’s most subtle falsehoods. Even
if you reject the main lie—that a God or gods exist—you
might still unknowingly swallow this one, allowing certain
others to slide in with it. Once you’re on that path, the death
of every loved one becomes something of a hostage situation.
If you don’t continue to believe in your dad’s immortal soul, it
will be like he died all over again.
But if you go with this fanciful social paradigm—
because it’s hopeful and mitigates the immediate pain—you
inevitably undermine trust in your own mind. By accepting
what others tell you, by not allowing yourself to know what
you know, you undercut your individuality, your freedom,
your very self.
As to the rest of the world, I’d like to say it doesn’t matter
what any one individual believes, but some part of me views
that with the same regard I give the idea that it doesn’t matter
what private individuals think about spousal abuse or dog
fighting. An indulgent or encouraging view of such ideas opens
the door to large-scale, real-world effects.
The idea of souls is a sociocultural poison hugely more
consequential than the individual conclusions of a world
minority of atheists. We have breathed it in as a species,
incorporating it into our thought, our language, our customs,
our daily lives—the very structure of our societies—so that we
have little or no idea how to live without it. Belief in ensoulment
is more pervasive, more deeply affecting to us—from the
individual level to the level of our entire civilization—than
we’re able to realize.
So the real job for us atheists is a vastly more complex task:
the remaking civilization itself. It involves the reimagining
and reforming of a world full of lifeways that grew from the
tainted soil of millennia-old religious thought. Individual
atheism is only the first tiny step. A generations-long journey
stretches out before us.
Hank Fox is the author of Red Neck, Blue Collar, Atheist: Simple
Thoughts About Reason, Gods & Faith, and his new book BrainDrops:
The One & Only Ungodly Bathroom Reader—An Astounding
Compendium of Wit, Wisdom and Complete Goddam Nonsense
from a Complete Goddam Atheist. Both are available on Amazon.
AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 11
Queer Disbelief
Why LGBTQ Equality is an Atheist Issue
by Camille Beredjick

Ally and advocate: Beredjick joined a New York City protest of Trump’s proposed travel ban in January 2017

T he past decade has brought unprecedented progress for the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender, and queer/questioning (LGBTQ ) people. But this community is still far
from achieving true equality, especially in a political landscape heavily influenced by
religious interests. One group in particular can help LGBTQ people in their fight for equal
rights: atheists.
In Queer Disbelief, Camille Beredjick documents the overlap between the LGBTQ and
secular movements: how they are alike, what they can learn from each other, and why it’s
never been more critical for atheists to join the movement for LGBTQ rights. The following
are selected excerpts from the book.

12 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org 1ST QUARTER 2018

W
hen I started writing about LGBTQ issues for
Hemant Mehta’s blog, The Friendly Atheist, I was
often stumped by the lack of news about the explicit
overlaps between LGBTQ people and atheists. Stories about
active collaborations between these two groups were sparse.
All I seemed to read (and write) were stories of outrageous
homophobic and transphobic behavior by conservative
churches and evangelical politicians, all in the name of God.
What I didn’t immediately realize, though, is that religious
groups oppressing LGBTQ people is an atheist issue. Any
abuse of religious freedom, particularly at the expense of a
marginalized group, is an atheist issue. That’s how I reframed
my work for the blog, and that’s the lens through which I
wrote this book.
Queer Disbelief is an examination of the ways atheists and
LGBTQ people are natural allies, the ways these groups can
learn from and support one another, the reasons atheists have
a responsibility to support human rights issues like LGBTQ
equality, and, most importantly, why it’s crucial that we do so
without delay or hesitation.
I’ll be honest with you. There have been days when I
wished I believed in God. It’s not an incessant, gnawing
feeling, but every once in a while I wonder what it would
be like to feel that someone was out there watching over me,
to know that my future wife and I will meet again on some
eternal plane, to believe I was never alone. But I don’t believe
that. I can’t make myself believe it, as much as I tried to when
I was eleven and all the cool kids were doing it. And for the
most part, I’m comfortable with that.
There’s disagreement about the role of choice in atheism
and religion more broadly. None of us thinks about the
possibility of a god until someone tells us about it. Your first
conscious thoughts as a baby are less about the creation of
the universe and more about when you’re getting your next
meal. But does that mean babies are atheists until further
notice? Are dogs atheists because they can’t bark out that
they believe?
Realizing you’re an atheist is dependent upon knowing
that other people believe in God. But a girl who has a crush
on another girl in elementary school doesn’t necessarily
know that she’s in the minority.
Being LGBTQ is decidedly not a choice. Thanks to
homophobia and transphobia ingrained in society, there’s no
doubt that some LGBTQ people wish they were different, or
at least felt that way at some point in their lives. I remember
sobbing in the shower as a teenager, wishing my crush on a
girl was just a fluke, knowing I could never tell anyone about
this awful defect I’d discovered in myself. I never felt that
Atheists were early advocates
for marriage equality.
1ST QUARTER 2018
kind of devastation about realizing I was an atheist, but that
doesn’t mean there weren’t moments of discomfort in the
process.
Who We Are
By nature, atheism is not a belief system, but the absence of
one. And just as there is no monolithic “LGBTQ community,”
there’s no singular “atheist community,” either. Atheism
isn’t traditionally passed down through families, and you’re
unlikely to find an “atheist neighborhood” in your city the
way you might find one that’s heavily Jewish or Muslim, for
example.
But there are atheist organizations. American Atheists, as
well as the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Secular
Student Alliance, the American Humanist Association, and
dozens of others serve to gather atheists with common goals;
advocate for the separation of church and state; and provide
news, resources, and even scholarships for atheists. Many
of these organizations consider LGBTQ equality to be an
important part of their mission.
Nick Fish, the national program director at American
Atheists, says there’s a “very natural allyship” between
LGBTQ people and atheists. “I think that it’s obvious to all
of us here that this is something that we need to do,” Fish
said. “Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also
because it gives us a lot more power and a lot more activated,
excited, and seasoned activists who are willing to fight for
these issues.”
Fish said that American Atheists engages with the
LGBTQ movement in a number of ways. They work with
LGBTQ organizations whenever possible to collaborate on
lobbying efforts, letters of support, and community events.
From a policy standpoint, the group has been monitoring and
fighting religious freedom restoration laws across the country
that aim to legalize faith-based discrimination. American
Atheists participates in Creating Change (the National
LGBTQ Task Force’s annual conference of thousands of
activists) both to make sure atheists are represented and to
lend their support to LGBTQ causes. LGBTQ discrimination
is “very easily the clearest example” in the last two decades of
using the state to enforce religious dogma, Fish said.
Fish believes that because nearly half of LGBTQ people
have no religious affiliation, it would do both groups a
disservice to ignore the overlaps in membership. The atheist
movement will be stronger when dedicated LGBTQ activists
participate, and vice versa. “If you’re doing LGBT activism,
and you’re not thinking about the half of the people who
are nonreligious when you’re doing it, you’re necessarily
AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 13
 Atheists have a history of staring down
discriminatory laws and negative associations.
excluding this huge segment of people, alienating them, and Ultimately, he chose not to call the police, but he was
losing them as potential activists,” Fish said. disowned by his family. His boyfriend set up a fundraising
I asked whether atheists should fight for LGBTQ equality page to help him get back on his feet and cover his medical
because of their atheism or simply because it’s the right thing expenses. When the campaign took off, raising nearly
to do. He said that it’s about elements of both. “It’s something $100,000 (far more than he needed), Pierce used the money
that most Americans are on our side on, so we think it’s to support Lost-n-Found, the LGBTQ youth organization
something that’s right for the fight, and a good way for us
to show that church/state separation matters, because it’s
impacting actual people,” he said. “If we can be a part of that
. . . we’re not co-opting, we’re coordinating. We’re not taking
over, we’re supplementing.”

Religion Hurts
There’s no shortage of stories illustrating how religion has
harmed LGBTQ people. It can happen in a number of ways:
interpersonally when someone is rejected by religious family
and friends, institutionally when laws prioritize “religious
freedom” over equal rights, and plenty of rungs in between.
Daniel Ashley Pierce had the coming-out experience
every young LGBTQ person fears. He also caught part of it
on camera. Pierce is from a Christian family in Georgia. He
came out to them in 2014, and a couple of months later, he
published a video on YouTube of his family assaulting and
berating him for violating “the word of God.” Pierce told
HuffPost.com that he’d prepared the camera because his
family was having an intervention of sorts, and he wanted
evidence in case it got violent. (The fact that he had that
foresight should tell you a lot.)
Pierce was twenty when he recorded the terrifying
altercation. The video starts with his family yelling at him for
the “choice” he’s made. They tell him he’s no longer welcome Beredjick at the 2017 Women’s March
to live in their home, and they curse and hurl slurs at him, in New York City
calling him a disgrace and a “damn queer.” Eventually, the
camera gets shaky as they start beating him, his stepmother
punching him in the face as he yells for her to stop. “No, you that helped him relocate when he was in danger.
can believe that if you want to,” someone tells him in the Of all the barriers to full LGBTQ equality, religion is the
video, “but I believe in the word of God, and God creates most aggressively defended. To this day, people ranging from
nobody that way. It’s a path that you have chosen to choose small-town bakers to government officials claim religious
. . . You go by all the scientific stuff you want to. I’m going by beliefs as an excuse to denigrate, delay, or deny equal rights.
the word of God!” Some of them, like Pierce’s family, get away with it. As people
It’s hard to imagine any story like this having a silver who care about separating church and state, atheists should
lining, but Pierce did receive an outpouring of support and be outraged that one group’s religion can be used to take
used this moment of visibility to give back to the community. away another group’s rights. But we’re more than atheists;

