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James Morrow once said that the bromide about no atheists in foxholes said more about foxholes than about atheists. Reading the tired, predictable dismissals of atheism as simply another brand of fundamentalism suggests that the folks who've made up their minds don't really know a whole lot about atheists.
We're not Madalyn Murray O'Hair or Michael Newdow or that pimply-faced kid in the throes of an adolescent rebellion, trying to piss off his parents by dissing their church. We're not a monolithic force (do you consider all polytheists to believe the same things? Didn't think so). We don't have a secret meeting place. We don't have an Atheist's Creed. We don't sing atheist hymns. Some atheists do go to church --some of us are Unitarians (my favorite hymn is "For All The Saints") and quite open and accepting of religious diversity, but others disguise themselves as Episcopalians and Methodists and U.C.C.-ers, taking comfort in the eloquence of the Book of Common Prayer and the organ prelude and the lovely poetry of the Psalms and Ecclesiastes and the Sermon on the Mount and--most of all--the tacit approval of family members who would be devastated to learn that one of their own secretly believed that after death there was nothing but the void.
Some subscribe to religions that don't have gods, like Theravada Buddhism, though it might be argued that "nirvana" is a state of divinity. Some simply stay home on Sundays, safe in the knowledge that there are lots of Americans who consider themselves "spiritual" even if they belong to no organized religion, and they can blend in. You'll find them, of course, in the sciences, where even those who profess a religious affiliation have a complicated relationship to it.
Don't insult these people by saying that they don't know the difference between faith and religion. Anyone who has grown up in a Christian church, teaching second-grade Sunday school and singing in the choir and reciting pages and pages of scripture and who realizes at the age of twenty-one that God just isn't there knows the difference between faith and religion.
Why the camouflage? You know what the reaction to declaring one's lack of faith is? It ranges from repulsion to ridicule to condescension to smothering, well-intentioned concern. And hiding in there, too, is the feeling of being threatened. By what? By perceptions that someone, somewhere, believes something different from you and is fine with this? By the sneaking suspicion that they might be right, and wouldn't you have egg on your face then? If, of course, you still had a face to have egg on, because the vast majority of atheists have concluded that, yeah, we're food for worms. (Find that joke disconcerting? So do I. By no means have I come to terms entirely with the fact that nothing happens to us after death, and I'm sure I'm not the only atheist with an existential crisis.)
But more than we fear death, I think we fear isolation. A large number of atheists are secular humanists--we believe that reasonable people can and do come together to solve problems and do fabulous things, and if we don't have a God to love, we turn that affection toward other people. And not sharing something perceived to be so crucial, so fundamental, as a belief in a deity is something that's hard to transcend. So we avoid situations in which we have to demonstrate our difference. Or we find environments where it's acceptable. Or we hide behind the utterances that, inwardly, we don't accept, because to reject them aloud is so often to create an impermeable barrier between ourselves and those we love most.
To those of you who have responded to Harris and to the other atheists on this thread in a kneejerk way, I say, get over yourselves. Listen to us. We are not your enemy. Sam Harris is holding a mirror up to you, and your reflection ain't that of a Botticelli nymph, that's for sure. If you want to demonstrate that religious moderates and liberals are truly reasonable people, try to see things from our perspective. Think of it as an exercise to strengthen your faith. Because there are wackos out there trying to breed a red heifer and bring about nuclear apocalypse and all kinds of scary things described in some fantastic vision scrawled on papyrus by a wild-eyed, hallucinating hermit in a cave somewhere off the coast of Greece nineteen hundred years ago, and if you continue to try to insist on proving us wrong instead of doing something about it, we will all be food for cockroaches. If there's anything left of us and this lovely planet.
