Dan Barker - Life Driven Purpose: How an Atheist Finds Meaning

ADVANCE PRAISE

One of the biggest misconceptions about atheists is that without God they can have no morals, values, or meaning in their lives. In this lovely secular sermon, Dan Barker handily rebuts that claim, showing that true meaning and morality can come only from accepting our finitude, and dealing with it rationally and humanistically.

Jerry Coyne, Professor of Ecology and Evolution, University of Chicago, and author of Why Evolution Is True

Dan Barker has cleverly reversed the arrows of purpose so they fly from the bows of life instead of raining down from an imaginary archer in the sky.

Victor J. Stenger, author of God: The Failed Hypothesis

If youve been searching for meaning and purpose in life, its a sure bet youve never found answers in a bookat least not answers that are grounded in any kind of objective realityuntil now. Dan Barkers Life Driven Purpose deserves its own category. Its a book of emancipation, a book of vitality, a book of enrichment, a book of celebration, a book of inspirationput simply, a book that honestly and rationally teaches how to live.

Peter Boghossian, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists

Religions hijacked the meaning of life long ago and now Dan Barker is stealing it back. In this brilliant and inspirational book, he shows that value, worth, and meaning can be discovered and created by anyoneno religion required.

Guy P. Harrison, author of Think: Why You Should Question Everything and 50 Simple Questions for Every Christian

This book is really Something (see ). In his calm, patient voice, Dan Barker helps us understand and untwist black-and-white thinking so we can see and appreciate all the colors of the rainbow.

Linda LaScola, coauthor (with Daniel Dennett) of Caught in the Pulpit: Leaving Belief Behind

Life Driven Purpose is an important book that puts the lie to the strange notion that without God life has no purpose. Living is great, fulfilling, and meaningful without God. Like his previous book, Godless, Life-Driven Purpose is a book that every one with an interest in spirituality, religion in political life, and how to lead a meaningful life will want to have on their shelves.

Daniel Everett, author of Dont Sleep, There Are Snakes and Language

Dan says hes certainly not pretending to be a Deacon of Atheism or Bishop of Freethought, but he is. In this book Deacon Dan uses good scholarship in offering convincing answers to some of the most important reasons why believers keep on believing despite the lack of sufficient evidence. Writing with the wit and storytelling of a preacher, this series of sermons will definitely reach the masses. I heartily endorse it. May it produce a revival, one of reason, logic, and science.

John W. Loftus, author of Why I Became An Atheist, The Outsider Test for Faith, and coauthor of God or Godless?

Deftly handling the complexities of philosophy and physics, meaning and morality, Barker debunks the woefully inadequate monochromatic worldview of the religious fundamentalist and replaces it with one of rich color and beauty. This accessible, witty, and thoughtful book provides answers to the most profound questions but, more than that, it helps us embrace life; life in all its fullness.

Paul Beaumont, author of A Brief Eternity

In Life Driven Purpose Dan Barker confronts the complexities of moral behavior and offers us the gift of his lifelong engagement with the Big Questions. Everyone will profit from reading Barkers penetrating and revealing analyses, but the true believers will profit most, since they have the most to lose, and to gain. One of Barkers advantages in wrestling with these profound issues is that for many years he was himself one of the true believers, preaching the orthodox gospelso he knows the tricks of the trade; hes been inside the orthodox stronghold, and knows where the bodies are buried. Barker is not only smart, he is wise, and this book is an invaluable gift to all of us.

Philip Appleman, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Indiana University

Copyright 2015 by Dan Barker

All rights reserved

Pitchstone Publishing

Durham, North Carolina 27705

www.pitchstonepublishing.com

To contact the publisher, please e-mail

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barker, Dan.

Life driven purpose : how an atheist finds meaning / Dan Barker ; foreword by Daniel C. Dennett.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-939578-21-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Life. 2. Conduct of life. 3. Ethics. 4. Atheism. I. Title.

BD431.B2788 2014

211.8dc23

2013049775

Cover photo by Ingrid Laas

For Anne Nicol Gaylor who shows us how to live a purpose-filled life

Index

What is the point of my life? This question cannot have haunted many people in earlier centuries; they were too busy scratching out a living, providing food and shelter for their families, fending off threats to their health and security. But now that we have pretty well solved the most pressing problems of staying alive, and have the free time to reflect on what it all means, we are assaulted at every turn by a flood of information about the apparently meaningful lives of a lucky fewdoctors, judges, guitar heroes, sports stars, billionaires, celebrities, politicians, explorers of ocean depths, and conquerors of the highest mountains. If we cant all have glamorous livesif we cant all be famous for even fifteen minuteswhat is the point, really? Why should we care about anything?

The best answer today has been the best answer for millennia: find something more important than you are, and devote your life to it, protecting it, improving it, making it work, celebrating it. But doesnt this usually require joining forces with others, finding a supporting organization with a clear vision? Yes, it does, and for centuries the premier options have been religions, made all the more irresistible by one of the great master strokes of advertising: you cant be good without God. There may well have been a time when this was practically true, when the only feasible path to a life of importance (and we all want our lives to be important) was to be a member in good standing of one church or another, one temple or another. Step One in the project of having a meaningful life was to be God-fearing. Those who werent God-fearing were seen as disreputable, untrustworthy, sinful, defective, empty.

The term God-fearing is a fascinating fossil trace of earlier times, when the standard or default conception of God was as an anthropomorphic Protector of Us (but not Them), Merciful Judge, Witness to our sins, Appreciator of our praise and our incessant declarations of undying loyalty. And that largely obsolete conception of God was itself a direct descendant of earlier conceptions of gods that were genuinely frightening, because they had to be appeased, and were far from loving or just or even good. How strange that the term should survive today with so little recognition of not only its obsolescence but its embarrassing history of oppression!

Wake up, folks! Listen to what your holy texts actually say! Among the delights of Dan Barkers book are the succession of startling juxtapositions, looking at our religious practices through the eyes of a quizzical Martian. Did you realize that all Christian ministers are essentially slave traders, prized for their ability to soothe and cajole their flock of slaves into ever more submissive obedience, and even getting them to pay their keepers?