“You go by all the scientific stuff you want

to. I’m going by the word of God!”
14 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org 1ST QUARTER 2018
 An ally doesn’t take the microphone from
you on your behalf; they hold it up for you.
we’re human beings. That alone should be enough for us to
give a damn when someone gets hurt.
Excessive Entanglement
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” We all
learned the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment
in school. It means the government cannot prohibit religious
expression, but neither can it enact laws that prioritize one
religious system over another. That includes belief over
nonbelief.
In 1971, the Supreme Court heard Lemon v. Kurtzman, a
case addressing whether the Pennsylvania Superintendent
of Public Schools could reimburse the salaries of private
school teachers, many of whom taught at Catholic schools.
The Court held 8-1 that the Pennsylvania law violated the
Establishment Clause for intermingling church and state
unnecessarily.
That case also set an important precedent for how future
church-and-state lawsuits would be decided. In the decision,
the Court established the “Lemon test,” a set of three
“prongs” that deem whether a law violates the Establishment
Clause. For the law to pass the test, “the statute must have
a secular legislative purpose, its principal or primary effect
must be one that neither promotes nor inhibits religion, and
it must not foster ‘excessive government entanglement with
religion.’”
The law under scrutiny in Lemon v. Kurtzman was
busted by the “excessive entanglement” prong. It could be
argued that this prong of the Lemon test is the one most
likely to depend on the whim of a judge’s personal opinion.
After all, “excessive” is a subjective term. You and I might
find it excessive to prominently display the Bible’s Ten
Commandments at a government building, but others will
disagree.
Only about twenty legal cases relating to LGBTQ rights
have invoked the Lemon test. One of them, Barnes Wallace
v. City of San Diego, asked whether San Diego violated the
Constitution by leasing land to a Boy Scouts of America-
affiliated group that discriminated against LGBTQ people
and atheists. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in
favor of the city, finding no religious overstep.
Whether they have been put to the Lemon test or not,
American Atheists engages with the
LGBTQ movement in a number of ways.
1ST QUARTER 2018
virtually every LGBTQ issue facing political backlash right
now has been attacked by some argument that’s religious in
nature. Marriage, kids, transgender identity—the right to
buy a cake, for Pete’s sake. Some of these issues have been
settled—although it doesn’t feel safe to assume so under the
Trump Administration—while others are still in the throes
of debate.
Some advocates have assumed the Trump Administration
won’t bother trying to unravel equal marriage because
it would take a lot of work to overturn a Supreme Court
decision. However, that doesn’t mean religious pushback
against marriage equality has died down. In 2017, at the
annual “Washington: A Man of Prayer” event held at the U.S.
Capitol, Congressman Randy Weber of Texas actually wept
as he “confessed the sins of our nation” into the microphone.
He tearfully apologized to God for taking the Bible out of
public schools, for the country’s legalization of abortion,
and for same-sex marriage: “Father, we have trampled on
your holy institution of holy matrimony and tried to rewrite
what it is and we’ve called it an alternate lifestyle,” he cried—
literally. “Father, oh Father, please forgive us!”
When Family Values Don’t Value Family
In a handful of states, state-funded adoption and foster
agencies are still permitted to discriminate against potential
parents based on the religious beliefs of the groups running
them. This is a not-so-subtle way of saying that same-sex
parents, as well as atheists or other people whose “lifestyles”
don’t fit a religious agency’s idea of the perfect parents, may
be turned down, even if they’ve done nothing wrong.
To make matters worse, anti-LGBTQ conservatives still
claim that children need a mom and a dad to succeed, an idea
that research has proven incorrect time and time again. But
while it’s become second-nature for us to tune out the trolls,
it’s more disappointing when elected officials—whose job it
is to help same-sex couples—fall prey to those falsehoods.
In Kentucky, for example, family court judge Mitchell
Nance attempted to recuse himself from a case regarding
same-sex parents “as a matter of conscience.” He wrote that
he would not be able to participate in such cases without the
possibility of bias, due to his “conscientious objection to the
concept of adoption of a child by a practicing homosexual.”
(He announced plans to resign a few months later amid
AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 15
 Let’s use our unique, overlapping history
to call out injustice when we see it and
do everything we can to stop it.
ethical concerns about that recusal.)
Technically, it was nice of him to bow out so his beliefs
won’t interfere with a child finding a home, but it’s a shame
he had to do so at all. Furthermore, could any gay people,
even in non-adoption cases, feel like they were getting a fair
hearing in Nance’s courtroom?
Allies and Accomplices
Truly supporting LGBTQ people and other marginalized
groups in your day-to-day life can take a little bit of work.
You might find yourself staring down biases you’re not
comfortable acknowledging, or having to challenge
assumptions you took for granted. But I promise it’s worth
the effort. Remember that concepts like reason and logic are
fundamental to most atheists’ understanding of the world.
And standing up for your fellow humans in their time of need
is the only reasonable thing to do.
In social-justice circles, particularly in the LGBTQ world,
there’s a lot of discussion about what it means to be an ally.
The basic definition of “ally” is a person who supports the
cause of a marginalized group to which they do not belong.
In that sense, heterosexual people can be allies to LGBTQ
people; gay, lesbian, and bisexual people can be allies to
transgender people; white LGBTQ people can be allies to
LGBTQ people of color, and so on.
But there’s more to allyship than that. Simply expressing
tolerance of a group of people who are different from you
shouldn’t merit a celebration in one’s honor; it’s an act of basic
human decency. And it’s dangerous for people to think that
support from a distance, which is passive allyship, is enough
to make a difference.
That’s why preferred definitions commonly include
one key word: active. True, active allies, sometimes called
“accomplices,” express their support for different groups,
even when doing so isn’t convenient or comfortable. They
advocate for their marginalized peers when they aren’t in the
room and prioritize the voices of those peers when they are.
An ally doesn’t take the microphone from you on your behalf;
they hold it up for you.
So what does it look like to be an active ally to LGBTQ
people regardless of their beliefs? A crucial part of being an
ally is defending a person or group, whether they’re present
to hear it or not. This principle can apply to anyone. It’s the
grown-up equivalent of not letting the school bully talk about
your friends behind their backs. So why is it so difficult to put
into practice in adulthood?
16 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
Many of us have been raised around people who didn’t
take kindly to difference—those who are leery of races,
religions, sexual orientations, and identities they aren’t
familiar with. Or maybe we have friends who don’t care one
way or the other, but who drop casual racism or homophobia
into otherwise tame conversations. (“No homo,” anyone?) If
you say something challenging to them, you run the risk of
being ridiculed yourself.
If you’re straight, maybe they’ll accuse you of being gay,
and you’ll have to explain both that you’re not and that it
would be okay if you were, which even sounds exhausting. Or
maybe you are gay (or bi, or trans, etc.) but you don’t want to
be “one of those gays.” You don’t want to ruff le feathers or ask
your friends to behave any differently just because you’re at
the table. Don’t get trapped in that mentality. It’s important
to ruff le feathers for these reasons, whether you’re LGBTQ
or not. These intimate moments with friends and family
are where the best learning can happen. If an acquaintance
of yours witnessed a conversation where someone put you
down—for being an atheist, for your race or upbringing, for
something that makes you different—you’d want them to do
the same on your behalf.
Then there’s the advocacy component of allyship. Here,
I’m speaking specifically about straight, cisgender atheists.
Being outraged at the government isn’t fun. We don’t protest
or hold rallies for the hell of it. We’d much rather live in a
world where everyone respects everyone and it’s never
necessary to f lood the streets in rage and fear. Unfortunately,
we aren’t there yet. And while there are more openly LGBTQ
people than ever before, we can’t do it alone.
We need help from people of all identities and religious
backgrounds, but especially from atheists who share
our concerns about religious overstep and irrational
policymaking. If your LGBTQ friends are up in arms about
a new law, elected official, or Cabinet appointee, do your
homework and find out why. Think through the implications
that certain policies could have for LGBTQ people—plus
atheists, people of faith, people of color, poor people, and so
many others—and then get mad, too. Sign the petitions we
post on Facebook. Donate to our causes, if you can spare it.
Follow our lead and ask how you can help. We generally know
what we’re doing.
Come to marches with us, if they’re not designated as
LGBTQ-only spaces. (Those are necessary sometimes—
having a place to heal and plan with others who share your
experiences is vital.) Call your governor, your state legislators,
1ST QUARTER 2018
 LGBTQ discrimination is the clearest
example in the last two decades of using
the state to enforce religious dogma.
and your members of Congress to voice your concerns. The 4,500 miles away. Certainly the thousands of gifts at our feet
most egregiously anti-LGBTQ laws are also an assault on hadn’t come only from LGBTQ people.
the freedom from religion, like the “license to discriminate” It’s unfair to assume that every LGBTQ person will feel
laws that have emerged in dozens of states. Those are atheist severely traumatized by a tragedy like Pulse, but many of
issues, too. us did. After the high-profile suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a
Finally, you cannot be an effective ally without holding transgender teenager whose parents sent her to Christian
empathy in your heart. When news of the shooting at the conversion therapy, public support for trans youth soared on
Pulse nightclub in Orlando broke, people with ties to the platforms like Twitter and Tumblr. Eyes turned to caring for
communities most affected—LGBTQ people, Latinx people, North Carolina’s LGBTQ community after the “bathroom
even Orlando residents, bill” was passed. Calls to
to an extent—had reason LGBTQ suicide hotlines
to react more strongly spiked after Donald
than others. (Latinx Trump’s election.
has recently come into These moments
use as a gender-neutral represent sadness
replacement for Latino and solidarity in the
and Latina.) As the aftermath of anti-
death toll on television LGBTQ violence—
climbed, did you text whether literal, political,
your LGBTQ friends to or societal—and they’re
ask how they were doing? crucial to supporting
I was out of the LGBTQ people. When
country at a cousin’s something happens
wedding the night of the that harms one of us,
Pulse shooting, which many more of us will
was both a privilege feel its effects resonate.
and a curse. Shock and During and after these
grief had hit us all like moments, check in with
a punch to the gut, but your LGBTQ friends.
I was still far away from You don’t have to assume
the epicenter of the the worst, but be genuine
heartbreak. Without a and kind. “What awful
community of LGBTQ news today. Are you
friends around to doing okay?” will suffice.
grieve with, it didn’t Empathy also
feel as real. It hit me shouldn’t be exclusive
completely a few days to times of mourning.
later, when my future Before the Supreme
wife and I came across Court ruling on
Amsterdam’s gay rights marriage equality, I
monument by accident. would text my family in
It was piled high with a group chat whenever
f lowers, candles, letters, another state legalized
and rainbow flags. We it. They celebrated with
sat at the monument for fifteen minutes, heavy with reality, me every time, never letting the news get old or sending
absorbing the messages of love that had poured out from canned responses. Heterosexual friends and family listened

