Atheism Defined

by Dan Barker

Some have raised again the question of the definition of atheism/agnosticism. (Actually, I might have prompted the discussion in a recent email about a talkshow I did on Christian radio.^* For about 20 years I have been one of the leading atheists in the US, and I am always asked to define precisely what those words mean.)

Right at the start there is a problem — though it is not a problem created by atheists. Different dictionaries often give different definitions. Dictionaries usually include one or more of these definitions of "atheism":

1. The denial of the existence of a god. (Or, as [a list participant] puts it, "the belief that there is no god." Or the dogma that god does not exist.)
2. The disbelief in the existence of a god. (Or some other way to say this, such as "the absence of a belief in god.")
3. Wickedness. This is usually last, and it is sometimes presented as informal usage. ("Wickedness" or "lack of moral standards" is more often a description of the word "godless" or "godlessness," which is the same as "atheism." And quite an insult.)

Some dictionaries only give one of those definitions, and some give both. Except for #3, both primary definitions are correct, as understood by atheists themselves.

Looking up a word in the dictionary is not the best way to study a topic. How many Christians, for example, would trust the dictionary to explain their religion? (According to some dictionaries, a "Christian" is reasonably defined as a "follower of Christ," and by that definition Adolf Hitler, who was a member of the Catholic Church in good standing and claimed to be doing the will of Christ, was a Christian.)

My understanding and usage of the words "atheism" and "agnosticism" conforms to most atheistic literature, historical and contemporary , such as:

• Atheism: A Philosophical Justification, by Michael Martin (1992, Temple University Press)
• Atheism: The Case Against God, by George Smith (1980, Prometheus Books)
• The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, edited by Gordon Stein (1985, Prometheus Books)
• Atheism, and other addresses, by Joseph Lewis (1941, Freethought Press)
• What is Atheism? A Short Introduction, by Doug Krueger (1998, Prometheus Books)
• A Defence of Atheism, by Ernestine Rose (1810 - 1892)

… and others.

I admit that there is some disagreement among atheists, especially among philosophers (surprise, surprise). A few atheists think only Definition 1 is valid (because who would call herself or himself an "atheist" unless they are denying something?). Others think only Definition 2 is valid. And (I think) most of us think both definitions are valid. But those disagreements are not important to the actual question of whether a god exists.

Here's how I see it:

"Atheism" is a lack of belief in a god or gods. General atheism is not a belief — it is the absence of belief. (Corresponding to Definition #2.)
"Theism" is a belief, not a fact. Whether a god exists or not is indeed a question of fact, but "theism" is a belief system. Some theists do claim to know that a god exists, but they are a subset of theists. They all have a belief, whether they claim to know or not.

The prefix "a-" is the privative Greek prefix meaning "without" or "lacking" or "not" in the privative (not negative) sense. The prefix "a-" is not the same as the prefix "anti-".

For example, amoral does not equal immoral. Someone who is apolitical is not opposed to politics. Music that is atonal is not music that is anti-tonal (whatever that would mean).

And an atheist is not (necessarily) an anti-theist.

An a-theist is simply someone who is not a theist. Someone who lacks a belief, for whatever reason. Under this definition, every baby is an atheist. (See Stein, especially, on this point, as well as Rose. Stein goes to great historical lengths to show that this is precisely how atheist writers and activists have defined themselves, despite the general public's insistence that atheism is a belief.)

When it comes to the general question of whether a god exists or not, I am an a-theist in this privative sense. There are so many (perhaps an infinite number) definitions of the word "god" that there is no way anyone could say with confidence that they "know" that none of these gods exist.

However, there is a subset of atheists who do claim to know that a god (or a certain god) does not exist. These correspond to Definition #1, the denial of the existence of a god.

Atheist writers and philosophers have distinguished between these two types of atheism. Michael Martin calls it Negative Atheism (lack of belief) vs. Positive Atheism (denial). George Smith calls it Hard vs. Soft atheism. I call it capital-A "Atheism" vs. lower-case "atheism."

In any event, every positive-hard Atheist is also a negative-soft atheist — those who call ourselves "Atheists" who deny a particular god also lack a belief in any god.

