- 6 months ago
Atheism is far from new, but the various ways that people say “no thank you” to belief in gods, deities, or particular religions are so diverse that they’ve had a huge impact on world belief systems. In this episode of Crash Course Religions, we break down the different flavors of atheism and nonbelief and ask the question, “Is atheism a religion?”
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00Hi, I'm John Green. Welcome to Crash Course Religions.
00:02So this one will be fun and not at all stressful.
00:04God is dead and we've killed him.
00:07At least according to 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
00:10Nietzsche was an atheist, meaning he didn't believe in a deity.
00:14He was also a harsh critic of Christianity and religion in general.
00:19But this wasn't his way of bragging.
00:21It was an alarm bell, a warning that there may be some downsides
00:25to conceiving of a universe governed by physics and not divine will.
00:29Without God, who will we look to for moral guidance?
00:32The death of God could spell the end of European society, of the whole world.
00:38And yet, the world has continued to spin.
00:40So were the rumors of God's death an exaggeration? Maybe.
00:44But Nietzsche's generation wasn't the first to give up their belief in God
00:48and certainly wouldn't be the last either.
00:50Today, we'll talk about what it means to live in a world where more and more people do not believe
00:55in gods and whether approaching those atheistic beliefs through the lens of religion can be
01:01informative. Which won't make anyone mad.
01:13The word atheism comes from the Greek word atheos, meaning without a god.
01:17And that's pretty much what atheism is today, a lack of belief in a higher power.
01:21But the word's meaning, like the folks who identify with it, has changed over time.
01:26Like back in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the word first gained traction in Europe,
01:30the Protestant Reformation was in full swing and people needed a new vocabulary to describe
01:35the splintering of religious beliefs that was happening. The word atheist was originally
01:40coined as an insult, something few people would have identified with.
01:44English dictionaries from the 1600s defined atheism as a quote,
01:47damnable doctrine, and often included quotes meant to discourage people from becoming atheists.
01:53Which, I mean, I guess, dictionaries have never been impartial?
01:56But it didn't stick. French philosophers like Voltaire and Diderot in the late 17th
02:00and early 18th centuries made the idea of non-belief a lot more mainstream and visible,
02:05even as they struggled with their own faiths personally.
02:08Similarly, some of the founders of the United States, while not technically atheists, were into deism,
02:13where they thought God technically existed, but after making the universe, he just left it alone,
02:18like a watchmaker, or like my personal hero Charles Alderton, who invented the perfect soda recipe,
02:24Dr. Pepper, and then left it alone to take over the world.
02:28Different deists were more or less prone to reject Christianity, with some interested
02:32in Christianity's moral and ethical teachings while ignoring, like, the God stuff.
02:36Thomas Jefferson, for instance, spent years privately cutting every reference to the supernatural
02:42out of a Bible while pasting and moving around certain teachings on morals and ethics.
02:47Atheism really took off during the 19th century, with the writings of folks like Nietzsche,
02:52Charles Darwin, and Karl Marx. While Darwin himself was neither here nor there on the existence of a
02:57god, his theories about human evolution were often seen as in opposition to the Christian creation story.
03:04And Darwin's friend and fellow scientist Thomas Huxley even debated the highly regarded Bishop of Oxford
03:11on the topic and essentially told the Bishop,
03:13I'd rather have an ape for a grandfather than a guy like you.
03:16While atheists are still often stereotyped as immoral or even dangerous, atheism itself continues to grow
03:23in popularity. In 2024, studies showed that roughly 28% of Americans identified as religiously unaffiliated.
03:31Of course, all those unaffiliated folks aren't necessarily atheists. Within this category,
03:36there's a pretty big crew of agnostics, which comes from a word that means without knowledge
03:40appropriately. Agnostics say they simply don't know whether there's a god. Many think it's impossible
03:46to prove or disprove god's existence and that there's no point in trying. Then you have your
03:52materialists, who believe that everything that exists can be studied through science, which isn't
03:57an outright denial of god's existence, but a way of saying if a god did exist, it would have to do so
04:02within the laws of physics. And plenty do identify as atheists. But even within atheism, we find
04:08variations in philosophy. There's explicit atheism, which asserts positively that no higher power exists,
04:15and implicit atheism, which is a passive lack of belief in a higher power.
04:20Oh boy, I'm getting a call from a blocked number, which I didn't know was even possible.
04:24Hey, broski, don't hang up. I just got a question. It's one that's been bugging me.
04:29That's what you guys do here, right? You answer questions. I mean, that doesn't even begin to
04:32describe everything we do at Crash Course, but sure, go ahead.
04:35Isn't believing in god just like a better bet than not believing? Like, I mean, if atheists are
04:40right, then believing in god doesn't change anything. But if they're wrong, we lose everything.
04:45Wouldn't it be better to just hedge your bets and believe?
04:47That's actually a pretty popular philosophical argument called Pascal's Wager. It's the idea that
04:52belief in god is like the safer bet. So, I'll bite. Which one do you have your money on?
04:56That's a silly question. God? The Father? Capital G? The one from the Bible?
05:01So, not the West African god Anansi? Or maybe the Egyptian war goddess Nyth?