1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 17

to my rambling thoughts about the state of the movement,
bought me books they never would have picked up otherwise,
asked my opinion on the LGBTQ news of the day, and sent
me articles about topics they knew I’d be interested in. Every
one of those actions was another way of saying, “I support
you.”
Of course, it’s key to remember that your LGBTQ friend
has a life, interests, and values beyond their sexual orientation
or gender identity. You don’t want to tokenize your friend,
play into stereotypes, guess their interests based on one
factor of their identity, or assume they want to date your
only other gay friend. (Thanks for offering, though!) There’s
a difference between “I thought you might like this article
because you were talking about the subject the other day” and
“I thought you might like this article because you’re gay.” But
in general, making an effort at all is really, really important.
Showing up matters. If you strike up a conversation with us,
we might have more in common than you think.
Onward
Historically, it’s been difficult to get people to show
up for causes that they think don’t affect them—think
not only LGBTQ rights, but immigration, racial justice,
and other issues that primarily impact only a few groups.
Atheism does not require any set of political or social
beliefs. It does not command a stricter commitment to free
speech or freedom of religion, it does not center on a group
of like-minded believers, and it has no guidebook. Atheism
is the absence of belief in any gods. Full stop.
But even though atheism itself doesn’t intrinsically
support any social justice movement, many atheists do.
Atheists support abortion access and opposed the war
in Iraq in higher numbers than believers and were early
advocates for marriage equality. And the many of us who
are both LGBTQ and atheist have a personal stake in what
happens next.
As for shared values and ideas, atheists reject the concept
of acting in accordance with the wishes of a higher power.
Therefore, they make their decisions based on what’s best
for them and, in an ideal world, the people around them.
Atheists may see people as accountable to one another
rather than to a god. That should breed compassion and
a commitment to helping one another live with agency
and self-determination. For LGBTQ people to recognize
our full potential, we must not be encumbered by bigoted,
religiously-inf luenced laws or social mores that dictate
what we can and cannot do.
It’s idealistic to think that LGBTQ people, religious
minorities besides atheists, and others who are
disadvantaged under the current system will ever be
considered fully equal by the people at the top. But that
doesn’t mean we aren’t making progress toward that lofty
goal. Every inch forward makes someone’s life better, even
if it isn’t enough to eradicate inequality and save the world
18 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
entirely. LGBTQ-inclusive laws aren’t thrown together
in vain as a “politically correct” gesture. They have a
measurably positive impact on real lives and therefore on
society at large.
A handful of examples: Some states and adoption
networks don’t allow unmarried couples to jointly adopt
children. That means marriage equality makes it easier
for same-sex couples to give kids in need a loving home.
Being allowed to transition leads to better mental health
outcomes for transgender kids. That means trans-inclusive
school policies make it a lot easier for them to be their
happiest, healthiest selves. Bias and discrimination are
linked to worse physical and mental health for LGBTQ
adults, too, and some (transgender people especially) are
likely to avoid public places for fear of how they may be
treated. How can someone be a productive, tax-paying,
economy-stimulating member of society if they’re terrified
about where to pee?
Atheists have a history of staring down discriminatory
laws and negative associations, and we continue to face
aggressive distrust and resentment from large swaths
of the population, even though the majority of laws that
targeted us are long gone. Societal prejudices against
atheists continue to this day. We’ve dealt with this kind
of treatment for ages. We should understand and defend
those who face it now.
If one day we live in a world where it really is okay to be
gay, we may still find ourselves defending the civil rights
of minority groups. In the 2016 election, for example,
LGBTQ people didn’t bear the worst of conservative
bigotry. That ire was aimed primarily at immigrants or
those perceived to be immigrants, especially Mexicans and
Muslims. Maybe one day we will have a president who’s
atheist, LGBTQ , or both, but it’s likely that old prejudices
will remain (Obama’s election didn’t end racism), and
others will rise to new prominence.
The allyship of atheists and LGBTQ people shouldn’t
be based on the severity of the injustices we face. As groups
with up-close-and-personal knowledge of how bigotry—
faith-based and otherwise—can inf lict unfathomable
pain, it’s on us to carry that understanding into future
generations. We’ll never forget those who called us and our
families less than human, or the lawmakers who suggested
our existence was an affront to society.
Even if “it gets better” one day, we’ll remember how it
used to be. Let’s use our unique, overlapping history to call
out injustice when we see it and do everything we can to
stop it. Let’s teach our kids and their kids about what we
and our forebears lived and died through. We can’t promise
them it will never happen again, but we can swear to them
that we won’t sit quietly by and watch.
Camille Beredjick is the editor of the LGBTQ news blog GayWrites.org.
Queer Disbelief is her first book.
1ST QUARTER 2018
Will Post Secular Beat Present (But Tense) Secular?
A review of Post Secular: Science, Humanism and the Future of Faith
by Ed Buckner

M any of us atheists think we’ve read almost

everything on the nexus of science and
religion and on the future of faith and religion in society. Marc
Schaus quickly persuades those people, myself included, that
there is much more to learn and quite a bit of satisfaction to be
had from the pursuit. Post Secular: Science, Humanism and
the Future of Faith addresses atheism, humanism, science,
faith, and secularism so broadly that I initially expected his
book to be interesting but lacking in depth. I was slightly
nonplussed that I could only read it in an e-version because I
strongly prefer print (publisher, please take note). But paper
cannot accommodate web links, and I did find the instant
access to outside sources advantageous.
I also expected a humanist rather than atheist perspective,
given his publisher (Canadian Humanist Publications) and
his background in neuroscience research. Happily, I was
mistaken on both counts. The depth is as impressive as
the considerable geographic, historical, and philosophical
breadth, and I detected no hesitation in embracing the word
“atheism,” even though he mostly uses “secularism.”
Post Secular is sprightly written, tightly organized,
and original with unexpected insights throughout. It is
also an engaging invitation to read or reread many other
works. Although he has an excellent grasp of history, as
well as current issues in neurology, philosophy, mythology,
politics, and humanism, he avoids ponderous displays of his
knowledge. Richard Dawkins, Charles Bradlaugh, Taner
Edis, Baruch Spinoza, Daniel Dennett, Charles Darwin,
Malala Yousafzai, A. C. Grayling, John Scopes, John Locke,
John Dewey, William James, and many more get a turn on
Schaus’ stage, but always as integral, organic contributors to
the story, not as occasions for showy academic footnotes. as well. Entitled “Spokes on the Wheel: Similarities Among
A chapter on comparative religion across the ages brings Religious Traditions,” it is a fine example of his ability to
a wealth of details into the mix and some interesting analysis combine sweeping breadth with rich details and thoughtful

This book is profoundly optimistic,

imaginative, and sweeping while also
being grounded in realism and practicality.
1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 19
 His predictions about the place and
role of religion a century from now are
developed from a careful analysis of
cultural and biological evolution.
depth. If this chapter doesn’t contain at least one religion or
religious tradition you’ve never heard of, then you’re far more
informed than I am on the subject.
Schaus says, “I believe future generations will not even
be as free as we are, right this moment, to choose God.” He
can imagine, as can I, an unscrupulous, right-wing theocrat
taking these words out of context to say that the book is part
of an evil, secularist conspiracy to wipe out religious liberty.
But it’s not that at all. Schaus predicts that our improved
understanding of the world—especially biology—through
science will eventually erode any basis for holding on to
religious belief. The resulting logical and philosophical
constraints are undoing the “freedom” to believe in God and
the ability to claim reasonably that god-belief is plausible—a
prospect far more threatening to a theocrat than religious
oppression. His description is worth excerpting at length:
… [T]he perfect storm of [for creating and supporting]
secularism appears to be living in a safe, financially
stable and democratic society in which community ties
are linked to some other [non-mythical] shared purpose,
where social safety nets are in place to keep you less in
need of help from the immediate groups around you,
the police show up when you call and lawyers allow you
to sue people who cheat you, you are well-educated and
analytical, are aware of intuition but override it when
needed and do not require existential certainty or a
locus of control due to the scientific narrative in place.
It is ultimately the main thesis of this book that factors
like these are becoming more likely to exist.
This is not a crusade for atheism and secularism, it is a
description of what’s ultimately inevitable, and Schaus makes
his case powerfully. Morality—the “is/ought debate,” as he
The resulting logical and philosophical
constraints are undoing the “freedom”
to believe in God and the ability to claim
reasonably that god-belief is plausible.
20 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
sums it up—and meaningfulness for those of us with little
or no belief in anything “transcendent” receive effective
analysis in this book. He is certainly not the first one to
dismiss the unfounded theistic claim that only with gods and
religion can we have ethics or ethical standards or any reason
for valuing our own lives or those of others. But he does go
further by grounding his considerations firmly in human
evolution (biological and cultural/social) and suggesting
that even some of the more facile answers from secularists
miss key elements by not taking evolution into account. Yes,
we do indeed have responsibility to create our own meaning
and our own ethics, but human history (and pre-history)
give us not only the building blocks for this, but also the true
requirements for moral development and for understanding
who we are and can become.
The way the final chapter ties everything up is alone worth
the price of the book. A science fiction writer would be proud to
claim the century-forward description Schaus paints, but any
thoughtful academic analyst of science and religion would also
happily claim it as well. There are startling details related to
APM (atomically precise manufacturing) and the possibility
of bioluminescent plants replacing light bulbs, and there are
more obvious predictions regarding driverless cars. But his
predictions about the place and role of religion a century from
now are the core of this chapter, as well as the entire book.
These predictions are developed from a careful analysis of
cultural and biological evolution, not mere wishful thinking.
Post Secular is profoundly optimistic, imaginative, and sweeping
while also being grounded in realism and practicality. Most of
all, it is engaging, engrossing reading.
Ed Buckner is a past president of American Atheists and co-author
(with Michael Buckner) of In Freedom We Trust: An Atheist Guide to
Religious Liberty.
1ST QUARTER 2018
 GREATER EVIL IS BEYOND
THE IMAGINATION OF MAN
than that God,
perfect in every way,
all-powerful,
needing nothing,
knowing everything
past, future and even possible;

a loving, just, merciful and forgiving Father;

would summarily create,

from innocent nothingness,
creatures capable of suffering,
knowing in advance,
which of those he will consign
to suffer eternally—
as promised by Jesus!

No act of his creature-victims

could justify this verdict of unsurpassable hate,
injustice and endless mercilessness.

All in all, the very definition of unforgiving.

Nothing more is needed,

though volumes provide it,
to prove that such a God
is not and never was,
except as the sick
creation of
man.
—fellowfeather@gmail.com

Your comments will be answered and appreciated.

