In this post, I am going to explain why I don’t think we should model our primary identification on any positive metaphysical position, but rather should stake our ground on epistemology and methodology instead.

Christians identify themselves based on an allegiance to Jesus Christ. First and foremost they communicate “I am a follower of Jesus Christ”. When pressed for explanation of what this means the traditional response is to identify with the sorts of doctrines one finds in the Apostle’s Creed.

For many devout Christians these beliefs are primary and no other beliefs can be accepted which undermine these ones. And while many Christians will try their best to reconcile apparently contradicting scientific, logical, philosophical, historical and common sense truths with their Creed, there are infamous problems that they have doing so. And this leads to the numerous embarrassments Christianity has suffered from Christians who cannot cope with science or its metaphysical implications.

My concern is that, given the nature of the human mind, putting any particular belief as one’s intellectual bedrock and key identifier of one’s position in the conflict of ideas and practices risks this same problem. If people begin identifying themselves as first and foremost “evolvers” or “evolutionists” (rather than just as skeptics or atheists, etc.), then this positive position becomes paramount to them and an attack on it risks being taken as an attack on their very identity, just the way attacks on many religious people’s belief in God is wrongly taken by them as offenses against them themselves as persons.

This is the danger of tagging yourself with a specific idea—especially in the arena of religion. And when you start saying things like that evolution can do a better job of solving every problem God has previously been thought to solve, then you set up your evolutionary metaphysics as a competitor religion. Already atheism, which is, strictly speaking just the negation of theism, is tagged by many lazy dualistic taxonomers as a religion simply because it addresses the question of gods and the question of gods is treated as primarily a religious (and not a philosophical) question in the public mind.

The crude classifiers think “well everyone must have a religion” or “something fulfills religious functions for everyone” or “everyone has a god, even if it’s only their own reason”, etc. and on such grounds just insist on exposing atheists as having a religion after all no matter what we do or say. Do we have prominent figures in our movement? They must be the atheists’ priests! Do we have any firm epistemological, metaphysical, or moral commitments? Those must be the atheists’ dogmas! This is even the case while atheists are typically a group suspicious of, and hostile to, metaphysics and all broad, speculative claims that do not have scientific backing. Were atheists to call themselves “evolvers” and back a robust speculative metaphysics, there is no doubt in my mind that the lazy would immediately tag this as being just like faith-based reasoning no matter how much we protested to the contrary.

And, worse, if we saw ourselves and defined ourselves by our belief in metaphysical evolution first and foremost, we would be more likely to start to treat it as rigid dogma as the religious tend to do. We would be more likely to have implicit faith, the unwillingness to reconsider and explore new evidence against our current metaphysics.

In a way, this is a potential danger even with atheism itself–that identifying with disbelief in gods could become so important that we become hostile to any legitimate evidence for gods. This is a potential hazard of any believing or disbelieving.

So, given all of this, I think the best ground to stand on is epistemology. When asked “what are you?” our answer should be along the lines of “freethinker”. This has an unfortunately presumptuous sounding connotation of course, in that it can sound self-congratulatory, like you’re saying you are freer thinking than others. You had might as well go the whole arrogant nine yards and call yourself “The Correct Ones”.

But that’s not what “Freethinker” really means. It does not mean the presumption of superiority, but it means the acknowledgment of no arbitrary authorities in thought. Freethinkers, in principle, stand for free thought and against the right of anyone to demand assent to propositions by faith alone. The key contrast with the faith-based is that they acknowledge a legitimacy to surrendering one’s belief to priests, prophets, institutions, dogmas, and holy books even when no appeal to common sense or rigorous philosophy or science is given.

Self-professed “Freethinkers” should not be heard as congratulating themselves on thinking better than anyone else, but rather as those committed to the principle that everyone is entitled to, and responsible to demand, sufficient reasons for believing anything they are asked to assent to.

Allegiance to this principle of free thought is what should mark us as distinct from the faith-based as our key, anti-faith, anti-authoritarian principle. And free thought can stand for thought free of all prejudicial encumberances that stand in the way of true knowledge. It is an embrace of the scientific method, of philosophical rigor, of logical rigor, and of all that we have learned in the past several hundred years about how to identify and overcome bad forms of reasoning and replace them with more truth-conducive ones.

This should be our rallying point because today’s best metaphysics might tomorrow be refuted. Even today’s best science could see an earth shattering paradigm shift. People’s identities should not be bound up with any doctrine since that makes it harder for them to change their minds and abandon it when such a cataclysmic change happens. They should think of themselves first and foremost as those who oppose prejudice and willful belief of what is unsupported or undermined by evidence. The more obedience to this principle is the only thing they anchor themselves by, the more likely they are to be properly flexible when understanding progresses.

Plato and Aristotle were wonderful metaphysicians and the Catholic Church was to be commended for learning a great deal from them. But the Church’s dogmatic elevation of ideas from their metaphysics into non-negotiable absolutes has a once vibrant and progressive intellectual tradition lumbering stagnantly and regressively into the 21st Century.

Eric is right that atheists should give much much more rigorous and open-minded accounts of metaphysics than at present. But we should only believe them with as much conviction as their rational strength warrants. And before we bring up our metaphysics, we should be wary of giving the impression that we are saying, “oh I have heard your faith-based gobbledygook which I’m free to ignore and now here’s my faith-based gobbledygook which you are free to ignore too” (which is what too many people hear when metaphysics, especially related to religion, is raised).

So, instead we should stress our epistemic standards, stress their proven viability in practice, and then, when pushed for how we might answer metaphysical answers say (in so many words), “Well, these are the best alternatives there are and here is why they are better than theistic alternatives, and here is me stressing that I am only going to assent to the best alternative to the extent to which it is likely to be true.”

Finally, this prioritizing of free (and rigorously critical and skeptical) thinking is not another kind of faith as might be ironically charged. Placing skepticism as the priority is not some overestimation of the mind’s ability to refute every false doctrine or to know that every metaphysical doctrine is false, or anything like that. Cautious skepticism and slow willingness to assent to propositions until their evidence has been adequately established is not a statement that everything not assented to is false. Rather it is a recognition of the limits of the human mind to know and a painstaking curb on the temptations of the human mind to presume too much too impetuously and to believe by faith.

Skepticism is the antidote to the poison of faith, not itself another faith.

Lastly, why do I identify primarily as an atheist, despite having made the passionate case for “freethinker”. Well, it is factually true I am an atheist and it is in accepted parlance the scandalous word that signifies rejection of submission to all faith-based authorities more boldly and defiantly than any other and draws the line in the sand against theists in particular, in a way “freethinker” does not quite manage.

And given the current state of things, that confrontational stance is where the action is. It’s where the principled stand I want to make against faith is best understood.

First, I want to stress, contra-Eric, that “atheism” is the best and most accurate general term we have for non-theists.

Eric complains that “atheism” characterizes him negatively in terms of what he does not believe (as though that were more important than the many positive things he does believe). He also worries that the term atheism has too much baggage which leads people to make misleading assumptions about his metaphysics (e.g. that he is a materialist when he is not).

What this ignores is that a concerted and potentially successful effort is underway to make clear that the only thing atheism itself strictly means is that one lacks belief in any personal gods and that it need not mean anything else.

This most stripped down, strictly negative, “dictionary” meaning for atheism is the one we should emphasize for several reasons.

First of all, it is accurate. Regardless of whether previous atheists all got lumped in with materialism or nihilism or existentialism or communism or any other questionable “-ism”, the term is the clearest, broadest, most natural, and most familiar candidate available for contrasting our shared position with theism. While the word is taboo in many places, it is a more natural catch-all than other words with more content that would divide people too much for a true classification scheme. I am perfectly fine with the proliferation of atheist metaphysics and atheist ethical groups and political groups, etc. But on the most general level of categorization, an atheist is an atheist if she simply lacks belief in, or worship of, personal gods.

