Replying to the Rabbi: Misdefining atheism.

Rabbi Adam Jacobs, at Huffington Post, has written an “open letter to the atheist community.” Strictly speaking there is no atheist community. A community is based on share values and beliefs. Atheism is not a belief; it is the absence of a belief. As such, atheism espouses nothing. The non-existence of a belief is not a unifying factor. I have no values in common with someone else merely because we are both atheists.

This is not to say that atheists don’t hold beliefs, they do: many beliefs in fact.

But the lack of a belief neither binds people together nor inspires them to action. You may act on the basis of something you do believe, but not on the basis of something you don’t believe.

Quickly the good Rabbi wants to find a way to pretend that atheists don’t actually exist. He does this by misdefining atheism. He isn’t the first to pull this exact same trick, nor will he be the last. It is actually a very unoriginal argument. Though it does raise a question about the sanity of writing an open letter to people who don’t exist. But then they pray to a god who isn’t there.

He says, “there really are no true atheists” because “in order to claim with certainty that there is no God you would have to have knowledge of the totality of the universe—seen and unseen—and I don’t think any of you guys are ready to make that claim.”

Note several problems with this argument. First, he completely reverses the burden of proof. He demands that atheists prove there is no God, and since they can’t see the entire universe, they can’t do that, therefore atheists don’t exist. But the burden of proof is not on the atheist.

I can’t say that Jacobs doesn’t molest girl scouts because to do so would require that I have knowledge of every second of his life, and perhaps as good measure, knowledge of the life of every girl scout as well. Therefore, there can be no person in the world who can honestly believe the Rabbi isn’t molesting girl scouts. Clearly this logic is fallacious, so too it is when the Rabbi uses it.

The burden of proof rests with the one making the assertion. It is not the atheist who is called on to prove that no god exists anywhere. It is the theist who must show proof that a god exists somewhere.

For the same reason it is not up to the Rabbi to prove he doesn’t molest girl scouts, but up to his accuser to prove that he does.

Rabbi Jacobs also misdefines atheism. All one need do is look at the word itself. In this case it is two words a-theist. The “a” comes from Greek and means “without” and theist comes from “theos” which means a god. The word means “without god” or without a belief in a god.

This word describes a person who does not hold a belief in a god. Now there are similar beliefs that we don’t speak of. Many people lack a belief in the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus or the Loch Ness monster. They are not called upon to prove that no such entity exists. There is no community of people who disbelieve in these fantasies. And no one demands that they show every inch of the universe in order to prove that neither the bunny, Santa or Lochie actually exist, perhaps hidden behind some remote planet.

An atheist may assert that there is no god, but many don’t. Most, including the most prominent atheists around, have been quite clear that they lack a belief in a god, not that they “know” there is no god. Richard Dawkins refers to a teapot flying around the sun as an analogy. He says he thinks it higher unlikely that there is such a thing, but he can’t say so with absolute certainty. He hasn’t been there. In other words he is not an atheist in the way that Rabbi Jacobs defines them. Few atheists are.

Jacobs also says all atheists are really agnostics. If an agnostic lacks a belief in a god he is an atheist. If he holds a belief in a god, he is a theist. Agnostics say they don’t KNOW if there is god, which is not the same as saying whether they BELIEVE there is one.

An agnostic may say he thinks there is a god but he can’t prove it. He may also say he thinks one probably doesn’t exist but he can’t prove it. He is separating his knowledge from his belief. An atheist is someone who is lacks a belief in a god but he is making no assertion about his knowledge by that statement.

The Rabbi says that atheists don’t say they are agnostics because it “sounds wishy-washy and degrades your ability to take a firm stand against deism.” This merely continues his confusion about atheism and his misdefinition of it.

Rabbi Jacobs does make a rather shameful claim, in my opinion, one spread by some evangelical con men. He argues that the libertarian philosopher, Sir Antony Flew, changed from being an atheist to a theist late in life. Now Mr. Flew and I travelled in similar circles and knew many of the same people and worked with the same organizations. Before his alleged conversion it was widely known that Sir Antony was becoming senile, and losing his ability to think. BTW: It is Antony, not Anthony as the Rabbi spells it. You would think that if you are going to invoke a man in his senility you would at least find out how to spell his name.