1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 21

God is a Slave Owner’s Best Friend
and the Bible is the Instruction Manual
by Brian Bolton
A mong the Confederate monument controversies
that have made national news over the past
few years is one in Williamson County, Texas.
I live in the county seat of Georgetown, where the majority of
residents hold conservative religious, political, and social views.
One expression of their respect for tradition is the twenty-foot
Confederate soldier statue in front of the courthouse. Nearby
are a half-dozen additional statues and historical markers
recognizing prominent figures. Three years ago, a liberal
religious advocacy group called Courageous Conversations
began a controversial campaign to add a small marker to
acknowledge African Americans’ role in the Confederacy.
Like almost everywhere else, the issue at the center of this
local controversy is whether the statue insults black citizens by
honoring the institution of slavery. Some assert that the Civil
War was really about states’ rights or northern aggression, but
the 1861 Texas Ordinance of Secession is clear:
We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of
the states and the confederacy were established exclusively
by the white race for themselves and their posterity, and the
African race was rightfully held and regarded as an inferior
race, and in that condition only could their existence be
beneficial or tolerable.
This is the dark side of Jesus
the “Prince of Peace.”
22 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
Because the 1861 Constitution of Confederate States
of America called on the “favor and guidance of Almighty
God,” it is entirely appropriate to ask if the God of Judeo-
Christian scripture sanctions the institution of chattel
slavery. This article provides a definitive answer to this
important question.
A Brief History of Slavery
The origins of slavery date back to the ancient tribes
of our early ancestors who, after fighting and killing each
other for many millennia, came to the realization that it
would be more advantageous for the conquerors to enslave
rather than kill their adversaries. The economic benefits of
a system of forced labor in which one person owns another
person became immediately apparent, and the concept was
quickly extended to the acquisition of personal servants.
For this reason, the institution of slavery is found among
both primitive and advanced peoples.
Slavery was common and accepted in classical Greek
and Roman civilizations. In Athens, about fifty percent of
its half-million inhabitants were slaves who were essential
laborers in the heralded democracy. Prominent citizens
like Plato and Aristotle owned household slaves.
The early Christian church tolerated slavery mainly
1ST QUARTER 2018
 Christian clergy in the South at the time
that abolition was gaining strength found
justification for slavery in scripture.
because it was an unavoidable economic necessity. The
first inf luential Christian to condemn slavery was Bishop
Gregory of Nyssa in the fourth century C.E. Although
he argued that slavery is morally wrong, he did not
unambiguously advocate abolition of the practice.
Following the colonization of the Americas and the
opportunity to extract the wealth from the land, Africa
became an unwilling labor pool from which millions of
people were captured and transported to the new colonies.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, England
maintained a monopoly on the slave trade due to its
dominance of the seas.
The first cargo of slaves arrived at Jamestown, Virginia,
in 1619, coincidentally the same year that a democratic
government was instituted in the colony. Although they
acknowledged the injustice, several eminent U.S. founders,
including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson,
owned slaves, as did most wealthy landowners, to carry out
the extensive labor required on plantations. By 1850, out
of a total population of nine million people in the South,
about three million were slaves, most of whom worked on
just a few thousand large plantations where cotton was a
major crop.
The movement to abolish slavery began in the
seventeenth century, and the practice was outlawed in
the British Empire in 1833. The abolitionist crusade in
the U.S., starting in the 1820s with the emergence of
revivalism, demanded immediate freedom for slaves.
It is ironic that abolitionist sentiment had its roots in
evangelical Christianity because scripture unequivocally
sanctions slavery. In fact, some Southerners argued that
abolitionists were defying God’s will by opposing slavery.
President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation
Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing all slaves in the
Southern states. In December 1865, slavery was abolished
by the ratification of the U.S. Constitution’s Thirteenth
Amendment, followed by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments, which granted former slaves full citizenship
and (if they were male) the right to vote.
There can be no doubt that slavery was an accepted
societal institution throughout history up to the early
nineteenth century. Only then did Western nations become
Jesus never criticized nor condemned slavery,
and he did not forbid people from owning slaves.
1ST QUARTER 2018
sensitive to the moral questions raised by the ownership of
humans as acquired property by other people.
Slavery in the Bible
Ethical concerns about slavery were not a consideration
for the compilers of the Hebrew Testament, which contains
more than eight hundred references to slaves and servants
(these two terms are used interchangeably throughout
scripture). The Genesis stories about Abram, Hagar, Jacob,
and Joseph established the framework for the Biblical view
of slavery. Additional verses in other Pentateuch books
outline the rules that govern the relationship between
master and servant. These are exemplified in the sagas
about David and Solomon and their slave laborers in the
Histories. It is undeniable that scripture teaches that
servants are the property of their owners.
The much shorter New Testament includes about one
hundred fifty references to slaves and servants.
Obviously, it would not be feasible to review every
mention here. It’s also not necessary because there is
never any condemnation of the institution of slavery,
and Christians today are primarily concerned with the
declarations about slavery issued by Jesus, Paul, and Peter.
Therefore, only a few major slavery episodes in the Old
Testament are cited.
God’s rescue of the ancient Israelites from enslavement
in Egypt is the foundational event in early Hebrew history,
creating the basis for the covenant between God and his
chosen people. The Exodus story concludes with the
delivery of the Ten Commandments by Moses at Mount
Sinai, along with detailed guidelines to instruct the
Israelites, who were once slaves themselves, on how to be
masters to their own slaves (see the Ten Commandments
for Slave Masters on page 25). With this unequivocal
background, there can be no doubt that God the Father
approved of the institution of slavery, and his son and
spokesmen continued the tradition.
Jesus’ approval of slavery is readily apparent in his
inclusion of servants and their masters in eight of his parables
(see the summaries on page 37). Because he never criticized
nor condemned slavery, and he did not forbid people from
owning slaves, he tacitly endorsed the practice. In one of
AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 23
Five slave parables are noted for their extreme
violence through murder, killing, or maiming.
these parables, he explicitly authorized the cruel master-slave
relationship when he recommended whipping disobedient
slaves: The servant who knows the master’s will and does
not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be
beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and
does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few
blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will
be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with
much, much more will be asked (Luke 12:47-48).
Five of the eight slave parables are noted for their
extreme violence through murder, killing, or maiming with
phraseology including: both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no
• delivered him to the torturers
• cut him in two, grind him to powder
• cast him into outer darkness
• weeping and gnashing of teeth
• beaten with many stripes, and
• slay them before me.
Interspersed with this very disturbing language are
several standard expressions of Christian imagery:
• kingdom of heaven
• my heavenly Father
• kingdom of God, and
• beloved son.
The central figure of the master or the son is Jesus himself,
and the consistent theme in these five violent stories is that
those who disobey Jesus or reject him as Messiah will be
punished with unending torture in hell.
This is the dark side of Jesus the “Prince of Peace”, who
condemned interpersonal violence, even in self-defense,
while granting authority to slave owners to discipline their
slaves. This is the divine mandate used to justify the beatings
of black slaves in Southern states. Jesus also endorsed the
rules in the book of Exodus for slave owners, and two of his
miracles involved slaves: the healing of the centurion’s slave
(Luke 7:1-10) and the restoration of the slaveboy Malchus’
ear (Luke 22:50-51 and John 18:10).
In the Epistles, Paul decreed that slaves should obey
their masters with respect and fear in everything, just as
they would obey Jesus. And for their obedience, they will be
Some argued that abolitionists were
defying God’s will by opposing slavery.
24 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
rewarded in the next life:
Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear,
and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.
Obey them not only to win their favor when their eye is
on you, but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from
your heart. Serve wholeheartedly, as if you were serving
the Lord, not people, because you know that the Lord will
reward each one for whatever good they do, whether they
are slave or free. And masters, treat your slaves in the same
way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is
favoritism with him (Ephesians 6:5-9).
Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do
it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor,
but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord.
Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working
for the Lord, not for human masters, since you know that
you will receive an inheritance from the Lord as a reward. It
is the Lord Christ you are serving. Anyone who does wrong
will be repaid for their wrongs, and there is no favoritism
(Colossians 3:22-24).
All who are under the yoke of slavery should consider
their masters worthy of full respect, so that God’s name
and our teaching may not be slandered. Those who have
believing masters should not show them disrespect just
because they are fellow believers. Instead, they should
serve them even better because their masters are dear to
them as fellow believers and are devoted to the welfare of
their slaves. These are the things you are to teach and insist
on. If anyone teaches otherwise and does not agree to the
sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly
teaching, they are conceited and understand nothing (1
Timothy 6:1-4).
Teach slaves to be subject to their masters in everything,
to try to please them, not to talk back to them, and not to
steal from them, but to show that they can be fully trusted,
so that in every way they will make the teaching about God
our Savior attractive (Titus 2:9-10).
The apostle Peter emphasized that slaves are obligated
1ST QUARTER 2018
 The Bible that condoned slavery back then is
the same Bible used today.
by Christian faith and fear of God to submit to their owners,
no matter how brutal. He said that it is commendable when
slaves endure unjust suffering that is willed by God:
Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves
to your masters, not only to those who are good and
considerate, but also to those who are harsh. For it is
commendable if someone bears up under the pain of
unjust suffering because they are conscious of God. But
how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing
wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good
and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To
this you were called, because Christ suffered for you,
leaving you an example, that you should follow in his
steps (1 Peter 2:18-21).
The Bible’s three leading Christian figures testify in
unequivocal language to the legitimacy of the institution of
slavery, yet Christians today abhor the concept as much as
anyone. There is no better example of selective disregard of
scriptural mandates.
From the founding of the nation in the 1770s to the
beginning of the Civil War, the issue of slavery fractured
Protestant denominations, including Baptists, Methodists,
Presbyterians, and Episcopalians. John Wesley called
American slavery “the vilest that ever saw the sun.”
Ironically, abolition was inspired by the Protestant churches
in the North because, in their view, slavery was considered
to be incompatible with Christian values!
It should not be surprising, then, that Christian clergy
in the South at the time that abolition was gaining strength
found justification for slavery in scripture. For example,
in 1845, a South Carolina preacher named Richard Fuller
declared, “God sanctioned slavery in the Bible, and therefore
it cannot be wrong.” It should also be noted that surveys
indicate that most Americans today believe that slavery was
the worst moral evil to ever aff lict American society.
Implications
What does this definitive scriptural documentation mean
for atheists, civil libertarians, and social progressives who
view Civil War monuments as tributes to an embarrassing
Continued on page 37
Scripture teaches that servants are the
property of their owners.
1ST QUARTER 2018
The Ten Commandments for Slave Owners
from Exodus 21:2-32 (with specific verses in parentheses)
1. If you buy a Hebrew slave, he is to serve you for six years.
But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying
anything (2).
2. If he is bought alone, he is to go free alone. But if he has a
wife when he’s bought, she is to go with him (3).
3. If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or
daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her
master, and only the man shall go free (4).
4. But if the servant declares, “I love my master and my wife
and children and do not want to go free” then his master must
take him before the judges. He shall take him to the door or
the doorpost and pierce his ear with an awl. Then he will be
his servant for life (5-6).
5. If a man sells his daughter as a slave, she is not to go free
as male slaves do. If she does not please the master who has
selected her for himself, he must let her be redeemed. He has
no right to sell her to foreigners, because he has broken faith
with her (7-8).
6. If he selects her to be his son’s wife, he must grant her the
rights of a daughter (9).
7. If the son takes on another wife, he must not deprive the
first one of her food, clothing, or marital rights. If he does not
provide her with these three things, she is to go free, without
any payment of money (10-11).
8. Anyone who beats their male or female slave with a rod
must be punished if the slave dies as a direct result, but they
are not to be punished if the slave recovers after a day or two,
since the slave is their property (20-21).
9. A slave who goes blind in one eye from being punched by
their master is to be freed as compensation for the eye. The
same goes for an owner who knocks out a tooth, and this
applies to male and female slaves (26-27).
10. If a slave (male or female) is gored by a bull, the bull’s
owner must pay the slave’s owner thirty shekels, and the bull
must be stoned to death (32).
AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 25
The Verbiage of Theism
Religion dictates how everyone’s allowed to talk
by Ross Rosenfeld

In God we trust. Thank God. God is watching.

