Photo: Woodcock Johnson, Creative Commons, Flickr
Originally published in the Washington Post and picked up by Forbes, the story reports that 92 percent of Americans believe in God or a higher power – “including one in five of those who call themselves atheists”.
Photo: Ted_Abbott, Creative Commons, Flickr
Nonetheless, the Google RSS feed that delivered this non sequiter to my computer actually said 1 in 5 atheists believe in God.
At 7 a.m., which is when I first read this headline, coffee met cognitive dissonance and I was forced to ask myself if the problem is illiteracy or uncertainty. Do people not know the meaning of the word, or do they adopt the title because the current state of affairs makes the likelihood of a benevolent creator seem remote?
Merriam Webster’s dictionary, the definitive source, dates the term to 1546 and defines it as a disbelief in the existence of deity. Not just one deity, or any specific deity, but deity itself. Ergo, belief in any higher power automatically means you’re not an atheist and you don’t get to call yourself one. Deity can include Jehovah, Allah, Jesus, The Force, Gitche Manitou, Divine Providence, or any other supposed motive force behind the workings of the universe.
I don’t have a problem with atheists. I’ve known a few and find them by and large more ethical than the current crop of neocons. A fine example would be Michele DeKonty, who served as chief of staff at the Justice Department’s Juvenile Justice Division and plugged her favorite organizations into the system to get grants even after the deadlines had passed.
Thanks to DeKonty’s efforts, the World Golf Foundation received a $500,000 grant, which according to one whistle-blower was virtually assured even before anyone started to review and score the applications.
DeKonty, a graduate of Regent University (which bills itself as America’s preeminent Christian University), was fired June 24, after two years of progressively blatant chicanery. Before that, she was a legislative assistant for Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), the grandfather of the neocon movement in America.
Helms, a tobacco industry lobbyist who earned the nickname Senator No for consistently vetoing Democratic social welfare programs, was an avowed racist who made no apology for his bigotry. He left the Senate in 2001 after 30 years defending fascist military regimes around the world and trying to institute the same policies in America. Helms, who began his career as a radio spokespersion for Christian Fundamentalism, took a job as a TV commentator in 1960 – a career which launched him into the political arena as the only senator in modern American history who could destroy social progress by filibustering a policy of ignorance, hatred, bigotry and elitism.
Today, Jesse Helms is a shell of a man, living in an assisted care facility as the result of a debilitating dementia (likely the result of his lifetime of vitriolic hyperbole). To take a phrase from the Bible, he purported to follow, “the wages of sin is death.” Jesse Helms is as close to dead as one can get and still breathe.
But I digress. The point I had been trying to make – before outrage sidetracked me – is that many of us are guilty of fuzzy logic and escapist thinking. Just because we’re angry at our designated higher power for the current state of the world doesn’t mean It is nonexistent. Nor does our disenchantment make us atheists. In fact, if we are angry it’s because we believe some Thing is in control (and apparently falling down on the job).
True atheists are freed from the dichotomy of an omniscient and therefore presumably benevolent deity allowing evil to persist and even prosper. Christians are freed by the doctrine of free will. In either case, realists on both sides of the issue realize that there is no one to blame but ourselves if the environment is decaying, the elite are gaining wealth and power on the sweat of the poor, and our politicians are so corrupt, one candidate looks like another. They also accept that no fond, celestial Uberparent is going to clean up these messes for us, so we’d best get busy instead of copping out (by calling ourselves atheistic) or waiting for the Rapture.