Most people on the planet today – and well over 80% of students attending Utah State University – believe in both life after death and the existence of the supernatural, with fervor and conviction, beyond the shade of a doubt. These are the two core aspects of Faith: the existence of life after death, or immortality, and the existence of supernatural beings.

But throughout human history, there has also been a magnificent lineage of  thinkers who have not been convinced. For as long as religions have claimed to know about immortality or the supernatural, there have been people who have enjoyed meaningful lives without. Indeed, the tradition of positive non-belief is older than most world religions which survive today. People who cherish only one mortal life, and trust natural reasoning alone, have always – and will always – have an important place in the Universe. So, if you find yourself doubting the truth of society’s religious myths, have hope. You are not alone.

What is Humanism?

This is the first part of a series in which I will profile the backgrounds of some of the great thinkers who deserve acknowledgment and gratitude, for having the courage to rebel against cultural damnation and suppression, and for building the framework for a positive philosophy of life, known in our century as Humanism, or positive atheism. My goal here is to show that Humanism is an important and ancient school of thought, a respectable and venerable tradition. Drawing from the earliest Greek philosophers to various modern thinkers like Einstein, Kurt Vonnegut, Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov, the basic tenets of Humanism are the result of thousands of years of philosophy. It is now a bold and powerful non-theistic way of thinking about life, whose waters run deep.

Part One: The Other Garden of Eden

Even thousands of years ago, long before the existence of Christianity or Islam, the world still rumbled with man’s horror and awe about the supernatural. In the days of ancient Greece and Rome, human sacrifice, apocalyptic fervor, and religious division were everywhere. Superstition and myth were the central source of explanations for things, and for the meaning of life. Mankind slumbered in sweet dreams of the Divine.

The basic ideas of Humanism first arose in the Garden of Epicurus, a quiet and thoughtful philosopher, who bravely discarded mythical illusions in favor of waking up. Wake up, he said, to the wonder and mystery of Nature. He taught a naturalist ethics, a philosophy that celebrated human existence, emphasized the necessity of moral health and cherished the crucial importance of intellectual pursuits.

Why the importance of these things? Because he was a Deist; to Epicurus, the gods may have created the Universe, but now they are distant and uncaring. The idea that the soul survives forever is only illusion and wishful thinking. Death, Epicurus said, is harmless and natural. When it’s over, it’s over.

Death is nothing to us. For what has been dissolved has no sense-experience, and what has no sense-experience is nothing to us.

But this by no means enables any dark immorality, as is so commonly supposed. Like modern-day Humanists, Epicurus was no nihilist. He taught that death should inspire us to seek higher justice, pleasure, tranquility and peacefulness. He was one of the earliest thinkers to point out the Golden Rule, which is present in most religions as well.

The justice of nature is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness; neither to harm one another nor be harmed.

 

No pleasure is a bad thing in itself. But the things which produce certain pleasures bring troubles many times greater than the pleasures.

 

The just life is most free from disturbance, but the unjust life is full of the greatest disturbance.

He also considered reason and philosophy to be of prime importance. Using our intellect gives us control over chance, over the chaos of the world. Only by thinking carefully about the big issues of existence – by thinking for ourselves – can we gain control and power over our lives, which would otherwise be dictated by the whims of blind culture. Though his theories about the natural world lacked the power of modern scientific method, and thus seem quite absurd and outdated, Epicurus was inspired with scientific curiosity…

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This was original writen by Liz Emery, and with her permison I am posting it here. Today one of my friends, a fellow soldier committed suicide. War brings people close, in someways closer than family. I would have happily given my life to save his, and its hard to deal with the fact that I should have seen the signs. Being an atheist its hard for me to be comforted in losing someone so close But life goes on, as I now search for ways to comfort his family and my others brothers and sisters in arms. I can only look to the future and help keep others from making the same mistake.

Dealing with Death for Nonbelievers
By Liz Emery

When I was sixteen, a very good friend’s young mother was diagnosed with an aggressive form of lung cancer and died four months later. This was the first time I really had to confront the idea of death—until that point, dying had been something that happened to unlucky pets, great grandparents, and strangers on the news. At the time, my religion was a great source of comfort for me and gave me the answers I needed to justify a tragedy that was otherwise unjustifiable.

Just a few weeks ago, another good friend’s even younger mother was diagnosed with the same disease. This time, neither I nor my friend have a religion to buffer the ugly reality of death. This drove me to ask the question: How do you comfort a nonbeliever who’s grieving?

Although everyone deals with loss in their own way, there are some guidelines to remember and respect when you’re comforting someone you love who does not believe in an afterlife.

The most important is that, even though a religious worldview may bring you consolation, it can come off as arrogant and insulting. This may sound strange, but if you’re religious, imagine a nonbeliever trying to comfort you by saying, “I know you’ll never see them again.” You’d feel awful, right? The same idea works conversely by saying, “I know you’ll see them again,” to a nonbelieving person.