I ndeed “God” is all around us; not in any physical or
spiritual form, but most certainly in our language. And
whether or not atheists realize it, we partake by accepting the
verbiage of theism despite rejecting its irrational beliefs.
We do this even when we address the issue of belief
itself. We ask others, “Do you believe in God?” when really
the question ought to be, “Do you believe in gods?” or “Do
you believe in a god?” Or, better yet, “Do you believe in
gods and other superstitions?” The proper noun “God” is
truly improper grammar in this instance, as it wrongfully
attributes a persona to something that does not exist. We
don’t do this with other common plural nouns. We would
not ask someone if they believe in Fairy. We would say, “Do
you believe in fairies?” Gods should be no different.
The word “faith” has also permeated our language and
is biased in favor of religion. “Having faith” is considered
a good thing, though it shouldn’t be. “Faith will move
mountains.” “Just have faith.” “I have faith in you.” Faith
is nothing more than belief without evidence. If you were
having surgery, you wouldn’t want to have faith in the
surgeon; you’d want to have confidence in them. Having
faith in their abilities would essentially mean that you have
no reason whatsoever to trust in their competence. If that
were the case, you might as well ask me to perform the
operation. But you don’t; your confidence in the surgeon is
not based on blind belief, but on sound reason and on their
record of accomplishment.
Religious language also infests our politics, even when
it’s not about breaking down the wall of church/state
separation. You may have heard, for instance, Medicare and
Social Security described as “sacred cows.” Where did that

We would not ask someone if they believe in

Fairy. We would say, “Do you believe in fairies?”
Gods should be no different.
26 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org 1ST QUARTER 2018
 President Eisenhower signed a law that made
“In God We Trust” the official U.S. motto as if to
say, “We’re the good ones because we believe in a
powerful supernatural being.”
expression originate? From Hinduism, of course, where
cows cannot be devoured due to their supposed sanctity.
Midwesterners are often described as the “salt of the Earth.”
You’ll find that phrase in Matthew, 5:13, where the world’s
most popular fictional character, Jesus, delivers the Sermon on
the Mount and instructs his followers
to spread his message.
Another one you’ll hear in politics
is the “gospel truth.” A politician Religious
might say that one when he wants to
assure his audience that something language also
is a 100% bona fide fact. But since
the Gospel is full of fictions, it infests our
politics, even
hardly proves his statement reliable.
If he’s been scandalized, he may
have had a “fall from grace,” like our
favorite baddie, Satan. Maybe he’s
been “through hell”—you know,
when it’s not
where Satan lives with all his little
demon friends.
about breaking
Law and government are no
exceptions. In 1954, amidst the down the wall
Cold War and McCarthyism, the
words “under God” were added to of church/state
the Pledge of Allegiance. Two years
later, fearing “godless communism,”
President Eisenhower signed a
separation.
law that made “In God We Trust”
the official U.S. motto as if to say,
“We’re the good ones because we believe in a powerful
supernatural being” (who, for some reason, couldn’t
defeat Soviet tanks). It also appears in countless American
courtrooms and on all of our currency. Legal documents
reference “acts of God.” And presidents end their State of
the Union addresses with the words “God bless America!”
But it’s more than that. Religion has not only inf luenced
what we say but has largely dictated how we’re allowed to
talk. If you’re on a publicly-licensed television network,
you can’t curse without incurring a fine from the Federal
When someone says, “God knows,” feel free to
finish the statement for them by adding, “Nothing.
Because he doesn’t exist.”
1ST QUARTER 2018
Communications Commission. Most cable stations
have, for some reason, copied this policy of prohibiting
curses, even though they have no legal requirement to
do so. Why? Because of a puritanical streak in America
that has existed since the days of the Pilgrims that frowns
upon “swear words.” That same
puritanical nature has made it
difficult throughout our history
to talk about sex, a proprietary
insistence that has had real and
serious consequences when it’s
come to women’s issues.
American Atheists President
David Silverman says we need
to throw out the rule book when
it comes to combating religion.
Perhaps we should also throw out
the language guide, or at least learn
to use it honestly and properly.
Let’s not treat religion with any
more respect than it truly deserves,
which is none. Religious “thought” is
no better than any other superstition.
So when someone says, “God knows,”
feel free to finish the statement for
them by adding, “Nothing. Because
he doesn’t exist.” When someone
says, “God help us,” feel free to say,
“We’re going to need more than that.
We’re going to need something real.” And when someone
offers to “pray for you,” perhaps ask them if they can do
something useful instead.
Don’t worry, you can do it. I have faith in you.
Ross Rosenfeld is an educator and historian who has written for
the Daily News, The Hill, Newsday, newsweek.com, and numerous
others. His latest book is History and Hamilton: A Critical Analysis
of the Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ron Chernow Broadway Show. He is
vice president of Long Island Atheists.
AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 27
Our Growing Secular
Demographic
A recent study shows a significant drop in the
number of religious Americans
by Becky Garrison

T he Public Religious Research Institute (PRRI) has conducted the most comprehensive survey
to date of the current religious landscape in this country. Published last September, “America’s
Changing Religious Identity: Findings from the 2016 American Values Atlas” is the result of surveying
101,000 people from all fifty states. American Atheist contributor Becky Garrison spoke with Robert P.
Jones, PRRI Assistant Director of Research, to unpack some of the study’s conclusions.

What was the impetus for the study?
It’s always been important for PRRI to understand the
shifting religious landscape and how this impacts our culture
and politics. There is no existing source for this information,
not even the U.S. Census.
How did you differentiate between atheist, agnostic, and
secular?
Among the religiously unaffiliated, we found that 14% were
atheist, 13% were agnostic and 58% were secular. We defined
“secular” as someone who said, “I’m neither atheist or agnostic,
I’m just nothing” and also answered “no” when they were asked if
they considered themselves to be a religious person for any reason.
There appears to be a reluctance to use the word “atheist.”
I do think there’s a social desirability effect. People may
not want to reveal this personal information to a stranger in a
telephone survey—out of fear of being judged. We found that
people were more willing to state they don’t believe in God
than to claim the atheist label.
Did any of the results surprise you?
We already knew that people are becoming increasingly
unaffiliated, so I wasn’t surprised that one out of four young
adults aren’t affiliated with any particular religion. What
does surprise me, though, is how quickly these changes are
occurring. For instance, the percentage of Christians is down
to four in ten Americans, with a lot of this drop occurring
in the last decade. In 2007, white Christians made up the
majority of the population in roughly thirty-nine states. In
2016, only twenty-three states had a majority white Christian
population.
What social issues did the survey address, and has anything
changed?
One of the key changes we saw was a shift in attitudes
pertaining to human sexuality, like birth control, same-sex
marriage, and abortion rights. In the past, religious orientation
was the chief dividing line. The attitude of religious people was
much more conservative than the attitude of the non-religious.
Now, a higher number of religious people have progressive

People were more willing to state they don’t believe

in God than to claim the atheist label.
28 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org 1ST QUARTER 2018
 In 2007, white Christians made up the majority of
the population in roughly 39 states. In 2016, only 23
states had a majority white Christian population.
views on issues around human sexuality. This does not apply,
however, to the dividing line regarding marijuana legislation.
Religious people are more opposed to legalizing marijuana
than non-religious people.

What shifts have you observed among those who consider

themselves to be religiously unaffiliated?
For a long time, the prevailing view was that people
who were religiously unaffiliated were not necessarily
non-religious. Rather, they had just drifted away from
institutional religion but were willing to come back, or they
were at least interested in religious ideas. There’s an argument
that religious institutions just need to incorporate more
elements of contemporary culture like music, videos, and
social media. But those strategies aren’t necessarily what will
woo this group back, because they have no interest in being
part of any religious tradition. Among those who identified
as religiously unaffiliated, less than a third identified as in our culture and the way they engage in politics.
“spiritual but not religious.”
This study shows that unaffiliated Americans are primarily Why is the shift toward secularism occurring so rapidly?
secular in their orientation. They’re not looking to engage A number of things are happening. The religious diversity
religiously, and they don’t spent a lot of time thinking about God in this country is increasing, both in terms of the number of
and religion. But they don’t have a negative outlook on religion, different religion traditions and the racial backgrounds of
so they aren’t anti-religious per se. This shift is important, as it Christians. Because of that, there’s less pressure to conform to
suggests that this group will sort of stay this way. Their secular a specific religious norm. Also, the politicization of Christian
origination influences how they think about the role of religion activism matters because right now conservative Christians

This study shows that unaffiliated Americans

are primarily secular in their orientation.
1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 29
 Among those who identified as religiously
unaffiliated, less than a third identified
as “spiritual but not religious.”
Does this account for Donald Trump’s victory? He won 81%
of the white evangelical vote.
Religiously unaffiliated people are not nearly as active—
socially or politically—as people who are adherents to
established religious traditions. The religiously unaffiliated may
comprise a quarter of the population, but they account for only
15% of voters who showed up for the 2016 presidential election.
This would explain why so many government figures attend
events like the National Prayer Breakfast.
There’s a great story about Barney Frank. He came out as gay
relatively early in his career, but it wasn’t until after he retired
that he came out as an atheist. That gives you an idea about the
political baggage associated with that term. A number of studies
reveal that among religious people, atheism is viewed far more
negatively than other religions. It’s slowly changing, though. For
the longest time, the majority of Americans were of the opinion
that a belief in God was necessary to be a moral person. But in
2016, the majority of Americans said that it’s not.
Has Trump’s embrace of the religious right played a part in
turning people away from religion?
No, it’s not that simple. It’s a very complicated process for
someone to abandon their religious identity, so Trump has had
Religious people are more opposed to legalizing
marijuana than non-religious people.
30 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
very little influence on the rise of people who claim they are
religiously unaffiliated.
How can this data help inform the election campaigns in
2018 and 2020?
The religiously unaffiliated tend to vote two-to-one for
Democratic candidates. This number continues to rise, so in
theory this could be good news for Democrats. However, this
group is not easily activated, so it’s hard to figure out how to get
them to the polls.
Editor’s note: No matter your party affiliation, your vote is
your voice. Showing politicians that atheists, agnostics, freethinkers,
and other secular people are a powerful—and growing—voting bloc
requires getting out the vote and demonstrating that we are a force
to be reckoned with at election time. That’s why American Atheists
has teamed up with the Center for Inquiry, the Secular Coalition for
America, and the Secular Student Alliance to launch the Secular
Values Voter initiative. You will play an important part in raising
our profile when you pledge to vote and become a vocal member of
your community. Learn more at SecularAmericaVotes.org.
Becky Garrison is a freelance writer based in Portland, Oregon. Follow
her travels and writing via Twitter and Instagram @Becky_Garrison.
1ST QUARTER 2018
 Support American Atheists by purchasing an autographed copy for
$50 ($25 is tax-deductible where allowed by law), and receive a free
one-year membership. Order online at Atheists.org/FightingGod or
send payment to American Atheists, P.O. Box 158, Cranford, NJ 07016.

