Musings on Atheism, Belief, and Statues

The website godchecker.com lists roughly 4,000 “weird and wonderful Gods, Supreme Beings, Demons, Spirits and Fabulous Beasts” which have been worshipped since the beginning of recorded history. Many are still being worshipped.  It’s quite an amusing and exhaustive collection of deities, demons, and demigods like saints. All gods and demons are, at least to me, weird, albeit not wonderful except as expressions of our limitless imaginations. Ditto with the rest of the supernatural baggage that comes with deities: reincarnation, ghosts, angels, an afterlife, souls, saints, and miracles.*

Seeing these lengthy lists of gods and their underlings underscores the point made by evolutionary biologist and self-declared atheist Richard Dawkins, when he wrote in his 2006 book, The God Delusion (Chap. 1, Explaining the Improbable):

We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.**

I’ve always liked that quote. How many “believers” — particularly those among the pseudo-Christian Talibanelists (aka Evangelists, Christo-Fascists, and Christian Nationalists), religious cults, Orthodox Jews, and fundamentalist Muslims — will agree that the belief in other gods like Zeus, Odin, Poseidon, Bacchus, Horus, Inanna, Baal, Ganesh, or Moloch has any validity and credibility? Few, if any, methinks. Yet I can find no compelling argument that makes monotheism any more reasonable than pantheism or paganism.

What got me thinking about this topic was a recent article by columnist Howard Anglin in The Hub whose piece is titled, “It’s ok to draw the line at statues of Satan.” In it, he lauds “the toppling of a statue of Satan in the Iowa legislature,” with the comment,

If our society can’t draw a principled distinction between benign expressions of religious pluralism and the literal embodiment of evil, then we might as well pack it up.***

This presumes a belief in a particular pantheon of European and Middle Eastern deities. And it entirely misses the reason the statue was erected in the first place (as political theatre). Anglin then tossed in the supercilious:

My main takeaway from the episode is that there are a lot of very smart and earnest people out there who apparently do not believe in the Devil or in the objective reality of evil. To which I’d say: how do you explain all this? (Gestures vaguely at the world around us.)

Well, everyone can see the “literal embodiment of evil” all around us: Donald Trump, his boss Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un, Ismail Haniyeh, Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei, Stephen Harper, Danielle Smith, Jeffrey Epstein, Pierre Poilievre, and others of their ilk are in the news every day, usually encouraging their followers to express the “objective reality of evil” that gets into the news.

We can see the increasing rise of the rightwing fascists and neo-Nazis eager (and actively trying) to destabilize our democracies. We can see the daily mass shootings in the USA, the HAMAS killings and rapes, the whipping of women and beheading of apostates in Iran, the bombing of civilians in Ukraine and Gaza, the genocides and the murders. They’re impossible to escape seeing. We see the evil very well, thank you, without needing the lens of religion to interpret it.

What we can’t see is how the statue of an imaginary character (who’s not even Satan – see footnote) represents anything more than a medieval fiction, erected as a sardonic point being made about so-called religious freedom in the USA, is related to actual, objective evil that we see around us. Did the statue cause a mass shooting? Or a hospital bombing? Start a war? Even the appearance of the character of Satan is fictionalized, but let’s not get too far off track (I might add details in the comments section later or in a subsequent post…).

And we can explain evil quite well by pointing out the human element: no sane, benevolent god would allow any of it to happen. No caring god would allow one of its creations to torment, torture, and brutalize others of its creation just for spite and fun (or for a gamble like in the Book of Job…). Ergo no god, no devil to blame it on. Believers may try to explain and even excuse evil by blaming it not on the people behind it, but on some mythical demon. That way the real, and very human villains get a pass.

The “problem of evil” is the thorniest theological problem and still being thrashed about after millennia of debate. To slough it off on a statue of some mythological character is not merely trite: it avoids the responsibility humans have for that evil. I am going out on a limb here, but I’d bet Anglin gets upset when statues of white, imperialist, allegedly Christian politicians like John A MacDonald or Confederate war leaders get toppled.

Conflating the belief in Satan with a belief in evil is, to me, like conflating believing in Invisible Pink Unicorns and believing in rainbows: an argument based on a logical fallacy. And, while the notion of an underworld is not uniquely Christian, making its caretaker evil certainly is. Neither the Romans nor the Greeks considered the overseers of the afterlife evil. Neither the Hindu Yama nor the Buddhist Mahakala are considered evil nor do they foment evil on Earth.

