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Atheology #2: What Does an Atheist Do (or Not Do) All Day?

Last updated on 2017-07-25

So how does being an atheist affect my daily, practical life? What do I do that’s any different from the mostly theist people around me?

As I noted earlier, I feel a strong moral impulse, just like most of the people around me. (And yes, I do notice that the impulse to do bad things appears to be just as prevalent among believers as among non-believers.) I wake up feeling the same desire and drive I see others manifest to protect and provide for loved ones, do good work, follow (and improve!) the law, and generally take care of our planet for current and future generations. Atheism does not stop me from wanting to live well, do good, and seek and speak the truth. Arguably, my belief that we have no God to fall back on strengthens my desire to do those good things—if we want anything done right, we have to do it ourselves.

My not believing in any God or gods seems to distinguish me mostly in things I don’t do.

Obviously, I don’t go to church. (Neither do 10% of Americans, who say they believe but don’t attend organized services.) On regular Sundays, my Lutheran pastor wife goes to her church early to get ready for services. Later I drive my daughter to the church so she can attend one of the worship services and go to Sunday school, but I go to get groceries or work on the blog, or read a book or go for a long bike ride.

Note that even as I don’t go to church, I don’t try to keep anyone else from going. I don’t spend time trying to deprogram my daughter from my wife’s Christian teachings. I’ll consider our parenting successful if my daughter adheres to any reasonable facsimile of my wife’s sensible Christianity.

I don’t go to atheist meetings. Some nonbelievers host “Sunday assemblies” or “atheist church,” but my immediate reaction is, “Why? Taking one more obligation off the calendar is one of the most obvious perks of atheism!”

Actually, I understand the impulse to fellowship. Nonbelievers may benefit as much from spending time with each other and reinforcing each others’ beliefs as believers do. But I don’t feel that impulse. I don’t feel an urge to talk about and explore my atheism on a regular basis (these essays are an exception). I’ve never sought out the company of fellow non-believers. In college, all of my friends were Christians. I didn’t seek out an atheist for marriage. I concluded at SDSU that if marriage happened, I’d be stuck with an atheist, since no sensible Christian woman would tolerate an atheist husband, but my Christian wife has proven that conclusion wrong. I attended an atheist conference a couple years ago in Sioux Falls, and while I had some good conversations with people I knew through the blog, I left early and spent the day having fun conversations with a UCC pastor, a Catholic weatherman, and a Protestant immigrant to America. Maybe I find greater fellowship in contrariness. Maybe if I turned into a believer, I’d want to hang out with atheists all the time.

My atheism creates occasional social awkwardness. I omit “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance, as did the Pledge itself until Red-Scared Congressmen added that phrase to our socialist flag-marketing chant in 1954. I don’t feel too badly—I pledge my loyalty to the United States of America every day by following the law, paying my taxes, and blogging for liberty and justice for all. Besides, an intelligent Christian critique says pledging allegiance to a flag isn’t really Christian.

Similarly, when drawn into group prayers—grace at someone else’s dinner, invocations or benedictions at public functions—I do not participate. If everybody joins hands, I’ll usually join—nothing wrong with a physical demonstration of human solidarity. Occasionally I’ll slip and say Amen, either because I succumb to social inertia or because, on some special rare occasions, I’ll hear a public prayer so good and true that I heartily second its secular message. But usually I stay silent. Sometimes, particularly in official public or political meetings where I feel sectarian prayers are uninclusive and unconstitutional, I won’t even bow my head. I don’t raise hell, but I don’t acknowledge Heaven… or at least not inappropriately timed and placed assertions of one group’s particular vision of Heaven.

I don’t get to resort to the same stock phrases my neighbors use to soothe others in times of calamity. I’ll pray for you… She’s in a better place now… God is watching over us… I can’t say any of those things to someone facing sickness, loss, or travail. But I also don’t take advantage of such moments to say some crass thing like, Where is your God now? I just listen, hold a hand, hug, and try to help.

These differences in my daily life seem minor. Beliefs matter, but 99% of the time, I’m living, working, playing, and loving like pretty much everyone else around me.

6 Comments

  1. Robin Friday

    Well said, Cory. I find my thoughts so similar to yours. I grew up as a Lutheran, married a Catholic, catechized, baptized, confirmed, the whole thng, raised our kids Catholic and gradually, it seems, over the first 25 years, we both came separately to the conclusion that this wasn’t working. My whole family is Protestant, his whole family devout Catholics. We recently lost our youngest adult son to cancer at the age of 47. Over and over, people said to me “You know you’ll see him again in Heaven”. My thought was, well that would be nice to believe, but there is no Heaven. It breaks my heart, but I don’t say that, I don’t reject the thought because I know they mean to be kind, and to reject their sentiment would be unkind of me. I don’t presume to know what other people should do or believe, except we should keep their religious laws based on one religion, including Christianity, out of our laws.

  2. Adam

    Cory, you might want to consider the idea of being a poly-atheist – where one does not only contest the existence of one God, but also the existence of many Gods – and rejecting the idea that any one of man’s numerous religious God constructs could be accurate.

    If God exists, He/She/It/They would never punish good people in the after life just for some technicality about how the human believed some fake news about salvation from a plausible source. God would have to be much higher-minded than that IMO.

  3. Adam, that’s an interesting term, polyatheist, but it seems to be unnecessary. Logically, atheist, monotheist, and polytheist seem to cover all possible bases: zero, one, or many.

  4. Robin, I’m sorry you lost your son. I appreciate your gentleness in response to people saying something in sympathy you don’t believe. But I wonder: if you can consider it unkind to reject a false statement offered in sincere sympathy, could one also argue that it is unkind to offer in sympathy a statement that one knows a listener considers to be false?

    When I encounter a Christian friend who is grieving the loss of a loved one, I don’t trumpet my belief in nothingness after death. I focus on the things that I know we can agree on—we miss the deceased, that missing hurts, but we’re here to help each other, and the deceased would want us to keep living. Someone else’s grief is not the time for me to slip in a plug for my worldview.

  5. Adam

    The term polyatheist is an effort to remind believers of a god how many other gods there are to choose from – all over the world – and just how many people there truly are who have never even had a Bible in arms reach their whole entire lives. God could never send those people to hell for having, perhaps, not having been alive long enough to eventually choose the correct God.

    If you say, “I’m a polyathiest,” they’ll say, “what is that?” And then you have been invited to share a veiw that gives God a much larger context than what (for instance) the puny minded Alt. Christian Trumptards think about every day (if that’s what you’re in the mood for talking about – with complete idiots).

    :-)

  6. Boy, Adam, that’s a lot of linguistic effort for me to make to do outreach on behalf of a bunch of religions that I don’t believe in. :-D

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