Are there atheist churches

It s a question you may prefer not to be asked. But I m afraid I have no choice. We find ourselves, this very autumn, three and a half centuries after the intellectual martyrdom of Galileo, caught up in a struggle of ultimate importance, when each one of us must make a commitment. It is time to declare our position. This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.

The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there s no excuse for shirking. Three writers have sounded this call to arms.

A few months ago, I set out to talk with them. I wanted to find out what it would mean to enlist in the war against faith. The walls glint gold in the late afternoon, as waves or particles of light scatter off the ancient bricks.

Logic Lane, a tiny road under a low, right-angled bridge, cuts sharply across to the place where Robert Boyle formulated his law on gases and Robert Hooke first used a microscope to see a living cell. A few steps away is the memorial to Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Here he lies, sculpted naked in stone, behind the walls of the university that expelled him almost years ago — for atheism. Richard Dawkins, the leading light of the New Atheism movement, lives and works in a large brick house just 20 minutes away from the Shelley memorial.

He is 65 years old, and the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene , dates from well back in the last century. The opposition it earned from rival theorizers and popularizers of Charles Darwin, such as Stephen Jay Gould, is fading into history. Gould died in , and Dawkins, while acknowledging their battles, praised his influence on scientific culture.

They were allies in the battle against creationism. Dawkins, however, has been far more belligerent in counterattack. His most recent book is called The God Delusion. A few months earlier, in front of an audience of graduate students from around the world, Dawkins took on a famous geneticist and a renowned neurosurgeon on the question of whether God was real.

The geneticist and the neurosurgeon advanced their best theistic arguments: Human consciousness is too remarkable to have evolved; our moral sense defies the selfish imperatives of nature; the laws of science themselves display an order divine; the existence of God can never be disproved by purely empirical means. Dawkins rejected all these claims, but the last one — that science could never disprove God — provoked him to sarcasm.

It is also, I suppose, wrong to say we don t need the Flying Spaghetti Monster, unicorns, Thor, Wotan, Jupiter, or fairies at the bottom of the garden.

There s an infinite number of things that some people at one time or another have believed in, and an infinite number of things that nobody has believed in. The onus is on somebody who says, I want to believe in God, Flying Spaghetti Monster, fairies, or whatever it is.

It is not up to us to disprove it. Science, after all, is an empirical endeavor that traffics in probabilities. The probability of God, Dawkins says, while not zero, is vanishingly small.

He is confident that no Flying Spaghetti Monster exists. Why should the notion of some deity that we inherited from the Bronze Age get more respectful treatment? Dawkins has been talking this way for years, and his best comebacks are decades old. For instance, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a variant of the tiny orbiting teapot used by Bertrand Russell for similar rhetorical duty back in Dawkins is perfectly aware that atheism is an ancient doctrine and that little of what he has to say is likely to change the terms of this stereotyped debate.

But he continues to go at it. His true interlocutors are not the Christians he confronts directly but the wavering nonbelievers or quasi believers among his listeners — people like me, potential New Atheists who might be inspired by his example. He asks me to keep an eye on his bike, which sits just behind him, on the other side of a window overlooking the street.

I think we re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that s the case with atheists. They are more numerous than anybody realizes. Dawkins looks forward to the day when the first US politician is honest about being an atheist. It just doesn t add up. Either they re stupid, or they re lying. And have they got a motive for lying? Of course they ve got a motive!

When atheists finally begin to gain some power, what then? Gay politics is strictly civil rights: Live and let live. But the atheist movement, by his lights, has no choice but to aggressively spread the good news.

Evangelism is a moral imperative. Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes. Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods? Dawkins is the inventor of the concept of the meme, that is, a cultural replicator that spreads from brain to brain, like a virus.

Dawkins is also a believer in democracy. He understands perfectly well that there are practical constraints on controlling the spread of bad memes.

If the solution to the spread of wrong ideas and contagious superstitions is a totalitarian commissariat that would silence believers, then the cure is worse than the disease. But such constraints are no excuse for the weak-minded pretense that religious viruses are trivial, much less benign.

Bad ideas foisted on children are moral wrongs. We should think harder about how to stop them. It is exactly this trip down Logic Lane, this conscientious deduction of conclusions from premises, that makes Dawkins proclamations a torment to his moderate allies.

While frontline warriors against creationism are busy reassuring parents and legislators that teaching Darwin s theory does not undermine the possibility of religious devotion, Dawkins is openly agreeing with the most stubborn fundamentalists that evolution must lead to atheism.

I tell Dawkins what he already knows: He is making life harder for his friends. He barely shrugs. My answer is that the big war is not between evolution and creationism, but between naturalism and supernaturalism. That puts me on the other side. The monthly Brights meetup in London is among the largest.

The main organizer, Glen Slade, is a year-old entrepreneur who studied computer science at the University of Cambridge and management at Insead, Europe s leading business school. Slade points out that political developments in Europe and the US have created new opportunities for consciousness-raising.

At what point does society say, Hey, that s insane? Like Dawkins, Slade rejects those who might once have been his allies: agnostics and liberal believers, the type of people who may go to church but who are skeptical of doctrine. Now that people are more worried about the fatwas of Muslim clerics, Slade says, this concern could spread, become more general, and wake people up to damage caused by the Pope.

