Does America Need More Atheists?

An opinion piece on the October 3 website of the Washington Post caught my eye and captured my attention. It was by WaPo’s contributing columnist Kate Cohen and titled “America doesn’t need more God. It needs more atheists.” 

Kate Cohen is a mother, an atheist, and an author. Her book, We of Little Faith: Why I Stopped Pretending to Believe (and Maybe You Should To), which was also published on Oct. 3, states that being a mother led her to “come out” as an atheist.

Cohen was raised Jewish and married a Jew in a Jewish wedding—but she explains that she never really believed “in that jealous, capricious, and cruel Old Testament God” (p. 12). But she never identified herself as an atheist until she began rearing her children.

In her book, Kate tells how she vowed to teach her children “what I truly thought about everything,” and she “did not let them decide for themselves,” for she strongly believed that “passing on one’s preference for reason, evidence, and honesty…is the truly moral choice” (pp. 13, 14).

Kate was born and reared in Virginia. She graduated from Dartmouth University and married in 1997. She is now in her late 40s, but I was unable to find out how old her children are. They are probably young adults now and it would be interesting to know how they have turned out.*¹

There are positive aspects of Kate Cohen and her book that should be recognized. She is honest in identifying who she is rather than seeking (any longer) to keep her lack of religious faith closeted. And she encourages others to be honest also as intimated in her book’s subtitle.

Even though I have spent most of my life seeking to help people become God-believers, I think those who don’t believe in God should be able to identify themselves openly rather than pretending to be and to believe, what they are not and do not. Honesty, indeed, is the best policy.

Further, Cohen seeks to remove the stigma from those who identify as atheists. She writes, “Like atheism, homosexuality is a difference that can be hidden. Sociologists call it a Concealable Stigmatized Identity” (p. 221), but she claims that that stigma is disappearing more rapidly for LGBTQ people than for atheists.

But as a God-believer—and because I am a God-believer—I certainly think that people need to be respected/accepted regardless of their religious faith or lack thereof. After all, that is what freedom of religion means.

There are also highly questionable aspects of Cohen’s book. While there are some nuanced places, she gives the impression that all atheists are largely the same, and “good,” whereas all who believe in God/religion are also largely the same, and “bad.” (See, for example, p. 228).

In strongly encouraging people who do not believe in God to affirm their atheism, she writes,

If you need a reason to let people know that you don’t believe moral authority derives from a Supreme Being, then I offer you no less than making America a safer, smarter, more just, and more compassionate country.*²

It is because of that belief that the WaPo article was titled “America doesn’t need more God It Needs More Atheists.”

On the previous page, she asserts, “…peel back the layers of discrimination against LGBTQ people and you find religion.”

She further contends that “control over women’s bodies,” as well as “school-library book bans, and even the backlash against acknowledging the racist underpinnings of our nation are motivated by religion.”

To such charges, I can only say “Yes, but….” Yes, there are Christians who are exactly such as Kate mentioned. But, there are Christians who are against discrimination and control as much as she is. And regarding climate change, note what Pope Francis said about in his 10/4 “apostolic exhortation.”*³

Moreover, if truth were known, my guess is that there is a large percentage of atheists who support discrimination and control as well as the (mostly) conservative evangelical Christians she uses as her foil.

So, no, Ms. Cohen, America doesn’t need less God and more atheists. It needs more intellectually honest and intelligent atheists (or whatever) as well as intellectually honest and intelligent God-believers to work together to make our society more compassionate and more just for all.

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*¹ In her book, Cohen says that her children are “engaged, informed, and savvy citizens” (p. 227).

*² These words are in a paragraph that begins with her saying that “anti-atheist sentiment is not a matter of life and death in America. But transphobia is, sexual violence against women is, forced birth is, climate change is, and global pandemics are” (p. 230).

*³ I wrote about this in some detail in my Oct. 13 blog post (see here).

