The Language of God, Chapter 1

By B.J. Marshall

The chapter begins with a description of Collins' experiences growing up. His parents shrugged off the business world and lived an agrarian life on huge tracts of land in the Shenandoah Valley. His father went on to teach at a women's college. Collins was homeschooled, and faith did not play a part in his upbringing. He went to an Episcopal church, but it was more for music appreciation than theology. OK, so we have a picture here of an ardent scientist who really didn't have a place for theism.

It's funny how, written from a theist perspective, he paints such a picture of atheists. Collins recounts how, as a student at the University of Virginia, conversations would easily turn to religion, where Collins' sense of the spiritual was easily challenged by the one or two "aggressive atheists one finds in almost every college dormitory" (p.15). Later, he says he enjoyed his agnosticism because it was "convenient to ignore the need to be answerable to any higher spiritual authority" (p.16). Collins likens this to practicing the "willful blindness" of his number one idol, C.S. Lewis (p.16). After college, he pursued a Ph.D. program at Yale and shifted to atheism, where he felt "quite comfortable challenging" the spiritual beliefs of others (p.16).

That comfort obviously didn't last long. After moving from chemistry to biology and getting accepted by the University of North Carolina, he did work that put him in intimate contact with very ill patients nearing death. He was astounded by their spirituality, and in one conversation a elderly woman simply asked him what he believed. He said he wasn't really sure and admitted to himself that he had never really weighed the arguments for and against belief. He realized he "could no longer rely on the robustness of [his] atheistic position" (p.20). How does one go from being quite comfortable challenging theists to having their "robust" atheistic world-view crumble? Apparently all it takes is to have an elderly sick woman ask what one believes. Incredible. I would have loved to have seen the atheistic Collins in action when he felt comfortable challenging the spiritual beliefs of others. Of course, Collins never says whether those challenges ended in his favor; I'm guessing they probably didn't.

So, Collins decided to look for answers and was pointed by a Methodist minister to look into the theology of C.S. Lewis. Collins marveled at how Lewis' arguments seemed to anticipate what Collins was thinking. The idea that most rocked Collins' ideas about science and spirit: The Moral Law and a Christian penchant for capitalization of random words. He then details a bunch of everyday problems, noting how it seems to be a universal human attribute to defer to some sort of unstated higher standard. "Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral sense, they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other species' behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal rightness" (p.23).

Of course, Collins never cites his sources, so we are left wondering how he knows how narrowly spread these non-human glimmers of morality are, and we are left asking how Collins is able to differentiate between "any" sense of universal rightness and these animals' behaviors - let alone the assertion that humankind's behavior is all that noble and aligned with universal rightness. Ask Hitler, Pol Pot, or even Mother Teresa.

Jessica Pierce and Marc Bekoff's book Wild Justice highlights the broad range of what we would call moral behaviors - fairness, trust, empathy, reciprocity, and more - in other animals. (I say "other" animals, because too often theists imagine humans apart from the animals). Pierce was interviewed on the Conversations from the Pale Blue Dot podcast. Here are some examples from her web site:

• An older female elephant chasing away a male to protect and care for the younger female he injured in his rambunctiousness,
• A rat in a cage refusing to push a lever which, although he knows he will receive food, he knows that pushing the lever will shock a neighboring rat, and
• A group of chimpanzees punish latecomers because no one can eat until everyone arrives.

(I encourage you to add your own examples in the comments)

Over at Why Evolution Is True, Greg Mayer addresses this same excerpt of Collins' book, so I will simply link to it rather than expound here.

Not only does he confuse how animals can be moral, but he goes further to conflate morality with truth: "Let me stop here to point out that the conclusion that the Moral Law exists is in serious conflict with the current post-modernistic philosophy, which argues that there are no absolute right and wrongs.... If there is no absolute truth, can postmodernism itself be true?" (p.24). I'm not here to discuss the merits of postmodern philosophy, but I do find it amusing that he goes from moral relativism to the rejection of absolute truths. I can easily see how someone who holds to a relativistic standard of morality would still be perfectly well off thinking it's absolutely true that all rocks dropped in Paris will fall to the ground.

Collins sees altruism as a stumbling block to naturalistic explanations. He claims that selfless altruism - he explicitly rules out reciprocal altruism - cannot be attributed to individual selfish genes that want to perpetuate themselves. He gives three arguments from sociobiologists such as E.O. Wilson (though Collins never cites his sources, so we don't know without looking it up ourselves whether Wilson actually posited any of these three) that Collins think fail:

1. Altruism as positive attribute for mate selection,
2. Altruism as indirect reciprocal benefits, and
3. Altruism as benefiting the whole group.

Before we unpack these arguments, we should note that Collins states that if altruistic behavior on the basis of its positive value to natural selection could be shown to be a credible argument, "the interpretation of many of the requirements of the Moral Law as a signpost to God would potentially be in trouble" (p.25). Well, sorry to say for Collins' sake, there's a lot of literature out there (check the references at the bottom of the page) explaining how evolution could have led to altruism - and not just in humans. Dawkins mentions four good reasons for individuals to be altruistic in "The God Delusion" (p.250-251):

1. Genetic kinship: We evolved in small groups, allotting plenty of opportunity for kin altruism to develop,
2. Reciprocal altruism: This one is out by Collins' standards, but we'd have plenty of time to develop this altruism given that we'd meet the same people over and over,
3. Reputation: Dawkins states that biologists see a survival benefit to not only being a good reciprocator but having a reputation for being a good reciprocator, and
4. Conspicuous consumption: Those who can provide food/shelter/protection with no expectation of compensation can flaunt their superiority.

Additionally, I argue that reciprocal altruism might not be as plainly seen as Collins might think. OK, there's the obvious "I scratch your back, you scratch mine." But I think there are plenty of examples of altruistic behavior with no tangible repercussions. For example: We had a huge snowstorm, and I helped my elderly neighbor shovel out her parking space. I am not expecting anything from it, and it doesn't even fall in line with Dawkins' lines of evidence (genetic, reputation, or conspicuous consumption). I did it because it fulfilled in me a desire to help my neighbor. I felt good doing it. Collins would not have been able to see that.

So, it appears that altruism as a positive attribute for mate selection corresponds nicely with kinship altruism and conspicuous consumption. It appears to me that having a reputation for being generous does indirectly benefit oneself, so maybe Collins would cry foul that this is a type of reciprocal altruism. However, it seems to me and others that a group consisting of individual members with unique and sometimes competing desires living cooperatively together seeks a stable solution to cohabitation.

