“This book profoundly affected me. It’s funny, and poignant,
and most importantly, true! You must read this book.”
—JULIA SWEENEY
comedian, actress, Saturday Night Live alum
For bonnie Annie Laurie
Foreword
It isn’t difficult to work out that religious fundamentalists are deluded—those people who think the entire universe began after the agricultural revolution; people who believe literally that a snake, presumably in fluent Hebrew, beguiled into sin a man fashioned from clay and a woman grown from him as a cutting: people who find it self-evident that the origin myth that happened to dominate their own childhood trumps the thousands of alternative myths sprung from all the dreamtimes of the world. It is one thing to know that these faith-heads are wrong. My mistake has been naively to think I can remove their delusion simply by talking to them in a quiet, sensible voice and laying out the evidence, clear for all to see. It isn’t as easy as that. Before we can talk to them, we must struggle to understand them; struggle to enter their seized minds and empathize. What is it really like to be so indoctrinated that you can honestly and sincerely believe obvious nonsense—believe it with every fiber of your being?
Just as Helen Keller was able to tell us from the inside what it was like to be blind and deaf, so there are rare individuals who have broken the bonds of fundamentalist indoctrination and are also gifted with the articulate intelligence to tell the rest of us what it was like. Some of these memoirs promise much but end up disappointing. Ed Husain’s
The Islamist
gives a good picture of what it is like to be a decent young man gradually sucked in, step by step, to the mental snake pit of radical Islamism. But Husain doesn’t give us a feeling for what it is really like, on the inside, to believe passionately in arbitrary nonsense. And even at the end of the story, when he has escaped from jihadism, it is only the political extremism that he abjures: he seems even now not to have shaken off his childhood belief in Islam itself. Faith still lurks, and one fears for the author that he remains vulnerable. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s
Infidel
is a fascinating and moving account of her escape from the singular oppression that is a woman’s lot under Islam (and “under” is the right word), including the unspeakable barbarism of genital mutilation. But even at her most devout, she was never the kind of zealot who goes around preaching and actively seeking victims to convert. Again, her book doesn’t really help the reader to understand mental possession by religious delusion. The most eloquent witness of internal delusion that I know—a triumphantly smiling refugee from the zany, surreal world of American fundamentalist Protestantism—is Dan Barker.
Barker is now one of American secularism’s most talented and effective spokespeople—together with his delightful partner (in all senses of the word) Annie Laurie Gaylor. Dan, to put it mildly, was not always thus. He has a truly remarkable tale to tell of his personal history and breakout from the badlands of religious fundamentalism. He was in it right from the start, up to his ears. Dan was not just a preacher, he was the kind of preacher that “you would not want to sit next to on a bus.” He was the kind of preacher who would march up to perfect strangers in the street and ask them if they were saved: the kind of door-stepper on whom you might be tempted to set the dogs. Dan knows deeply what it is like to be a wingnut, a faith-head, a fully paid-up nutjob, an all singing, all glossolaling religious fruit bat. He can take us—simultaneously laughing and appalled—into that bat-belfry world and even make us sympathize. But he also knows what it is like to stumble upon the unaccustomed pleasure of thinking for oneself, without help from anybody else, right in the teeth of opposition from what was then his entire social world. The socially unacceptable habit of
thinking
led him directly to realize that his entire life so far had been a time-wasting delusion. All by himself, he came to his senses—in a big way. Unusually, he has the verbal skills and the intelligence and the sensitivity to tell us the whole story, step by painful—and yet exhilarating—step.
His account of his early indoctrination into his parents’ fundamentalist sect, his unquestioning faith in the literal truth of every word of it, his disturbingly easy facility in “saving” souls, his successful career as a preacher and musician and composer for Jesus, is riveting. Even more fascinating is the process by which the doubts set in and gradually multiplied in that intelligent but naive young mind. Then there is the pathos with which he tells of the interregnum period when he was already a convinced atheist, but could not quite bring himself to leave the church of which he was a minister—mostly because this was the only life he knew, and he found it hard to face the world outside, or confront his family with the truth. As so often where there is pathos, comedy is not far behind, and there is a sort of dismal comedy in the responses of Dan’s religious friends when he finally announced his atheism. In all the many letters he received, not one offered any kind of
reason
why atheistic beliefs might actually be wrong. Perhaps the funniest example is that of the Rev. Milton Barfoot, who said to Dan’s brother, in apparently honest bafflement, “But, isn’t Dan afraid of hell?” No, Reverend, Dan doesn’t believe in hell anymore, that’s one of the things about being an atheist, you see.
Dan’s delay, after he became an atheist and before he resigned from the ministry, carries the likely implication that there are lots more clergymen out there who have ridden the same course as Dan but shied at the final fence: reverend atheists who dare not jump from the only way they know to make a living, dare not lose their ticket to respect in the limited society in which they move—their big fish-hood in a very small pond. How hard must that be to give up? Fascinatingly, since the publication of his previous book,
Losing Faith in Faith
, Dan Barker himself has become a kind of secret rallying post for large numbers of now faith-free but still pusillanimous clerics. Like a kind of atheistic father confessor, Dan is a magnet for the disillusioned clergy. As a good confessor, he will not betray their confidence as individuals, but there is nothing to stop him from telling their story in a general way and, once again, there’s comedy mixed in with the pathos.