A woman named Torrie shared with me her reaction when her brother committed suicide and a congregation member trying to comfort her told her, “He is not in a happy place right now. He is still suffering.”

“I wanted to slap the woman,” Torrie told me, even though she knew the woman meant well. “But you know what? I didn’t, because I knew my brother was dead. He was gone. And he wasn’t sad; he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t in a better place; he wasn’t in a worse place. The matter that made my brother was no longer functioning in the form that I knew as Dave.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself; and when this is what you believe—that death in its finality is not to be assuaged by ideas of afterlife— there are clearly much better things to say than the woman in Torrie’s example.

A wonderful article on alternet.org called “When it’s not God’s plan: 8 Things to say to Grieving Nonbelievers,” has some great ideas, the most popular simply being, “I am so sorry.” No wordiness, no creativity, just plain and simple human empathy.

Another suggestion is to just say, “This sucks,” because it does suck; no matter how you deal with death, it’s hard to avoid the cold, hard fact that we suffer when someone we love dies. Rather than offering cliché platitudes that really don’t mean much, let them know you’re suffering right along with them.

Share stories of good times about the deceased; ask how you can help, with the sincere intent to do dishes for a week if that’s what it takes. Or better yet, don’t say anything and just listen. Companionship goes a long way when alleviating the stark loneliness of grief.

When it really comes down to it, none of us know what happens when we die. We believe, we hope, we resign ourselves to reality; and in the end, we all deal with it in the way we know best.

Atheists, agnostics, and others who may not believe in the afterlife still get angry about death; but when I asked atheist and agnostic students at Utah State concerning the matter, the overwhelming sentiment was not of sadness but of hope and happiness. Rather than waiting for an afterlife to provide the comforts of paradise, they all focused on creating a piece of heaven on earth and leaving the world a better place.

Ann Druyan, the wife of the late astronomer and agnostic Carl Sagan, said it best after her husband died. “Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again… But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting…the way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don’t think I’ll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.”

When the machine breaks down – the greatest invention of all, a bubbling, crashing, whirling creation of a Man-God, whose legs are ancient dusty pages and colored cathedral windows for eyes – when the gears become rusty and the giant idol crashes with an ancient groan, worn-out piles of busted stuff scatter, left to their former caretakers – monks and nuns, picking up pieces in funeral garb with everlasting pride in their former creation… but the rest of the builders are left with nothing to do.

Build a new machine? The only thing left to do is to stare ahead into a universe of parts; bolts and nuts, questioning even their own eyes. Wandering away from the pile of busted bolts and trashed tinkering, they feel the a sense of quietude at the senseless cosmos peeking over the treeline at night. The sound of the flies gets louder.

When the machine of God is gone, when all our tinkering around idols stops, steps might lead back into the jungle and the drum-beat of ancestors, which (for no reason) now sounds dangerous and wrong.

The builders cry for more music of the gears, a performance of the big finale – a sweet serenade about the meaning of life, a concert and comedy to light up our simian minds with certainty. Hands moving in remembrance of complicated motions to build up a new machine. Without the grinding of gears, the rancid whisper of steam, frightened by the void of space, the trap of biology, the lovely recurring nightmare of Spring and Winter. Reality hits, like a train. Everything is algorithmic, chaotic, pointless – suffering is everywhere, competition, survival, pedicured sun-basted modern masked animals who deign themselves meta-Gods, feasting on the bones of dead beasts, hidden under clothes and makeup to disguise the despicable truth, lost in the rotting skeleton of God, a concrete maze.

But what should they do? Abandon hope, smelt the gears into bullets, stare up at the sky with nausea? Step backward into the jungle or try to fix the machine – put the gears back in order, shine the cathedral windows, rewrite the books?

When the machine of religion has died, morality, meaning, purpose – it disappears underfoot. No longer can anyone build false purposes and bring them flowers of worship. All paths open. The builders are the machine. When all idols are broken, what remains but empty midnight?

“One hand on this wily comet. Take a drink just to give me some weight. Some Uberman I’d make; I’m barely a vapour.” – James Mercer

Some things that are useful aren’t necessarily true. A good religious friend implied that insistence on a world of hard facts and knowledge shows that I am really just afraid of feeling the truth of those things which reside outside the realm of rationality, such as the existence of God. Maybe secular humanists, atheists and free-thinkers are just scared to admit that some feelings are beyond reason, telling us eternal truths about life.

The implication here is that my feelings will lead me to God; that I’m only blocking Him out using mortal tactics of scientific submersion and avoidance, through a pithy world of shaky human constructs. A very touching argument – but far too cute to survive in the real world. There’s more to it than that.

Yes – there is an important axis of human life which extends far beyond the scientific or rational, into a world of the mythical, creative and experiential; and we all salve or feed this daimon of feeling, sometimes with help from native stories, myths and fables, other times with art, music and sex. Regardless, it’s part of being human.