Since Collins thinks that altruism must come from outside humanity, where does it come from? Well, he quotes his beloved Lewis again (Collins says he was stunned by the logic you are about to read): "If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe - no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves...." (p.29). OK, so let me get the analogy straight. We can't expect God/architect to be a fact inside the universe/house, so the only place we would expect to find God/architect is within us?? I'm in the universe, too, so why should I expect to find God in me and not outside me? On what grounds is this good logic? Although, it does explain why I've been haunted by my architect. Oh wait, no I'm not.

Collins has now found God, and he wonders what sort of God this is. He rules out deism out of hand on the grounds that, if Collins did indeed perceive God, then God would want a relationship with me. Sadly, I've tried to use this logic on Alyson Hannigan in vain for years. Given the high standards of the Moral Law, Collins concludes this God must be holy and righteous. He doesn't even consider Euthyphro's dilemma in trying to figure out the correlation between his God and the Moral Law: Does God arbitrarily dictate what is moral (in that case, isn't he amoral?), or does God say stuff is moral because that stuff is moral (in which case, why's God the middle man?). He also apparently didn't consider any other god who might desire a relationship with him. Nope - just Yahweh. Well, Jesus: Yahweh 2.0.

It became clear to Collins that science would get him nowhere in questioning God. Collins states that, if God exists, then he must be outside the natural world (but inside all of us, I guess), and therefore outside the purview of science. Oh, if he could only get off that easily.

Despite endless reiterations of how atheists find justification for morality, we all routinely hear from apologists who claim that without believing in God, we can have no basis for ethical behavior. That's one thing, but today I want to discuss a far stranger and more disturbing variant of this argument.

Regardless of whether we agree about the existence of God, you would think that atheists and believers would agree that good behavior should be encouraged. You would think that a religious evangelist would say to an atheist, "I may not understand how you can justify acting ethically, but I'm glad you do and I hope you continue treating others with kindness and doing good deeds." But often, that's not what we get. Instead, we see apologists not just scorning the idea that atheists can have moral principles, but actively trying to convince us that we should be evil!

Consider three recent examples from comment threads on Daylight Atheism:

Why is the next step [after becoming an atheist] to treat others with kindness? We don't have to do that at all. If there's no God telling us to be kind, then I say its survival of the fittest. I should oppress as many as possible to make my own position better. (source)

You have nothing but your own mind, a clump of chemicals, to judge the actions of another clump of chemicals. It's like a dog judging the way a cat runs his life, or Uranus criticizing the orbit of Pluto. It's ridiculous, incoherent nonsense. If you were consistent, you would just shut your mouths and do whatever pleases you at any moment, and not criticize when someone else did what pleases them.... (source)

Nonetheless, why do you even care about this? As atheists I would think that survival of the fittest at any cost would be acceptable. You have no accountability to anything. Truth and right is subjective in your eyes, so why is scamming a few suckers so bad? (source)

One might assume that the apologists engage in this bizarre behavior because they want us to conform to their stereotype of atheists as selfish, amoral nihilists - making it easier for them to frighten others away from joining us. And I think, at least in some cases, there's truth to that. The atheist movement is a convenient scapegoat for religious preachers who blame every evil in the world on our wickedness. There's nothing like a good atheist-bashing sermon to get the congregation reliably riled up, and if we persist in doing good deeds, helping people, and being productive citizens, it's going to make things very awkward for the sermon-writers (especially since it's no longer socially acceptable to bash the previous scapegoat du jour).

However, I think the real roots of this behavior go deeper. Religious evangelists aren't just calling atheists immoral because it's on their list of talking points. I think most of them truly believe it: it's an article of faith for them, a cornerstone of their worldview. And when they see that expectation violated, it induces a profound and frightening feeling of cognitive vertigo that they'll try to cure by any means possible.

Imagine you were walking along the rim of a high cliff when you saw someone, a dozen paces beyond the edge, apparently standing on thin air with no visible means of support. Most likely, you wouldn't placidly accept this. Wouldn't you be stunned, amazed, terrified? Wouldn't you cry out that this was impossible? Wouldn't you demand, "Why don't you fall?"

Just so is the situation with religious apologists encountering ethical atheists. They believe, because they've been taught to believe, that belief in God is vital and necessary both to provide moral guidance to individuals and also to hold the fabric of society together. They believe that humans are inherently sinful and that only God provides a moral law that can check our selfish impulses. Thus, the conclusion that atheists have no morals isn't just a claim of no consequence; it's a link in the chain of interconnected assumptions that constitutes their worldview. It's something that, as far as they're concerned, has to be true.

No wonder, then, that they react so strongly when they see atheists who are moral. Their missives betray not just anger and denial - the usual response to someone whose worldview is threatened - but maybe even a hint of fear. ("Why do you even care about this?" has more than a hint of pleading, doesn't it?) After all, an argument that God doesn't exist or that the Bible contains contradictions is a worldview threat that most Christians are familiar with, and they have well-rehearsed apologetics to soothe their own minds. But the discovery that atheists are moral is something they can't dismiss as easily; it just doesn't fit into their worldview. (Some apologists employ the face-saving gambit of claiming that even if atheists are moral, it's only because we're unknowingly following the law of God written in our hearts - but this amounts to much the same thing, and in any case this claim tends to evaporate when we point out how our morals lead us to conclusions that differ from what's written in their holy books.)

And as a consequence, we see claims that boil down to, "If I were in your position, I'd be evil and selfish! Why aren't you?" It's the same intellectual anguish we'd experience upon seeing someone standing on thin air: "If I were in your position, I'd be plummeting to the ground! What's keeping you up?" It's the shock of someone confronted with what they believe cannot exist, the existential dizziness induced by trying desperately to explain the inexplicable. In a way, a good and moral atheist is far more threatening to them than any kind of intellectual argument against God. A committed theist can use faith to overcome any evidence or reason used against them, but they can't use faith to wish us away. But they clearly wish they could, which is what leads to the bizarre spectacle of apologists trying to persuade us to do evil.

Of course, the existence of a moral atheist isn't inexplicable in general. It's only inexplicable to people who start with the presupposition that believing in God is the only possible source of morality. To atheists who have moral principles, the answer is clear enough: we're motivated not by the fear of divine punishment, but by the emotional experience of the unpleasantness of suffering, coupled with the intellectual realization that the world is populated by other human beings who probably feel the same way. Our morality, in other words, arises from reason blended with compassion, and when you try it, it turns out to be a perfectly workable basis. We're not standing on air after all, but on good solid ground - it's just that it's invisible to the apologists who've convinced themselves that it can't exist. If they'd open their eyes and their minds, they'd see it for themselves, and maybe even consider stepping out onto it and exploring it with us.