Dan Barker’s own confessor is each reader of this book, and it is hard not to revel in the role. It is hard to disavow the exultation as Dan breaks the shackles, and even more so when he is later joined in unbelief by the parents who had been responsible for his original religious fervor, and by one of his two brothers. It wasn’t that he turned his preaching skills on his family in reverse, and worked hard to deconvert them. Rather, it simply had never
occurred
to any of the family that being an atheist was even an option. As soon as they had the example of Dan before them, to show that a decent and good person could be a non-believer, they started thinking for themselves about the real issues and it didn’t take them long to reach the obvious conclusion. In his mother’s case, it only took her a few weeks to conclude that “religion is a bunch of baloney” and a little later she was able to add, happily, “I don’t have to hate anymore.” Dan’s father and one of his two brothers followed a similar course. The other brother remains a born again Christian. Perhaps one day he too will see the light.
Deconversion stories occupy only the opening chapters of this book. Just as Dan’s religiously doped youth gave way to a more fulfilled maturity, so later chapters of his book move on, and give us the generous reflections of a mature atheist. Dan Barker’s road from Damascus will, I predict, become well trodden by many others in the future, and this book is destined to become a classic of its kind.
—Richard Dawkins
The Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason & Science
The Official Richard Dawkins Website
Introduction
The first time I
ever
spoke publicly about my atheism was on Oprah Winfrey’s
AM Chicago
television show. That was in 1984 and less than nine months earlier I had been preaching the gospel to appreciative audiences. Now here I was, about to attack everything I had once professed. I was nervous. I had been on television before as a Christian musician, but this was entirely different.
Anne and Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (the first atheist friends I had ever knowingly met) handled the first segment of the show, discussing atheism. After the commercial, the camera pointed to me and the lights came up.
“Joining me now,” said Oprah, “is a former ordained minister of 17 years who gave up his religion: Dan Barker. So, tell me your story, Dan, the
ex-
reverend.”
“I was one of those guys who would walk up to you on the street and tell you about Jesus Christ,” I began, “and would convince you to say the sinner’s prayer, would convince you that you were a sinner deserving of damnation, tell you about Jesus’ love, read the bible to you and pray with people like yourself. I was an evangelist and I loved the gospel, the calling of the ministry—and I’ve changed my mind.”
“What made you change your mind, Dan?”
“I could give a little levity,” I said. “In 30 years of going to church and being a preacher, I never got to sleep in on Sunday mornings.” [laughter]
“Well, Dan, for goodness sake! Sleep in on Saturday!” Oprah quipped. “But what is the real reason? You woke up one morning and you said—what?”
“No, for me it was a five-year struggle. I was always in love with reason, and intelligence, and truth. I thought Christianity had the truth. I really believed it. I dedicated my life to it.”
“When did you become a Christian?” Oprah interrupted. “When you were a little boy?”
“I was raised in church, but at the age of 15 I dedicated my life to Jesus Christ. I accepted a calling of God on my life to be a minister, to be an evangelist, and at that age I went out and started sharing. I went to the mountains and jungles of Mexico to share my faith for years. I traveled the United States, standing in parks and on street corners, telling people about Jesus’ love. A 15-year-old evangelist.”
“I know,” Oprah said. “I did it in the third grade. I understand.”
“And I really haven’t changed. I’m still searching for intelligence and reason and values, and I still love the truth. I’m still the same person, the same minister who wants to know what is real and what is true, and I have decided that the evidences for Christianity are not solid evidences. The bible is an unreliable document, and it is a very uninspiring document. My heart cannot accept what my mind rejects.”
“And you have decided what? There is no God?”
“I am an atheist.”
“You went for 17 years as a minister to not believing in God! What does that say about you?”
“That I was wrong,” I replied.
The word “godless” is defined in the
American Heritage Dictionary
as “1. Recognizing or worshiping no god. 2. Wicked, impious, immoral.” This equating of atheists with evil no doubt stems from the bible: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good...they are all gone aside, they are all together become filthy: there is none that doeth good, no, not one.” (Psalm 14:1-3)
It’s hard to believe that I used to preach that sermon. I now know that the bible and the dictionary are wrong. Atheists are not filthy, corrupt fools. Millions of good people live moral, happy, loving, meaningful lives without believing in a god.
Oprah said it was 17 years, but it was actually 19 years between my first sermon at the age of 15 and my last sermon at the age of 34. Part 1 of
Godless
, Rejecting God, tells the story of how I moved from devout preacher to atheist and beyond.
Part 2, Why I Am an Atheist, presents my philosophical reasons for unbelief. While Refuting God gives simple, thumbnail responses to most theistic arguments, Cosmological Kalamity (which you are welcome to skim if philosophy is not your cup of tea) shows how I deal in depth with one of those arguments.
Part 3, What’s Wrong With Christianity, critiques the bible (its reliability as well as its morality) and the historical evidence for Jesus. Biblical Contradictions gives a brief list of discrepancies, but Understanding Discrepancy takes one of these into greater depth, showing that we skeptics are not simply rattling off shallow lists.
Part 4, Life is Good!, comes back to my personal story, taking a case to the United States Supreme Court, dealing with personal trauma and experiencing the excitement of Adventures in Atheism.