A book was published with Flew’s name on it entitled There is a God. Oddly when a reporter interviewed Flew and asked him about the authors cited in the book, Flew said he didn’t know them or their work. It seems the main author, perhaps only author, was a fundamentalist Christian. One reviewer noted that:

Oddly, Flew seems to have turned into an American as well as a believer. His intellectual autobiography is written in the language of an Englishman of his generation and class; yet when he starts to lay out his case for God, he uses Americanisms like “beverages,” “vacation” and “candy.” It is possible that Flew decided to make some passages easier on the ears of American readers or that an editor has made trivial emendations for him. But it is striking how much of Flew’s method of argument, too, has changed from that in his earlier works, and how similar it now is to the abysmal intellectual standards displayed in Varghese’s appendix. In fact, Flew told The New York Times Magazine last month that the book “is really Roy’s doing.

The same reviewer wonders if “Flew has lost the desire to reason effectively or whether he no longer cares what is published in his name.” Sadly it wasn't the desire to reason he lost, but the ability. Mutual friends who visited Flew reported a man who was often befuddled and confused. That a fundamentalist type took advantage of that is shameful. Using it as argumentation is doubly shameful.

Bu,t the Rabbi’s point is that there are intelligent people who believe in a god, and this is to counter the argument supposedly made by atheists that brilliant people don’t believe in a god.

First, I have never heard an atheist argue that atheism is true because brilliant people are atheists. Brilliant people are not infallible. It is the argumentation that is important, not the arguer. So, even if a befuddled Sir Antony change what was left of his mind before his death, it proves nothing. The Rabbi has offered up a straw man argument. He thinks there is some sort of tie and crows “you will quote your expert and I will quote mine. …At the end of the day, it’s always going to be a draw…” But, that only happens if you ignore entirely the quality of the argument and rely ONLY on the authority of the man.

There were many brilliant men who worked in German universities, who endorsed the National Socialist platform and endorsed Jew-hating. There were many equally brilliant individuals who were aghast at the anti-Semitism and bigotry, and openly opposed it. Would Rabbi Jacobs accept that “at the end of the day, it’s always going to be a draw?” NO! If he had any intelligence at all, and he clearly does as it takes some intelligence to forge arguments that sound good but are fallacious, he would respond to that example by saying the quality of the arguments must be investigated, not just who is saying them.

Anti-Jewish rants are not more logical because the man who utters them has a high IQ, or is an expert in chemistry. Facts, logic and the quality of argumentation are far, far more important. But the Rabbi wishes to have a “draw,” so he pretends the arguments themselves are irrelevant. This is precisely why he raised the false claim that some number of atheists, presumably enough to mention, think atheism is correct because brilliant men endorse it.

He next asks and then answers the question as to why atheists bother to challenge religion. His answer is: religion does bad things. Most atheists don’t spend much time on the topic, though a few do. Certainly the typical atheist spends less time trying convert people than the typical Baptist. Jacobs next says that secularists like “Hitler, Mao Stalin, and Pol Pot” also did bad things. Thus assuming another tie.

Hitler was a Roman Catholic who regularly invoked his belief in God and Jesus Christ, so why would the Rabbi simply invent that he was a “secularist?” As for the Communists he mentioned, go back to what I said at the beginning. Atheism does not inspire action, as it is the absence of a belief. People will act on a belief they do hold, not on one they don’t hold. What inspired Stalin, Pol Pot and Mao? Communism. They were not acting as atheists, they were acting as Communists. They also lacked a belief in Santa but no one would seriously argue that their lack of a belief in Santa made them commit genocide.

Hitler’s National Socialism and anti-Semitism inspired his genocide. Marx, and their own views on communism inspired the others. They didn’t act based on what they didn’t believe, but on what they did believe.

Finally Rabbi Jacobs appeals to the Right-wing Christian author, Paul Johnson. Jacobs says his Jewish faith, according to Johnson, brought all sorts of important values to the West. While a bit of self-congratulatory, it isn’t exactly humble, or exactly correct. I would argue that many of the concepts that Johnson ascribes to the Jewish religion were not really in the Jewish religion until long after the West adopted them, and that the West received many of these ideals from the Greeks instead.

The pieces don't seem to fit.

Right-wing Catholic writer, Mary Eberstadt, has tried to explain the rise of secularization in the West. And she tries to do it and promote a Catholic view of things at the same time. Having babies is important, it is the only justification for sex, according to the Catholic sect. She argues that secularization of a society follows the decline in population growth. As people stop having more and more babies they cease to be religious.

Because families are smaller today than they used to be that is promoting a change in beliefs. Her evidence, in my opinion, is pretty flimsy. She also assumes that a smaller family is a "decline of the family." Big Catholic families ("every little sperm is sacred" - see video below for fun) would be described as a successful family. Having fewer children is not the decline of the family. It is just smaller families. People stil have families. Even just a couple who love each other are a family. But the Catholics are quite obsessive about reproducing—odd since their priests are so bad at it—though not for a lack of trying in some case. But altar boys just don't get pregnant.