David Silverman
President of American Atheists

“A sometimes funny, always informative look into the mind behind

America’s frontline of Atheism. Dave reminds us that religion is
everyone’s enemy.”
~ Taslima Nasrin, international human rights activist and author of Shame and Revenge

1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 31

Invisible Friends and Time Travel
How life with a fundamentalist dad spawned my atheist sci-fi novel

by Marty Essen

S omeday, laws will exist to protect non-

believing children from overzealous
Christian parents. But for now, as long as the pushing
doesn’t veer into abuse, faking it or taking it are the
only realistic options most children have. When I
was a kid, I did a little of both.
I was eight years old when my father found Jesus
and announced to the world how happy his discovery
had made him. Since I loved and respected my father,
I wanted in on the happiness, too. Still, no matter how
hard I tried, I couldn’t quite believe as unconditionally
as my father did in his invisible friend.
“Ask him into your heart,” he’d say. I’d ask and
kind of believe, but more out of wanting to please
my father and to share in his experience. At eight,
I didn’t have the wherewithal to critically examine
the Bible. So, rather than understand that my lack of
conviction was a result of trying to believe a tome
written by people who couldn’t have passed one of
my second-grade science exams, I became frustrated.
Besides, shouldn’t a child be able to pick his own
invisible friend? Mine was Super Moose, and not
once did he ask me to invite him into my heart or
do any recruiting for him. He was, well . . . super
and therefore didn’t need silly human things,
such as blind allegiance or ten-percent tithes. His
sole purpose was to take control of my arms and
legs whenever my older brother picked on me. To
summon my friend, all I had to do was yell, “Super
Moose!” and hold my open hands on each side of
my head to mimic horns, and then touch those
horns to any solid object to “charge them.” With
a surge of adrenaline, I’d flail back at my brother
with high-speed moves. Admittedly, even with the
Power of the Moose, my brother was too big for me

He was even more of a victim of Christianity than I

had been. At least I had been able to escape.
32 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org 1ST QUARTER 2018
Shouldn’t a child be able to pick his own invisible friend?
to damage. Instead, my antics would get him laughing so hard
that I nonetheless got the desired result: no more teasing.
My father’s invisible friend was much more dangerous
than mine because he played a large role in my mother filing
for divorce. I think it was the “wives, submit yourselves unto
your own husbands” thing. Later, he told my father to move to
Florida and become a rack jobber for Christian books. Since I
lived with my mother in Minnesota, I could only see my father
for a few weeks each summer.
Even though being far away from him was traumatic at
times, once we got together, I loved our summer visits and even
enjoyed going on the book-rack restocking rounds with him.
I just wished he spent more of our time together in dad mode
rather than evangelist mode.
When he was in dad mode, we’d play tennis or mini
golf, and visit Sea World or Disney World. When he was in
evangelist mode, his agenda was to get me to believe with the
proper amount of conviction. Sometimes the lines between the
two modes blurred. Do you know what makes Disney’s Space
Mountain even scarier than it really is? Having your dad pray
in your ear for God’s protection during the entire ride!
As I entered my teens, I occasionally had to endure
an experience even more terrifying than the one at Space
Mountain: eating in restaurants and risking the embarrassment
of my father praying aloud. So I’d watch his body language for
signs that a prayer was about to begin. Then I’d excuse myself
to go to the restroom. My maneuver seldom worked, and even
when it did, he’d try to get me to pray aloud with him once we
returned to his apartment. Even though I had long outgrown
Super Moose, I recognized that my childhood invisible friend
had been far superior to Jesus. Never once did the Moose ask
“What?” because he couldn’t hear my thoughts and needed me
to vocalize them as, apparently, my father’s friend required.
As an adult, I could better deal with having an evangelist for a
father. The defining moment of becoming a full-fledged heathen
came when my thirty-four-year-old sister was dying of lupus. My
father was convinced that God would save her, as long as we all
believed “just so.” He even brought one of his born-again friends
to the hospital room to help him pray over her. I still remember
the wide-eyed look in my sister’s eyes as she endured the prayers,
unable to speak because of the tube down her throat. My brother
and I eventually got angry enough to put a stop to the prayers,
but not nearly as quickly as we should have. I suppose we, too,
clung to the hope that Jesus would come through.
Had my sister lived, Jesus, not the doctors, would have
gotten the credit, and my father would have never stopped
My father’s invisible friend was much more
dangerous than mine because he played a large
role in my mother filing for divorce.
1ST QUARTER 2018
talking about the miracle. Well, she did die and left a young
son who needed her. But according to my father, Jesus hadn’t
failed. What failed was our lack of faith. How nice to have a god
that gets credit for all of the wins and none of the losses. The
day of her death was the day I parted with Christianity. Even if
God did exist, he was either too weak or too uncaring to make
a difference—screw him!
From then on, arguments with my father over his invisible
friend became much more frequent. And, of course, with its
countless inaccuracies and contradictions, the Bible just may
be the most useful tool for disproving its own message. Because
most preachers stick to the passages that make up God’s greatest
hits, it’s not unusual for even ardent church-goers to know only
a small fraction of what’s in the Bible. Consequently, the most
entertaining way to throw off Christians in arguments is to
bring up unfamiliar and controversial passages that shock the
heaven out of them. My favorites include reciting Psalm 137:9
or asking which of the two versions of Eve’s creation in Genesis
is true and which is a lie.
I argued with my father far less after he died. And I must
say, without him being able to verbally deflect any challenge
with some version of “but then a miracle happened,” my rate of
winning increased dramatically.
To this day, I still vacillate on how I feel about my father’s
religious aggression. Like a member of any cult, he was
incapable of thinking critically, so he honestly believed he was
doing the right thing. In fact, in his mind, it was sinful to even
consider that the people in biblical times were so primitive that
butane lighters, firecrackers, and duct tape would have been
magical to them. By refusing to let doubt enter his thoughts,
he gladly allowed his life to be run by people who lived one
thousand years before the invention of sunglasses.
He was also an easy mark for anyone asking for his money
in the name of “doing God’s work.” Near the end of my father’s
life, when he needed some financial assistance, I actually had
to withhold my check until he promised not to turn around and
give ten percent of it to God. He was even more of a victim of
Christianity than I had been. At least I had been able to escape.
Today, I’m an environmentalist college speaker and the
author of three books. Or, in my father’s words, a victim of Satan
working through my wife to deceive me. My writing style uses
humor to make political points because people are less guarded
when they’re laughing. My latest book, Time Is Irreverent, fits
into a genre I call science fiction-political comedy. For years, I
toyed with the idea of a book that sends the protagonist back
to the days of Christ. Once there, he would inadvertently do
AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 33
 The day of her death was the day
I parted with Christianity.
something to change the course of history. Then, when he
returns to the present, the guy starring in the New Testament
isn’t Jesus—it’s him.
I wasn’t able to figure out how to write it until Donald
Trump became president. Knowing that millions of Christians
were now fawning over a man who is the antithesis of the main
character in the New Testament— with some even believing
he was ordained by God—inspired many possibilities. When
I learned that well over fifty percent of Republicans would be
happy if America became a Christian theocracy, the entire plot
quickly came together. Also, being a time-travel story, I could
send my characters back to the year 31C.E. to crash the Sermon
on the Mount, as well as send them forward to the year 2056, to
show what American life would look like after a succession of
Supreme Leaders “elected by God.”
Let the laughs begin!
Okay, life in an American theocracy would be miserable. In
Time Is Irreverent, women have no rights, Muslims and other
non-Christians were immediately deported, and it’s against the
law to drink alcohol, listen to rock and roll, or be gay or lesbian.
The story is told from the point of view of Marty Mann, who
involuntarily travels from 2020 to Florida in 2056, where the
land is ravaged by the effects of global warming, and he has little
hope of returning to the present. There, he meets Nellie Dixon,
a lesbian who must hide her sexual orientation from both her
father and the authorities. Together, the odd couple embark on
a cross-country road trip with the goal of reaching either the
nation of California or the Canadian province of Minnesota.
34 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
(Those liberal states were kicked out of the theocracy, along
with Washington and New York.)
As I was writing the book, I became convinced that Marty
and Nellie had entered my fingers and did the typing for me—
just like born-again Christians are convinced that Jesus has
entered their hearts. I had no idea what they were going to do
until the words appeared on my computer screen.
Marty and Nellie remain my invisible friends. I know they
aren’t real, but since they don’t ask for money or demand I devote
my life to recruiting for them, we have a happy relationship.
In fact, the three of us are already working on a sequel. Near
the end of Time Is Irreverent, Marty and Nellie travel back
to 31 C.E. and discover that Jesus is a first-century showman,
similar to the tent revival preachers of today. For the next book,
we thought it would be fun to bring Jesus to the twenty-first
century and see how today’s Christians—especially those on
the far right—treat him. I’m sure it will be a laugh riot.
Marty Essen began writing professionally in the 1990s, as a features
writer for Gig Magazine. His first book Cool Creatures, Hot Planet:
Exploring the Seven Continents, won six national awards, and the
Minneapolis Star-Tribune named it a Top Ten Green Book. His second
book, Endangered Edens: Exploring the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,
Costa Rica, the Everglades, and Puerto Rico, won four national awards.
Also a popular college speaker, he has performed the stage-show
version of Cool Creatures, Hot Planet on hundreds of campuses, in
forty-five states. His website is MartyEssen.com and he blogs at
Marty-Essen.com.
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1ST QUARTER 2018
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by Rhys Hagan, 313 pages, RhysHagan.com
A crime fiction
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It soon becomes clear
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by Karmak Bagisbayev, translated from Russian by Joanna
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In this fictional
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A Better Ten Commandments - A Guide to Living
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by James Miller, 77 pages (with references), ABetterTen.com
James Miller puts
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Combining history
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Reason is on the rise
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AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 35
 Support American Atheists every time you shop Amazon.com!
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Cont. from p. 25 - God is a Slave Owner’s Best Friend

and shameful aspect of American history? What are the

implications of biblical truth for activists who generally reject Jesus’ Eight Slave Parables
all forms of religious mythology? 1. Unmerciful Servant
First, the irrefutable conclusion that emerges from this Matthew 18:23-35
focused review is that the God of Judeo-Christian scripture
sanctioned slavery as an honorable human relationship. He is Those who do not forgive others will not be
the slave owner’s best friend, and his perfect word, the Holy forgiven by God and will be tortured forever.
Bible, is the slave owner’s instruction manual and rule book.
2. Wicked Tenants
Furthermore, God’s designated spokesmen—Moses, Jesus,
Matthew 21:33-46, Mark 12:1-12, Luke 20:9-19
Paul, and Peter—amplified and extended his pro-slavery
mandate for the Judeo-Christian community. Those who do not recognize Jesus as Messiah will
Second, it should be made perfectly clear that not enter eternal life.
Confederate statues and historical markers are primarily
3. Wedding Banquet
symbols of slavery. Although some defenders of
Matthew 22:2-14
Confederate honor deny that this was the major issue,
others argue that their ancestors sincerely believed that Those who reject God’s generous offer of salvation
slavery was a God-ordained practice. Both the ancestors through his son will be thrown into hell.
and descendants are, in fact, correct. The Bible that
4. Unfaithful Servant
condoned slavery back then is the same Bible used today.
Matthew 25:45-51, Luke 12:42-48
Third, in an effort to mitigate antagonism and promote
harmony, we should avoid the slavery debate with those who Those who are not prepared to receive the
regard the statues as memorials to their deceased forebears kingdom of God will be sent to hell.
who gave their lives to defend the beloved Southern way of
5. Talents/Minas
life. Instead, we should channel our energy to correcting
Matthew 25:14-30, Luke 19:11-27
the present-day inequalities, oppression, and unfairness
that minorities of all races, ethnicities, and orientations Those who do not use God’s bountiful resources
experience in America. productively will endure everlasting suffering.
Fourth, we should seek compromise and accommodation
6. Watchful Servants
by proposing to place explanatory plaques, historical
Mark 13:32-37, Luke 12:35-40
markers, and additional statuary near the Confederate
memorials, with the goal of clarifying and balancing official Be ready for Jesus’s return, because only God
community recognition. This should be done in a way that knows when he is coming.
satisfies—as much as is possible—the competing interests
7. Great Banquet
and viewpoints of all parties, realizing that no solution will
Luke 14:15-24
please everyone.
Those who are too busy to accept God’s invitation
Epilogue will not enter the kingdom of Heaven.
After Courageous Conversations’ effort of three years
8. Master and His Servant
to add a small marker to Georgetown’s Confederate soldier
Luke 17:7-10
statue, the conservative county commissioners summarily
voted down the proposal on November 14, 2017. Don’t expect to be rewarded for only doing what is
required of you.
Brian Bolton is a retired psychologist living in Georgetown,
Texas. He dedicates this article to the memory of the late
Bible scholar A.J. Mattill, Jr., who called the Bible “the slave
owner’s best friend.”