 

Praise for the Pope

Like most of you who read this blog, I am not a Roman Catholic, but I have considerable appreciation for Pope Francis. Jorge Mario Bergoglio was born in 1936, ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1969, and elected Pope in March 2013. He chose Francis as his papal name in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi. 

Pope Francis speaking at the Vatican on 10/4/23]

There are many reasons to praise Pope Francis. For example, just nine days ago (on 10/4/23), the Pope issued an “apostolic exhortation” under the title Laudate Deum (=Praise God). That document, which can be read in full here, was directed “to all people of good will” and was “on the climate crisis.”

Last month, I read much of Fratelli tutti, Pope Francis’s encyclical officially published by the Vatican in 2020 on October 4, the feast day of Francis of Assisi. While there was much good and important content, I was somewhat critical of it as it seemed to be lacking specificity or concreteness.

This month’s new document, however, which is a commentary on Laudato si' (=Praise Be to You), the Pope’s major 2015 encyclical on the environment, is generally quite specific and concrete. In the second paragraph of this recent “exhortation,” the Pope says:

…with the passage of time, I have realized that our responses have not been adequate, while the world in which we live is collapsing and may be nearing the breaking point.

Over the past twenty months, I have cited Michael Dowd and others who have spoken warningly about collapse, but here is a clear statement about that fateful future by the Pope.**

Also, an Oct. 4 Vatican News article (see here) states that in Laudate Deum the Pope “criticizes climate change deniers, saying that the human origin of global warming is now beyond doubt.”

Early this month, the Pope convened the three-week General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops at the Vatican, sometimes called the Super Bowl of the Catholic Church. It drew bishops from around the world to discuss hot-button issues.

Some of those issues are whether priests should be allowed to get married, if divorced and remarried Catholics should receive communion, whether women should be allowed to become deacons, and how the church will handle matters around the LGBTQ community.

It remains to be seen how, or when, these contentious matters will be resolved, but for those of us who are egalitarians, the Pope’s willingness to consider such matters is certainly praiseworthy.

Sadly, many USAmericans have little praise for the Pope. Politics takes precedence over their religious faith. Or for others, they hold to an outdated, conservative Catholicism and are, literally, more traditionally Catholic than the Pope.

According to an Aug. 28 APNews.com post, “Many conservatives have blasted Francis’s emphasis on social justice issues such as the environment and the poor,” and they have also branded as heretical his openness “to letting divorced and civilly remarried Catholics receive the sacraments.”

As an example of politics taking precedence over the position of the Pope, consider the contrast between Francis’s recent “exhortation” regarding global warming and U.S. Catholics.

The Pope, as well as the preponderant majority of climate scientists around the world, emphasizes that “the human origin of global warming is now beyond doubt.”

But last month, Pew Research Center (here) reported that only 44% of U.S. Catholics say Earth is warming mainly due to human activity—and of U.S. Catholics who are Republicans or lean Republican, only a strikingly low 18% think that global warming is human-caused.

In response to such criticism, the Pope has called the strong, organized, reactionary attitude of some Catholics in the U.S. Church “backward,” and has stated that their faith has been replaced by ideologies.

Francis reminds these people that “backwardness is useless, and they must understand that there’s a correction evolution in the understanding of questions of faith and morals” that allows for doctrine to progress over time.

Such progressiveness is one of the main reasons I have praise for the Pope. His deep concern for the future well-being of all people around the world has led him to claim that a correct understanding of Catholic doctrine allows for change over time.

Would that all Catholics, and all Protestants as well, could embrace these progressive ideas of the forward-looking Pope.

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** With considerable sadness I am sharing the news that Michael Dowd (b. 11/1958) died on October 7 as the result of a fall in a friend’s home. More information about his death and memorial service is available here. 

Remembering Alvin Toffler and “Future Shock”

When I happened to see that Alvin Toffler was born in October 1928, I thought that today, the 95th anniversary of his October 4 birthday, would be a good time to write about him and his book Future Shock. 