You can be a soft atheist for any number of reasons. Your reasons don't even have to be defensible because you are defending nothing. Some people simply do not believe, and don't care. Some of them give philosophical reasons for their lack of belief. Some give emotional reasons, or political reasons (like the Soviet atheists). Some give social reasons, such as the church's opposition to gay rights or women's rights. Some of these people prefer to call themselves "agnostics" (more below), though they can be defined as lowercase "atheists" because they do not have a belief in a god.

But few of these soft atheists would be comfortable with the label "Atheist" as a description of who they are, like many religious people wear the label of their "Christian" or "Muslim" or "Jewish" faith as a personal identification.

Here's a simple way to test if you are an atheist (lowercase, at least). Ask yourself:

"Is there any 'god,' by any definition of the word 'god,' that I believe exists?"

If you can't answer that question with "Yes," then you are without a belief in a god. You are an atheist. You might prefer the label "agnostic," but I can call you an "atheist." (Calling such a person an "atheist" is not attaching a label — it is simply a description, like if I called you a female, not a "Female" signifying a member of a formal named religious or philosophical group.)

Having said all that, I personally take it a step further. Not only am I a soft atheist in general, I am also a hard Atheist in particular, depending on which god you are talking about. For example, regarding the "God of the revelation" (the Judeo/Christian/Islamic "God"), I am a positive capital-A Atheist. Not only do I lack a belief in such a god, I claim to know with certainty that such a god not only does not exist — it cannot exist. I deny the existence of that particular God. (I won't explain here, but I have good reasons for saying such a thing.) As far as most Christians in America are concerned, since they believe there is only one God, I might as well be labeled a hard "Atheist." The other gods don't matter to them.

So I am both an "atheist" and an "Atheist" depending on the god being discussed.

This means that there are some definitions of the word "god" that are either not clearly enough defined or about which I am insufficiently informed to make a decision. I do not necessarily deny their existence, but I certainly do not claim a belief in their existence. I am without belief, "atheistic," regarding those gods.

Some people confuse soft atheism with agnosticism, and it is easy to see the confusion. In fact, most atheists will claim that they are also agnostic, with no contradiction.

The mistake many make is to treat agnosticism as if it were a kind of halfway house between atheism and theism. But there can be no such thing. You either do, or you do not, have a belief in a god. There is no middle ground.

The distinction between atheism and agnosticism is simple, and once acknowledged, it erases the apparent conflict.

Atheism/theism addresses BELIEF.

Agnosticism addresses KNOWLEDGE.

You can be both an atheist and an agnostic. They address two different things. They are not mutually exclusive.

Every person who identifies himself or herself as an "agnostic" still has to answer the question: "Do you have a belief in a god?"

If they can't answer "Yes," they are atheistic agnostics.

If they answer "Yes," they are theistic agnostics.

For example, philosopher/mathematician Blaise Pascal was a theistic agnostic. Pascal said that you cannot know for certain if god exists, but it is safer to believe than not to believe, so he chose to believe in the Catholic God. (I know that is an oversimplification of Pascal's position, but you get the point.) I think Pascal's position is honest, at least. I think there are many Christians in the world who take that position, especially liberal believers: they don't claim certainty, but they value faith.

Agnosticism is not really much of a philosophy. It is a relatively new word, coined by Huxley more for PR purposes than to start a new school of thought. We already had the words "rationalism" and "skepticism." An agnostic is just a rationalist about religion.

An agnostic is a person who chooses not to make a Yes/No judgment about the truth of a proposition when there is insufficient data or reason to make a decision.

You can be an agnostic about UFOs, about the fidelity of your spouse, and about the character of your representative to Congress. But most often agnosticism is applied to the question of the truth of the proposition "God exists."

So … I am an atheistic agnostic about the existence of many defined (and undefined) gods. I don't claim either KNOWLEDGE or BELIEF.

If you think about it, the very notion of "faith" or "belief" requires agnosticism. If you KNOW something is true, you don't need faith. It is only when you lack certainty that you invoke faith.