By JulietEcho

Editor's Note: This piece emerged from the discussion of my recent post on the legality of polyamory. Please welcome Daylight Atheism's newest guest contributor, JulietEcho, who has her B.A. in both Philosophy and Religious Studies and is also the administrator of the Friendly Atheist forum. You can e-mail her at ejsunflowers@gmail.com.

I've been in a polyamorous relationship with my two partners for over three years now, and it's been great. The only downside: the secrecy. Many people in the US don't even know that plural relationships exist outside of Islamic countries and fundamentalist Mormon compounds. Polyamorous families tend to be very secretive - and with good reason. The religious majority in America considers any romantic relationship that's not between a straight woman and a straight man (usually in the context of marriage) to be sinful and immoral – and people in polyamorous relationships mostly consider silence the safest option, given the risks of losing jobs, reputations and even custody of children. However, bad reactions to polyamory aren't limited to reactions rooted in religion. I'm going to outline what I've found to be the three most common bad reactions to polyamory from non-religious people, and I plan to demonstrate why they're bad reactions.

1. "Polyamory? That's okay, as long as <insert horrible things here> isn't going on."

Underage marriages. Forced marriages. Abusive marriages. Polyamory is just swell, as long as it's not underage, forced, and/or abusive polyamory! While the reaction based on historical connections is understandable, it's a non-sequitur. When you find out that someone is marrying the woman of their dreams, you don't say, "That's great, as long as you don't plan on beating your new wife!" There's a long, horrible history of socially-acceptable violence against women, not to mention the centuries during which they were treated as property. This doesn't, however, mean that we're obliged to point out that it's unacceptable every time we find out about a man and a woman in a romantic relationship. No one should have to clarify that their polyamorous relationship is abuse-free, any more than someone in a relationship with a woman should have to clarify that they don't plan on treating her like property.

Some even argue that we should criminalize polyamory, or never acknowledge poly relationships as a normal part of society, because it would benefit abusers who force underage girls to marry them. This is beyond ridiculous – the fact that pedophiles are out there hasn't led us to outlaw sex, and the fact that thieves are out there hasn't led us to outlaw property ownership. There are still abusive relationships, pedophiles, and forced arranged monogamous marriages all over the world – are these things okay as long as they only involve two people? Should we outlaw one-on-one marriages so that we aren't providing a framework for abusive husbands, forced arranged marriages, marital rape, etc? The solution isn't to penalize polyamorous relationships – it's to crack down on the abuse of women, whether they're being abused singly or in groups.

2. "Those relationships are always about drama/don't last/are dysfunctional."

You don't tend to hear about the relationships that do last, because polyamorous families don't stand to gain anything from going public. You hear about the failed attempts from people who are upset and bitter about bad relationships (monogamous people don't have a monopoly on those), and from cases where there was serious fall-out between groups of friends, etc. You don't hear about the ones that last, because the people involved are generally terrified that they'll lose their kids and their jobs if people find out.

With more factors involved, poly relationships have a higher probability of failing – just like single people are much less likely to get divorced than married people. There's one more person who needs to "click" and more personal dynamics involved. It's hard to find (and sustain) a happy, healthy polyamorous relationship – but once you've got one, the people involved tend to be strong communicators, prioritize honesty and not take the relationship for granted. That's what it takes to make polyamory work.

In the end, to paraphrase Dan Savage, every relationship you have is going to fail – until one doesn't. That's true no matter how many people you date at once.

3. "Telling people that you're polyamorous is over-sharing – it's like telling them about your sex life."

Telling someone that you're dating a man is essentially telling them that you're interested in sex with men. Telling someone that you're dating a woman is essentially telling them that you're interested in sex with women. Telling someone that you're in a polyamorous relationship is essentially telling them that you don't see sexual monogamy as a necessary part of a healthy relationship. That's all. It doesn't imply (and no one should infer) that poly people have group sex, orgies, or have open relationships. It doesn't imply that every person in the relationship has sex with every other person in the relationship – in a way, it gives you less information about someone's sex life than finding out that only two people are dating each other.

It might feel like too much information to hear that someone is in a poly relationship – but that's about your personal comfort zone, not about the objective amount (or type) of information being shared. Many people are uncomfortable around gay couples or would rather not know that someone is gay – and that's tough cookies. People in love shouldn't have to (and aren't going to) go through a constant, public charade so that other people won't be grossed out or offended. No one is going to have sex in front of you. No one is going to ask you to join their poly relationship, like it's a club or something. Admitting the existence of a romantic relationship isn't inappropriate or over-sharing – it's normal.

When it comes right down to it, perhaps the biggest unspoken reason people have for objecting to (or being offended by) polyamory is fear. It's common for monogamous people to fear that a partner might leave them for a polyamorous relationship (or might demand opening up the existing relationship) if polyamory becomes normalized. But if your partner would actually leave you, or demand that you open up your relationship against your wishes, then you obviously aren't on the same page. There are tons of people out there (I'd wager a large majority of people) who want mostly or completely monogamous relationships – and they should find, date and marry other people who want the same thing.

Being honest about whether or not you're truly willing to commit to one other person sexually and romantically for life is ethical and healthy. Pretending to want monogamy (or genuinely wanting it, and then changing your mind and keeping it a secret), and then cheating is very, very common. Perhaps divorce and infidelity would become less common if more people were aware that poly relationships are an option, and if people made a greater effort to communicate their needs and desires. In short: polyamorous people aren't a threat to people who truly want monogamy – any more than relationships with men are a threat to people who are only interested in relationships with women.

Whether polyamorous marriage is ever legalized or not, I'll be more than happy if it's someday considered socially acceptable. There's nothing inherently unethical or offensive about it, and I've been surprised to find out how many polyamorous people I know, once they feel safe enough to talk about it. "Coming out" as polyamorous is currently a frightening, risky thing to do. If a friend discloses a polyamorous relationship to you, I hope you won't react in any of the ways I've discussed above, but rather give them the support and friendship that they need.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments if you're curious about polyamory, and thanks for reading.

The comments in a recent thread on same-sex marriage have been heading in this direction, so I thought I'd offer some thoughts about polyamorous relationships and how we can view them from a humanist standpoint.