Satan — aka Lucifer, literally “morning star” but also known as the Bringer of Light —is barely mentioned in the Old Testament (Tanakh) and even then as merely the adversary or accuser; the term referring to humans in the early books, but turned into a supernatural being in later books like Job, and not portrayed as the lord of Hell. In Islam, Satan is the tempter, but little else. So it’s fair to say that only Christians, particularly literalists, would consider the mythical Satan the “embodiment of evil.” And that Satan seems far too human, in my estimation.

Anglin, I note from his biography, is also an arch-conservative, “previously Deputy Chief of Staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to the Premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney…” both of whom I’d easily class as nasty, evil men — Harper being the embodiment of evil to many Canadians — doing the work of Anglin’s devil. Anglin’s also apparently a believer in numerology because he ends his column with “Twelve months, twelve entries. Good enough for the Apostles and the Tribes of Israel, and surely good enough for my odd, disruptive life.”

Anglin doesn’t give a name to those who “apparently do not believe in the Devil.” I trust he knows that the statue was erected by the American Church of Satan, who actually don’t believe in the devil, but I believe he’s referring to the godless liberals (nyuck, nyuck, nyuck…) who criticized its vandalism. Come on, Howard, call us by the name you surely mean: atheists.

As the Godchecker website points out, contemporary humans have thousands of gods from which to choose, should they wish to believe in something supernatural. And, frankly, I see little difference in believing in anything supernatural: gods, angels, saints, goblins, ghosts, demons, angels… they’re all just figments of our admittedly fertile imaginations. But if you must believe in the gods, why not something fun and playful, like Dionysius or Pan? Or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? A god that reflects who you are… as one novelist succinctly put it,

Gods always behave like the people who make them.
Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (1938), Ch. 15, p. 219

Theism, Wikipedia tells us, is the “belief in the existence of one or more deities,” but in Western terms, it means belief in the monolithic Abrahamic god, sometimes called Yawheh, Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, or simply God. Or, perhaps just The Hairy Thunderer. Exactly who or what this god is, does, or commands depends on which segment of which faith (or often which particular branch or cult of that faith) you belong to. But like Dawkins said, we are all atheists in some form.

Sam Harris makes a good point in his 2006 book, Letter to a Christian Nation, asking why we even need a name for people who don’t believe in gods because it is not a formal, or even well-defined view:

Atheism is not a philosophy – it is not even a view of the world. It is simply an admission of the obvious. In fact, “atheism” is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a “non-astrologer” or a “non-alchemist.” We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.****

Harris is correct: there is no accepted “scripture” for atheists; no agreed-upon book, gospels, textbook, website, or even ideology, much less churches, ministers, rabbis, or imams. Non-believers have a wide range of lack of belief, from the wishy-washy agnostic to the militant atheist. The word atheist dates back to 1570, at the height of the wars between European Catholics and Protestant reformers when each side accused the other of it. Then it evolved to mean a generic “godless person,” a definition still in use, although it lacked the modern political and social aspects. Yet in all that time, there has been no accepted doctrine or even view of what exactly an atheist is or believes. Or doesn’t…

As Jennifer Michael Hecht has documented in her 2004 book, Doubt: A History, people have been questioning the existence of the gods since the invention of writing. Such doubters in their day — including religious leaders like Buddha and the authors of biblical texts like Job and Ecclesiastes — were called philosophers, gurus, prophets, and skeptics. I’d argue that if a deity gave us free will, then being a non-believer is only exercising that attribute as it was intended to be used.

Molecular biologist Dr. Dean Hamer suggested that human spirituality may be biological and inheritable, in his 2004 book, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired Into Our Genes. It’s a fascinating book, but I am not convinced by his argument that “spiritual experiences and religion are nearly universal human attributes” and thus the product of neurochemicals triggered by the gene SLC18A2. My reading suggests that humans have an equal disposition towards doubt and skepticism. But it’s an interesting debate.

Although I’ve read and enjoyed many of Dawkins’ and Harris’ works, I don’t know anyone who ever became an atheist from reading them, or from reading any of the other well-known and published atheists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Daniel Dennett, Michael Shermer, Armin Navabi, Jerry Coyne, or Christopher Hitchens. I suggest people most likely read them to either confirm or elucidate further existing views about religion or faith (or lack thereof), or simply to come up with points of contention to debate and contradict the authors.

There’s an entire industry of religious contrarians dedicated to publishing responses to Dawkins and Hitchens. To me, their counter-arguments have all the credibility of those anti-vaccine screeds or creationist drivel, and often push a pro-religious, rightwing ideology that tolerates no apostasy or heresy. And I doubt anyone is convinced of their views from reading them, either. Confirmation bias is at play as much here as among non-believers.