The word "belief" is often used to signify doubt or uncertainty:

"It is 2 o'clock, I believe." "Let's have faith that Mom will survive the operation."

So in general, a "theist" (a believer in god) is a doubter, an agnostic. I suppose we could say that "Theists" (capital-A godders) are theists who claim to KNOW that a god exists. We could use the word "Gnostic" for this kind of god-worshiper, but that word has a certain historical usage limited to the pre-Constantine Christian mystery cults.

Did you know that the early Christians were called atheists by the Romans? They did not believe in the right gods.

In fact, every believer is an atheist regarding everyone else's god. No Christians believe in the existence of the Norse god Wodin, though they acknowledge that god when they use the word "Wednesday." There are HUNDREDS of gods about which Christians not only lack belief, but about which they positively DENY their existence. (I think they are actually stronger Atheists than I am in that regard.)

The only difference between me and them is that I believe in one less god than they do.

---

* Indeed this article itself was originally message on an e-mail list.

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"It's Only Natural"

(lyrics and music to a new song)

©2006 by Dan Barker

Song lyrics are not meant to be read like a poem . . . they tend not to read as well on paper as they sound in a song . . . but these lyrics are interesting, I think, as a "popular" song, in that they incorporate evolution as the most natural idea. I was inspired by Dawkins's book Unweaving the Rainbow, where he makes a plea for more science in the arts.

Also, I wanted to write lyrics like Cole Porter, that can be sung by male or female, gay or non-gay.

IT'S ONLY NATURAL

It's only natural that I would want you;
It's only natural that you want me.
A million years of evolution had its way,
So we can blame it on our parents' DNA.

I move instinctively in your direction -
Somehow you signal me to turn and see.
You will always be my natural selection,
As a voluntary choice, naturally.

Download a pdf version of the score.

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Patriotism Was His Religion

Irving Berlin the Agnostic

by Dan Barker

Originally published by the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Inc.

This article was included in the 52nd issue of the Carnival of the Godless.

How many patriotic Americans, proudly singing "God Bless America," realize that the song they are intoning was written by a man who did not believe in God?

Or that it was intended as an anti-war anthem?

Irving Berlin is by any measure the greatest composer of popular American music, with hundreds of enduring hits, such as "Alexander's Ragtime Band," "I Love A Piano," "Always," "Blue Skies," "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee," "Cheek to Cheek," "Marie," "Play a Simple Melody," "There's No Business Like Show Business," "Anything You Can Do," "Easter Parade," and "White Christmas."

Born in 1888 into a Russian Jewish family who came to New York City to escape religious persecution when Irving was five years old, he quickly shed his religious roots and fell in love with America. He became an American citizen when he was 29. "Patriotism was Irving Berlin's true religion," writes biographer Laurence Bergreen in As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (1990).

Irving Berlin was "not a religious person," according to his daughter Mary Ellin. Relating the story of Irving's marriage to Ellin Mackay in 1926, whose devout father had a deep reluctance to welcome a "lower-class" Jew into the wealthy Catholic family, she writes:

"About religion -- Jew and Catholic. My mother has broached the subject of being married by a priest. She herself, though she goes to mass, keeps up appearances, doesn't believe in all that anymore, she assures him. She has had such a strange religious upbringing: a Protestant like her mother till the divorce, a Catholic since. But a priest might help soften her father. Irving, however, the cantor's son, doesn't see himself being married by a priest. Though he is not a religious person, doesn't even keep up appearances of being an observant Jew, he does not forget who his people are." (Irving Berlin: A Daughter's Memoir, by Mary Ellin Barrett, 1994.) They got married in an unannounced secular, civil ceremony at the Municipal Building, not a church or synagogue.

Once they had children, Mrs. Berlin did try to keep up a minimal appearance of religious tradition. Mary Ellin writes that her unbelieving parents "had their first bad fight when my mother suggested raising me as a Catholic . . . ."