Alvin Toffler, who died in 2016, was an author, futurist, and businessman who, with his wife Heidi, wrote Future Shock, which became a worldwide best-seller. It is considered to be one of the most important and influential books about the future ever written.

Toffler was raised in Brooklyn and graduated from New York University in 1950, the same year he and Heidi Farrell married. During the last half of the 1960s, the Tofflers did research for Future Shock, first published in 1970.

According to the Tofflers' website, over 15 million copies of Future Shock have been sold worldwide. It has been translated into more than 30 languages and has never been out of print.

The second book authored by the Tofflers and issued in 1980, was titled The Third Wave. Following the agrarian revolution, and the industrial revolution, the “third wave” is the information revolution.

Powershift (1990), their third major book, deals with the increasing power of twenty-first-century military hardware and the proliferation of new technologies.

The later books continue the Tofflers’ exploration/development of ideas first introduced in Future Shock.

Alvin and Heidi Toffler coined the term future shock to describe the emotional distress that individuals and societies experience when facing rapid technological and social change.

Early in the first chapter of their book, the Tofflers referred to “culture shock,” explaining that it refers to “the effect that immersion in a strange culture has on the unprepared visitor.” They then go on to say that

culture shock is relatively mild in comparison with the much more serious malady, future shock. Future shock is the dizzying disorientation brought on by the premature arrival of the future. It may well be the most important disease of tomorrow.

In 2020, a massive book titled After Shock was published with the subtitle, “The world’s foremost futurists reflect on 50 years of Future Shock and look ahead to the next 50.” (I wish I had been able to read much more of it.)

Rather than writing more specifically about the books just mentioned, though, I will now share only some of my personal reflections about Future Shock and how I was influenced by it.

Reading Future Shock in my early 30s was instructive and formative for me. Early in 1970, I somehow heard about “future shock” and that Toffler had written about that concept in an essay published in the March issue of Playboy magazine, of all places.

As I was living in Japan at that time and there was no other way to read Toffler’s essay, I bought a copy of that Playboy magazine at the excellent English bookstore in Fukuoka, the city where I lived, and read his article with great interest.

(Memories from 50+ years ago are rather unreliable, but as far as I can remember, that was the first and probably the last time I ever bought a Playboy magazine.)

After several months I was able to get a library copy of the book, and it took a few weeks to read it as I was stretched by the challenge of teaching university classes in Japanese. I also remember taking rather extensive notes, but alas, they weren’t included in what I brought back to the U.S.

Partly because of reading Future Shock, sometime in the 1970s I joined the World Future Society (WFS), founded in 1966, and read The Futurist, their bimonthly magazine. I never was a futurist as such, but through the decades I was deeply interested in thinking about the future.

In July 1989, I flew from Japan to Washington, D.C., to attend the WFS’s annual assembly, and at one of the study group sessions I presented a paper titled “Religious Faith and World Peace in the 1990s and Beyond.”

Perhaps it is not a direct quote, but Toffler is widely credited for this aphorism: “The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Much has changed since 1970, and the likely future of world civilization is more shocking now than ever.

The challenge for us now is to unlearn much of what we think we know, to learn what the world actually is at present, and to see and act upon the new knowledge of what it is likely to become in the near future.

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** The underlying notion of future shock existed many years before the Tofflers’ book was published. In 1949, an issue of the Saturday Evening Post included the poem (not by Toffler) titled “Time of the Mad Atom,” which I remember reading, and quoting, in the mid-1950s. Here it is in its entirety:

This is the age
Of the half-read page.
And the quick hash
And the mad dash.

The bright night
With the nerves tight.
The plane hop
With the brief stop.

The lamp tan
In a short span.
The Big Shot
In a good spot.

And the brain strain
The heart pain.
And the cat naps
Till the spring snaps

—And the fun’s done!