This bareness and simplicity of “Dictionary Atheism” unifies us as a competing bloc against the large contingent of theists, while also being empty enough to not constrain different atheists from having different particular views about epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, politics, etc. (just as theists do). If agnostic atheists, gnostic atheists, and deists can all find common cause as opponents of theism–i.e., as atheists–then there is a unified front against theism that comes in handy on a central issue, even if particular kinds of atheists diverge from each other in any number of particulars from there.

Eric also complains about going to atheist meetings where

everybody was mainly there just to be hostile towards religion (by which they pretty much all seemed to mean the conservative Christianity of the American religious right). I don’t see how hostility is ever helpful. I dislike hostility from atheists as much as I dislike it from religious fundamentalists. I have no interest in participating in a group whose primary purpose is the hatred of some other group. I’d prefer to build positive bridges and to expand the rational community of hope.

While I agree that it is dangerous for atheists only to be associated with the negative and to only organize as an opposition group and never as people who do anything positive, there is nonetheless still room for a level of organization on which we are an opposition group. The hegemony of irrationalistic, faith-based thinking and institutions is real. And it requires not only positive alternatives but some degree of hostile (but always non-violent) opposition to faith’s damaging ethical and political consequences.

Atheists have been treated with an enormous amount of hostility over the ages. A good part of atheists’ reputations as generally angry and hostile is actually due to religious projection of these traits into us as part of their vilification of us. Where atheists are angry and focused on their anger, often it is either a phase of getting out pent up and repressed frustrations based on cultural, familial, and ecclesiastical abuse over their personal dissent from religion. They deserve this outlet, even if they should then be steered into constructive channels from there.

Other times atheist anger is a proper and calibrated response to injustices, including the unfairness of manifestly unqualified religious leaders and institutions being held up as authorities to the detriment of morality and knowledge.

Do angry atheists sometimes go over the top? Yes, regularly activist atheists are as unnecessarily intemperate in their rhetoric as activist liberals or activist conservatives or activist environmentalists or activist feminists or Tea Party activists or members of any other activist groups. But does that mean they should never organize specifically around their opposition to unwarranted religious power over hearts, minds, and governments? No way. We can encourage activist atheists to temper their rhetoric without counter-productively conflating the whole endeavor of being an opposition movement with being a hate group. Conflict is part of life. We should be as respectful as possible but that does not mean treating conflict as an inherent evil to be avoided at all costs.

An atheist opposition movement is very necessary. Atheists (and other God-ignoring scientists and academics) have for a couple of centuries now been doing the positive, constructive science, metaphysics, ethics, cosmology, etc. that Eric wants us to focus on. And yet all the positive advances in god-indifferent ideas have not by themselves been able to supplant numerous theistic and superstitious ideas or institutions in the cultural mainstream.

Countless natural and social scientists and philosophers have advanced our knowledge in ways which de facto undermine theism and religious beliefs and institutions and should naturally have made them irrelevant and obsolete. And yet, those institutions chug on (and often even grow) because all the positive alternatives in the world make no difference to the mainstream culture as long as they only exist in the parallel universe of academia and science labs.

And even if we were able to mainstream knowledge about alternatives to theism and theistic religion, this will not by itself win over people who feel no compunction to abandon their existing beliefs. So what if there would be an evolutionary metaphysics on the market that some philosopher says for some arcane reason is better than theism? If someone has deep personal, cultural, familial ties to her theism that go unchallenged, she feels as though she has no reason to ever seriously consider this new alternative. A negative attack on theism is important for people to understand why they need to leave what is comfortable to them to begin with.

And while I agree with Eric that atheists should engage in philosophical speculation and develop robust alternative accounts about metaphysics and ethics, there are dangers in defining ourselves as primarily “evolutionists” and “evolvers” as he suggests.

First and foremost, in the popular mind there are few rules if any constraining speculative thinking. People think that when it comes to speculation, we are free to believe whatever we want as our “faith-based choice”. Atheists who center themselves not on a call for more epistemological rigor but rather on a speculative metaphysics would be to the average person “Just another speculative, faith-based belief system, only as valid as any other, including theism”. Even worse, we would be cast as “just another religion” which can be waved away as easily as one waves away a foreign culture’s beliefs as “maybe good for that culture but not at all a challenge to my own religion”.

We would be “just another faith” since we are no longer just speculating metaphysically but defining and identifying ourselves by a metaphysical hypothesis that is insufficiently grounded in evidence to justify the strength of our commitments.

I think an atheist metaphysician may feel well enough justified in believing in cosmological evolution to qualifiedly believe in it and hypothesize about it. But to make it a defining feature of one’s identity and a foundational belief that influences one’s entire way of thinking in a controlling way risks being formally identical enough to other, irrationalistic faiths for the other faiths to see an opening and say, “See ‘Evoluitonism’ is just another faith—no more justified than ours—and therefore there is no need to abandon the faith you already are attached to for something that is only another faith.”

And not only this, but the preexisting faiths already cozy up nicely to people’s anthropomorphizing, superstitious brains in a more naturally intuitive way than evolutionary thinking does. In the competition among leaps of faith, faith in a purposeful person in the sky offering love and eternal life would likely trounce a vague, indifferent, counter-intuitive, unguided process like cosmic evolution which still leaves the question open “where did the first thing come from since it could not have evolved out of any prior thing?” I think if it was faith in personal gods vs. faith in all-encompassing metaphysical evolution, a populace which already will not even accept the scientifically sure evolution by natural selection (but constantly demands either creationism or personalistic theistic evolution) will certainly choose the personal gods over the impersonal evolution principle. It’s a losing proposition.

And not only would evolutionary metaphysics persuade hardly anyone in the cultural mainstream, there would be a much worse consequence: advocating it and centralizing our identities based on it would lose us the moral high ground. We would no longer credibly be able to define ourselves as those who stand for rational scrupulousness and against faith. I am for speculation but not for the elevation of speculative beliefs to a greater role and influence than their degree of sureness warrants. This is what separates me first and foremost from the faith-based thinker and I want to keep it that way.

And, finally, the worst consequence of defining ourselves as “evolutionists” is that it would play right into the fundamentalists’ hands. They desperately want to drag down the theory of evolution to the status of “mere, faith-based speculation” and a “prejudicing worldview”.

By trumpeting speculative metaphysical evolutionary theories as foundational to our thinking and identifying as “evolvers”, we would be actively helping them in their efforts to confuse all evolutionary thinking with “just another unscientific, faith-based worldview”. We would be undermining the crucial effort to establish in the public mind the truth that evolution by natural selection is a scientific theory that should be rationally compelling to all people regardless of faith commitments and that should be capable of undermining many religious beliefs which its objective truth objectively falsifies.

Publicly equivocating in our use of the concept of evolution and extending it liberally and ideologically to solve every other cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical problem—and doing all of this as part of building an inevitably partisan community identity—would add all sorts of counter-productive baggage to the theory of evolution that it does not need and which fundamentalists have been working hard to saddle it with for decades.

Evolution’s primary association should only be with scientific neutrality, not with any one community, not with wishful speculation, and not with overreaching, all encompassing accounts of everything in existence.

The worst consequence to fear from Eric’s suggestion is that fundamentalists are able to disingenuously claim that evolution by natural selection is not the outcome of the best, most objective science, but is only supported by a metaphysical prejudice towards an evolutionary cosmos. If evolution becomes a matter of faith, a dogma we are caught looking to sneak under every nook and cranny of existence, then we give ammunition to the lie that even biological evolution is only believed in because of that preexisting dogmatic faith that evolution is everything.

And once evolution is tied up with faith, then it loses any standing to challenge people’s existing faiths. And, again, when given the choice between their own, preexisting arbitrary faith attachments on the one hand and an alternative set of arbitrary faith attachments on the other, the vast majority feel justified in sticking with their own arbitrary beliefs and ignoring the alternatives.

Your Thoughts?

