Today, most of our fellow travelers have fallen by the wayside. The rise of Evangelical Christianity pushed deists and pantheists further into the margins, and even unitarians are no longer the vibrant movement they once were.

In their place, a new crop of people that find orthodoxy too confining have arisen: seekers, liberal Christians, postmodern Christians, Christian agnostics and syncretists of every type. Many of these modern groups emerged as a reaction to the same forces that atheism did: science, higher criticism and individualism.

But whereas atheism rejected belief in a deity as unsustainable and even immoral, these other freethinkers just made things more complicated. As Karen Armstrong says, “belief is a red herring.” Religion is no longer just an assent to an intellectual proposition.

Armstrong, a bit of a mystic, will say that God is not something you believe in, it’s something you experience. Similarly, there’s a long line of Liberal Christians who say that religion begins with an experience of faith; an inner feeling of absolute dependence.

Robert M. Price, a Christian Atheist along the lines of Don Cupitt, will sometimes say that he doesn’t believe in God, but that he’s willing to suspend disbelief on Sunday mornings. God is real within the worship itself, even if nowhere else.

Folks like Real Live Preacher have said that “faith is a verb,” it’s not something you have, it’s something you do. Some would say “fake it until you make it,” act like you believe until you feel that you believe. Others, even more postmodern, would say “fake it, and who cares if you make it.” Do what works for you.

I’ll be honest, sometimes I feel like a relic. I’ve been reading The End of Christianity, a collection of counter apologetic essays edited by John Loftus (review coming). Many of these argument would have been familiar to atheists 150 years ago, at least in outline. We’re trapped in the same debates that Robert Ingersoll and Elizabeth Cady Stanton started.

As folks like Evolving Thoughts parse the difference between belief, disbelief and agnosticism ever more finely, I can’t shake the feeling that the whole argument is becoming obselete. What does it mean to be an atheist in this postmodern world? What does it mean to not be a Christian when belief in the Christian God is no longer the point?

I will never answer the majority of the questions unbelievers have about God, questions that deal with proof that God exists; to do so would violate the “faith clause” that is a condition of becoming a Christian.

In a lot of ways, it makes sense. Faith, for Pastor Steve, means believing in God without concrete evidence. It’s vital to him, because faith is what’s required to be saved. Part of the challenge of being Christian is continuing to believe in a complex series of theological assertions (God loves us, Jesus was God, his death saves us from something called sin, etc.) based only on ambiguous clues.

You can look at it another way. Faith is a presupposition from which all the rest of Christian thought flows. If you don’t believe in a God already, you’re not going to believe in a God ever. You have to believe in a God, in sin, in an inspired scripture and in salvation and heaven before you can makes sense of Steve’s brand of Christianity.

So you either have faith or you don’t. But is it really that simple?

Last month, a portal for motherhood blogs called “The Circle of Moms” held a contest to find the most popular mommy blogs of various categories. One category was faith blogs. Competition became heated when a pagan blog, Confessions of a Pagan Soccer Mom, took the lead.

The blogger, Mrs. B, found herself the target of a lot of bile. Some Christians seems unable to accept that there might be non-Christian and even non-monotheistic faith. Mrs. B came out with a confession of faith:

Before I get much further, for those who might be wondering (and I can only speak for myself on this part of the issue), I can say that yes, my practice and religion is faith based. I live my faith every single day. I wake up and say a prayer to my deity.

So Mrs. B has faith. The Christian bloggers should applaud her. Some did, but quite a few continued their heated criticisms of the whole idea of pagan faith. She still won.

If we take Mrs. B and the rest of the sprawling online pagan community seriously, we see that there has to be more than one type of faith. So it’s not a binary problem, where you either have faith or not. Many Christians who were raised in the Christian traditions can’t seem to wrap their minds around this. There’s faith – Christian faith, naturally – and then there’s superstition. This is parochialism, pure and simple.

So here’s the problem with the faith card: why this faith and not that one? There needs to be some criteria to figure out which faith you should accept. You can’t tell me to take the leap of faith until you give me some way to know which direction I should leap in.

“A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction… The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation. The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one.”