For the New Atheists, the problem is not any specific doctrine, but religion in general. Or, as Dawkins writes in The God Delusion , "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.

The New Atheist insight is that one might start anywhere — with an intellectual argument, with a visceral rejection of Islamic or Christian fundamentalism, with political disgust — and then, by relentless and logical steps, renounce every supernatural crutch. At dinner parties or over drinks, I ask people to declare themselves. Usually, the first response is silence, accompanied by glances all around in the hope that somebody else will speak first.

Then, after a moment, somebody does, almost always a man, almost always with a defiant smile and a tone of enthusiasm. He says happily, "I am! But it is the next comment that is telling. Somebody turns to him and says: "You would be. This type of conversation takes place not in central Ohio, where I was born, or in Utah, where I was a teenager, but on the West Coast, among technical and scientific people, possibly the social group that is least likely among all Americans to be religious. Most of these people call themselves agnostic, but they don t harbor much suspicion that God is real.

They tell me they reject atheism not out of piety but out of politeness. As one said, "Atheism is like telling somebody, The very thing you hinge your life on, I totally dismiss. I continue to invite my friends for a nice, invigorating stroll down Logic Lane. For the most part, they just laugh and wave me on. But if logic by itself won t do the trick, how about the threat of apocalypse?

The apocalyptic argument for atheism is the province of Sam Harris, who released a book two years ago called The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. Harris argues that, unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end. Between and , his book sold more than a quarter million copies.

This autumn, Harris has a new book out, Letter to a Christian Nation. In it, he demonstrates the behavior he believes atheists should adopt when talking with Christians. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well — by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service to your religious myths, and by your attachment to an imaginary God. In midsummer, Harris and I overlap for a few days in Southern California, so we arrange to meet for lunch.

I am not looking for more atheist arguments. I am already steeped in them. I want to talk to Harris about emotion, about politics, about his conviction that the days of civilization are numbered unless we renounce irrational belief. Given the way things are going, I want to know if he is depressed. Is he preparing for the end? He is not. We are at a beautiful restaurant in Santa Monica, near the public lots from which Americans — nearly 80 percent of whom believe the Bible is the true word of God, if polls are correct — walk happily down to the beach in various states of undress.

The most intelligent, sophisticated people used to accept that you could kidnap whole families, force them to work for you, and sell their children. That looks ridiculous to us today. We re going to look back and be amazed that we approached this asymptote of destructive capacity while allowing ourselves to be balkanized by fantasy. At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God.

Suddenly I notice in myself a protective feeling toward Harris. Here is a man who believes that a great global change, perhaps the most important cultural change in the history of humanity, will occur out of sheer intellectual embarrassment. It's singing awesome songs, hearing interesting talks, thinking about improving yourself and helping other people — and doing that in a community with wonderful relationships. What part of that is not to like?

The movement dovetails with new studies showing an increasing number of Americans are drifting from any religious affiliation. Pew researchers stressed, however, that the category also encompassed majorities of people who said they believed in God but had no ties with organized religion and people who consider themselves "spiritual" but not "religious.

Sunday Assembly — whose motto is Live Better, Help Often, Wonder More — taps into that universe of people who left their faith but now miss the community church provided, said Phil Zuckerman, a professor of secular studies at Pitzer College in Claremont. It also plays into a feeling among some atheists that they should make themselves more visible. For example, last December, an atheist in Santa Monica created an uproar — and triggered a lawsuit — when he set up a godless display amid Christian nativity scenes that were part of a beloved, decades-old tradition.

I think a lot of secular people say, 'Hey, wait a minute. For all the work secular groups do to promote acceptance of nonbelievers, perhaps nothing will be as effective as apathy plus time. As the secular millennials grow up and have children of their own, the only Sunday morning tradition they may pass down is one everyone in the world can agree on: brunch.

All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Read This Next Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London Love them or hate them, there's no denying their growing numbers have added an explosion of color to the city's streets.

India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big Grassroots efforts are bringing solar panels to rural villages without electricity, while massive solar arrays are being built across the country.

Epic floods leave South Sudanese to face disease and starvation. Travel 5 pandemic tech innovations that will change travel forever These digital innovations will make your next trip safer and more efficient. But will they invade your privacy? Go Further. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals This frog mysteriously re-evolved a full set of teeth. Animals Wild Cities Wild parakeets have taken a liking to London.

Animals Wild Cities Morocco has 3 million stray dogs. Meet the people trying to help. Animals Whales eat three times more than previously thought. Environment Planet Possible India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big. Environment As the EU targets emissions cuts, this country has a coal problem. Paid Content How Hong Kong protects its sea sanctuaries. Paid Content Mangroves' crucial role in protecting Hong Kong's coasts. History Magazine These 3,year-old giants watched over the cemeteries of Sardinia.

Magazine How one image captures 21 hours of a volcanic eruption. Science Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. Science The controversial sale of 'Big John,' the world's largest Triceratops. Science Coronavirus Coverage How antivirals may change the course of the pandemic.