Daniel Fincke: How do you feel about Dawkins calling “God” a delusion and other language of atheists that treats religious belief as a psychological problem—even only “metaphorically”. Do you think it’s accurate? Is it fair? What has been your experience with the interaction between mental health and religiosity?

Richard Wade: There’s what you mean by a word, there’s what a dictionary says a word means, and then there’s what that word means to your audience.

In the strictest sense, a delusion is a false belief, a conviction of the reality of something that is indeed not real. So in the narrowest sense of the word, if I believe there is one more cookie in the cookie jar, but the jar is actually empty, that could be called a delusion. If I believe that a herd of purple flying elephants is headed right for my house, and the skies are actually elephant-free, that also could be called a delusion. In the case of the cookie, most people would use the word “mistake” rather than “delusion,” while in regards to the purple flying elephants, most people would use the word “delusion” rather than “mistake.”

One of the main criteria for defining mental health vs. mental disorder is to see the effects that a person’s thought processes and behaviors have on two important things in their lives, their ability to love and their ability to work.

So if a quirky thing attracts the attention of other people, but it does not rise to a level of severity where it interferes with making and keeping personal relationships, or the ability to do one’s livelihood, then it is just a quirk, an eccentricity, an idiosyncrasy,  rather than a mental disorder.

Dawkins lays out a pretty convincing case that religion very much interferes with the ability of some individuals “to love and to work,” and the ability of whole societies to do the same.  Regarding the ability to love, he spells out many examples of dysfunctional relationships between individuals, between sectarian groups, and between whole regions in very unloving conflicts arising from religious beliefs.  Regarding the ability to work, consider that the world becomes more and more dependent on good, solid science every day.  Faith thinking discourages rational thinking,  and religious dogmas drag at society’s ability to understand, to accept and to support science, so religious beliefs definitely hurt our ability to make our livelihood as a civilization.

So I think that he has a good argument for calling it a delusion not just from the narrow dictionary sense, but from a psychological meaning as well.  However there’s the way a word is heard by your audience.

Religious people will take umbrage at their belief in a god being called a delusion not only because they think they’re right, but also because they as individuals think that they’re doing just fine, with nothing interfering with their ability to love or to work.  Their anger is probably at least in part about the connotation. They feel that the word “delusion” lumps them together with lunatics who play with their feces and need to be kept in locked facilities, lest they act on their delusions that they can fly off the rooftop, or they are the appointed executioner of some evil person. Even given that anger, I think Dawkins’ use of the word in his book was a good idea because it certainly gets people’s attention. “The God Mistake” just wouldn’t have that much punch.

As a counselor, I’ve worked with some very religious people, and I’ve worked with some very crazy people. Only rarely did I ever encounter someone who was both, and I never saw a link where one trait was a cause of the other, or where one exacerbated the other. What the religiosity and the craziness did was to color each other, or to give each other a flavor.

There was a recent incident at Virginia Tech where during a discussion at the “Ask an Atheist” table, a young man drew a cross on the back of his hand and asked others to stab him in his hand with a pen, saying something about proving that God exists. They refused, and he ended up stabbing himself several times with the pen. Eventually he was arrested and he was further violent with the police.

Several atheists commenting on blogs about this were quick to draw a causal connection between his apparent religiosity and his bizarre and self-destructive behavior, equating religion in general with severe and dangerous mental disorders. I think that is an ignorant connection to make, and an unworthy argument to attempt by exploiting this young man’s personal suffering.

It will take a psychiatric examination to know, but on the surface it looks like the young man has a serious disorder, perhaps schizophrenia. It often shows up when people are in their early twenties. In my opinion, it’s very unlikely that his religious beliefs have any causal relationship with his disorder. His religion did not “make” him go crazy, and it probably did not make it any worse, either. He would probably still be having trouble with bizarre thought processes and impulse control problems at this time in his life if he was previously an atheist or any other category about religion.

When people start to psychologically decompensate, they very often draw upon the ideas, stories, images, and terminology of whatever things were important in their upbringing in an attempt to express their confused thoughts and emotions. Those things aren’t the cause of the mental disorder, they’re just the vocabulary with which it is expressed. The religiosity and the craziness color each other, flavor each other.

So I think that in a broad civilization-wide view, god beliefs and religions are “delusions” in the psychological sense because they do harm to our ability to have better relationships with each other as individuals, as cultural groups, and as nations, and they do handicap our efforts to use science to better secure our livelihood as a civilization. As I’ve often said, nothing divides people from themselves or from each other as quickly, deeply and permanently as does religion. This is easy to demonstrate. Just say that statement to a believer, and then ask them to look at their own feelings about you. Chances are they will be feeling very divided from you, not just in disagreement with you.

However, I don’t think it is a good idea  to draw that comparison on a more personal level, as in the kind of mental illnesses we see in troubled individuals.  It’s not really accurate, and it’s also not a successful tactic. It won’t convince religious people to give up their beliefs. It’s only going to galvanize them against the more broad use of the analogy.

Read all the previous 7 parts of the interview, in which I ask Richard about:

The Origins of the “Ask Richard” Column

Anger In Families Divided Over Religion

Atheism and Religions As Bases For Identities

How Atheists Should Respond to Alcoholics Anonymous, and How Personal Values Influence Professional Therapy

The Ethics of Lying To Stay In A Protective Closet

How Atheists Should Confront And Replace Religions

Whether Believers and Non-Believers Should Avoid Marrying Each Other

Your Thoughts?

Daniel Fincke: Okay, so, I don’t think you’d be one to give hard and fast rules for everyone. But from your extensive experience in marriage counseling, do you think marriages between believers and ardent atheists are a particularly bad idea? If you learn an atheist refuses to get involved with religious people, do you do more than just respect that choice but think it particularly wise or particularly closed-minded? Should atheists treat this as a key assessment for marrying people, especially with the prospective education (and possible indoctrination) of children in the future? What are the real issues that make “unequally yoked” arrangements work or fail?

Richard Wade: Relationships are the most complex things that people ever attempt. Putting men on the moon and returning them safely to Earth is not quite as complex. Even in the best of circumstances, starting with backgrounds and sets of values that match well, couples are faced with very very complex tasks of communicating to each other on multiple levels. Add to that they are often quite unfamiliar with and unconscious of many of their own issues, and add to that they are always changing, always a moving marksman aiming at a moving target, and you have an extremely challenging task to make connections.

Then enters the most divisive thing ever invented, religion.

Young couples learn their best and their worst habits of communication from their families of origin. They almost never have any formal training or coaching in how to effectively communicate, and in their new relationship, they tend to practice their worst habits of communication more often than their best habits. I often have wished that states would require some basic pre-marital counseling before granting marriage licenses. It is amazing what important things that courting people don’t discuss before marrying. They only find out important things about the other after they’re deep into commitments.

In the case of an atheist/theist couple, they usually have some discussions about religious issues during their early dating period, and if their differences are not immediate “deal breakers” they tend to gloss over their differences, telling themselves more than telling each other that it won’t matter. This is often because they’re drunk on their initial love and infatuation for each other. It feels so good, and they don’t want to spoil it. They often fall into subtle patterns of tacitly agreeing to avoid any topics, including religion, that would bring up the possibility of a future impasse. The “elephant in the room” syndrome begins to grow.

Atheists sometimes pride themselves on being clear thinkers, looking at things rationally, and they often accuse theists of wishful thinking. But all people who are in love are susceptible to the intoxication of our endorphins and all the other brain chemicals that are released during pair bonding.

So things go along pretty smoothly until the question of children comes up.

Suddenly both people become adamant about their viewpoints where they used to assume they wouldn’t care much. There seems to be something far more primal, far more biologically imperative in seeing to it that one’s offspring copy our most cherished beliefs, even if our mates do not. It’s a kind of intellectual version of our DNA insisting that it make viable copies of itself.