Maybe this part of life could be called the spiritual, the emotional, the artistic or the Dionysian: no matter how we cut it, there is a vista which appears to transcend all rationality with brute natural force.

But how is it, as we begin to muddle the lines between truth and feeling, that this necessary condition of humanity must lead always to faith and religion? This is, after all, what they’re saying.

There are at least eight giant religions that rule the world. The title of religious studies professor Stephen Prothero’s book makes it clear: God Is Not One. This collection of clear, fair and academic religious studies information shows us that the world’s religions are not spiritually compatible, as many assume. He shakes off the wave of 1970′s universalism ideas (“All roads lead to the same God”), calling them religiously-illiterate “Godtalk”.

All roads don’t lead to the same God. These are very different religions, and very different gods. So if irrational feelings can tell us truth, such as “My God is the true God and So-and-So is his only Prophet,” we are in a hell of a lot of trouble.

Can we not, instead, say that the myths behind the transcendent are merely signposts to realistic things? God is a word for guidance, Jesus is a word for compassion, Buddha for perception. Now they are useful ideas; we can humanize the myths of religions to learn to focus our spirit. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that we know anything about anything, as religions and theists would have it; that there really is a God lurking in omnipotence, or that Jesus returned to life, or that Buddha was born from a lotus flower. (More on this later with Jefferson and the Bible).

Without going into it much further, I’m going to coin the term Mythodipsia to describe it. Thirst for myths. We all have that parched throat for the mysterious, the transcendent – the explanatory; the guidance, the compassion. Everyone needs a story. What would human life be like without it?  But mythic usefulness does not need to transcend naturalism. We can humanize myths without de-humanizing reality. We can quench our creative thirst with wine – without believing a man magicked it from water.

A recent billboard in Pennsylvania put up by a group of atheists would have made anyone driving by slow down and do a double-take, if it hadn’t been anonymously torn down in less than a day. As I try to unstick my forehead from my desk after seeing it, I tell myself: when advertising to strangers that non-believers may be an alluring group with a good message, think before plastering stuff on America’s highways.

Okay! – is the first thought inside my simple, middle-class, white, non-religious brain. Jesus condoned and justified slavery and racism for thousands of years of Western history! Therefore the state legislation naively supports a year of barbed-collar whippings and lines of rock-chipping chain-gangs by ‘christening’ 2012 as the Year of the Bible. Wow! Points taken, American Atheists! Congratulations on your successful advertising! – (sincerely, other white disbeliever).

Okay. So I’m with you so far, AA, I really am. There’s some kind of cognitive dissonance happening with a Year of the Bible. It’s no book of bedtime stories, to be used in courtrooms as some kind of moral weight, nor declared a righteous piece of glowing compassion, flown on public wings by a draft of praise, above sparkling smiles and parades, etc. etc. Yes, there are issues here that should be openly spoken about; namely, Christ, slavery and the worldviews of the Western world.

(Now, someone looking deeply enough, with a good enough microscope, might be able to discern what I think AA was trying to say, or at least should have been saying. It is in there somewhere, squeaking weakly between the lines: the implication that such a holiday tramples constitutional American freedom of religion. I doubt many people saw it, but that’s okay, because these atheists accomplished the main goal: changing people’s deepest integral philosophical and Western religious world-views – with under 20 words!)

But, on a billboard? The bigger issue is good advertising. Here’s the kick to the face…

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“Only connect! And the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.” E.M. Forster

The logic of our ideas is not as crucial as the quality of our conversation. After hearing  talk about the club (and about non-theists in general) I felt I need to clear some things up for the sake of our dialogue with religious friends and neighbors. Who are we, what are we doing and why do we do it?

The premise that brings secularists, humanists, atheists and free-thinkers together is the lack of religion. This is at once a hallowed freedom – but it can also be a cursed negativity, giving everyone the wrong impression.

You just don’t believe in God and have nothing positive to say.

We’re not about the hatred or absence of religion. Rather, we have a positive goal: to give USU students an open playing ground to discuss matters of spirituality, faith, science and reason beyond religion.

Imagine the beauty that our pumping hearts and thinking minds are literally made out of the dust of ancient stars. Comprehend the stark magnificence and special humility of the human condition, if we are the result of billions of years of free-form natural phenomena rather than some mere god’s design. Ponder the trillions of planets and the probability of distant life-forms: are we doomed to loneliness in the galaxies? Is this special species only a branch on a tree of life, a wisp and a tiny blotch in a sea of vast dark? What’s the mystery behind all this?

Now we’re talking, right? Beyond religion, the view is spectacular, and there’s work to be done.

You hate religious people.

No, we don’t. How else can I say it? Religion is a great force in the world, a powerful weight on the shoulders of believers and disbelievers alike. This blog may be infuriatingly skeptical, focusing our powers on poking and prodding religion, but it hardly qualifies as hatred to do so – it’s actually something more akin to bravery, to stand up for such a hated minority viewpoint.

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