Eberstadt theorizes that family sizes fell in Europe and then religion declined as a result. And, this is pretty much true. But corrallation is not causation. She says: "In France, for example — where secularism has been a ferocious social and political force for centuries — people generally stopped having babies much sooner than they did elsewhere on the Continent."

So, she assumes the one causes the other. And then to prove it says: "Once we allow that family decline is at least partly responsible for religious decline, we can do a better job of explaining the 'exceptions' in the literature than does secularization theory itself. Specifically, we can explain the largest problem that has bedeviled the theory all along: i.e., the difference in religiousity between Europe and the United States."

This is Eberstadt's proof. Since the U.S. is more religious and has higher birth rates than Europe then "changes in marrying and having babies are helping to drive changes in religiosity..." She claims that: "While fertility has plummeted in most of the rest of the industrialized world, to take one example, in the United States it remains the same, even registering a slight increase."

According to the The World Factbook, compiled by the CIA the fertility rate, that is the average number of children that a woman will give birth to in her lifetime, is 2.05 for the United States. For the "secular" French it is 1.98. The difference is rather small. So the drop in French fertility rates, as compared to the U.S. is all of 0.07. Basically that means for every 1 million American women there are 2,050,000 births and for every 1 million French women there are 1.980,000 births. Is a birth difference of just 70,000 per million women enough to drive the French to secularism while Americans are religious?

It is also curious, if the CIA numbers are correct, why cultures that are far more secular than the United States can have higher fertility rates? For instance, Greenland, a Danish outpost, has a birth rate of 2.19. The difference between Greenland and the United States is much greater than the difference between the United States and France (0.14 vs 0.07). If family size drives religiosity to some degree then we would have to presume that Greenland is even more religious than the United States. Unfortunately, for the theory, that isn't the case.

Another example is New Zealand. The fertility rate in New Zealand is 2.1, which is higher than in the United States. But church attendance in New Zealand is on levels well below the United States. Only 7.5% of the Kiwis are in church on any given Sunday. While surveys in the United States show about 20% of the population as saying they have "no religion," the New Zealand census showed that 32% of Kiwis claim to have no religion. Higher birth rates and higher secularization.

Eberstadt attempted to explain why the United States is the exception in religious trends around the world. She assumes that is the case. I don't think so. Religion is on the decline in the United States EVEN as birth rates remain steady or, as Eberstadt claimed "even registering a slight increase." She tries to explain exceptions to one theory and offers another that has even more exceptions that need explaining.

Take Cyprus as another example. Cypriots tend to be more religious than Americans. The percentage of Cypriots who claim to be members of Greek Orthodox church is greater than the number of Americans who claim to be Christian. Yet their birth rates are very low in comparison, just 1.77.

If Eberstadt's family-driving-religion theory made sense then the following ought to be true:

• Greenland ought to be more religious than the United States. In fact, it is less religious.

• New Zealand ought to be more religious than the United States. In fact, it too is less religious.

• Cyprus ought to be less religious than the United States but instead is more religous.

Now let us look at actual trends in the United States, trends that run counter to Eberstandt's theory.

Eberstadt notes that the U.S. has relatively higher birth rates compared to the rest of the West. She assumes religion causes that. Yet Americans today are far less religious than they were just a few years ago. The number of Americans who classify themselves as non-believers has doubled in recent years even as the birth rate has not declined, as would be expected if Eberstadt is correct. The most recent American Religous Identification Survey shows that currently 70% of Americans say they are Christian. In 1990 it was 86%. That is a substantial drop in a very short time that clearly is unrelated to birth rates. The Survey says: "The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not coe from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion."

The Survey said, in a press statement:

The percentage of Americans claiming no religion, which jumped from 8.2 in 1990 to 14.2 in 2001, had now increased to 15 percent. …Northern New England has now taken over the Pacific Northwest as the least religious section of the county, with Vermont, at 34 percent “Nones,’ leading all other states by a full 9 points. Ariela Keyser who helped conduct the survey said: “The Nones are the only group to have grown in every state of the union.”

The Survey says that statistical analysis indicates that a lot of people who decline to answer questions abour religion are more likely in the "None" category. They write, "we can observe that in 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990." Clearly the secularization process is taking place in the United States, and at a relatively rapid pace, while birth rates are not declining. This ought not be happening if Eberstadt's theory makes sense. I conclude it doesn't.

