Myers - The Happy Atheist

Copyright 2013 by PZ Myers

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to reprint an excerpt from GILGAMESH: A Verse Narrative by Herbert Mason. Copyright 1970, renewed 1998 by Herbert Mason. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Myers, PZ (Paul Zachary)
The happy atheist / PZ Myers.
pages cm
eISBN: 978-0-307-90745-5
1. Atheism. 2. ReligionControversial literature. I. Title.
BL 2747.3. M 94 2013 211.8dc23 2013000202
www.pantheonbooks.com

Jacket image: A variant of the Darwin fish
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v3.1

To Mary, Alaric, Connlann, and Skatje. Not that theyd agree with everything I say, but Im deeply appreciative of a life lived among argumentative and irreverent freethinkers.

When I became convinced that the universe is natural, that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell. The dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust.

Robert G. Ingersoll, Why I Am an Agnostic

On any fine morning in rural Minnesota, I can step outside the door of my home and look a few blocks to the southwest and see the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. A few blocks to the west, just out of sight behind nearby houses, lies the First Lutheran Church. About four blocks to the east is the Federated Church, the liberal church in town. Even closer stands the Lutheran Campus Ministry, which serves the university at which I work, and the Newman Center, its Catholic counterpart. Since this is Minnesota, I could make fairly fine-grained sectarian choices within Lutheranism: the First Lutheran Church belongs to the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, but I could attend Faith Lutheran Church, which is another member of ELCA. Or if I wanted something a bit more conservative, I could attend St. Pauls Evangelical Lutheran Church, which belongs to the Wisconsin Synod, or Bethel Evangelical Lutheran Church, of the Church of the Lutheran Confession. Theres also the Zion Lutheran Church nearby, which belongs to the Missouri Synod.

If I were really broad-minded, I might choose the First Baptist Church, the Kingdom Hall of Jehovahs Witnesses, the Apostolic Christian Church, or the Morris Community Church, which meets in the local high school. I count fifteen churches within walking distance of my house; there are no synagogues or mosques, probably because the believers they would prey upon are too thinly populated here to be profitable.

Often when I step outside, I am treated to hymns played at a stunning volume from the loudspeaker in Calvary Cemetery, just two blocks to the north. During the day, they sound at least every hourwhen the old fellow who donated the loudespeaker to the cemetery is feeling particularly pugnacious, theyll be programmed to play every quarter hour. The coffee shop downtown is owned by a coalition of churches, which normally makes no difference to methe coffee is secular, at leastbut Ive learned not to visit it on Tuesday mornings, when the Mens Bible Study group meets there. It is simply too stressful to try to hold my tongue when they discuss the historicity of Noahs Ark, or the imminence of the Rapture and the End Times, while I sip my coffee. Ive succeeded in keeping my thoughts to myself so far, but I wouldnt want to risk an eruption. At some moments, like the time they were discussing the proper role of Christian women (that is, to be subservient and quiet), I have been tempted to perform a few secular baptisms with that good secular coffee.

This town has a total population of roughly five thousand people. As I said, we have fifteen churches, but only one bookstore, which doubles as the video rental store, the kids card game store, and the local cell phone retailer. Were drowning in piety with a host of preachers, each one of whom offers a different version of the eternal and irrefutable truth, each one of whom takes advantage of the taxexempt privilege of religion to build a little temple to his or her peculiar dogma.

There is nothing unusual about my town. This is perfectly ordinary, rural midwestern America, like thousands of other small towns all across the country. Were just immersed in religion, like every other God-soaked spot in lightly populated, Republican-leaning, Real Live Genuine USA.

My fellow townsfolk are good people, like most human beings, who are mostly concerned with getting along, doing well for their families, and seeing their community thrive as a safe and stable place. I dont accept the common atheist line that religion makes people do evil acts, like fly airplanes into buildings and start holy wars; it can and has done so, of course, but those are the pathological extremes, and it isnt right to judge an idea by the excesses of the maniacs who turn it into a cause for violence. Mainly what religion does is make people believe ludicrously silly things, substitute dogma for reason and thought, and sink into self-destructive obsession as they fret more over their reward in the next life than their accomplishments in this one.

There is also a mix of levels of fervor in town. Certainly there are zealots who are convinced that every fornicator is going to burn in hell for eternity, but I suspect that the fornicators outnumber the fervent. For every true believer, there may well be a dozen who go to church simply because theyve always gone to church, because theyre in charge of bringing the coffee cake to the social afterward, because its been dunned into their heads that good people express their worth publicly in regular attendance, because theyve been told it provides good moral guidance for their children, or because their mother-in-law would make family get-togethers a living hell if there was even a hint that their faith had lapsed.

But some of these sincere believers show hints of desperation with which I can sympathize. The old man obsessively poring over the pages of his Bible, his finger moving word by word over Revelation, quietly mumblinghe is afraid, his mortality is hanging over him, and he wants to make sure hes right with the Lord, whom hes sure hes going to face soon. The woman wracked with guilt over her wild teenage years, her abortion, her flirtations with drugs and sexnow her kids have reached that same age, and she cant bear the thought that they might carry out the same experiments she did, and she hopes a little hellfire and Christian discipline will keep them in line. And so many people have secular concerns: Will the economy improve? Will America triumph? Will their children prosper? Theyve been told so often that the fate of the nation lies in courting the goodwill of God that they seek answers to real-world problems in the reassuring fantasies and apocalyptic terrors of faith.

Im an atheist swimming in a sea of superstition, surrounded by well-meaning, good people with whom I share a culture and similar concerns, and theres only one thing I can do.