So if a couple with widely differing religious views were to ask me for advice, I would urge them to get several sessions of counseling from a counselor who can be impartial about religious issues, one who concentrates on helping them to fully communicate, to carefully think ahead about many issues that may emerge down the road, and to work out clear and realistic agreements.

That will probably help increase their odds of a successful relationship, but in general, I don’t bet much money on these couples lasting for very long.

You see, there is another compounding problem that multiplies the complexities: their parents and families. In all but very rare cases, couples don’t just marry each other, they marry each other’s families. Those families have all sorts of expectations and requirements for their child’s mate.

I don’t know of any good survey on this, so what I’m going to say is merely my impression from dealing with many “mixed” couples. It’s a process that gets tougher at every step. I think only a small fraction of atheist/theist couples survive the initial dating courtship. Only a fraction of that group then survives the early years of courtship and marriage, either by a healthy set of agreements, or more likely the mutual denial that I described.

Then even if that much smaller group somehow passes the trial by fire of what the heck to do about their children’s religious upbringing, at every step along the way they will have their parents and siblings pressuring them to not go further with that “unsuitable” partner of theirs. The disapproval, the emotional blackmail, and the outright threats of cutting them off can take their toll on even the most intrepid of couples.

So to answer your question, no I don’t have hard and fast rules about such couples, only guidelines about going into these relationships with their eyes much more wide open than they think they are. They should talk, talk talk about it honestly and fearlessly in many separate discussions, and a referee, an impartial counselor would greatly improve the chances that those talks would be thorough and useful.

In sober moments, we look at the odds of a proposition, we look at the likelihood of a venture’s success, we count the number of smoldering wrecks scattered along the same road we’re traveling, and we often wisely decide that what we’re considering is not worth the risk. But sober moments and love are seldom in the same head at the same time. To touch on that biological imperative I mentioned earlier, nature doesn’t give a damn about our individual happiness when it drives us to find a mate. The only thing that matters to nature is to reproduce those DNA molecules,  period.

For our happiness, it’s up to us to use that big brain for something it that might go against its own central purpose. We have to think through the whole thing, projecting what will most likely happen during the next twenty to forty years of our bond with this prospective mate. It’s a guess at best, and it’s in a sense going against nature, but there we are, faced yet again with human nature.

Read the other 7 parts of the interview, in which I ask Richard about:

The Origins of the “Ask Richard” Column

Anger In Families Divided Over Religion

Atheism and Religions As Bases For Identities

How Atheists Should Respond to Alcoholics Anonymous, and How Personal Values Influence Professional Therapy

The Ethics of Lying To Stay In A Protective Closet

How Atheists Should Confront And Replace Religions

Whether Believers Are Literally Deluded

Your Thoughts?

In that last context, Richard finished his final answer by saying, “In short, on rare occasions, some people do not deserve being told the truth, because they do not respond to that truthfulness and candor honorably.   There’s also the idea of it not being anyone’s damn business. Keeping private the details of our sex lives, bowel habits, and religious views is not being “dishonest,” it’s being prudent, and I think that prudence is a very legitimate principle that must be considered along with the principle of honesty.”  The installment of our interview below picks up right there.

Daniel Fincke: You compared the forthright airing of religious views to oversharing about sex or bathroom matters.  I suspect it’s the fact that religious ideas are inherently faith-based, unsupportable, and incommensurable that makes people feel frustrated.  These inherently divisive and rationally insoluble features of religion make it logically impossible that religious adherents from opposing traditions can ever come to agreement with each other (unless they start abandoning what the most devout typically take to be the most foundational and non-negotiable beliefs).  In that context, discussion is doomed from the start and only ends with frustration and conflict.

And so the secularist compromise has, understandably, been to allow people their private beliefs to be whatever they want as long as they keep them from the public sphere where their logical sectarianism can only create irresolvable divides.  And that’s fine as a compromise for containing the influence of religion’s divisiveness.  But the unfortunate side effect of this approach is that it turns people against philosophical discussion itself.  All inconclusive (or just philosophically difficult) questions get a bad name.  All debate about ideas is assumed to be as inherently emotionalistic and irresolvable through reason as religious debates are.

And to me that is a disastrous over-correction.   I cringe when I hear even outspoken atheists say they don’t care what other people think, that they just want to be left alone, etc., as though philosophical debate in general and discussion of issues related to gods and religion in particular are matters that can only lead to conflict and never productive advance and agreement and learning.

Do you think I’m wrong about this?  Do you think all atheists should be concerned with is political and cultural respect and equality and secularism in government?  Do we not also have a responsibility to be modeling  how people can talk about ideas in ways that are actually reason based, rather than faith-based (and so actually resolution oriented, rather than conflict perpetuating)? Do you think we should take an active interest in dissuading people of their religious beliefs, out of our concern for truthful living?

Richard Wade: Firstly, I never use the phrase, “All atheists should…”

Daniel Fincke: I don’t mean every atheist, I just mean, the only thing atheists should be worried about, in case that’s not clear.

Richard Wade: Atheists are people who are unconvinced of gods. Beyond that, their interests, their politics, their hopes, fears and needs can be very disparate.   At this point in time, I’m very leery about seeing atheism as a cohesive ideology. It is for some, and their ideology includes many of the principles and aspirations that you have mentioned in your question. But what is important to those atheists may not be important to others. If from that ideology we build a dogma around ourselves, and then disapprove of other atheists who don’t live up to that,  then it seems to me that we’ve built ourselves a new prison similar to the dogma that many of us struggled so hard to escape.

There is nothing intrinsically and universally virtuous about being earnest about philosophical questions, or being philosophically mature. That is a value shared by those who share that value, and not shared by those who don’t.  Who is to say as if in a higher level of authority that one is superior to the other? Some atheists really do just want to be left alone, and while you and I might prefer that they be more engaged with their neighbors in critical thinking and discussion, I think it would be very arrogant and self-centered of us if we were to dismissively characterize as somehow “inferior” their honest desire to live simple lives and be left in peace.

As I said in a recent comment on Friendly Atheist, Calling oneself an atheist does not bring with it any obligation to follow some kind of atheist creed, dogma or precepts written by… who? No one owes any allegiance to such a creed, or ideology, or to any “cause,” just because they don’t believe in spooks in the sky.

I prefer atheists to be engaged in the on-going maturing of our civilization in any way they can, and any way that works for them. They may have an interest and a talent for that on a political level, but not on an interpersonal, one-to-one level. Others may have a better personal touch, and may have more interest in encouraging skepticism and critical thinking in face-to-face discussions over coffee, but they feel lost or overwhelmed or beyond their depth in bigger arenas. I encourage everyone to do whatever they are good at, and to be open to discovering that they might be good at more than what they originally thought.

Daniel Fincke: I agree of course that philosophical virtues are not the only important ones, and that not every one need have them or be much focused in life on the task of promoting them.  And I am not suggesting we should be dogmatic or have narrow understandings of what all atheists should think about any particular issue (at least by virtue of their being atheists).

My concern was that you might want to banish such questions into the realm of the private too strongly, but I see you didn’t mean so strong a connotation.  I think that it’s important that there be atheists out there challenging the hegemony of the major religions in matters of ethics and spirituality, and certain areas of philosophy, etc. This is not like just any other non-belief. This is a non-belief that leads to both disengagement with and challenge to massively overly influential authoritarian, regressive institutions that actively perpetuate bad thinking and some bad moral codes and attitudes.

And if atheists are not as passionate about defending rationalism itself—not any fine philosophical point in particular but the more general and basic primacy of reason in thought and practice—then we are not living up to a responsibility to be a counter-weight and a voice against injustice.  Of course, though, not every atheist has to be focused on this any more than every environmentally concerned person needs to be primarily engaged on those issues, etc. But in general some atheists do need to orient around that.  And I think that, without becoming dogmatic, we need to find a way to create alternative means for religious people to meet the needs they presently turn to religion for.  What are your thoughts on how we might do that in order to make religion feel less necessary for people?