Oddly Albert Mohler, comes to the defense of Eberstadt's theory. He says: "Mary Eberstadt is also surely right." He says that American "exceptionalism" is evidence of it. Southern Baptist Mohler is actually contradicting himself. In his own blog he previous claimed that "The worldview of most Americans is now thoroughly secularized..." He claimed the church was displaced as is "characteristic of the process of secularization which has now so thoroughly alterned the landscape of American culture." He goes as far as saying that America is a "post-Christian" nation. But if America is a post-Christian nation, as Mohler claimed, then Eberstadt's theory is wrong.

Poor Rev. Mohler, whatever you think of his theology, his logic is piss poor. He wants America to be the exception to the general theory and thus highly religious in one case. But in another case he claims religion has been displaced and America is now "post-Christian." I'm not surprised he has said contradictory things. His motives were different in each case. The artilce on "post-Christian" America was the typical doom and gloom you hear from fundamentalists. His cheerleading for Eberstadt's theory however, had a different agenda.

As Mohler sees it, and perhaps as Eberstadt does as well, this theory supposedly proved "the importance of preserving family structure and high rates of childbirth in light of spiritual commitments." When fundamentalist talk about "preserving family" you know that an old-fashioned gay bashing isn't far behind.

As Mohler wrote himself, America has entered a "post-Christian" era. Apparently he thinks America is still the "exception" to secularization while being a shining example of secularization simultaneously. It is one thing, and it's complete opposite, at the same time. In other words: A is not A. Now you know why I say he is poor at logic.

Both Mohler and Eberstadt have religious agendas. That's fine. We know they have them. But I think it is clear that they are trying to interpret reality to fit with their religion. Unfortunately for them reality doesn't work that way. It is what it is. Perhaps in Mohler's mind A can be non-A but in the real world A is A.

The post-Christian shift in America continues.

For several years I have been claiming that the United States is entering a post-Christian stage of intellectual development, something I consider to be a positive trend. I argued that this trend was part of a wider trend toward more social liberalism in generally, another thing which I consider to be generally positive. Last year I wrote: “Americans are moving rapidly and quickly toward social liberalism… The American people got tired of the culture wars and they seem to be abandoning the cultural conservatives.” All this is part of our country “moving toward a post-Christian culture.”

In 2007 I wrote an article entitled “The rise of post-Christian America” which got a lot of attention in some circles. I said “there has been a marked shift in American attitudes toward religion that has come about in the last four to eight years.” I pointed to several trends, which I felt were indications “that the United States is about to enter the post-Christian phase of intellectual development that has already dominated every Western nation except the United States.”

I also warned Christians, who rarely listen to what I have to say anyway, that there is a tipping-point in religious attitudes. I wrote:

…that religion in America has relied heavily on group pressure and social norms. People rarely embraced religion because they were intellectual convinced it was rational. …Most religionists embraced theism merely because everyone else did. If fewer and fewer people embrace religion that gives others permission to reject it as well.

The most recent American Religious Identification Survey (2008) shows that the trends I’ve claimed exist are substantiated. This survey notes that in 1990 86% of Americans identified themselves as Christian in some form or another. In 2008 that has dropped to 70%. In rough terms that means that approximately one in five of the individuals who identified as Christian in 1990 no longer do so. The survey also says that the decline in numbers of Christians is not due to them converting to a new faith but abandoning their faith. “The challenge to Christianity in the U.S. does not come from other religions but rather from a rejection of all forms of organized religion.” The number of Americans who say they lack religious beliefs increased from 8.2% in 1990 to 15% in 2008.

However, the number of Americans who fall in the non-believer camp may still be higher than these numbers indicate. While 15% of Americans admit to being without a religious belief the percentage saying they will have a non-religious funeral is at 27%. Since the religious community has continually demonized atheists and other non-believers the numbers of people holding such beliefs tends to be higher than the number who admit holding such beliefs. Another area which may be hiding non-believers is the increasing percentage of Americans who refused to answer whether they believed or not, or who claimed (unconvincingly) that they “don’t know” what they believe. That category went from 2.3% in 1990 to 5.2% in 2008. The survey says: “If we include those Americans who either don’t know their religious identification (0.9 percent) or refuse our key question (4.1 percent), and who tend to somewhat resemble ‘Nones’ in their social profile and beliefs, we can observe that in 2008 one in five adults does not identify with a religion of any kind compared with one in ten in 1990.” The raw number of people who identified as non-believers went from 14,331,000 people in 1990 to 34,169,000 in 2008, an increase of 138%.