The countries studied were Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. I didn’t really raise an eyebrow looking through that list until I got to Ireland – Ireland? Really? I’m not a mathematician or a statistician, so I can’t really give an opinion on their method of analysis, but the trends as they currently stand are pretty unambiguous.

The UK census is currently being taken (mine is sitting on the floor next to me, I’ve been avoiding it for days), but Question 20 (“What is your religion?”) is voluntary (as well as incredibly presumptive and badly worded), so it remains to be seen whether the group will (or will be able to) apply the same analysis to UK data, but I shall wait with interest to find out.

In the meantime, I put it to the multinational UF family: What do people from those countries think about the predictions? Accurate and incisive or foolish and flawed?

I’ll start with a premise. There is such a thing as good and bad behaviour. There are moral acts and immoral acts; these things are, in my opinion, highly subjective, but they do exist.

Some theists will argue that this proves God exists – because morals have to have a source. Of course, this is flawed immediately because it discounts the possibility of evolved social behaviour, however we’ll continue to the question, which should be familiar to most atheists:

Are right and moral acts and deeds right and moral because God says that they’re right and moral, or does God say that right and moral deeds are right and moral because they are inherently right and moral?

Now to the point of the question:

Option one (right and moral acts and deeds are right and moral because God says that they’re right and moral) logically leads to the conclusion that God could say that anything is right and moral, including (for example) genocide, child rape, slavery, cruel and unusual punishment… Would anybody ever agree that these things are right and moral? I don’t think so – and yet they’re right there in the Bible – some of them as instructions from God himself. I guess that rules out option one! It also causes massive problems with option two: God’s proclamations (if you believe the Bible) are often not right and moral – in fact they’re often very wrong and very immoral. There’s more: If something is inherently right and moral, then surely we don’t need God to point it out to us – surely we’d have figured it out for ourselves anyway?

Now look at option three: Human societal norms are evolved and God has nothing to do with it. Doesn’t that rather neatly solve the problems with options one and two?

Bishop Broadhurst, who is the chairman of the Forward in Faith organisation, declined to say whether he would leave the Church of England, because he said he needed time to talk to the priests under his pastoral care.

“My organisation has 1,000 priests and about 8,000 lay people in it. None of those priests are happy,” he said.

“Now people have to decide whether they will knuckle under – if they do, that is not a very happy situation for them or the Church – or whether they’ll go, or whether they’ll just defy it, and I can see that happening with many people.”

Part of me finds it hard to suppress a little soupçon of glee over this; as an atheist it confirms some of my opinions of religion in general so very nicely – particularly that some people simply use religion as a cloak for bigotry and that their bigotry is far more important to them than any faith they might profess. Most of me, however, finds it deeply sad that the laws of my country still permit exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation on religious grounds, effectively allowing organisations like the CofE to remain decades behind the rest of society in their attitudes towards equality and fairness.

Background story from the BBC.
Main story from the BBC.

Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays (1928), “On the Value of Scepticism”

Question of the Day:

Do you agree? Is it bad to hold a belief for which there is no evidence, even if it harms no one?

We’re all very familiar with this kind of thing. Perhaps I was actually thinking back to a few days ago when I actually had left them on the desk. Maybe last night I had a dream in which the memory was dredged up, and that dream confused my brain. Maybe it was just a stray neuron firing. But still, I was convinced …

This is the kind of thing that I think about whenever I’m dealing with a believer, particularly the liberal persuasion, who wants me to understand why they believe in some higher power or alternate reality that we might call God or spirit. I hear a lot about trusting the inner conviction or listening to that still small voice. Yes, our minds might be wrong about where we left the keys last night, but somehow our instincts are better equipped to tell us about this higher reality.

It may be worse for me, because my family has a propensity to manic depression and related mental illnesses. I’ve dealt with people having odd convictions, compulsions and the rare hallucination. It was brought home to me early that our brains are not perfect instruments, and that we are prone to any number of illusions, fallacies and errors.

One of the reasons I like the scientific enterprise is that we’ve spent generations honing the process to try and weed out as much human error as we can. As Robert Feynman said, “Science is what we have learned about how to keep from fooling ourselves.” Everything from the peer review process to the collective and combative nature of the enterprise works to try and cancel out these problems. If it still fails on occasion, well, that gives you some idea of what we’re up against.