Are there ways we can do that and avoid the vices of religion that we are so worried about?  And feel free to register any disagreements with any of what I just said too if you want!

Richard Wade: I didn’t think that an atheist dogma was where you were going with your first question about philosophical thinking.  I just have been very aware of this issue lately, and I tend to jump onto a soap box when I think about it. As you say, “avoiding the vices of religion” in ourselves first is what I’m talking about.

Daniel Fincke: Okay.  Is there any way we can be constructive and offer people substance without letting a paralyzing fear of rigidifying and dogmatizing prevent all positive advance “as atheists”?

Richard Wade: Many, if not most, atheists are capable of good, if simple, logical and rational thinking. But not that many are articulate. They are able to think clearly, but communicating those thoughts clearly to others is a very different, and much rarer ability. So we will always have far more atheists who agree with us, but are not going to be actively engaged in any kind of debate or dialogue on any level.

However, I think we are definitely in a very big historical trend, where with our newly found voices, the articulate ones will become engaged in the maturing of our civilization at the level at which they are proficient.  Every one of them who eloquently speaks for rationalism wakes up several others who thought about it but never spoke about it before. A voice calling in the wilderness IS heard by others who thought they were alone. I think as a species we are reaching a kind of critical mass, where rational thinking will no longer be only a philosophical stance, but will become a constantly growing norm.

I think I’m more patient about this than many others. It’s funny how older people, who have less time left are often more patient than younger people who have plenty of time. I look at this in terms of the next 100 to 200 years. So seeing it in the short term, like say, the next election cycle, it can be very frustrating to see many of us not being responsible for countering irrationality and superstition by being passive or apathetic, or by our inaction supporting that “hands off religious ideas” double standard.  I tend to say “Take a deep, slow breath, do your part as well as you can, but this is for the long haul.”  You get to cut your one stone for the gigantic edifice of a better civilization, and many others yet unborn will add theirs on top of yours. So while each of our contributions may be small, each one supports what is added on later.

As to your earlier question, “I think that, without becoming dogmatic, we need to find a way to create alternative means for religious people to meet the needs they presently turn to religion for. What are your thoughts on how we might do that in order to make religion feel less necessary for people?”

I think in an earlier installment of this interview, I used an analogy about a civilization where everyone is addicted to heroin and no one knows what it is like to be without it.  Referring to that again, we need to first step back from what we are assuming are actual “needs” and see if they really exist in people  intrinsically and are not just created by their use of religion. It could be that much of what we “need” will become irrelevant once our civilization gets over the withdrawals.  Then we can sort out what needs are truly built into human beings. Again, I’m speaking about the next couple of centuries.

Daniel Fincke: At least some of what people get out of religion is needed though.  I’m talking about the numerous parents who feel anxiety and enormous responsibility at having a kid and feel compelled to bring them to the holy man and the congregation to make sure they “learn values”.  If there is no other institution to fill that kind of void, you continue to have people lured back to religion out of insecurity about their own ability to instill values without institutional guidance.

Or the numerous people who use church as a vehicle for their desire for community, for their metaphysical curiosity and wonder, for their feelings of deep gratitude, their interest in meditation, their desire to be charitable.  Obviously there already exist some secular outlets for some of these needs but the packaging of all these things together is what religion offers and some of those things do not have strong secular alternatives at all.

I don’t think those sorts of goods can be dismissed as only religious fictions the way, say, people’s desire to be “saved” is. Of course people could just find secular alternatives without an “atheist” banner. But I guess what I’m interested in is how we can decouple the association people have in their minds whereby these things go hand-in-hand with religion (or indispensably require it even) unless we develop alternatives that show explicitly that they can be achieved in secular, rationalist ways.  Does that make sense?

Richard Wade: Well, we won’t really know for certain until we have very large numbers of people who are not mainlining on religion. People are remarkably inventive. We will invent solutions as we go along that we had not even envisioned we’d need just a short time before. Most importantly, we really should try to see the assumptions built into our very questions. For instance, you asked if there is not an alternative institution for parents to use to instill values into their children, they might be lured back to religion to fulfill that need.

Stop and look at that assumption framed in your question: Why an “institution”?  That is a whole paradigm that might be not only unnecessary, but actually growing obsolete. Why must we have some building called something like the Ministry of Values, filled with specialists who do some special value-instilling service? Why not, perhaps a culture of values? We already have that anyway. When we build institutions to things, in other words, when we centralize something, we immediately invite rival institutions to be built, and the whole divisive process starts again. When values are learned from a culture that is rich with them, we have dialogues about the differences and nuances, and we can improve on them. When we put them into an institution that is separate from the rest of the culture, and identified as the “source” of these values, we stop the dialogue and devolve into diatribe.

Read the other 7 parts of the interview, in which I ask Richard about:

The Origins of the “Ask Richard” Column

Anger In Families Divided Over Religion

Atheism and Religions As Bases For Identities

How Atheists Should Respond to Alcoholics Anonymous, and How Personal Values Influence Professional Therapy

The Ethics of Lying To Stay In A Protective Closet

Whether Believers and Non-Believers Should Avoid Marrying Each Other

Whether Believers Are Literally Deluded

Your Thoughts?

Daniel Fincke: So, you often advise people, especially young people who are under their parents’ financial roof, to be very cautious about coming out as atheists if it would cause them hardship.  What would you say to those who say that both as a matter of ethical principle and as a matter of effectively breaking religion’s power, people should be honest and even willing to sacrifice for truth in these areas if necessary?  Or to put it more in a more adversarial way: are you encouraging people to lie? Is that consistent with the values of truthfulness that are so important to many principled atheists?

Richard Wade: This comes up for me every time I read one of these letters where someone is under the authority or control of very intolerant religious people. It’s in a post I published recently, about an atheist woman who just discovered she has been hired by a “Christian based” company.  I’m never completely comfortable advising people to deceive others either passively or actively.  But I see these quandaries in life as an ever-shifting balance between the principles and the pragmatics. We have to acknowledge both in every situation.

Generally I encourage people to remain honest and to even be courageously forthcoming with the truth. But I do not think that I have the right to tell them to put themselves in harm’s way, whether it’s a teenager risking actual abuse or abandonment by their family, (and that does happen) or a newly hired nurse who really will be in a pickle if she loses her job at a “Christian company” while she looks for a more tolerant place to work. All these ethical choices exist in a context, not in a vacuum. The context includes people’s very legitimate material needs as well as their ideals and their principles.

I usually tell someone in such a predicament to carefully and discreetly investigate the situation first, to “feel them out” about how their parents or employer might react to being told that their child or employee is an atheist. Then if it seems obvious that it would not be in their best material or safety interest to be honest about it, I advise them to be as minimally deceitful as they can be for as short a time as they can be.

Invariably, someone commenting will say “Oh you should never lie. You should be brave and face whatever they do, and that will help all atheists to be more open”. With almost no exception, those people talking so bravely have never, ever been in such a situation where they might not be getting regular meals for a long time if they were to “out” themselves. In other words, it’s easy to talk bravely about principles and honesty and integrity when you’re not the one standing in harm’s way.  If a big man with a knife and a gun approaches me angrily demanding where is Richard Wade, I’ll say that Richard went off in that direction. Then I’ll call the police.  I have a very strong conscience, but I won’t feel guilty for lying to him.

So I reluctantly will even coach atheists in these predicaments how to lie the least that they must, and bide their time until they’re no longer under the thumb of these intolerant people. I think that the person to whom you tell the truth has some responsibility to make that truthfulness safe to tell. Some people will not honor a truthful atheist. The atheist’s lack of beliefs have nothing to do with their work or their duties, but the person in power will severely penalize them for demonstrating that courage and integrity.