1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 37

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AL North Alabama Freethought Association Huntsville http://www.meetup.com/thenafa

AL UA Alabama Atheists and Agnostics Tuscaloosa http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2234029305

AL UAH Non-Theists Huntsville http://www.facebook.com/uahnontheists

AL West Alabama Freethought Association Tuscaloosa http://www.meetup.com/westalabamafreethought

AR Arkansas Society of Freethinkers Little Rock http://www.ARFreethinkers.org

AR ArkLaTex Freethinkers, Atheists, Agnostics & Humanists Texarkana http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=128265161357

AR Southwest Arkansas Atheist Community Nashville http://goo.gl/K2koj

AZ Reason Riders Glendale Reasonriders.com

AZ Tucson Atheists Tucson http://www.meetup.com/Tucson-Atheists/

CA-N Atheist Advocates of San Francisco San Francisco http://atheistadvocatesofsanfrancisco.com/

CA-N Atheist Community of San Jose San Jose Sanjoseatheists.org

CA-N Humanist Community in Silicon Valley San Jose www.humanists.org

CA-N Atheists and Other Freethinkers Sacramento http://aofonline.org

CA-N Central Valley Alliance of Atheists and Skeptics Fresno http://www.cvaas.org

CA-N Contra Costa Atheists & Freethinkers Pleasant Hill http://www.meetup.com/Contra-Costa-Atheists-and-Freethinkers/

CA-N East Bay Atheists Oakland http://www.eastbayatheists.org

CA-N San Francisco Atheists San Francisco http://www.sfatheists.com

CA-N Santa Cruz Atheists Santa Cruz http://santacruzatheists.org

CA-N Rosmoor Atheists Walnut Creek http://goo.gl/K2koj

CA-S Atheist Coalition of San Diego San Diego http://www.atheistcoalition.org

CA-S Humanist Fellowship of San Diego San Diego http://goo.gl/K2koj

CA-S Atheist Society of Kern Bakersfield http://goo.gl/K2koj

CA-S Backyard Skeptics Villa Park http://www.backyardskeptics.com

CA-S Humanist Society of Santa Barbara Santa Barbara http://www.santabarbarahumanists.org

CA-S New Atheists of East County Jamul http://www.meetup.com/New-Atheists-of-East-County/

CA-S Orange County Atheists Orange http://www.ocatheists.com

CA-S Riverside Atheists and Free Thinkers (RAFT) Riverside http://RiversideAtheists.org

40 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org 1ST QUARTER 2018

 CO Atheists and Freethinkers of Denver Denver http://athofden.tripod.com

CO Boulder Atheists Boulder http://www.boulderatheists.org

CO Metro State Atheists Denver http://metrostateatheists.wordpress.com

CO Pikes Peak Atheists Colorado Springs http://goo.gl/K2koj

CO Western Colorado Atheists & Freethinkers Grand Junction http://westerncoloradoatheists.org

CT Atheist Humanist Society of CT and RI Norwich http://atheisthumanist.org

CT Connecticut Valley Atheists South Windsor http://www.cvatheists.org

DC American University Rationalists and Atheists Washington http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=34367344446

DC Washington Area Secular Humanists Washington http://www.wash.org

FL Atheists of Florida Tampa http://goo.gl/K2koj

FL Central Florida Secular Alliance Dunnellon http://cfsecularalliance.weebly.com

FL Florida Atheists, Critical Thinkers & Skeptics Longwood/Orlando http://www.meetup.com/Critical

FL Gator Freethought (UF) Gainesville http://www.gatorfreethought.com/

FL Ocala Atheists Ocala http://www.meetup.com/Ocala-Atheists/

FL Sarasota-Manatee Atheists & Secular Humanists (SMASH) Nokomis http://goo.gl/K2koj

FL Secular Student Association at Univ. of Central FL Orlando http://ssaucf.com

FL Humanist Community of the Space Coast Satellite Beach http://goo.gl/K2koj

FL St. Petersburg Atheists St. Petersburg http://www.meetup.com/atheists-209

FL Tallahassee Atheists Tallahassee http://www.tallahasseeatheists.com/

FL Treasure Coast Atheists Stuart http://www.meetup.com/atheists-600

FL Williston Atheists Morriston http://goo.gl/K2koj

GA Albany Georgia Atheists Albany http://www.albanygeorgiaatheists.com/

GA Gainesville Atheists Gainesville http://goo.gl/K2koj

GA Atlanta Freethought Society Atlanta http://www.atlantafreethought.org

GA Black Nonbelievers of Atlanta Atlanta http://www.blacknonbelievers.org

GA Fayette Freethought Society Peachtree City http://www.meetup.com/Fayette-Freethought-Society

GA Atheists United, Kennesaw State Univ Kennesaw http://goo.gl/K2koj

GA Kennesaw State U. Student Coalition for Inquiry Kennesaw http://www.facebook.com/ksusci

GA Macon Atheists & Secular Humanists Macon http://www.meetup.com/georgiamash/

IA Atheists United for a Rational America Iowa City http://rationalamerica.com

IA Iowa Atheists & Freethinkers Des Moines http://www.meetup.com/Iowa-Atheists-and-Freethinkers

IL Chicagoland Freethinkers Chicago http://www.meetup.com/chicago-freethought/

IL The Chicago Freethought Project Chicago http://www.facebook.com/thechicagofreethoughtproject

IL IL/WI Stateline Atheists Society Rockford http://www.meetup.com/statelineatheists

IL IWU Atheist, Agnostics, and Non-Religious Bloomington http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5558627959

IL The Secular Segment Mt. Vernon http://www.secularsegment.com

KS Secular Latino Alliance Kansas City Secularlatinos.weebly.com

KS U of K Society of Open-Minded Atheists & Agnostics Lawrence http://www.kusoma.org

KY Humanist Forum of Central Kentucky Lexington http://www.facebook.com/groups/kyhumanists/

KY Lexington Atheists Lexington http://www.meetup.com/The-Lexington-Atheists-Meetup-Group

KY Louisville Atheists and Freethinkers Louisville http://www.louisvilleatheists.com/

KY Secular Student Alliance, Morehad State University Morehead Facebook.com/msussa

LA New Orleans Secular Humanist Association New Orleans http://nosha.org

MA Atheists of Greater Lowell Lowell http://www.meetup.com/lowellatheists

MA Boston Atheists Boston http://bostonatheists.org

MD Freethinkers Union at McDaniel College Westminster <none>

1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 41

AFFILIATES AND LOCAL PARTNERS
MD Secular Student Alliance, Frostburg State University Frostburg Secularstudents.org/frostburg

MD Maryland Freethinkers Annapolis http://www.mdfreethinkers.com

ME Maine Atheists and Humanists Waterville http://goo.gl/K2koj

MI Atheists @ Oakland University Rochester http://www.facebook.com/AtheistsAtOU

MI Atheists, Skeptics, & Humanists Assn, N. Michigan U. Marquette http://goo.gl/K2koj

MI Michigan Atheists Detroit http://michiganatheists.org

MI Mid-Michigan Atheists & Humanists Lansing http://www.mmah.org

MN Atheists for Human Rights Minneapolis http://atheistsforhumanrights.org

MN Campus Atheists Skeptics & Humanists Minneapolis http://cashumn.org

MO Black Freethinkers of Kansas City Kansas City http://www.meetup.com/Black-FreeThinkers-of-KC/

MO Columbia Atheists Columbia http://www.meetup.com/The-Columbia-Atheists-Meetup-Group

MO Joplin Freethinkers Joplin http://www.joplinfreethinkers.org

MO Kansas City Atheist Coalition Kansas City http://www.kcatheists.org

MO MU Skeptics, Atheists, Secular Humanists & Agnostics Columbia http://muSASHA.org

MO O’Fallon Freethinkers O’Fallon http://www.meetup.com/OFallon-Freethinkers

MO Rationalist Society of St. Louis St. Louis http://www.rssl.org

MO Secular Student Alliance @ UCMO Warrensburg http://www.centralskeptics.org

MO Springfield Freethinkers Springfield http://www.meetup.com/SpringfieldFreethinkers

MO Springfield Skeptics Springfield http://goo.gl/K2koj

MO St. Joseph Skeptics St. Joseph http://stjosephskeptics.org

MO We Are Atheism Grandview http://goo.gl/K2koj

MS Humanist Ethical Atheist Rational Thought Society Biloxi http://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/HeartsOfTheSouth

MS Great Southern Humanist Society Biloxi http://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/southernatheist

MS Mississippi Humanist Association Jackson Mshumanists.org

NC A-News Raleigh http://www.apartmentJ.com

NC Charlotte Atheists & Agnostics Charlotte http://www.charlotteatheists.com

NC Hickory Humanist Alliance Claremont http://goo.gl/K2koj

NC MASH Ft. Bragg Fayetteville http://www.mashfortbragg.org

NC Sandhills Secular Society Hope Mills http://goo.gl/K2koj

NC WNC Humanists Fairview http://www.wnchumanists.org

ND Red River Freethinkers Fargo http://redriverfreethinkers.org

NE Omaha Atheists Omaha http://omahaatheists.org/

NJ Camden County Humanists Blackwood http://goo.gl/K2koj

NJ New Jersey Humanist Network Somerville http://njhn.org/

NJ Secular Student Alliance @ Montclair State Univ. Montclair http://secularstudents.org/montclair

NJ South Jersey Humanists Oceanville http://goo.gl/K2koj

NJ William Paterson Univ. Secular Student Alliance Pompton Lakes https://www.facebook.com/SSA.WPUNJ

NM Roswatheists Roswell http://www.meetup.com/Roswatheists

NM Atheist Community of Santa Fe Santa Fe http://goo.gl/K2koj

NV Reno Freethinkers Reno http://www.RenoFreethinkers.org

NY Freethinkers of Upstate New York Syracuse http://www.funygroup.org

NY Gotham Atheists New York https://www.meetup.com/GothamAtheists/

NY Hudson Valley Humanists Saugerties http://hudsonvalley.humanists.net

NY Long Island Atheists East Setauket Meetup.com/li-atheists

NY New York City Atheists New York http://nyc-atheists.org

NY Ward Melville High School Secular Student Alliance East Setauket http://goo.gl/K2koj