The Berlins had three daughters. "Both our parents," Mary Ellin recalls, "would pass down to their children the moral and ethical values common to all great religions; give us a sense of what was right and what was wrong; raise us not to be good Jews or good Catholics or good whatever else you might care to cite, but to be good (or try to be) human beings. . . . When we grew up, she said, we would be free to choose--if we knew what was best for us, the religion of our husband. . . . It wouldn't quite work out, when we 'grew up,' as my mother hoped. All three of us would share our father's agnosticism and sidestep our husband's faiths."

The man who wrote "White Christmas" actually hated Christmas. "Many years later," Mary Ellin writes, "when Christmas was celebrated irregularly in my parents' house, if at all, my mother said, almost casually, 'Oh, you know, I hated Christmas, we both hated Christmas. We only did it for you children.'"

So why did an agnostic humanist who hated Christmas write the song "White Christmas?"

Undoubtedly, it had something to do with the businessman in him. When his friend Cole Porter confessed that he hated his own "Don't Fence Me In," a surprise international hit, Berlin advised him, "Never hate a song that has sold a half million copies." (Cole Porter, by William McBrien, 1998.)

Christmas, for Irving Berlin, was not a religious holiday: it was an American holiday. He simply needed a melody in 1940 for a show called Holiday Inn, an escapist "American way of life" musical (when all hell was breaking loose in Europe) which called for a song for each holiday. The words to "White Christmas" are not about the birth of a savior-god: they are about winter, the real reason for the season.

Biographer Bergreen writes about the Christmas of 1942:

"Accustomed to traditional holiday celebrations, Ellin arranged for a Christmas tree to be delivered to Berlin's hotel suite in Detroit, where he was performing in This is the Army, and with the girls' assistance she proceeded to decorate the tree while a photographer memorialized the occasion. The photograph of the songwriter, his wife, and family decorating the Christmas tree, when reproduced in the newspapers, served as another plug for 'White Christmas.' Berlin, the cantor's son, rationalized his participation in the Christmas rite on the basis that it had become an American holiday, and as a professional patriot, he made a habit of appropriating all things American to himself."

This U.S. postage stamp (above left) was issued in a ceremony in New York City in September 2002, one year after the 9/11 WTC attacks. Out of agnostic Irving Berlin's 1,500+ songs, "God Bless America" was chosen to represent his life's work.

"God Bless America" was originally written in 1918 for a patriotic WWI show. Irving Berlin had joined the army, and (according to Harry Ruby, his pianist colleague at Camp Upton) to avoid getting up early each morning, Irving convinced his superiors to allow him to serve his country by producing a musical for military PR. It was a light-hearted life-in-the-army show called Yip, Yip Yaphank, including the comic bugle call "Oh, How I Hate to Get Up In The Morning."

As he was finishing the writing, "Berlin composed one unashamedly patriotic anthem," Bergreen writes, "which spoke of prairies and mountains and oceans white with foam. He called it 'God Bless America,' but even as he dictated it to Ruby, Berlin became insecure about its originality. 'There were so many patriotic songs coming out everywhere at the time,' Ruby recalled. 'Every song-writer was pouring them out.' As he wrote down the melody, Ruby said to Berlin, 'Geez, another one?' Deciding that Ruby was right, that the song was too solemn to ring true for the acerbic doughboys, Berlin cut it from the score and placed it in his trunk. 'Just a little sticky' was the way he described the song. 'I couldn't visualize soldiers marching to it. So I laid it aside and tried other things.'"

The song was forgotten for two decades. During those years, Irving Berlin's attitude toward war evolved.

In 1938, while the United States was resisting joining the new European conflict, the singer Kate Smith was looking for a song to perform during her Armistice Day broadcast--a "song of peace," she said. It happened that Irving Berlin was also casting about for an idea for a pacifist anthem. Almost no one in America wanted to go to war. "I'd like to write a great peace song," he told an interviewer, "but it's hard to do, because you have trouble dramatizing peace. Easy to dramatize war. . . . Yet music is so important. It changes thinking, it influences everybody, whether they know it or not."

He tried writing a couple of peace songs, but they were "too much like making a speech to music," he said. It then occurred to him to dig up that discarded composition from 1918.