In short, on rare occasions, some people do not deserve being told the truth, because they do not respond to that truthfulness and candor honorably. There’s also the idea of it not being anyone’s damn business. Keeping private the details of our sex lives, bowel habits, and religious views is not being “dishonest,” it’s being prudent, and I think that prudence is a very legitimate principle that must be considered along with the principle of honesty.

Read the other 7 parts of the interview, in which I ask Richard about:

The Origins of the “Ask Richard” Column

Anger In Families Divided Over Religion

Atheism and Religions As Bases For Identities

How Atheists Should Respond to Alcoholics Anonymous, and How Personal Values Influence Professional Therapy

How Atheists Should Confront And Replace Religions

Whether Believers and Non-Believers Should Avoid Marrying Each Other

Whether Believers Are Literally Deluded

Your Thoughts?

Daniel Fincke: Speaking of drugs and religion—during your career as a therapist you specialized in addiction medicine.  What would you advise an atheist to say if half way into a heated debate about the existence of God her interlocutor were to get emotional and insist that he just needs to believe in an AA-conceived “higher power” because otherwise he’d wind up in the gutter? Should we push rationalism and skepticism with such people or treat their religious belief like the methadone to their heroin in this case, i.e., not recommendable in general but necessary for some addicts?

Richard Wade: I often had this issue come up with patients of mine. The chemical dependency clinic where I worked relied heavily on 12-step concepts, and I had to do a lot of interpretation for patients’ specific needs. My personal method was intensely pragmatic: Find whatever works to keep you alive, and don’t worry about whether or not you are perfectly following your philosophical principles, if indeed you have even clarified them for yourself. So if believing in gods keeps you sober, fine. If that doesn’t work, find whatever will work!

The main problem is that AA and its 12-step cousins are everywhere, and there are very few secular support groups in between. When an agnostic or atheist asks me what the heck does he do with all that “God stuff,” I tell him to shrug and use the group of human beings he’s with as his “higher power.” Just as five men can lift a fallen tree out of the roadway while a man alone cannot, so five caring people who are right there to support him in his pain and doubt are more likely to successfully get him through it than he would by himself.

From an atheist’s viewpoint, that’s what’s really happening when 12-step program members succeed in recovery. The “higher power” was the camaraderie and encouragement they got from each other, even though they wanted to attribute it all to a deity. I hope that secular programs continue to grow and become more available, because addiction is like a plague. Millions of people are dying in slow and awful ways, and even the best methods are miserably ineffective. It’s dismal. It’s very unfortunate in the rare instances where the “God stuff” in AA is used to proselytize religion, and it’s usually corrected by group members. It’s just that I have seen so much abject misery  and so much death from addiction that I just don’t care that much about sticking to esoteric or abstract principles. Just do whatever works, stay alive, and later you can sort out your philosophy.

Daniel Fincke: What do you mean about group members correcting against the “AA” stuff being used to proselytize—are they explicitly warned against trying to persuade each other into sectarian interpretations of God?

Richard Wade: In most 12-step meetings, there are rules and customs that they follow, and while many members will refer to God when they share their thoughts to the group, overt proselytizing is strongly discouraged. They talk about themselves, not each other. So they don’t say YOU should find God, even if they attribute God to their own recovery. They insist that it’s a “spiritual” rather than a “religious” program, but that’s where the ambiguity of that term spiritual can still be a problem. It has so much religious connotation. When sponsors work individually with new, struggling members, they are not observed by the group and they may abuse their influence with someone. Usually if a new person has strong objections to that, he or she can seek a different sponsor, but it’s tough when they’re desperate, scared, ashamed, and hurting very badly. They’re so vulnerable and not necessarily very assertive even when they’re at their best.  I really can’t overstate how difficult early recovery from addiction is.

Even if they think “group” when they hear “God,” for atheists there still are serious problems with the 12 steps themselves, because they are very heavily influenced by Christianity. The surrender to a higher power, the abdication of self will, the prayer and meditation, the confession; so many things. I’ve seen some secular versions of the 12 steps written, and some of them are clever and offer a possibly useful angle on it for an atheist, but I think an entirely different method might need to be invented, even if it uses the parts that work in AA.

Again the problem is the huge scope of the plague of addiction. With so much suffering, there’s a tempting mass of victims for unscrupulous predators peddling cures. Somewhere in there might be someone with a legitimate idea, but it’s tough to get the support they need when they have to first show that they’re not con artists, and they have to get past others’ belief  that 12 Step programs are the only thing that works.

Daniel Fincke: Yes, this is brutally tough, because human ennoblement and civilizational progress in the last centuries has come through people’s increasing political, moral, and intellectual autonomy.  Yet the addict bears naked the limits of human autonomy.  Many religious people want to characterize all humanity as being as desperate and in need of abject submission to something outside themselves, and therefore the addict saved by God has become a major modern conversion myth.

Richard Wade: Yes, exactly.

Daniel Fincke: Now, this raises a broader question.  When asked about your own perspectives on truth and ethics, it’s clear you have well-worked out ideas that you are passionate about and willing to persuade others of.  Yet, I was taken aback when you said that before writing your “Ask Richard” column, you had never actually given advice but had only helped people find their own solutions.  So, I hear a little tension there.  Do you feel queasy about encouraging people to adopt your own strongly held values in a therapy context?  Do you separate your own confidence in your own values from an interest in people finding their own path?  Is it not just the alcoholic that you would be willing to meet on his or her terms like that?

Richard Wade: The advice column is not therapy. I use some of the knowledge and skills that I employed when I was a counselor, but it’s a very different thing with a different purpose. In the column, someone describes a dilemma, and I offer one or two possible suggestions. I also hope that others reading it will find some useful insight or encouragement, and that others commenting will offer ideas I didn’t think of.

On the other hand, therapy is a complex, back-and-forth relationship that is constantly changing and evolving. The goal is not just to solve a particular predicament, but to help the client to develop predicament-solving skills, and a self image that includes “I am able to solve my problems both by drawing upon my own abilities, and by searching out skilled allies.” So if I were to quickly give advice to a therapy client for his presenting problem as I do in the advice column, I would not be helping him to grow both outwardly and inwardly as a successful problem solver.

As a counselor, I always saw the purpose of my job was to work myself out of a job, to become no longer needed by my client.  It’s sort of like teaching them to fish rather than feeding them a fish.  My own method of fishing might become apparent to the client during the therapy process, but I’m mostly interested in helping him experience the empowerment that comes from inventing his own method of fishing. If it’s something like mine, I still want him to take full ownership of the method that he’s putting together. If it’s not like my method a all, I have no ego investment in that, that’s fine with me. If his way works to his satisfaction and I’m convinced he’s really looking at it, great! His taking full responsibility for his successes and failures is absolutely essential.  Several times former clients have come up to me in a store or on the street years later and told me that I saved their lives.  I always reply that while I’m delighted that they’re still alive,  I didn’t do that, they did.

Daniel Fincke: Wow, that’s terrific, I never realized how much being a therapist was like being a philosophy professor before, but we (or at least I) have a similar attitude about teaching critical thinking to students.  It’s not about our own ideas but about working with the students to develop their own critical approaches to philosophical questions.

Richard Wade: Ah wonderful. What a fun job that sounds like.

Daniel Fincke: Yes, it is great.  And it depends, for me anyway, on incorporating something you do also, which is to provide lots of affirmation.  I think half the secret of getting students to open up is to validate them—not by humoring them into thinking every idea they have is perfect, or perfectly realized, but by making clear to them that their ideas catch the scent of the truth and are worth exploring.

Richard Wade: “We be of one blood, thou and I.”

Daniel Fincke: Yes, that’s been my impression!

Read the other 7 parts of the interview, in which I ask Richard about:

The Origins of the “Ask Richard” Column

Anger In Families Divided Over Religion

Atheism and Religions As Bases For Identities

The Ethics of Lying To Stay In A Protective Closet

How Atheists Should Confront And Replace Religions

Whether Believers and Non-Believers Should Avoid Marrying Each Other

Whether Believers Are Literally Deluded

Your Thoughts?