At the same time the numbers of people who are members of Christian sects, but who hold distinctly unchristian beliefs about God, is another factor to consider. Some self-identified Christians are not actually Christians when it comes to their beliefs. The percentage of people who claim to belong to Christian sects are approximately 70%. And the survey shows that 69.5% of all Americans believe there is a personal God. At first glance that seems to be a relatively small difference. But we ought to remember about 78% of the public claims to identify with a faith that teaches the existence of a personal God. Some unknown, but not insignificant, number of non-believers are a member of the various sects even today.

Nor are all religions are being affected equally. Some Christian sects are in more trouble than others. And some are facing future problems more significant than others today. The number of Catholics has declined slightly, from 26.2% to 25.1% but this hides the decline of native-born Catholics since immigration is helping hold these numbers steady. Baptists have significantly declined from 19.3% in 1990 to 15.8% in 2008. And mainline Protestants have dropped from 18.7% to 12.9% of the population during the same period.

The numbers of those who describe themselves as broadly Christian has gone from 14.8% to 14.2%. Pentecostals increased slightly during this time period from 3.2% to 3.5%. But all that gain was in the 1990s. Since 2001 the percentage of Pentecostals has declined slightly. And contrary to the spin put on church membership by the Mormon leadership that sect has had no growth whatsoever in the last 18 years in terms of their percentage of the population. It has remained steady at 1.4%.

Future problems for a sect are indicated by the percentage of young people in their pews. If a congregation is primarily made up of the elderly it will disappear relatively quickly. If it is mostly young people it will probably grow. An estimated 22% of the American population are between the ages of 18 and 29. Below is a chart of selected Christian sects and how far off they are from that percentage in regards to church membership. A negative number implies they are that many percentage points below the national average of young people. I have added the “nones” in as a comparison.

Catholic -1
Baptist – 11
Mainline Christian -4
Pentecostal – 6
Mormon 0
Jewish -1
Nones +7

That Mormons have no statistically advantage in terms of youthful members is rather surprising. According to the survey 22% of Mormons are between 18 and 29, which is precisely the percentage of Americans between those ages. Yet, according to the New Yorker: “The Mormon birth rate is about fifty per cent higher than the national average.” A higher birth rate ought to mean that the percentage of young Mormons is higher than the national average not the same.

Mormonism is clearly having a problem. It seems unable to hold on to converts and unable to hold on to their own young. The 2001 ARIS numbers showed that the numbers who left the Mormon cult was slightly higher than the number joining it. Official Mormon numbers are vastly higher than the numbers of people who actually think they are Mormon—in other words the Mormon sect counts as members people who do not think they are Mormons. For instance, the LDS sect claimed to have 176,998 members in the UK as members while the official census showed only 61,949 people said they were Mormons. Arthur Sido, a former Mormon wrote: “Before I left Mormonism I was the membership clerk in the bishopric, and the number of people on the rolls who were not only not attending, but outright hostile is staggering (maybe as high as 50% or more never attended).” The Salt Lake Tribune says, “the number of Latter-day Saints who are considered active churchgoers is only about a third of the total” of official membership figures. And one Mormon expert says that the sect “lose 70 to 80 percent of their converts.”

The last area I will cover is where non-believers live: some states have a higher percentage of non-believers than other states. Regionally non-believers are more likely to be found in New England and in the West. Here are the states with the largest percentage of non-believers.

Vermont • 34
Wyoming • 28
Washington • 25
Maine • 25
Oregon • 24
Nevada • 24
Delaware • 23
Idaho • 23
Massachusetts • 22
Montana • 21
Colorado • 21
California • 18
Arizona • 17
Ohio • 17
Nebraska • 17
Michigan • 16
New Mexico • 16
Wisconsin • 15
Iowa • 15
Indiana • 15
New Jersey • 15
Pennsylvania • 15
Virginia • 15
West Virginia • 15

As you can see non-believers are a substantial number of people in many states today. In fact many US states now have more non-believers than there are Catholics. States where non-believers outnumber Catholics are: Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Vermont, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. In Arkansas, Georgia, South Carolina and Colorado, Catholics and non-believers are in a statistical tie. While I don’t have hard numbers to calculate the population percentages of Baptists in the various states it appears that non-believers outnumber them in approximately 32 states. Compare the map at the top of the page to the one below of Baptists in the various counties to see what I mean.

