We Don't Need More God, We Need More Atheists

That’s the way Kate Cohen, a Washington Post columnist headed her column and it got my attention. I read her book, “We of Little Faith Why I stopped Pretending (and Maybe You Should Too.) and decided her ideas were worth sharing in a Unitarian Sunday Service.

So, what are the facts about atheists. Pew Research conducted a survey in 2023 and published eight facts about atheists in February 2024. They found that atheists make up 4% of U.S. adults. That compares with 3% who described themselves as atheists in 2014 and 2% who did so in 2007.

Every week, we note that “Whether you believe in God All of the Time, Some of the Time, or None of the Time”, you are welcome here.” Perhaps. this statement reflects your religious journey, as it does mine. I invite you to consider your path to Unitarian-Universalism as I share my story with you.

I grew up in a farm community in central Iowa about ten miles south of Des Moines. Scotch Ridge, a mile from our farm, had a grocery store, an automobile repair shop, and a United Presbyterian Church. My family had been members for more than a hundred years and there was no question about what we would be doing on Sunday morning. My family encouraged me to develop my speaking skills early by competing in bible reading contests and later in Women’s Christian Temperance Speaking contests. The Dartmouth football coaches who were recruiting me chose to not bring me to campus because they were apprehensive that if I were to see how some of the students lived, I would be repulsed by the drinking.

Some people today do not allow their children to go to college because they fear that they will be drawn astray by those liberal professors. I could be a poster child for that position. My perspective on sources of ultimate truth were influenced by two particular courses, A French course and a Philosophy course.

In French, we read Jean Paul Sartre’s Le Jeux sont Fait, the games are done. Sartre really captured the zeitgeist of the post war period with a particularly French brand of existentialism:  The interpretation that we derived was that even if you enjoy an afterlife, it will be an impotent affair where you will no longer have any direct influence on earth, i.e. when you die, “the games are done.”

Sartre’s existentialism and that of other western Europeans may explain why 23% of the French identify as atheists, the highest in Western Europe according to the Pew Surveys. Only Poland and Hungary at 2% rank below the U.S.

In Philosophy, my professor had a particularly compelling narrative about invisible little green men. The hypotheses about the invisible little green men went like this. Every physical sensation is caused by little green men. When you hear me speak, there are little invisible green men in your ear beating on your eardrum so that you can hear me. When you feel a breeze on your cheek, it’s really more of these little guys touching your cheek. When you ask me how I know that this is so, I tell you that it is simply that my faith tells me that this is so. Since it is my faith, you cannot disprove that this is the way the world works. Afterall, they are invisible. The philosophy professor brought us back to reality by suggesting that we should test our ideas, our faith, by how they helped us understand the world. If, in fact, our understanding was not enhanced, perhaps we could pare that belief away. I continued to sing in the church choir and have great conversations with my Catholic roommate, but the seeds of doubt had been planted.

In California, I was busy with classwork and my spouse Mary went off to some meetings at the local Presbyterian Church. She was turned off when they suggested that the class for new members was like the class that you might expect in moving to a new town as preparation to transfer your membership in Rotary or Lions. Rather than be inducted into a social club, we remained unchurched in our new surroundings. In discussing her feelings with a friend in a baby-sitting pool a year or so later, the neighbor suggested that we might enjoy the Unitarian Fellowship that was meeting literally across the street from us in the Menlo Park city hall. The day we tried them out, the music from a tape player was the Mamas and the Papas singing “Do What You Want to Do”, We’ve been UUs ever since.

Along the way, my philosophy has modified and become more aligned with the ideas of Kate Cohen’s that were summarized briefly in the reading. One of the steps along the way was my introduction to Jennifer Michael Hecht’s book Doubt whose ideas I shared with you in an earlier service here at 2U. Doubt was important to me because it validated that throughout the history of religion it has been the sceptics and nay-sayers to the prevailing hegemony that have pushed thinking forward and built new ways of being.

So, how do Kate Cohen’s ideas build on my foundation and challenge my ethical philosophy? Why do I want to bring them to you and challenge your faith framework? I think that the fundamental issue is her recognition that she wasn’t being honest with herself about what her beliefs really were. How do we come here every Sunday and ground ourselves in our faith?  What is that faith really in?

