A Manual for Creating Atheists (19 page)

(Long pause)

PB
: What scares you the most?

GF
: Well … well, that he won’t go to heaven. I know that must sound silly to you. But it makes me sad.

PB
: It doesn’t sound silly at all. I totally understand that’s how you feel and that that’s how you were raised.

FS
: Yeah.

PB
: So you think that because he doesn’t believe in heaven he won’t go there?

GF
: No, but, but because he doesn’t believe in Jesus.

PB
: Is FS a good man? Does he treat others well. Is he kind? Is he sincere?

FS
: Yes!

(Laughter)

GF
: Of course he is.

PB
: But you’d like more? You’d like him to be good
and
to believe in Jesus?

GF
: Yeah, I would.

PB
: If someone’s bad but they believe in Jesus do you think they’ll go to heaven?

GF
: If they believe, yes.

PB
: So if heaven is your goal, then it’s more important to believe in Jesus than it is to be a good person? I ask because I’m trying to figure out how you’re thinking about it.

GF
: Well the way you get to heaven is through Jesus. If you believe in Jesus that will make you good.

PB
: Really? A lot of people believe in Jesus but they’re not good. Or do you think they’re just pretending?

GF
: I don’t know. Maybe they’re just pretending.

PB
: Yeah, I’m sympathetic to that view. There’s way too much pretending going on. So I’m curious, if you could choose only one, FS being good or FS believing in Jesus, which would you choose?

GF
: Both.

(Laughter)

PB
: But let’s just say you can’t have both.

(Brief silence)

GF
: Good.

PB
: Then you already have what’s really important to you.

GF
: Yeah, I guess so. I just want more. For him.

PB
: Wanting more is probably part of the human condition. I’m curious, you obviously consider yourself to be a good person, right?

GF
: Yeah.

PB
: Would you be good if you didn’t believe in Jesus?

GF
: What do you mean?

PB
: I mean if you didn’t believe Jesus was the Son of God, if you came to the conclusion that this was just a fairytale, would you still act the way you do or would you do bad stuff? Would you be mean, vindictive, petty, you know, do bad stuff?

GF
: I never thought about it before.

PB
: Let’s just say at some point, maybe tomorrow or the next day, you decided that the whole Jesus, heaven, devil thing was just a story, a myth, and so you stopped believing. Would you continue to be good?

GF
: I don’t know. Honestly, I think I’d be scared.

PB
: Scared of what? Death? Not going to heaven?

GF
: Yeah. Not going to heaven. Death. Yeah. All of it.

PB
: Of not seeing the people you love, like FS?

GF
: Yeah. I guess of nothing. You know?

PB
: You mean of there being nothing after you die?

GF
: Yeah, sure. Of course.

PB
: I don’t want to put words in your mouth. I’m just trying to understand.

GF
: I know. What do you think?

PB
: It’s not really about what I think, it’s about what you think.

GF
: I know. But I want to know what you think.

PB
: What I think about what?

GF
: What you think about this discussion. About what I’ve been saying. About this.

(Gesturing at FS)

PB
: Well, I think you’re both good people. I think you’re sincere and that you’re trying to do the right thing. I think you really love each other, and that matters—a lot. I also think you’ve been indoctrinated into a set of beliefs. I think if you were raised in another part of the world, like Saudi Arabia, you’d be a sincere Muslim. I don’t think that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and deep down I think you really question whether or not that’s true, and that you have for some time now. I think you like the idea of believing in something, and you like to think of yourself as the type of person who holds this belief. I think that you have a real possibility of letting go of that belief and making your own way. I know you can do that. And I also think you’re at a point in your life when you’re ready to. That’s what I think.

(Long pause)

FS
: Wow. Dude.

PB [to GF]
: What do you think about what I think?

(Pause)

GF
: Well … well. Maybe. I don’t know.

PB
: It’s okay not to know. I think you’re ready to take your sincerity and honesty and apply that to your beliefs. Just be really, really honest with
yourself
. Ask yourself if you really believe someone rose from the dead or walked on water. Ask yourself if you or if [FS] needs to believe that to be good. Really ask yourself.

(Long pause)

GF
: Okay, okay.

(We hugged each other.)

DIG DEEPER

Books

Seth Andrews,
Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason
(Andrews, 2012)

Jerry DeWitt and Ethan Brown,
Hope after Faith: An Ex-Pastor’s Journey from Belief to Atheism
(DeWitt & Brown, 2013)

John W. Loftus,
Why I Became an Atheist: Personal Reflections and Additional Arguments
(especially chapter 20) (Loftus, 2008)

Marlene Winell,
Leaving the Fold
(Winell, 1993)

Online Resources

The Clergy Project (
http://clergyproject.org
): “The Clergy Project is a confidential online community for active and former clergy who do not hold supernatural beliefs. The Clergy Project launched on March 21st, 2011… . Currently, the community’s 390 plus members use it to network and discuss what it’s like being an unbelieving leader in a religious community. The Clergy Project’s goal is to support members as they move beyond faith.”

John W. Loftus, “Advice to People Who Leave the Fold,”
http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2009/07/advice-to-people-who-leave-fold.html

RationalWiki, “RationalWiki Atheism FAQ for the Newly Deconverted,”
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/RationalWiki_Atheism_FAQ_for_the_Newly_Deconverted

Recovering from Religion (
http://recoveringfromreligion.org/pages/home
): “Recovering from Religion is a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing multi-dimensional support and encouragement to individuals leaving their religious affiliations through the establishment, development, training, and educational support of local groups nationwide.”