42 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org 1ST QUARTER 2018

 NY Westchester Atheists Chappaqua http://www.meetup.com/atheists-504

OH Free Inquiry Group Cincinnati http://www.gofigger.org

OH Freethought Dayton Dayton http://www.meetup.com/freethoughtdayton

OH Humanist Community of Central Ohio Columbus http://www.hcco.org

OH Mid-Ohio Atheists Mansfield http://midohioatheists.org

OK Atheist Community of Tulsa Tulsa http://www.ACTOK.org

OK Oklahoma Atheists Oklahoma City http://www.oklahomaatheists.com

PA NEPA Freethought Society Wilkes-Barre http://www.nepafreethought.org

SC Piedmont Humanists Greenville http://www.PiedmontHumanists.org

SC Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry Charleston http://www.lowcountryhumanists.org

SC Upstate Atheists Boiling Springs http://goo.gl/K2koj

TN Memphis Atheists Memphis http://goo.gl/K2koj

TN Memphis Freethought Alliance Memphis http://memphisfreethought.com

TN Nashville Secular Life Nashville http://www.meetup.com/secularlife

TN Rationalists of East Tennessee Knoxville http://www.rationalists.org

TX Atheist Community of Austin Austin http://atheist-community.org

TX Corpus Christi Atheists Corpus Christi http://www.meetup.com/CCAtheists

TX Denton Atheists Denton http://www.meetup.com/The-Denton-Atheists-Meetup-Group

TX El Paso Atheists El Paso http://www.elpasoatheists.com

TX Freethinkers Association of Central Texas San Antonio http://FreethinkersACT.org

TX Golden Triangle Freethinkers Beaumont http://goldentrianglefreethinkers.org

TX Houston Atheists Houston Meetup.com/Houston-atheists

TX Kingwood Humble Atascocita Atheists Atascocita http://www.kha-atheists.org/

TX Lubbock Atheists Lubbock http://www.meetup.com/atheists-496

TX Secular Humanist Society of East Texas Nacagdoches http://goo.gl/K2koj

TX UNT Freethought Alliance Denton http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7647566521

TX Wise Free Thinkers and Skeptics Wise http://www.meetup.com/Wise-Free-Thinkers-and-Skeptics

UT Salt Lake Valley Atheists Salt Lake City http://nowscape.com/a

VA Beltway Atheists Leesburg http://www.meetup.com/Beltway-Atheists-Inc

VA NOVA Atheists Leesburg http://www.meetup.com/NOVA-Atheists

VT Atheists of Rutland Vermont Rutland http://www.atheistsofrutlandvt.com/

WA Seattle Atheists Seattle http://www.seattleatheists.org

WA Tri-City Freethinkers Pasco http://www.tricityfreethinkers.org

WI Southeast Wisconsin FreeThinkers Milwaukee http://swiftnow.org

WV Kanawha Valley Atheists and Agnostics Charleston http://goo.gl/K2koj

WV Mountain State Freethinkers Martinsville http://www.meetup.com/Mountain-State-Freethinkers

WV Morgantown Atheists Morgantown http://www.morgantownatheists.com

WY Wyoming Atheists Facebook.com/groups/wyomingatheists

US Atheist Nexus http://www.atheistnexus.org

US Black Atheists of America http://www.blackatheistsofamerica.org

US Military Association of Atheists & Freethinkers http://www.militaryatheistsorg

Intl Southeast Asia Freethought Association

Intl Ateístas de Puerto Rico San Juan http://goo.gl/K2koj

Intl Philippine Atheists and Agnostics Society http://www.patas.co

1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 43

AIMS AND PURPOSES
A merican Atheists, Inc. is a nonprofit, nonpolitical, educational organization dedicated to the complete
and absolute separation of state and church, accepting the explanation of Thomas Jefferson that the First
Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was meant to create a ‘wall of separation’ between state
and church.

American Atheists is organized:

• To stimulate and promote freedom of thought and inquiry concerning religious beliefs, creeds, dogmas, tenets,
rituals, and practices;

• To collect and disseminate information, data, and literature on all religions and promote a more thorough
understanding of them, their origins, and their histories;

• To advocate, labor for, and promote in all lawful ways the complete and absolute separation of state and church;

• To act as a ‘watchdog’ to challenge any attempted breach of the wall of separation between state and church;

• To advocate, labor for, and promote in all lawful ways the establishment and maintenance of a thoroughly
secular system of education available to all;
• To encourage the development and public acceptance of a humane ethical system stressing the mutual
sympathy, understanding, and interdependence of all people and the corresponding responsibility of each
individual in relation to society;

• To develop and propagate a social philosophy in which humankind is central and must itself be the source of
strength, progress, and ideals for the well-being and happiness of humanity;

• To promote the study of the arts and sciences and of all problems affecting the maintenance, perpetuation, and
enrichment of human (and other) life; and
• To engage in such social, educational, legal, and cultural activity as will be useful and beneficial to the members
of American Atheists and to society as a whole.

Definitions:
Atheism is the comprehensive world view of persons who are free from theism and have freed themselves of
supernatural beliefs altogether. It is predicated on ancient Greek Materialism.

Atheism involves the mental attitude that unreservedly accepts the supremacy of reason and aims at establishing
a life-style and ethical outlook verifiable by experience and the scientific method, independent of all arbitrary
assumptions of authority and creeds.

Materialism declares that the cosmos is devoid of immanent conscious purpose; that it is governed by its own
inherent, immutable, and impersonal laws; that there is no supernatural interference in human life; that humankind,
finding the resources within themselves, can and must create their own destiny. It teaches that we must prize our life
on earth and strive always to improve it. It holds that human beings are capable of creating a social system based on
reason and justice. Materialism’s ‘faith’ is in humankind and their ability to transform the world culture by their own
efforts. This is a commitment that is, in its very essence, life-asserting. It considers the struggle for progress as a moral
obligation that is impossible without noble ideas that inspire us to bold, creative works.

Materialism holds that our potential for good and more fulfilling cultural development is, for all practical purposes,
unlimited.

44 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org 1ST QUARTER 2018

AMERICAN ATHEISTS
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1ST QUARTER 2018 AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org | 45
Why I Am an Atheist
by Branden Dodson
At some point there comes a time when you just have to
say, Wait. Stop. This doesn’t make any sense. That point came
for me about three years ago when I finally decided that I had
pretended long enough.
I grew up in a Southern Baptist Christian household. By
the time I was about eight or nine years old, I recognized that
our religion seemed very similar to stories and myths I had
read about, so I wondered why was it correct to believe that we
experience pain and suffering because a snake talked to Eve
and tricked her, but, at the same time, it was a sin to believe that
Thor causes thunder with his hammer. I didn’t understand, but
I pretended that I did.
In 1978, Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, founders of the PTL
(Praise The Lord) Club, opened a Christian theme park called
Heritage USA in Rock Hill, South Carolina. In 1981, when I was
eleven, my family relocated to Rock Hill from Orange County,
Virginia, so that we could attend the church affiliated with PTL.
At that time, Heritage USA only consisted of a campground, a
swimming pool, and a rec center. In a few years it had grown to
include the five-hundred-room Grand Hotel, a four-hundred-
unit campground, a skating rink, Heritage Island Water Park,
and more.
I went to the private Christian school on the grounds of
Heritage USA, and was in the same class as Jim and Tammy
Faye’s daughter, Tammy Sue. I saw the Bakkers become
fabulously wealthy while my mother gave the PTL Club money
that we could not afford to give. (In 1987, Jim Bakker resigned
as president of Heritage USA amidst allegations of sexual and
financial misconduct. A federal grand jury indicted him for
fraud over diverting millions of dollars of church funds to
personal use.)
When I asked why we never seemed to receive any of the
blessings that the preachers promised us, I was told, among
other things, that our faith wasn’t strong enough, but I knew
that was a cheap cop-out, a loophole in their system. How does
one quantify faith? And, for that matter, what is faith? It’s belief
without proof. I was pretending to believe, I just could never
pretend enough.
During my teen years, as I struggled to maintain my faith, my
mother tried to teach me how to speak in tongues. “When you
are all alone and you are praying, just ask God to give you the
gift of tongues. Then, just open your mouth and start. Just make
utterances. Your spirit knows what it is saying, and God knows
what you are saying.” So there I was, kneeling beside my bed, my
mouth forming pure gibberish. I knew that this didn’t make any
sense, but I pretended that it did.
I left home earlier than most kids, and I was on my own by
the time I was eighteen. I had little time or inclination to go to
church, and it was then that I started openly calling myself an
agnostic.
Shortly after turning forty, I became a grandfather for the
first time and began seriously questioning the foundations
of Christianity. I knew that science had proved beyond any
46 | AMERICAN ATHEIST | www.atheists.org
reasonable
doubt that
the Earth is
billions of
years old, and
that humans
evolved from
other species.
Those facts
alone rule out the possibility of Adam and Eve. No Adam and
Eve means no original sin; no original sin means no need for
Jesus to die on the cross. But to think such a sacrilegious thing,
much less say it, was, well, unthinkable. So, I didn’t say anything.
I just continued to pretend.
My oldest brother is one of the most intelligent people I
know. He started higher education at age fourteen. He has spent
untold hours in a college classroom ever since as a perpetual
student studying philosophy, history, and Russian. He also
went to flight school, and is now in the medical profession.
When I started my serious questioning, I first went to my
brother thinking that I would find a kindred spirit—someone
who had set aside all that silly superstitious indoctrination that
we had suffered as kids.
What I found instead stunned me. Not only was he a
Christian, he was also a young-Earth creationist! He and I
started to debate back and forth, so I needed to learn more to
better defend my position. The more I learned, the less I could
pretend.
Quite by accident, I came across Broca’s Brain by Carl
Sagan. After reading this book, I sought out other authors, like
Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss. I thought that I was
just acquiring the erudition that would support my position, but
along the way, I found that they were different from the preachers
and evangelists: they didn’t require that I pretend anything.
I have a ten-year-old daughter. When she was five, she asked
me to take her to church, so I did. She and I attended the little
Baptist church within walking distance from our house. After
almost a year, I couldn’t mask my hypocrisy any longer, so I
stopped going but didn’t stop her from going. Whenever she
asked, I would drop her off and pick her up from church. In
time, she went less and less often. Just recently, she has started
to ask those questions that come from every child at one time or
another. Questions about Adam and Eve, about dinosaurs, and
even the idea of there being no God.
I think through every answer before I share it with her.
I try to word my responses as objectively as possible. I will
never try to dissuade or persuade her beliefs. I encourage her
to seek her own answers, to investigate for herself. And I will
never ask her to pretend.
Branden Dodson owns a small landscaping business in Fredericksburg,
Virginia. When not working or golfing, he writes or spends time with
his family.
1ST QUARTER 2018
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