The reason I (and others) advocate full marriage equality for same-sex couples is straightforward. Marriage is a civil ceremony which confers many legal rights on both partners, rights which are either extremely burdensome or impossible to obtain any other way. At present, the law in many states denies certain couples the right to enter into marriage because of the gender of the participants. This is wrong for precisely the same reason as anti-miscegenation laws, which denied certain couples the right to enter into marriage because of the race of the participants. Both of these are discriminatory policies which deny people the equal protection of the laws by treating them differently based on which group they belong to (black/white, heterosexual/homosexual).

However, laws which restrict marriage to two partners are not discriminatory in the same sense, because those laws apply equally to everyone. Unlike with same-sex marriage, therefore, I conclude that there is no straightforward anti-discrimination argument for extending marriage rights to polyamorous partnerships. This is not a case of legal benefits being offered to certain partnerships but denied to others based solely on morally irrelevant characteristics of the partners, like race or gender. Instead, the law is consistent: no one can enter into a legal marriage with more than one partner. One can certainly argue whether this is the most rational policy for society to follow, but it's not a self-evident violation of anyone's human rights.

So far, so good. But now the further question: even if it's not discrimination, is it the most rational policy for society to forbid multiple-partner marriages?

The first thing to recognize, in my opinion, is that once we decide to allow polyamorous marriages, there's no rational cutoff point at which we can limit their size. Any argument which would permit a polyamorous relationship of N partners would equally well permit a relationship of N+1 partners. (In software engineering, my chosen field, a similar principle is called the zero-one-infinity rule: "When processing input, allow none of X, one of X, or infinity of X.")

But this presents us with some problems, because there are numerous rights and responsibilities that come with a two-person marriage that simply can't be extended in a straightforward manner to a multiple-partner marriage. Take the right not to testify against your partner in court, for example, or the death benefits paid to partners of federal employees, or the right to gain residency or citizenship by marrying someone who is already a citizen. Allowing such rights to be extended to an arbitrarily large group of partners could lead to chaos - but having permitted them for two-person marriages, how could we fairly forbid them to larger arrangements?

And then there are the legal issues, which would be orders of magnitude more complex than the already difficult dilemmas that arise in family law. How do you take a new person into a polyamorous relationship - must it be by unanimous consent of all current partners, or a mere majority vote? If such a partnership dissolves, how do we fairly divide up property, or settle on child custody or visitation rights? If you're married to two or more people and become incapacitated, who would have the deciding vote in matters of care? These problems aren't insoluble - but they would be extraordinarily difficult to grapple with. (This, again, contrasts to same-sex marriage, where the nature, rights and responsibilities of the relationship don't change just because we've removed one limitation on who can participate. Polyamorous marriage, on the other hand, would truly be a brand-new kind of relationship requiring its own set of rules.)

All these factors would seem to indicate that our current policy is rationally justified. And yet, the libertarian in me rebels against the idea that the state has any business butting into people's private relationships. Mutually consenting adults should be able to enter into any kind of arrangement they please. I have to admit that I find considerable justice in this argument. If three people rather than two want to share household responsibilities, by what right can we deny them that? A larger family structure might even, arguably, be superior to pair marriages in terms of sharing childcare duties and other responsibilities, and more resilient against tragedies like the death of one partner.

On the other hand, these lofty principles, so clear and simple-seeming in the abstract, inevitably get snarled in the complications of the real world. And here's one whopping big complication that atheists and freethinkers should be especially sensitive to: in the real world, one of the most common manifestations of plural partnerships is in religious cults that use polygamy as a way to keep women subjugated.

Escapees like Carolyn Jessop and Elissa Wall have written grippingly of their virtual imprisonment in isolated sects like the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints - an extremist offshoot of the Mormons), which force girls into harem-like polygamous marriages with older males whom they're expected to obey absolutely. (See also this article, or my older posts on Warren Jeffs.)

This is an evil that no society should tolerate - but if we legally permit polyamory, how can we prevent it? Better enforcement of age-of-consent laws would help, but even so, this would not prevent women who feel they have no place else to turn from being coerced into these relationships of subjugation.

With all this in mind, my qualified conclusion is that society should not legally recognize polyamorous relationships. I certainly don't think consenting adults should be prohibited from doing whatever they want in their private lives, but the full range of legal benefits that come with marriage should be limited to two-person partnerships, at least for now. However, I'm open to counterarguments. Is there a way to treat all kinds of committed relationships evenhandedly without encouraging women's subjugation or opening the door to legal absurdities?

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...

Hello Quixote,

Considering your last letter to me was some time ago, I apologize for the lateness of my reply. To tell the truth, this was the hardest one for me to write. It's not that I couldn't think of anything to say. Much the opposite: If I had said everything I wanted to say, this post would have been too long! Cutting it down to a reasonable length was more of a struggle than writing it. I've endeavored to edit in a way that does justice to your points and to mine.

I also want to say at the outset that this will be my last reply. I've enjoyed our conversation these past few months; I think we've both had ample opportunity to speak our minds and I'm glad for that. If you'd like to offer some final thoughts in reply to this letter, you're welcome to do so.

While you good folk may connect these observances, and they are real world observances, with logical arguments or rationale for unbelief, most do not. In ministry, we engage believers and unbelievers continuously, and it's a rare bird that cites any of the philosophic staples in my first paragraph, or others like them. The ones who do generally do not exhibit even a serviceable grasp of the attendant issues. This is my overwhelming and consistent experience firsthand.

That may be one of those points where we'll have to differ. In my experience, most atheists, even if they aren't experts in theology, come to atheism because they've decided that something about religious belief doesn't rationally add up. This may, of course, be self-selection bias - it's likely that most of the people who visit Daylight Atheism come here because they like to give thought to these issues.

However, I maintain that since there isn't (yet!) a thriving, real-world atheist community in the same way that there are religious communities, very few people are going to become atheists just because it's the default option in their peer group. Most people who become atheists do so as the result of a conscious decision on their part and an intentional effort to seek out the advocates of that philosophy. Granted, if we're as successful as I'd hope, that may change in a few generations. Greta Christina wrote a very thoughtful post about this (link), about how every social movement needs must start with the most independently-minded, committed people, and how that inevitably diminishes as its goals are accomplished and it becomes a more widely accepted position.

An insulating factor actively laboring against this realization is immersion. I define immersion as a progressive group dynamic which isolates and subsequently reinforces cognitive structures, mores, and peculiar linguistics — and a host of other things — among individuals sharing (un)beliefs and community. We're all guilty of it, and I can't speak for y'all, but one thing accomplished by this dialogue is the weakening of this exclusive immersive web by the coupling of new strands to existing ones.