The Secular Therapist Project (
http://seculartherapy.org/index.php
): “In my work with the secular community I have heard many stories from people who consulted a mental health professional only to find out after several sessions that the professional was spiritual or religious or had new age ideas. Investigating, I soon learned that it is quite difficult to find a therapist that is actually secular or will only use evidence based methods with a client. Secular therapists don’t advertise that they are humanist or atheist because that might alienate the churches and ministers who often make referrals to them. It might also drive off religious clients. Too many people have told me that they simply cannot find a therapist in their community who is not religious. On the other hand, I know that there are thousands of secular therapists, so how do we get these clients together with therapists. That is the task that Han Hills and I decided to tackle in 2011. We went live with the site in April of 2012 and are seeing clients and therapists finding each other and hopefully engaging in productive, life enhancing work.”

NOTES

1. My parents’ generation, and presumably the generation before them, went out of their way to insist that they knew what was best for their children. Even my own progressive parents maintained this attitude. It is my hope that the children my wife and I are raising will not be hobbled by the same sense of certainty that was so rife in previous generations. Indeed, I think there’s a more egalitarian relationship between children and parents now than at any time in the recent past.
   
2. It is my sincere hope that a field of academic study can develop around issues related to recovery from religion and faith, including how to raise skeptical children. Furthermore, innovative and gratifying careers can be based upon developing inoculation and containment strategies that promote the value of belief on the basis of reason and evidence, as opposed to believing on the basis of anything else. This is a pristine area ripe for study.
   
3. It may be worth looking at the literature on grief, specifically, Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s views on grief (Kübler-Ross & Kessler, 2005). I’ve just started incorporating her richer understanding of loss, as applied to faith, to deepen and enrich my interventions.
   
4. Our objective should be to create people who have learned key lessons from Socrates, Nietzsche, and the Four Horsemen—people who understand the dangers inherent in faulty reasoning processes, certainty, and religiosity. We need to create a society that holds not pretending to know things one doesn’t know as a virtue, as opposed to the contemporary view that holding a belief with certainty makes one a better person.
   
5. Nevada, where my parents lived and my mother died, does not have a Death with Dignity law. The faithful have extinguished hope that my mother, and others who are dying slow, painful deaths, can pass gracefully at a time of their choosing. As of 2013, only Oregon and Washington have Death with Dignity laws, and even those laws are highly restrictive.
   

   Tragically, the primary reason that terminal patients enduring tremendous pain are unable to quickly and painlessly end their lives, but are instead forced to endure days, weeks, or months of misery and suffering, is intertwined with the same false certainty created by faith. It’s a toxic problem when people believe the demands of their faith tradition apply to people who do not share their faith. This is evidenced by the Catholic Church’s campaign against Death with Dignity measures.
   

6. Perhaps my predilection is just a product of my liberal sexual culture. If I had been denied sex from adolescence, then seventy-two virgins would likely be more appealing.
   
7. I’ve been working closely with my students at Portland State University, Ryan Marquez, Anna Wilson, Renee Barnett, Kai Pak, Steve Helms, and others, to get critical thinking into the public high schools. For more than a year we worked diligently, facing a myriad of challenges. Unfortunately, our project is on hold (primarily because of budget cuts), but the materials that the students presented to school administrators will be made available and licensed under Creative Commons (
   http://creativecommons.org/
   ). Anyone who wishes to duplicate our proposed program will have access to all of the student and instructor materials once it becomes available. It is our sincere hope that readers will take up this project, duplicate, and improve upon our program in their local high schools.
   
8. My reasons for arguing that resources should be disproportionately devoted to those at greater risk are rooted in criminal justice literature. Though counterintuitive, the evidence is clear: when low-risk inmates receive treatment in prisons, or in the community, their recidivism actually goes
   up
   . Lower-risk inmates are not “broken” to begin with, but putting them in treatment they do not need tells them they are broken, makes them angry, and mixes them with higher-risk inmates who are broken and who negatively influence other people.
   

   In one study, high-risk offenders averaged a 92 percent recidivism rate under minimal treatment conditions, but their rate
   dropped
   to 25 percent under intensive treatment conditions. The lower-risk offenders, on the other hand, averaged 12 percent recidivism under minimal treatment conditions, but their rate
   increased
   to 29 percent under intensive treatment conditions (Andrews & Friesen, 1987). Many meta-analyses have confirmed this counterintuitive pattern of higher-level offenders getting better with the right kind of treatment and lower-level offenders actually getting worse (Andrews, et al., 1990).
   

   By putting lower-risk people in prison we also take them away from all the things that make them low risk—supportive wives and children, meaningful jobs, pro-social friends, etc. Higher-risk inmates are broken and when they receive the right treatment their recidivism goes down. This is called the “risk principle.” It tells prison administrators who they should focus their scarce treatment resources on—the higher-risk inmates. The “need principle” tells administrators what they need to focus on once they know who requires the most help.
   

   Many need areas such as mental health, poverty, and self-esteem are not predictive of crime. Most people who are poor and have low self-esteem, and most people who are suffering from clinical depression, do not commit crimes. Other need areas, known as “criminogenic need,” are highly predictive of crime. For example, individuals who have antisocial attitudes, values, and beliefs, antisocial friends, antisocial personalities (traits of impulsivity, low self-control, and narcissism), or substance abuse problems, are highly likely to commit crime and need help with these areas of their life. The risk and the need principles are just two of several, counterintuitive principles of effective correctional programming (Andrews, et al., 1990; Bogue, Diebel, & O’Connor, 2008; Bonta & Andrews, 2010; McNeil, Raynor, & Trotter, 2010).