Seeking the Truth, but Not on His Knees

My Sunday school education pretty much ended the day we heard about Moses parting the Red Sea. I had been reading my new kiddie encyclopedia, acquired volume by volume at the grocery store for 79 cents each with purchase of $20 or more, and I simply suggested that a more logical explanation might be low tide.

My departure didn’t trouble me or my parents. I suspect we went to church because everyone else in town did. The picnics, church-basement suppers and white-elephant sales made up much of the social life. Pancake Presbyterians is what I called us.

So we said grace at holiday dinners, sang Christmas carols, hunted Easter eggs and panic-prayed at night if something terrible was in the offing: Dear God please don’t let you-know-what happen.

My grandfather was a resolute pantheist. If there was anything sacred in the world, he believed, it was in the forests and the rocks and the waters and in the creatures who dwelt there. He would tell me that the only place where he was sure of not finding God was in a church.

Yet I never entirely let go of a faint credence in some vague and vaguely benign spiritual entity out there, maybe a universal uber-soul, or the clockmaker consciousness beloved of the deists. It was like having insurance: Something awful may never befall you, but it’s good to have, just in case. A safety net, more holes than fiber. I’m not altogether ready to work without that net. But Jon Nelson is--and does.

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At about the same age that I was questioning the Mosaic miracle, Jon Nelson was praying, for the first and last time. The 42-year-old Valley Boy grew up near a thriving church. Some of its parishioners were his friends, and they kept after him to pray.

So one night, he said, “I got down to the foot of the bed and clasped my hands and looked up, and I said, ‘Dear God . . . ‘ and as soon as I said it, I thought, Who am I talking to? . . . and why am I degrading myself in this way? When I talk to others I don’t approach them on my knees.”

And that was that. Thirty-five years later, he is co-president of Atheists United and pursuing a master’s degree in history with emphasis on--ta-daaa!--religion, because, save for economics, “religion has probably had more influence on the course of human events than any other phenomena”--and not to the good.

Religious dogma has set tribe against tribe and nation against nation, impeded science and medicine and learning. Christianity is not alone in its “anti-knowledge component,” but its parable may be the most vivid: Adam and Eve and the Serpent and the Apple. “They’re punished for thinking and not just believing.”

It has occurred to me that religion’s most powerful recruiting poster is not life but death, and Nelson agrees. “The primary fear most people have is fear of death,” he says, “so the primary metaphysical urge they have is to obviate it, render it not a reality”--thus, the allure of an afterlife. To his mind, that creates an inverted set of moral and ethical values based on some afterlife paradise, not on tangible “human needs here on earth.”

The now mysteriously vanished Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s fire-breathing, in-your-face legal challenges gave atheism a national identity--hers, of course--and a pugnacious profile that Nelson does not especially share, although he can summon a few pithy sound bites, defining religion as “a cult that made it,” and characterizing biblical prophets as “nomadic, hallucinatory, protein-deficient mystics.”

He prefers to do his debating on the academic turf of terms and definitions, from the Old Testament and the Koran and the Vedas to the First Amendment. But it’s useful to have a few sharp-edged aphorisms handy for the talk shows, like this one: “Search for the truth, and run like the dickens from anyone who claims to have it.”

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In O’Hair’s day, atheists sat across the scales from a middling, churchgoing community like the one I grew up in. Today, the religious right rides high, and so, too, does the New Age nondenominational mystic spirituality typified by the TV series “Touched by an Angel.” (Its producers interviewed Nelson and other atheists on tape a few months back; two lines spoken by one member ended up being aired.)

Angels on spoon rests or on stained-glass windows--humans have always longed for what Nelson defines as “the willingness and desire to believe in something outside of ourselves, something that cannot be proven . . . it’s hard for us to divorce ourselves from that . . . whether it’s the Bermuda Triangle or God or heaven or water dousing.”

It’s so often temptingly effortless, embracing “something that gives you answers so you don’t have to seek for yourself.” Astrology is easier than astronomy. Yet apart from the inherent laziness, what’s the harm?

Here is the difference between O’Hair’s style and Nelson’s: “If they want to believe in an afterlife, in a god who looks after them, fine,” he says. “The Christian Right has every right to be out there proselytizing and saying America should be a theocracy. It doesn’t mean they have a right to make it happen.”