"I had to make one or two changes in the lyrics," Berlin continued in the interview, "and they in turn led me to a slight change and, I think, an improvement in the melody. . . . One line in particular; the original line ran: 'Stand beside her and guide her to the right with a light from above.' In 1918 the phrase 'to the right' had no political significance, as it has now. So for obvious reasons I changed the phrase to 'Through the night with a light from above,' and I think that's better.

"One of the original lines read: 'Make her victorious on land and foam, God bless America, my home sweet home.' Well, I didn't want this to be a war song, so I changed that line to 'From the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam, God Bless America, my home, sweet home.' This longer line altered the meter and led to a change in the melody."

Kate Smith sang Berlin's peace anthem on national radio on November 11, and it became an immediate hit.

"The reason 'God Bless America' caught on," Berlin tried to explain to The New York Times in 1940, "is that it happens to have a universal appeal. Any song that had that is bound to be a success. . . ."

Discussing the mystery of what makes a hit song, he continued: "The mob is always right. It seems to be able to sense instinctively what is good, and I believe that there are darned few good songs which have not been whistled or sung by the crowd."

This was "a populist credo, as well as a merchant's," Bergreen observes. Irving Berlin may have been right about the business of the mob's taste in music, but he never envisioned "God Bless America" becoming a pro-war anthem, as it is often sung by "the right" today.

Some of us freethinkers might wonder why an agnostic would write a song about "God" at all, especially a Jewish agnostic who must have known that the capital-G "God" is perceived by most to be the Christian deity. But just as "White Christmas" is not about Christ, "God Bless America" is not about God; it is about America. Irving Berlin was not an atheist evangelist; he was a songwriter and businessman who wrote and sold music that reflected the popular mood.

"'God Bless America' revealed that patriotism was Irving Berlin's true religion," Bergreen writes. "It evoked the same emotional response in him that conventional religious belief summoned in others; it was his rock."

Even though Irving Berlin occasionally used the word "God" in a poetic sense, never once in his more than 1,500 songs did he ever promote religion.

"I don't write church lyrics on the side," he once told a journalist, "have no passion for flowers, and never read Shakespeare in the original Greek."

In fact, he sometimes poked fun at faith.

Four years after the original "God Bless America," Irving Berlin wrote "Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil in Hades," a song for his 1922 Music Box Review performed at the new Music Box Theater in New York, which he had built especially for his productions. The song was about the recent "jazz" craze that was sweeping the country, which was being condemned by the Church.

"In the press and from pulpits, self-appointed guardians of public morality decried this dancing bestiary," Bergreen writes. "Matters became so serious that a New York grand jury investigated, and after due deliberation arrived at a 'presentment condemning the turkey trot and kindred dances and laying particular stress on the fact that the hotels and cafes allow such dances.' " People were arrested for dancing! Some lost their jobs for dancing during lunch breaks.

During Berlin's 1922 rebellious revue, an attractive comedienne named Charlotte Greenwood, dressed in a red devil suit, dispatched popular jazz musicians to hell singing, "They've got a couple of old reformers in heaven, making them go to bed at eleven. Pack up your sins and go to the devil, and you'll never have to go to bed at all." (See sidebar.) The song is the perfect antidote to "God Bless America."

Irving Berlin died quietly at home in 1989 at the age of 101. A patriotic agnostic who devoted himself to enriching America, he lived a productive life full of family values, hard work, determination, and joy. He did not believe in an afterlife; but maybe he did jokingly wish for a hell, because "all the nice people are there."

As Mark Twain said, "Heaven for climate; hell for society." If there is a hell, we unbelievers will be in great company.

Dan Barker, a former minister, is a staff member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. Dan's father Norman Barker can be seen playing the trombone alongside Judy Garland as she sings "I Want to Go Back to Michigan" in the 1948 musical movie of Irving Berlin's "Easter Parade."

"Pack Up Your Sins and Go to the Devil in Hades" is recorded on Dan's new "Beware of Dogma" CD produced by the Foundation. Also on that CD is a parody of "God Bless America," and the new freethinking "God-Less America," re-written by Dan Barker and Steve Benson.

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