I couldn't agree more! Why do you think I wanted to do this in the first place?

Lastly, I might also ask you a related question: to what degree is your atheism dependent upon your birth in a western culture steeped in secularism? Would that influence your estimation of the reasonableness of your atheism? I'd also like to hear to what degree you believe your birth into a Judeo-Christian culture has imported tenets from those religions into your atheism, whether consciously or subconsciously.

I don't accept that Western culture, particularly American culture, is steeped in secularism. On the contrary, I'd say that being an atheist where I live requires swimming upstream against an overwhelming tide of public opinion: opinion treating belief in God not just as the expected, but the only moral position. Look at the money in your wallet if you don't think that's true. There may be some places where your remark about our secularism-steeped culture has a degree of truth. But in vast swathes of this country, nonbelief in public life, or even in private life, is all but impossible unless carefully concealed.

I'll grant that living in this culture does make atheism possible - in the sense that, as god-saturated as our society is, we've still managed to carve out some breathing room between religion and government, creating a small space where nonbelief can exist. In many cultures of the past and the present, even that wouldn't have existed, and outspoken atheism would not be an option at all. In those cultures I'd have been imprisoned or worse for saying the kind of things I say nearly every day on this blog.

As for importing Judeo-Christian tenets into my atheism - I don't know, which tenets do you have in mind? There are many moral principles, like the Golden Rule, that find expression in every culture. In our culture, which is heavily influenced by Christian thinking, these universals naturally find expression in a Christian context. In that sense, I'll concede that my worldview has been influenced by these beliefs; it would be virtually impossible for anyone who grew up in 20th-century America to say otherwise. On the other hand, the Bible and historic Christianity have promoted many principles that are antithetical to my worldview, and many social reform movements to whose ideals I subscribe - separation of church and state, women's equality, secular public schools, birth control, GLBT rights - were and often still are viciously attacked for being anti-Christian.

I've never lived a moment without out it that I can recall. There's definitely times when it's stronger, though. After absorbing so much heat for this admission, I'm figuring I should just go ahead and claim it as an evidence for God — I've got nothing to lose! I'd enjoy hearing of your comparable experience...

Well, now you've asked me a hard question! Trying to do justice to experiences like this is like trying to describe the experience of listening to a symphony. But I'll give it my best shot.

This kind of experience tends to come upon me suddenly at my happiest moments, though it sometimes wells up for no apparent reason. (Maybe it's from a little trickle of current in my temporal lobes.) The most salient aspect is a sense of heightened awareness - a feeling that all the world has suddenly become much richer in detail, that everything has become immeasurably more significant. Always accompanying this is a sense of great affection, of love for all the beauty of the world and my fellow living things. And lastly, there's a feeling I can only describe as oceanic: like the boundaries of my self dissolving, being opened up to all the unimaginable vastness of the world, and experiencing it as a source of bliss. In those few perfect moments, it feels as if the world is full of magic, and I've only briefly gained the ability to see it.

I won't say that this state, this awareness, is present in my life every waking moment. But when it does emerge, it's like the sun breaking through clouds, and I wonder how anyone ever does without it.

When I read your commentary and essays, I sense that you consider some things to be right, and others wrong, in a manner that equates them with objective moral values — in a manner that you would consider them right and wrong if you and every other human had never existed; simply put: more than only the natural functioning of a human cortex, a deliverance of human reason, or an emergent consciousness. I'm not convinced yet that your and your commentator's actions match your beliefs. Where is my misstep here?

I do consider that some things are objectively right and others are objectively wrong. However, I do not consider that this is mutually exclusive with the natural functioning of the cortex. I think these explanations are complementary: the existence of conscious, reasoning beings brings right and wrong into the world, just as it brings in a whole host of other abstract concepts - democracy, for example, or money, or science, or music. It wouldn't make sense to say that those things aren't "real", that they're just tricks of the cerebral cortex. We make them real by participating in them.

How can you prove that the only reason God would permit evil to occur is to bring about some other end?

Truthfully, I think that's the only defense a Christian could possibly offer, even as unsatisfactory as it is (a point you seem to agree with, if I read you correctly). For if God did not create evil as a means to some other end, there's only one other logically possible option: that God created evil as an end in itself. In other words, he created evil for its own sake. That's the definition of what an evil being is, and that creates an irreconcilable contradiction with the core tenet of Christianity that God is good.

If a genuine free will exists, not every possible world is feasible for God to create, and the one we know may just be the possible world feasible for God to create that contains the most good with the least amount of evil given the counterfactuals of creaturely free action. As I think I'm on the side of reason here, I'll endure the Panglossian taunts happily.

I really doubt that very strongly. When you look out at this world, you can't think of any way it could be improved? We wouldn't stand to gain by making human beings more empathetic, less prone to resort to violence to settle their disagreements? We couldn't gain by making free agents who are more inclined to take the long view, less inclined to value immediate short-term gain? By making people who are more courageous and morally steadfast, less willing to compromise their principles for material benefit?

These are all contingent parameters of human behavior that could hypothetically be altered; a creator could twiddle those knobs without depriving us of free will. If you really think this world is unimprovable, that's your right. All I can say, though, is that if God turned things over to me, it wouldn't take long to draw up a list of fixes.

Put yourself in my shoes for a moment: if you were convinced there existed an all-wise, all-good, all-powerful being, wouldn't you trust in Him with regard to evil?

If I was convinced of the exact statement you gave, yes, I'd pretty much have to. However, that's because your conclusion is contained in your premise: if there existed an all-wise, all-good, all-powerful being, it follows as a matter of logic that there can be no unnecessary evil in the world. But that's putting the cart before the horse. I see no rational way to draw such an inference, given the fact that unnecessary evil manifestly does exist. How anyone could look at this world and infer that supreme moral goodness intended it all to be this way, that's a conclusion I simply can't see any way to justify.

As I've said before, to infer moral goodness, one has to have at least some understanding of the actor's motives. But you say we should treat God's plan as a mystery, that we can't know he doesn't have good reasons of his own and therefore should trust him. Again, this is putting the cart before the horse. If God's motives are unknown to us, to be consistent, you'd have to say that his moral status, good or bad, is also an unknown quantity. Believing that God is absolutely good and that he has a motive for all the evil he causes is an argument that goes straight from premise to conclusion without any intervening steps.

In the days before Justice Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation, we witnessed a strange spectacle: religious-right Christian after religious-right Christian spoke out against her nomination on the grounds that she valued empathy, and that this was an undesirable quality for a judge to have.