Non-believers I know came to their skepticism through other means than reading, often a personal issue or event. but sometimes just via careful consideration and thought. For me, it was a family tragedy at age 10 when I was still attending Sunday school. Afterwards, I tried to understand why any gentle, intelligent, caring, and ostensibly religious person would be punished by God. What had they done to deserve God’s wrath? Why did bad things happen to good people? In my youthful uncertainty, I answered the age-old theological question by deciding only a capricious, angry, punitive, and arbitrary god would allow it to happen. God was not, therefore, good as I had been taught. And if that were true, then the entire mythology of God must be false. I deconstructed faith at an early age.

By age 12 I had stopped believing entirely in any deity or the supernatural. I was immune to comments about an unknowable or ineffable god or the mysterious ways in which a god worked. I didn’t say prayers or attend church. I was reading Darwin and looking through a microscope instead. While Darwin and other writers opened my eyes to evolution and science, it wasn’t for me the epiphany it apparently gave Dawkins:

Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.
Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker

My lack of belief in the supernatural is somewhat ironic, given that I have on my bookshelves the scriptures of all the major religions, as well as translations of ancient works from older religions  (like the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library). I have flirted with secular Buddhism for many decades (and still respect its moral philosophy).

I have many books about the history of religion, about the development of theology and belief, even about how the Bible came to be assembled and edited. I have catalogues of gods, demons, angels, and saints. Religion and faith interest, even fascinate me. I just don’t believe in the gods and demons in any of it, any more than I believe in the reality of Captain Kirk, Commander Spock, or Godzilla, even though I am equally interested in and fascinated by their stories.

I’ll have more to say about my views on religion and faith, their roles in history and society, and about being a non-believer, in a future post.

~~~~~

* I came across this site while looking for a comprehensive pantheon of Greek gods and goddesses to complement my reading of Homer’s The Iliad. The site was begun in 1999  and the authors “still haven’t finished counting the Gods.” I was surprised that I had not encountered it before (or at least cannot recall doing so). It’s on my favourites bar, now (along with the Encyclopedia Mythica which has more than 11,000 articles “about deities and beings from all corners of the world.”)
Both sites suffer, however, from an overabundance of trivial clickbait ads. The Mythica site has an inadequate search engine that also brings up advertising sites. The Mythica site has no reference article for Santa Claus, one of the most powerful deities in the Christian pantheon. Godchecker calls him a “Modern Charity Spirit” without reference to his role in Xmas prayer, idolatry, and worship. Neither site has an entry for Baphomet. However, they are still very useful sites.

** Dawkins had previously said in an interview in 2002 about “militant atheism,” that “An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.” But to expand that idea further, it’s not merely the gods: it’s the whole supernatural superstructure that many atheists find unbelievable, including the afterlife. Michael Shermer has an excellent book called Heavens on Earth about that aspect.

*** It was actually a statue of Baphomet whose appearance is the result of Eliphas Levi’s — a mid-19th century occultist who drew the picture — imagination. It was later purloined to represent Satan, and adopted as the official symbol of the Church of Satan. But Baphomet was always separate. The name was originally used in the 11th century by the Knights Templar during the Crusades as Bafometh, a corrupted form of the name Muhammad. A few centuries later the Templars were falsely accused of worshipping Baphomet as a deity. The knights were tortured, executed, and the order eradicated King Philip IV of France. The name doesn’t reappear until the occultist fad of the 19th century revived it and created the popular image now used. As Wikipedia notes, “Lévi’s Baphomet, for all its modern fame, does not match the historical descriptions from the Templar trials.” This Guardian article explains more about the controversy around the statue.

**** The author Douglas Adams is quoted about agnosticism in The American Atheist magazine and later published in The Salmon of Doubt:

If you describe yourself as “Atheist,” some people will say, “Don’t you mean ‘Agnostic’?” I have to reply that I really do mean Atheist. I really do not believe that there is a god — in fact I am convinced that there is not a god (a subtle difference). I see not a shred of evidence to suggest that there is one. It’s easier to say that I am a radical Atheist, just to signal that I really mean it, have thought about it a great deal, and that it’s an opinion I hold seriously. It’s funny how many people are genuinely surprised to hear a view expressed so strongly. In England we seem to have drifted from vague, wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague, wishy-washy Agnosticism — both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much.
People will then often say, “But surely it’s better to remain an Agnostic just in case?” This, to me, suggests such a level of silliness and muddle that I usually edge out of the conversation rather than get sucked into it. (If it turns out that I’ve been wrong all along, and there is in fact a god, and if it further turned out that this kind of legalistic, cross-your-fingers-behind-your-back, Clintonian hair-splitting impressed him, then I would choose not to worship him anyway.)