Daniel Fincke: Part of the problem when families fight due to someone in the family becoming an atheist is that fundamental identities are at stake.  Many religious people who watch their children or spouses defecting from their faith are not just seeing this as a change of mind but a rejection of their shared identities.  And atheists who come at religion with a morally heated critique are making that rejection explicit.  Both of these identities, the theistic and the atheistic, understand themselves at least in part through their explicit rejection of the opposite identity.

And we see with the botched attempts of religious people to “hate the sin but love the sinner” in the case of gays that when you do not accept a particular kind of identity, in a certain sense, you wish that people with that identity and that set of behaviors and beliefs just did not exist. Saying I love you but not what you do (or believe) does not cut it when, to a large extent, you are what you do and when what you do is flowing from something as basic to your self-conception as your identity is.

So the challenge becomes, how can we love religious people and how can religious people love atheists while both sides want the others’ entire belief structures and values to go extinct and each side responds to that desire coming from the other side as the desire for them themselves (or people like them) to just not exist at all?

Richard Wade: Yes. This is why all the shouting in the families that I just described is not about anger, it’s really about hurt. People confuse their beliefs and ideas with their being, with their sense of self. I think that is a major mistake.

Daniel Fincke: Right.

Richard Wade: I often say that “You are what you do, not what you think and not what you think you are.  The most valid characterization of you is the pattern of behaviors, the doings that you consistently do. So for example, if you say you’re an honest man, but you lie and lie very often, then no, you’re not an honest man. You are what you do.

The same goes for our cherished beliefs and opinions. They’re stuff. They’re like the clothes we wear and the stuff we get so attached to. I get atheists mad at me when I say that their atheism is just another thing in their heads like coins are things in their pockets. They feel existentially threatened just as vividly as a Christian who has fully attached his sense of self to his beliefs. This is a mistake. Our beliefs and views can be very important to us, can guide us and benefit us, but they are not us. They are our prized possessions. We should hold them lightly in our hands and not squeeze them in a death grip.

This is one idea that remains from my Zen Buddhist days. Avoid being attached to anything. It causes you problems, it causes you suffering.  We attach to a person or a prized object, or to an idea. Yes, yes, they are important to us, but to think of our ideas as one of our internal vital organs is going to twist our thinking, give us blind spots, and make us immediately react with a live-or-die, I-must-kill-this-or-be-killed sense of threat whenever someone challenges our ideas. It really spoils many opportunities for gaining understanding of others and of ourselves.

Daniel Fincke: But what if a conservative were to turn that around and say, “Gays are making a mistake by thinking that their same sex attraction is a matter of their being and not open to critique.”  Of course, attraction is much less mutable than beliefs (and certainly less amenable to persuasion through argument), but beliefs still naturally play major roles in people’s self-understanding.  How can we form a self, if not in reference to major, orienting beliefs?  Isn’t it natural to think this is a major identity issue?  Or is this Buddhist again—rejecting the idea of a self too? Isn’t, in fact, the increased atheist consciousness we’re experiencing, replete with calls to “come out of the closet”, really about precisely understanding atheism as a positive identity and not just an empty void of religion?  Doesn’t this movement encourage people to identify their atheism as a core part of themselves that can theoretically be refuted with rational arguments but otherwise cannot be compromised without violating their conscience?  Are you critical of the movement on this or do you think I mischaracterize what it’s doing?

Richard Wade: I think beliefs can be separated from identity, but it’s very hard to do, and very few people think so, and almost everybody is emotionally attached to their ideas, even those ideas arrived at in the most rational way. I saw this more than once as a kid, when some scientist at the museum could get livid at a challenge to some opinion of his that to me seemed quite abstract.  To me, it seemed like just a coin in his pocket. Maybe it was a favorite coin of his, but the scientist reacted like someone was trying to cut out his liver.

By the way, I’m not implying that I’m not just as emotionally attached to my opinions and ideas. Of course I am. I just think I know why I get so livid when somebody challenges what I ought to think of as just a coin in my pocket. Realizing what’s happening only helps me to calm down a little sooner and to loosen up my death grip on yet another attachment.  The things themselves don’t cause us unnecessary suffering as much as our desperate clinging to them as if we’ll drown without them does.

You ask about the movement encouraging atheists to think in “identity terms.” If that means what terms we use to call ourselves, well, the debate seems to be a long-winded loop tape. We seem to argue as endlessly with each other over our category label as we argue with theists over questions of the supernatural.  Some atheists are identifying their selves with not just a term, but what seems to be becoming an ideology.  Lately, I see atheists asking themselves questions about how would a “good atheist” handle some decision, or will they be a “bad atheist” if they do such-in-such. They also wonder about what conduct of theirs will help the “movement.”

Of course there is more to us than just a passive lack of belief in gods. We do stand for things. We have positive and assertive opinions about many things that are the root of our atheism rather than coming from our atheism. Many of us value critical thinking, open-minded skepticism, science, reason-based policies, and social justice (to name a few values that are very common among us). Those things we value can and seem to be congealing into an ideology, but it will be very unfortunate if we start judging each other by such a thing as “good atheists” or “bad atheists” or “not true” atheists. We find Christians and Muslims who do that to each other to be absurd and bizarre. I hope we can avoid that.

Daniel Fincke: So, if you’re saying all people should take a non-attachment approach to beliefs, including to their atheism, then how can we rationalists ever fill the void many people seem to feel for beliefs that orient themselves in the world and help them construct a coherent sense of self?  Skeptics and atheists are often accused of offering nothing constructive to meet the needs people turn to religion for.  Can we build solid institutions on the shifting sands of doubt?

Richard Wade: Well, first let me back up if I did say that “all” people should take such an approach. I’m saying that I think attachments carry a lot of disadvantages and can lead to problems that can be avoided if we at least reduce or minimize our attachments in both number and intensity. These choices always have pluses and minuses.  The things to which we often become attached also can bring great pleasure or advantage too. I just think it’s better if we’re going to embrace them, that we do it with our eyes open. Falling in love is a good example. It’s amazing and wonderful, and it can last either a short time or a lifetime. But eventually it does somehow end, and we have to accept the grief that is part of the package.  That’s why I say that love is for brave people.

As far as rationalism  and atheism not filling the void that religion is supposed to fill, I first think we should step back and look at the assumption that the “void” is intrinsic to people, and not created by the “void filler” of religion itself.  There is some validity to the old saying that religion is the opiate of the masses.

Imagine that you came upon an entire isolated civilization where every person was addicted to heroin. No one ever experienced life without it, and no one remembered any time in their history that it wasn’t there.  No one thought of it as a bad thing, because it seemed so necessary.  Every person would feel the “void” that their heroin would fill, and they might not ever stop to consider that the need they think is inborn in them is actually caused by the heroin itself.

We don’t have good examples of large cultures that do not have religion, or at least magical belief systems that soothe their childlike fears. So we have little to compare with to see if people would not actually have that “void” if they grew up in a culture without the “filler, or fulfiller.”

I think that people do have built-in important social needs, interpersonal needs, aesthetic, sensual, sexual, emotional, and intellectual needs, and we as skeptics or rationalists do need to consider those if we want to attract people to our viewpoint. But we should try to sort out in what ways those needs are truly built-in to human beings, or in what ways those are like “withdrawal symptoms” from the “opiate of the masses.”

Also, I think it’s unfortunate that those needs I listed above are often lumped together and labeled “spiritual.” I think that causes a lot of confusion, since that label has so much religious connotation.  It perpetuates the assumption that religion is filling a void that is already there, rather than possibly making its own “hole” for itself in which to live. I hear people toss around the term “spiritual” for want of a better term, and some even say “for want of a better term” when they use it. We ought to come up with a better term, possibly based on psychological and sociological thinking, even if we have to coin an entirely new word.  Don’t ask me to come up with one right now, that might take many years of consideration.  Maybe somebody a lot smarter than me already has one.