 Kate Cohen notes, “Religion offers ready-made answers to our most difficult questions. It gives people ways to mark time, celebrate and mourn. Once I vowed not to teach my children anything I did not personally believe, I had to come up with new answers.”

Second Unitarian Church is a place where people can develop those “new answers” and using their own beliefs can have new ways to “Mark time, celebrate, and mourn” which are based in common values and shared community rather than a belief in God.

Further, Cohen contends, “We need Americans who demand — as atheists do — that truth claims be tethered to fact. We need Americans who understand — as atheists do — that the future of the world is in our hands. And in this particular political moment, we need Americans to stand up to Christian nationalists who are using their growing political and judicial power to take away our rights. Atheists can do that.

Fortunately, there are a lot of atheists in the United States — probably far more than you think.

Cohen quotes some studies that claim that up to 26% of American’s are really atheists based on what they believe, although perhaps only 4% will answer yes to a direct question, “Are you an atheist?” What is the reason for the discrepancy? We all want to be liked and the perception of atheists is that they are a bunch of killers and bad people.

In the United States, some of our feelings about atheists were reinforced by the cold war when we could hold up Russian Communists as atheists who were bad people. We were quick to forget that it was God-fearing CHRISTIAN Germans who carried out the holocaust!

Perhaps, as we hear more about the increasing restrictions that the Muslim leaders in Afghanistan are imposing on women, we will recognize that the title of todays talk applies around the world.

As Cohen says, “Atheists are everywhere. And we are unusually disposed to getting stuff done.

I used to say, when people asked me what atheists do believe, that it was simple: Atheists believe that God is a human invention.

But now, I think it’s more than that.

If you are an atheist — if you do not believe in a Supreme Being — you can be moral or not, mindful or not, clever or not, hopeful or not. Clearly, you can keep going to church. But, by definition, you cannot believe that God is in charge.

You must give up the notion of God’s will, God’s purpose, God’s mysterious ways.

In some ways, this makes life easier. You don’t have to work out why God might cause or ignore suffering, what parts of this broken world are God’s plan, or what work is his to do and what is yours.

But you also don’t get to leave things up to God. Atheists must accept that people are allowing — we are allowing — women to die in childbirth, children to go hungry, men to buy guns that can slaughter dozens of people in minutes. Atheists believe people organized the world as it is now, and only people can make it better.”

The rap that atheists get is that it’s not an affirmation of belief but rather a denial of belief. For some reason, saying “no” is viewed negatively. Where atheism becomes a definite stance rather than a lack of direction, a positive belief and not just a negative one, is in our understanding that, without a higher power, we need human power to change the world. You don’t have to be an atheist to be a humanist, but to live an ethical life as an atheist, you sort of have to be a humanist.

If you agree with Cohen that religion is used as a sort of fig leaf for power positions, you see that “faith in god” is often used against groups. It is a collective power used to discriminate in any number of ways to keep underprivileged down.

She says, “Peel back the layers of discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, though, and you find religion. Peel back the layers of control over women’s bodies — from dress codes that punish girls for male desire all the way to the Supreme Court striking down Roe v. Wade — and you find religion. Often, there isn’t much peeling to do. According to the bill itself, Missouri’s total abortion ban was created “in recognition that Almighty God is the author of life.” Say what, now?”

But atheists can do one thing about the country’s drift into theocracy that our religious neighbors won’t: We can tell people we don’t believe in God. The more people who do that, the more we normalize atheism in America, the easier it will be — for both politicians and the general public — to usher religion back out of our laws.

So ask yourself: Do I think a supernatural being is in charge of the universe?

If you answer “no,” you’re an atheist. That’s it — you’re done.

And then? The more I say I’m an atheist, the more other people will feel comfortable calling themselves atheists. And the stigma will gradually dissolve.

Can you imagine? If we all knew how many of us there are?

To those who question why do we need to go to church if we don’t believe in God, we can respond: our Unitarian-Universalism provides us with a group of supporters who amplify the good that we try to do in the world, who help us bring up our children to live an ethical life, and who help us live this one meaningful life we have.

And to relate to our title, we don’t need more God, we need more atheists, at Second Unitarian we recognize that members may believe in God some of the time, all of the time or none of the time, “The next time you find yourself tempted to pretend that you believe in God? “ think in which category you are.