Note: The first map charts the percentage of non-believers in the various states. Please note that the ARIS survey seems to have nothing listed for either Alaska or Hawaii. I have emailed them for the numbers for those states. I will follow up on this with an article on what the ramifications of this shift are for American politics.

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Why atheists, humanists and libertarians should embrace alternative schooling.

Yesterday I reported on the role of fundamentalist extremism in causing a rise in the number, and loudness, of atheists in America. This was inspired by an article in the Washington Post on the new atheists. A second article on the topic has now appeared in the Post as part of a series of article on beliefs about religion.

The growth of atheism among young people is truly astounding. I have believed, for a couple of years now, that American fundamentalists were in trouble. They have overreached for power and they were too closely identified with Bush. They were pissing off a lot of people including other Christians and they were, as the saying goes, cruising for a bruising. And they are getting it.

In the 1980s about 11% of young people, ages 18 to 25, in Pew survey identified themselves as atheists, non-believers, agnostic or as having no religion. A follow up Pew poll that would have been done toward the end of last year said that the number had risen to 20%. The Post article mentions a recent Barna survey on religious beliefs and says “one in four four adults ages 18 to 22 describes themselves as having no faith.”

If the Barna survey is correct that means the increase in self-identified atheists, among the young, is continuing at a rather astounding pace. I remember reading a New York Times piece on the social/camming network, Stickam, which is mainly occupied by young people. I read a few articles on the site and similar ones and then browsed through the site. I randomly read the “profiles” which users left for themselves. And I remember being surprised by the number of users, mostly young, who described themselves as atheists.

The article also mentioned another phenomenon based on classical liberal principles -- the rise of alternative schooling. And that is the main thrust of what I have to write about today. The Post said that “charter schools based on humanist principles have opened in New York City and Florida” in recent years along with summer camps for kids of atheists. The alternative education principle is one I have promoted here. Too many non-conservatives, mainly progressives, have seen alternative, non-state education as a means of pushing religion and other Religious Right values.

But last February, when Utah passed a state-wide voucher system (now being opposed heavily by the self-serving teacher’s unions), I wrote:

I would like to see good quality, secular, private schools teaching kids. Instead of bitching about private education mainly being run by religious groups secular liberals need to open their own schools. Consider this my friends on the Left. You can have a school where you don’t have to turn over the ID data to the military for recruitment as you do with state schools. You can have a school where you don’t have to have some fundamentalist nutter come in with his version of sex education -- as you do in the public schools. You don’t have to worry about some board of education forcing theology on you in the form of so-called Intelligent Design.

The non-believing community ought to be embracing alternative schooling. Oddly, for decades, they were the leaders in the field. Until the late 1960s alternative education in America, outside the Catholic school system, was almost entirely operated by humanists, progressives and secularists. But when racial integration became prominent thousands of “Christian” schools were created in order to continue segregation.

Unfortunately most people have notoriously short memories. They don’t remember the work of Ivan Illich in his book Deschooling Society. It goes much further back than that. Joseph Neef founded three humanist oriented schools in the US between the years 1809 and 1827. Montessori began her first school in 1907, and Rudolf Steiner started his first school in 1919. By the 50s, 60s and 70s the alternative education movement was dominated by people like Paul Goodman, John Holt, Jonathan Kozol and Illich.

All this was forgotten by the tsunami of “Christian” segregated schools that rose up almost overnight. And in reaction to that non-conservatives clung to the state education system. The problem for them is the problem for the Religious Right today. The state is a cumbersome leviathan that creates chaos and conflict wherever it goes. If there is a job to be done they will screw it up. To have one’s ideas associated with the perpetual destruction imposed by big government is the kiss of death.

Decent, humanist schools are possible. And with various voucher programs where funding follows the students good, secular schools can be created much more easily than ever before. And it can be done without the artificial conflict created by monopolistic education. In addition such schools can't be controlled centrally by some third-rate Texas politician and changed from above. Sex education, courses I would support in a private school, became abstinence courses across the US because of the now heavily centralized, and federally funded, nature of education. This couldn't happen nearly as easily with a decentralized network of humanist schools.

I suspect one of the great tragedies of libertarian politics in recent years has be the Quixotic political campaigns for candidates with little, or no, chance of winning. These campaigns act like black holes that suck up and destroy vast financial resources and activists leaving nothing in their wake to speak of. A campaign that consumes millions of dollars, and in a few times will end, eats up enough funding to open several alternative, libertarian-oriented, secular schools. That money would not only fund them but allow them to be tuition free for years. Of course if tuition is charged the schools would could go on a lot longer.