Dan you used an interesting phrase, “to build solid institutions on the shifting sands of doubt.”  It seems to assume that the solidity of “certainty” is preferable or necessary. It also seems to see doubt as a basically bad thing, or something that can’t be included as a positive part of a philosophy, or a culture. I think it can.

To use the analogy of building a structure, perhaps a bedouin tent might work just fine on a foundation of shifting sands of doubt. We first have to get an entire generation to grow up being comfortable with doubt, to accept it as an important part of a healthy thinking mind.

As Jacob Bronowski said, if I remember correctly, “We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge…” He implored us to see that the worst crimes in history have been perpetrated by people who were convinced that they possessed absolute truth, (often spelled with a divine capital “T”) people who were incapable of doubt.

To avoid more of these atrocities, it’ s essential that we stop seeing doubt as only a painful or unattractive thing, and accept it as an important part of a healthy thinking mind. Let doubt be like a constant friend who helps us stay honest and humble. If you find doubt so uncomfortable, perhaps you’ re just experiencing the withdrawal symptoms from your addiction to absolute certainty. Doubt is always necessary for innovative or revolutionary ideas to be born. Nothing ever was done better or seen more intelligently until somebody said, “Hey, wait a minute, this might not be the way things really are, or the way things have to be.” Doubt is the prerequisite to improvement.

Read the other 7 parts of the interview, in which I ask Richard about:

The Origins of the “Ask Richard” Column

Anger In Families Divided Over Religion

How Atheists Should Respond to Alcoholics Anonymous, and How Personal Values Influence Professional Therapy

The Ethics of Lying To Stay In A Protective Closet

How Atheists Should Confront And Replace Religions

Whether Believers and Non-Believers Should Avoid Marrying Each Other

Whether Believers Are Literally Deluded

Your Thoughts?

Richard Wade: Many of the problems the letters describe are appalling and heartbreaking. They are at the level of pain that I’ve seen in thousands of patients while I was an addiction counselor. My initial reaction still is often “Oh man, what the heck can I do for this person?!” But after brooding over them for several days, something begins to sprout, something about hope and possibility and positivism.

The letters are so varied in what they present, but they do fall into categories. The biggest group is about young people who are agonizing over how and when to tell their parents or their spouses that they’re atheists.

Another big category is people who are reeling from the explosion of anger, hurt and fear from their families or spouses after they’ve told them that they’re atheists. It has been an amazing education for me to see how much strife and unhappiness comes from this single conflict, and how tragically unnecessary it is.

Daniel Fincke: I thought atheists were supposed to be the angry ones, do you get a lot of angry atheists?

Richard Wade: I get a few who are really stuck in their anger, but basically anger is the smoke while hurt is the fire. Whether it’ s a Christian father raging at his atheist daughter, or a young atheist complaining bitterly about his religious parents, if I address the hurt rather than the anger, things seem to loosen up, and possibilities for a better outcome begin to appear. You’ll see a few repeated themes in my responses to the letters about family conflict.

For instance, I often encourage the atheists to keep an open door in their hearts for the possibility for love to return between them and their families, even when the upset is so bad, it’s like a hate grenade has exploded in the living room. Just be open to the possibility. People generally want reconciliation. They just have to work through their hurt.

Daniel Fincke: So, all these Christians assuming atheists are angry because we don’t have God are mistaken—they’re really angry because Christians won’t let them be atheists?

Richard Wade: It’s not really about Christians not letting them be atheists. It’s about Christians not being willing to see them directly, as they are, real, rather than an idea that they have about “atheists.”  They don’t see us, they see their concept of an atheist. So often Christians will tell us what we think, feel and do, rather than openly and sincerely ask us what we think, feel and do. And there is an opportunity for a manipulation. If someone tells me that I’m angry when I’m not, but they won’t accept my correction to them, that’s a little irritating. They pick up on that and say something about my irritation.

That’s downright annoying, so my next response is full of annoyance.  Then they can crow, saying “See, I told you so, you’re an angry atheist!” By then I’m seeing purple. I’ ve been suckered into anger that he thinks confirms his first assumption.

Daniel Fincke: Do you think we are guilty of the same thing?

Richard Wade: Oh yes, we atheists are certainly capable of all the same kinds of prejudice, manipulations, unkindness, and unfair practices that we complain about in believers. I don’t spend as much time commenting on blogs as I did before starting the column, but sometimes I still find myself arguing with an atheist about his or her tactics with a theist if I see it as just as destructive as what we so often face from them.

Daniel Fincke: Are there any mistakes you think activist atheists are making? Is our confrontationalism as justified as we like to think? And regardless of its justification or lack thereof on moral or political grounds, do you think it is likely to be as counter-productive a way to persuade religious people as our detractors always warn? You’re someone who is passionate about healthy relationships. How can we be so confrontational and yet have a healthy discourse here? From the PR to the rhetorical to the personal levels, how might we improve what we’re doing already?

Richard Wade: I hope it’s not a vanity to quote myself, but there are a couple of things I often say. One is, “If you want someone to see something more clearly, don’t start by poking him in the eye.” The other one is, “Speak with your ears, not with your mouth.” By reading online I’m able to “listen in” on many, many dialogues. Some atheists get into these dialogues with theists just to vent their feelings. They’re focused on expression only. Other atheists actually want to persuade others of something instead of just venting. They’re focused on communication. But sometimes they make the mistake of not communicating with a strong sense of empathy.

They need to accurately imagine what it is like for the other person to hear what they’re saying to them. That’ s what I mean by speaking with your ears. They can say wonderfully logical, rational things, but if it begins with a deliberate or an inadvertent insult, or if there is an undertone of snide contempt, then it doesn’t matter. The message will be deflected, not received. Even if it is compelling by its technical points, it will not be persuasive in its effect. Now I fully understand that many religious people can be hair-trigger ready to take “offence,” and some are already offended just by our very existence. But if you get one who is actually talking to you, then use that opportunity skillfully with a delicate touch. Don’t blow your chance to change someone’ s viewpoint by indulging in a dumb wisecrack or using an insensitive tone.

I think you can get your message in deeper if you deliver it politely. I don’t mean being obsequious, or fawning, or meek. But you don’t have to shame or humiliate people into a wider view. Coax them. Imagine what would you need to be convinced if you were them. You probably have a pretty good idea what their thoughts are, and their basic framework. Instead of just sneering at it, get inside it and see where the openings are. Using empathy and understanding the other’s motives are the most important things in persuasion.

That’s where I see atheists fail when trying to persuade religious people to reconsider their ideas about atheists or about science, or about social issues. We need to be more patient. Plant seeds, and wait, and come back a little later and attend to them a bit more, and back off again. Don’t try for instant victories where your “opponent” will concede right there on the spot. That never happens, does it? Always give them a way to say “I’ll think about it” with their dignity in tact, and let them rest a while. That way they’ll be open for more seed-planting later.

Daniel Fincke: I completely, completely agree. I have a friend whom I have debated hours at a time and sometimes suddenly a key issue is clarified and he says, “okay, I understand, let me go think about that”, and it just ends there for the time being. You gotta let someone go when they’ve had enough and they have to go think things over before returning to the discussion.

Richard Wade: Yeah. and at that crucial, delicate moment, if you were to crow “Ha! I have beaten you!” then you’ve completely blown it. We should never go for trophies when it will rob us of a persuaded ally who now sees things our way. They might never fully realize that we were the one who persuaded them, and we won’t get that ego-boosting acknowledgment. So what?? We have a better situation. That is all that matters. Being an effective agent for positive change is so much more important than some fleeting feeling of personal triumph.

Continue to part 3 of our discussion, in which we discuss the pros and cons of seeing atheism as part of one’s identity. In the meantime, Your Thoughts?

The topic is “Is There An Afterlife?” and the video features Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, David Wolpe, and Bradley Artson.

Your Thoughts?