Coming from a religion whose founder supposedly said, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me," this is laughably absurd. Empathy is one of the founding moral teachings of Christianity, and here we see prominent Christians viciously attacking it. But in a deeper sense, I think this tells us something important. I don't believe attacks on empathy are a temporary position employed by the religious right for political advantage. I think that they're sincere when they claim to detest empathy, and that their abhorrence for it is an essential part of their worldview.

Let me refer again to Dave Schmelzer's Confessions of a Turncoat Atheist. Although Schmelzer's more willing than most to credit atheism for the good it's brought about, he still seems unable to avoid the atheists-are-angry-misanthropes invective that's ubiquitous in Christian apologetics books:

"[T]he tone... in the case of the 'nastiest' atheist writers, at least - does tend toward arrogance and sanctimony. I mean, do these authors seem happy to you? Is that worth noting?" [p.38]

and then there's this classic bit of propaganda, an exchange which he claims happened while he was speaking to an atheist students' club at a local university:

"In my presentation, I had told some inspiring (to me) stories about heroic, faith-driven responses to Hurricane Katrina, so I hazarded, 'To you, then, the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is not so much that so many people were killed or driven away from their homes, families, and community. You're saying that that's no more tragic than, say, whatever damage was done to the coastline.' He agreed with that and pressed his point by saying, 'A person's death and a tree's death should have the same value in the big picture.'" [p.111]

Atheists think humans are no more valuable than trees! (Insert gasp of horror from Christian readers here.)

Call me a skeptic, but I just can't take this story seriously. I think I can say that I'm pretty familiar with what atheists tend to believe, and I've never met or heard of an atheist who believes anything remotely like this. I'm all but certain that Schmelzer has misreported this conversation. It may not have been intentional: knowing what we know about the fallibility of memory, he may have misremembered it in a way that fits with his conception of how atheists think.

What does this have to do with empathy? I'm coming around to that.

Having read countless deconversion stories, I've seen one element that reappears in many of them: the moment when a person, on the brink of losing their faith, begins to see atheism as a genuine possibility, as a live option, and is exhilarated by the thought:

For a few seconds, I was not a religious mind, viewing atheism from behind a plexiglass shield and handling it with industrial gloves, but a neutral mind, considering what the world looked like through both religious and atheistic eyes. For an ephemeral moment, I saw that the anomalies present in my religious perspective dissolved in the light of atheism. (source)

The more time that I spent reading essays by atheists, agnostics and freethinkers/humanists, the more I began to realize with a mixture of both fear and joy that I was thinking more like an unbeliever, similar to before I actually became a Christian approximately seventeen years earlier. I felt a certain kind of excitement building inside of me that was a very freeing experience. (source)

Perhaps more than any strictly intellectual argument, this is the factor that makes you most likely to convert to a given worldview: whether you truly empathize with the people who hold it, whether you can put yourself in their place and understand their reasoning.

The religious right, of course, has no interest in people coming to think this way about any worldview other than their own, which is why they disparage empathy in general. But they're especially terrified of people coming to think this way about atheism. This is why every presentation of atheism in their writing is carefully tailored to horrify ordinary Christians - to depict atheists as evil, immoral misanthropes (people no more important than trees!) whose views are so obviously beyond the pale that they can be dismissed without further reflection.

This is why, if you ask a theist why they think people become atheists, you rarely get an answer other than cartoonish stereotypes like, "They hate God and want to rebel against him." They can't give good answers to this question because they've never thought about it themselves. By design, they specifically steer away from thinking about it.

This is also why proselytizers so often spread the lie that atheists have no basis for morality, and try to blame us for every evil under the sun. I've attacked this falsehood often, but I've come to realize that it's more than a merely factual confusion. We can't just point out that apologists are wrong about this and expect them to stop saying it. They say it because they need to say it - because it's a crucial part of their worldview that atheism be blamed for everything bad that happens, in order to keep their followers safely away from it.

Although we need to keep speaking out against this tactic, it isn't a battle we can win by words alone. As I said, the religious right says this because they need to, because instilling fear of different viewpoints is a vital part of their strategy, and no correction we offer will convince them otherwise. What we need to do is to be visible - be outspoken, be loud and proud, and don't be afraid to introduce ourselves as atheists. The more people get to know us, the more they'll see that religious stereotypes about us have no basis in reality, and the more isolated and ineffectual the people who insist on pushing those stereotypes will become.

I've been following, with some incredulity, a battle brewing in Congress over a military-spending bill and whether it will include money to buy more F-22 Raptors, a jet fighter used by the Air Force during the Cold War. Even though Defense Secretary Robert Gates insists that these planes are not needed, a contingent of Congresspeople are bent on putting that spending back into the budget - forcing the military to take these planes against their will!

Bizarre as this sounds, it's a classic example of how the military-industrial complex operates in America. Major military firms like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which make most of their profit from multibillion-dollar government contracts, deliberately spread out their operations over as many states as possible - ensuring that senators and representatives from those states will vote for their programs, to ensure the steady flow of government cash that creates jobs in their districts. This pork is like a drug, and Congress, for the most part, is hopelessly addicted.

Stories like this one explain why the amount of money that the U.S. spends on the military is so staggering. Our 2009 base military budget, plus supplementals to paay for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, is about $650 billion. When all military-related spending is counted, the total sum may be closer to $1 trillion. This is just about as much as every other country in the world spends, combined. (See also.)

Since the fall of the Soviet Union, America has not had an adversary that poses us any realistic military threat. And in a world increasingly interconnected by trade, great-power conflicts like those of the 20th century seem less and less likely to happen again. The wars of the future are far more likely to be the kind we've seen in recent years - peacekeeping operations in failed states and asymmetric conflicts with non-state actors like al-Qaeda - for which large conventional weapons systems are useless. Even if we were expecting to fight more wars like those of the past, our spending vastly outstrips any plausible enemy. How, then, can we possibly give a moral justification for such massive, reckless spending on weapons that, in all likelihood, we will never need? (The F-22, for example, has never been used in combat.)

America needs to relearn the concept of opportunity cost. This idea has been ignored by posturing elected officials who huff that "no price is too high to pay for security". But this is obviously false: every dollar we spend on the military is a dollar we can't spend on something else. And there are countless actual, urgent issues our country is facing where that money could be spent to make a major positive difference right now, as opposed to the entirely theoretical possibility of a distant future war that might require these weapons.