Bob LeFevre was closer to the mark than most modern libertarians when he founded Freedom School in 1957. But instead of only educating adults he should have expanded into all ages and opened an alternative schooling system. Considering that some of his teachers included Rose Wilder Lane, Milton Friedman, Leonard Reader, Gordon Tullock, Bruno Leoni, Ludwig von Mises, and Frank Chodorov -- what a school it would have been, even if they only gave guest lectures now and then.

Any group that wants to change a culture has to change minds. Political campaigns are short-term, sound bites. They reflect already existing views, they don’t create them. They follow trends, they don’t start them. What starts trends is the minds of people changing. And that is an educational process and politics is poor at educating anyone.

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Photo: Marie Montessori.

How fundamentalists helped revive militant atheism in the West.

The Washington Post has an article on the rise of the vocal atheist. It starts out with the story of a man who was a life long Anglican and who one day just decided he no longer believed. I’ve seen the same thing happen to other people. There is a clear increase in the number of individuals who identify as atheists. In recent years, among young people, the number of self-identified atheists has doubled.

Of course we don’t know the true number of atheists. Many atheists are aware of friends who put on the pretence of religion but privately admit to being atheists. Even some clergy fall into this category. What percentage of pews or pulpits are occupied by atheists is anyone’s guess.

In recent years polls in the US have shown that religious Americans are more likely to vote for a Muslim, in spite of the 9/11 attacks, than for an atheist regardless of their qualifications. The same sort of disdain for atheists carries into their private lives. All of this reduces the likelihood of an atheist speaking out. Many remain closeted but that doesn’t alter the fact that are atheists.

Yet in spite of this, the number of self-identified atheists is increasing rather rapidly. But that is only part of the phenomenon. The number of atheists who are being open about their atheism is increasing as well. And the number of atheists who are becoming vocal is also increasing. So, not only are the number of non-believers increasing, but those who do exist are becoming more militant and vocal.

The article discusses the rise of the Council of Ex-Muslims in Europe, which was founded in Germany a few months ago with several hundred members. It has created chapters in England and Holland as well. Maryam Namazie, the head of the English chapter said: “We are all atheists and non-believers, and our goal is not to eradicate Islam from the face of the earth.” Instead they are trying to make religion entirely private and strip it of the power to control the lives of non-believers.

The article quotes an academic who has studied the rise of atheism. Phil Zuckerman says: “Anytime we see an outspoken movement against religion, it tells us that religion has power there.” And one atheist is quoted saying: “There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public, and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising Islamic and Christian militancy.”

Strictly speaking, an atheist merely lacks a belief in a deity of any kind. It is not a rallying point, nor a particularly reason for social cohesion. Not being something is not something around which a common identity can be forged. The natural tendency, in my opinion, is for atheists to be a relatively unorganized because of this. Atheist organizations will generally contain only a very small percentage of non-believers. Atheists have no more in common with each other than do people who don’t believe in Santa Claus.

But recent world events has forced a rethink. Two things have happened. One is the 9/11 attacks, along with the rise of militant Islamists conducting other terrorist attacks. The second is that religious extremists -- Muslims in Europe and Christians in America -- have been demanding that more and more state power, meaning coercion, be used to further their agenda.

In both cases these militant fundamentalists are actively trying to impose their stilted world view on the rest of society. Witness the fits they go into over the gay marriage issue. Now if marriage equality is passed no fundamentalists will be forced to marry a same sex partner. They are free to shun the arrangement completely. They don’t want to be left alone, they want the law to prevent others from having the same relationships they can enjoy.

Fundamentalists complain if they are censored. But they are not against censorship. They favor it, provided they get to decide who shall be censored. Nor are they advocates of government leaving people alone. They want government to leave the religious alone and to actively harass others. And they have become increasingly vocal about such demands.

But the worst part for them was that they, and George Bush, entered in some sort of uncivil union. We saw the merger of church and state, the creation of the Theopublican movement. George Bush became their most visible representative. And for that, atheists should thank God.

The Theopublican agenda has been so closely linked to the Bush agenda that the dishonesty, viciousness and ineptness of the Bush administration now tarnishes Christianity itself. Whether that should be case is another question. Bush has been a PR disaster for the two things he is most closely tied to: the Republican Party and God.

On the other side of the world religious fanatics have unleashed their Dark Ages philosophy wherever they can. Islamists have killed thousands and thousands of people. Islamist governments kill people by the hundreds. And they do so in the most barbaric ways. The world is disgusted with Islam as a result. Even many Muslims have become disgusted with Islam.