Consider how much good that trillion dollars could do if spent in other areas. We could rebuild the entire nation's energy grid with clean alternative power, ending global warming and severing the dependence on foreign oil that poses a significant threat to our security in and of itself. We could enshrine universal healthcare and create an educational system that would make Americans the healthiest, best-educated, most secure people on the planet and an envy of the other nations. We could even apply it to areas of legitimate security concern, like inspecting more of the shipping and transit that passes through our ports - a plausible target of major terrorist attacks, and an area where our current precautions are woefully inadequate. Yet all these grand plans are viewed as too expensive, too "socialist", too unlikely to yield a benefit, by the same elected officials who think nothing of handing out hundreds of billions of dollars each year to well-connected lobbyists and corporations.

The easy excuse is to blame the politicians and assume that wealthy corporations have hopelessly rigged the system in their own favor. But this is too simplistic.

As debased as it is, America is still a democracy, and we still have the power to vote out any politician who offends us. The real problem is how we, the voters, evaluate risk and hold our government to account. Politicians assume, usually correctly, that any vote against the military budget will be used against them in attack ads. Wealthy lobbyists supply the cash needed to run expensive modern campaigns. And voters who would otherwise take their representatives to task for waste and corruption will cheer on almost any spending, no matter how frivolous, if it's justified by repeating the words "national security".

These attitudes create an environment that favors candidates who will vote for massive, wasteful military budgets instead of spending to address real needs. When the voters see the senselessness of this, when we're willing to vote for politicians who pledge to slash the military budget to only what is genuinely necessary for defense, we can dismantle the military-industrial complex and divert that spending into areas where it will truly benefit all of us.

Other posts in this series:

• On the Morality Of...

Back in 2007, I wrote a post on optimistic populism, or how free markets can be a force for good: by spurring efficiency and innovation, they increase the total amount of wealth in the world, making it possible to raise the standard of living for all people. I also noted the irony that libertarians, the fiercest defenders of the free market, so often misunderstand this. In their jeremiads against taxation, they're implicitly buying into the view that wealth cannot be created and that the economy is a zero-sum game where the only way to help some people is to harm others.

Today, I want to talk some more about how markets can be harnessed as a power for good. But first, consider the scope of the problem:

According to the CIA Factbook, the world's GDP was estimated at $69.5 trillion in 2008. If divided by the current world population of around 6.7 billion, that would yield a global per capita income of just over $10,300. This doesn't seem like much, but it would actually be a vast improvement - the World Bank estimates that in 2001, 2.7 billion people lived on less than $2 a day. (This number has undoubtedly gone down somewhat with the rise of China and India, but is still substantial.)

Of course, achieving this level of income equality would require pooling all the world's wealth and then redistributing it equally to every person - a proposal which is unlikely ever to be implemented, for a wide variety of reasons. But there's a bright side to this as well: the fact that billions of people eke out a living on so little means that total income equalization is not necessary. Even a small degree of redistribution would be enough to produce a drastic improvement in the standard of living for the world's poorest and most desperate.

"Redistribution" is a dirty word in the minds of libertarians and conservatives, who think of it solely as direct aid to developing nations funded by taxation. But that's an incomplete definition. Any program, public or private, that results in money flowing from the world's wealthy nations to the developing ones is a form of redistribution. Kiva is one example, a microfinance organization that makes loans to entrepreneurs and businesses in the developing world, which it funds with donations from citizens of wealthy nations.

Wealth-creating free markets have enormous potential to improve the lives of the world's poor. But billions of people who need those benefits most are unable to tap into them, because poverty is self-perpetuating. People in poor countries can't access the credit and lack the infrastructure that are needed to create successful businesses. Meanwhile, most of the wealth that's created in the industrialized world stays in that world, circulating among a small pool of rich stockholders and investors. The U.N.'s target for a meager 0.7% of GDP to be given as aid has been consistently missed by almost all rich nations. Private giving improves these numbers somewhat, but the amount that the rich nations give, compared to what we could give, is still pitifully small - and the wealth gap between rich and poor continues to widen.

To make real progress in ending poverty, we need a different vision of capitalism. We need businesses with a different mission: not to enrich the already wealthy, but to redistribute their profits in beneficial ways. I'm not talking about non-profit foundations that subsist on charity, but real businesses, making a profit by selling goods and services that people need, competing with each other for market share, just as we have now. These businesses would, however, make it a part of their charter to donate all or part of their profits to some worthy cause. Even pledging to donate as little as 10% or 20%, from a large corporation, could be a significant sum.

We already have exemplar companies, like Newman's Own, which donates all profits to charitable causes. But rather than just a few companies out of many doing this, it should be the norm. Why doesn't every business have a designated cause which they support? Why isn't philanthropy part of the core mission of every company, rather than a side pursuit engaged in mainly for the favorable publicity?

In the New Testament book of Hebrews, there's an exhortation to believers reminding them to show hospitality to their guests:

"Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares."

—Hebrews 13:2

The implication is interesting: that Christians should be hospitable to visitors, not simply because they are fellow human beings who need food and shelter, but because some might be angels in disguise who would, presumably, grant blessings to any person who showed them kindness. (The ancient Greeks had similar legends about gods in disguise visiting human beings and richly rewarding the humble souls who treated them well.)

When religious proselytizers claim that only their faith provides a solid basis for morality, the usual atheist retort is that their religion doesn't actually teach people to be good - it only coerces them to commit certain deeds out of a desire for reward or a fear of punishment. In other words, it keeps people in line with appeals to greed and fear, rather than encouraging goodness for its own sake. And in this verse, the Bible confirms that this is the model of behavior it's trying to inculcate.

The conservative columnist Cal Thomas offers another example of this belief that's truly incredible in its bluntness:

If results are what conservative evangelicals want... they already have a model. It is contained in the life and commands of Jesus of Nazareth. Suppose millions of conservative evangelicals engaged in an old and proven type of radical behavior. Suppose they followed the admonition of Jesus to 'love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison and care for widows and orphans,' not as ends, as so many liberals do by using government, but as a means of demonstrating God's love for the whole person in order that people might seek Him?

For Cal Thomas, doing good deeds is just a means to an end. He urges Christian evangelicals to do good for the needy and the downtrodden, not because they are human beings who need help and giving it is the right thing to do - that's the ideology of "liberals" - but because those poor, miserable people might be induced to convert to Christianity if Christians are the ones who help them out. (This passage speaks volumes about why conservative Christians try to slash government-run social programs while boosting handouts to churches that have free rein to proselytize.)