The fundamentalists of the world, mainly Christian and Muslim, have breathed life into the atheist movement. In many ways they are creating a new, vocal atheist movement.

As I noted, there is no common ground for atheists. You can’t build a movement around a non-belief. But the fastest way to build a movement is to find a threat that intimidates people. Environmentalists know this, which is why they have an endless series of scare stories and have had then for decades now. H.L. Mencken noticed that political movements often succeed by “menacing” people “with an endless string of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” When people face a common threat, or enemy, they tend to unify. Republicans know this. That’s why they pushed the antigay campaign for several years. They wanted to build a fear campaign around homosexuals to unify the Religions Right. Now they are doing the same over immigrants.

If imaginary hobgoblins work well in creating a movement then real hobgoblins are even better. And rational people have felt threatened by Islamism and Theopublicanism. There it is -- the reason for the rise of vocal, militant atheism. People are becoming atheists in larger numbers, or becoming more vocal and active atheists, precisely because the religious extremists have, or are trying, to seize power in order to inflict their agenda on the rest of society.

The moral majoritarians don’t merely want to avoid erotica. They want to force you to avoid it as well -- regardless of your personal preferences. They want to burn the magazines, and some no doubt, the publishers as well. The Islamists don’t want the right to worship Allah. They want to deny you the right to not worship him. It’s not that these people want to lead lives abstaining from what they see as sin but that they want the state to punish you if you sin according to their religion.

I became an atheist over two decades ago. I remember sitting in my apartment one morning looking into the garden while reading a book on the logic of theism. I had been a Christian, attended Christian schools, was active in the church, and even attended Bible college. I had no doubts about a deity but then I never gave the matter much thought -- something which is always conducive to faith. But that day I did give it some thought and concluded that a deity was a highly irrational assumption on my part and that the evidence was not there to support the belief I adopted. So at that point I abandoned it and haven’t looked back since.

But I was a quiet atheist for years. I did condemn the Moral Majoritarians and the like but pretty much ignored the religious impulses behind this new authoritarianism. But as time went by the nascent movement of theocrats in the 70s and 80s became increasingly shrill and illiberal and powerful. Their movement got uglier and more vicious. They were voracious for power. And then comes 9/11 with the praying fanatics who managed to kill 3,000 people in one day. I watched the second plane hit that tower as it happened on television. And I can’t escape the images of people leaping out of the burning building 100 floors above the ground, to their deaths. Watching these living human beings plummeting to their death was more than I could stomach.

And then I ran into some “orthodox Christians” who were pushing the theocratic agenda. And they felt I was an obstacle to them. So they engaged in a concerted hate campaign that turned my life into a living hell. And they enjoyed it. They relished it. They even bragged about it.

When I added all these things up in my head I concluded that I was obligated to not only reject the faith statements of theism, but that I ought to be more vocal about the threats and dangers as well. I was pushed into the position of being a “militant atheist” much against my own inclination. I’ve always been an adherent of the “live and let live” view of the world. But I realized that some people simply refuse to let you live and you have no recourse but to resist. So I went from quiet non belief to vocal atheism.

Apparently the same thing is happening in the educated nations of the world. Atheism is on the rise. The numbers of non-believers are escalating as people reconsider religion based on the results that they see around them. And those who, like me, were quiet atheists, have decided to put an end to their silence.

The massive sales of atheist books in the last year, works by Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, are the result of millions of people rethinking religion because of the actions of the religious. People are not buying these books because of Dennett, Dawkins and Harris. They are more likely to be doing so because of the Bushs and bin Ladens of the world. The real salesmen of atheism have been the theists not the atheists.

And when these theists started grabbing political power they gave millions of people the incentive to organize in opposition. If there were an Academy Award for atheism the recipients would have to get up and give a speech along these lines:

I want to thank all those people who made this possible. In particular George Bush and Osama bin Laden. Without you guys this just wouldn’t have been possible. Of course there are so many to thank. I should mention Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell as well but it was really the little people who deserve the thanks. All those people bashing on gays, bombing abortion clinics, closing down adult shops. And we can’t forget the guys who arrest people for selling dildos, or cut off the heads of infidels or slit the throats of sinners. And all those parents who murder their own children in ‘honor’ killings or let them die without medical care because medicine indicates a lack of faith. Your campaigns in the Shiavo case, to promote ‘faith based’ initiatives and to eradicate the separation of church and state, or mosque and state helped. All of you made this possible. Without your help we wouldn’t be where we are today. Thanks for making this possible.