Presumably, Thomas and others like him would view their effort as wasted if the recipient of their aid chooses not to convert, and Christians who follow the admonition in Hebrews would be disappointed if their guests turned out not to be angels. That's the difference between them and us, as Robert Ingersoll wrote in an essay explaining the meaning of secularism:

Secularism means food and fireside, roof and raiment, reasonable work and reasonable leisure, the cultivation of the tastes, the acquisition of knowledge, the enjoyment of the arts, and it promises for the human race comfort, independence, intelligence, and above all liberty. It means the abolition of sectarian feuds, of theological hatreds. It means the cultivation of friendship and intellectual hospitality. It means the living for ourselves and each other; for the present instead of the past, for this world rather than for another.

Ingersoll's focus on this world and the good things it has to offer shows what our moral motivation should be. As atheists and humanists, we welcome guests because we want to bring ease and comfort to our fellow human beings, not because we secretly hope to flatter angels. We put fantasies aside in favor of what is real and meaningful, and live for this world, rather than dreaming of one to come.

While some freethinkers have made contributions to science, the arts or the humanities, others are best known for exemplifying a sea change in human history - showing, by their lives, that one age was passing and another would soon dawn. Just so is today's post on the life of an American freethinker who has the unique distinction of being the last man imprisoned in America for blasphemy: a courageous reformer and patriot by the name of Abner Kneeland.

Kneeland was born in Massachusetts in 1774, the sixth of ten children and the son of a carpenter. In 1801, he became a convert to the Baptist church, underwent immersion baptism and began to preach. But he soon got embroiled in doctrinal clashes with fellow believers, and his flirtation with Baptism didn't last long. By 1803, he had decided he was no longer a Baptist, but a Universalist - an early liberal Christian denomination that didn't believe in Hell. He continued his work as a lay preacher, but now in the service of Universalism.

Kneeland continued as a traveling preacher for several years, but eventually settled down at a Universalist church in New Hampshire. He served as an officer of the New England Universalist General Convention and helped to compile a new hymnal, though some of his verses, like this one, met with a lukewarm reception:

As ancient bigots disagree,
The Stoic and the Pharisee,
So is the modern Christian world
In superstitious error hurl'd.

He moved around over the next several years, from Massachusetts to Philadelphia to New York, and though he continued his work as a Universalist minister, his skeptical side was beginning to assert itself. He read the writings of some of the era's most prominent religious skeptics, including the famous chemist Joseph Priestley and the Scottish utopian Robert Owen, and preached from the pulpit that he reserved the right to interpret the principles of Universalism in his own way. Slowly but surely, he began drifting away from Christianity entirely.

The last straw came in 1829 when Kneeland willingly loaned out his church as a platform for a controversial guest speaker, someone we've met before - the trailblazing freethinker and feminist Frances Wright. No one else in New York City would give Wright a place to speak, and the appearance of the "Red Harlot of Infidelity" in a church was too much even for the liberal Universalists. Kneeland was disfellowshipped by them and soon renounced Christianity altogether. He published a book that same year, A Review of the Evidences of Christianity, which made it clear just how far his theological position had shifted:

Like many others, I once thought that a belief in future existence was absolutely necessary to present happiness. I have discovered my mistake. Time, a thousand years hence, is no more to me now, than time a thousand years past. As no event could have harmed me, when I existed not, so no event can possibly harm me when I am no more. By anticipating and calculating too much on future felicity, and dreading, or at least fearing, future misery, man often loses sight of present enjoyments, and neglects present duties. When men shall discover that nothing can be known beyond this life, and that there is no rational ground for any such belief, they will begin to think more of improving the condition of the human species. Their whole thoughts will then be turned upon what man has done, and what he can still do, for the benefit of man.

In 1831 Kneeland moved to Boston, where he became a lecturer at the newly formed First Society of Free Enquirers and started his own newspaper, the Boston Investigator, whose motto was: "Truth, perseverence, union, justice - the means; happiness - the end. Hear all sides - then decide." His weekly lectures, which drew as many as two thousand people, denounced the influence of religion on society and advocated the full equality of women, arguing that they should be permitted to use birth control, obtain a divorce, be paid equally for equal work, and be allowed to vote. He also argued for the equality of the races and, most shockingly, in favor of interracial marriage.

He also made the acquaintance of some influential people, most notably the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison had just arrived in Boston and was searching for a church or hall to rent to deliver lectures against slavery, but as with Frances Wright, seemingly no one was willing to give him the space. Kneeland again came to the rescue, offering Garrison the use of Julien Hall, where he delivered his own lectures. Garrison would later write, "It was left for a society of avowed infidels to save the city from the shame of sealing all its doors against the slave's advocate."

But despite its political and philosophical ferment, Massachusetts in this era was no friend to freethinkers. A still-enforced anti-blasphemy law from 1782 outlawed "denying, cursing, or contumeliously reproaching God", and it was under this law that Abner Kneeland was arrested and charged for making statements like this:

1. Universalists believe in a god which I do not: but believe that their god, with all his moral attributes is nothing more than a chimera of their own imagination.
2. Universalists believe in Christ, which I do not: but believe that the whole story concerning him is as much a fable and fiction, as that of the god Prometheus...
3. Universalists believe in miracles, which I do not; but believe that every pretension to them can either be accounted for on natural principles or else is to be attributed to mere trick and imposture.
4. Universalists believe in the resurrection of the dead, in immortality and eternal life, which I do not; but believe that all life is mortal, that death is an eternal extinction of life to the individual who possesses it, and that no individual life is, ever was, or ever will be eternal.

Kneeland argued, unsuccessfully, in court that he was not an atheist but a pantheist. The prosecuting attorney, meanwhile, argued that if he were not punished for his opinions, "marriages [will be] dissolved, prostitution made easy and safe, moral and religious restraints removed, property invaded, and the foundations of society broken up". (See any parallels?) In 1838, he was found guilty and sentenced to sixty days in jail.

After serving his prison term, Kneeland moved to Iowa with the intent of forming a utopian community similar to Owen's and Wright's, but it did not survive after his own death in 1844. Nevertheless, his life had left its mark. The uproar in Boston over his conviction, including numerous newspaper editorials defending the First Amendment and a petition to the governor signed by over a hundred prominent citizens, made such an impact that never again, in Massachusetts or anywhere else in America, was a freethinker imprisoned for violating blasphemy laws. Although there were a few more sporadic trials (most notably the 1886 Reynolds trial defended by Robert Ingersoll), Abner Kneeland's greatest accomplishment was to show clearly that laws protecting religious feelings were archaic and incompatible with an increasingly modern and enlightened society.

Other posts in this series:

• The Contributions of Freethinkers