05:06Don't even get me started listing all the literal millions of Hindu deities. And then,
05:10of course, there's always the possibility that the one true god belongs to a religion
05:14that doesn't even exist yet. Right, but I don't believe in any of those gods. Oh.
05:21What makes Zeus or Demeter untrue but your god the only truth?
05:25Uh, listen man, I gotta make some calls.
05:30You know, I'm starting to think I might actually be getting through to him.
05:34Hold on.
05:36Oh, he just sent me a text message that's a picture of his butt with the caption,
05:39This is you. So that's... that's nice.
05:43But our friend the Devil's Advocate has brought up a good point, just not the one he was trying to make.
05:47Atheism as we know it today is often brought up in opposition to Christianity.
05:52But the idea itself is considerably older and more diverse than that comparison suggests.
05:57In many cultures throughout history, there have been groups who didn't care if the gods and
06:01goddesses of their people were really real, and others who specifically didn't believe in the
06:06popular deities of their day. Up to 20 percent of people who identify as Christian aren't sure
06:12they believe the god of the Bible is really real, and therefore might be classified as agnostic.
06:17And in other religious traditions, including Judaism, it's even more common.
06:22Ancient India saw multiple schools within Hinduism that denied the existence of an eternal
06:27or personal god. Buddhism was founded by a guy who didn't have much use for deities.
06:32Jainism, a religion that was founded in the 5th century and influenced the non-violent ideologies
06:37of people like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., has no rules about believing in a higher power.
06:42In many cases, though, these weren't the atheists we'd think of today. Scholars often used the term
06:48non-theism instead of atheism for ancient traditions. These non-theists were simply concerned
06:54with questions other than, does God exist? Cultures in ancient China, Greece, and Rome
06:59all had their non-theism cliques at various times.
07:02In the last couple centuries, though, especially in the United States, atheism has broadened into a way to
07:08critique religion, society, and politics, especially the places where society is shaped by religious
07:14traditions. The American writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who was formerly enslaved,
07:20criticized the hypocrisy of slave-owning Christians. He once wrote,
07:23I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me.
07:29Suffragist Matilda Jocelyn Gage pointed out similar religious hypocrisy when fighting for the rights of
07:35women. And in the 21st century, we've seen the rise of a movement known as New Atheism,
07:40popularized by writers like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. Other writers, like Ta-Nehisi Coates,
07:45have written about civil rights within the framework of a godless universe. In Between the World and Me,
07:51Coates imagines no moral arc of the universe bending toward justice, a response to a famous line from
07:57Martin Luther King. Where Nietzsche warned about the death of God and what it might mean for a moral
08:02society, the New Atheists have advocated explicitly for an ethical obligation to reject the idea of
08:09God centered around the belief that we could solve a lot of our problems if we did away with religion
08:14entirely. The New Atheists have at times been labeled dogmatic and even fundamentalist in their
08:20belief that there's no God, which has led some to wonder if atheism is also a religion. Now, I admitted
08:27in episode one that I don't know what a religion is, which means we're already in dicey territory,
08:33and as we've seen throughout this series, defining a religion can be a bit like trying to guess how
08:37many stars are in the sky, like you could say at least five or at least five million,
08:43and both answers would be right and wrong in their own way. But let's pursue this question by looking
08:49at some common features associated with religions and seeing how they stack up in atheism. Obviously,
08:55the whole supernatural higher power thing is out. But religions also serve as a framework that help
09:01people organize, shape, and make sense of life. For some atheists, the critique of religion fits that
09:07bill. Deconstructing religion and religious power is a moral imperative and an organizing principle in
09:13their lives. Of course, for lots of others, atheism isn't a framework for sense-making. We might also look
09:20for shared practices or gatherings, and there are non-religious communities like the American
09:25atheists and the Sunday Assembly who gather for events and experiences, kinda like churches,
09:31but who specifically don't believe in God. So shared practices are on the table, although only a tiny
09:38percentage of atheists attend such gatherings. And what about shared belief? Well, this one clearly varies,
09:44too. Just like we've discovered the incredible diversity in the beliefs within each religion, atheists share some
09:50beliefs and convictions and also have a lot of different priorities. So this one gets a solid maybe as well.
09:57Finally, there's doubt. Doubt is the foundation of atheism. And it also might be one of the most universal
10:04experiences humans share. We've all experienced doubt in ourselves, in the world, in each other, and yet we
10:12continue to believe in the possibility of a better world, despite our doubts.
10:17Atheism is just another way of contending with reality. It can mean a strong commitment to a
10:22particular kind of ethical thinking and behavior, without the looming judgment of a god to enforce it.
10:28It can also mean simply having too much going on to think about religion, or believing that the
10:32only things that matter are the things we can measure scientifically. Atheism defies broad brush painting.
10:39But perhaps the biggest hallmark of atheism is that it has always existed alongside theism. It's not a
10:45reaction to, but a complement of, the religious frameworks that guide many lives. Whether it can
10:52be called a religion is up for debate. I think it boils down to whether you see religion primarily as
10:58whatever lenses through which you consider moral imperatives and ultimate concerns, in which case
11:03atheism is perhaps, at least for some, a religion. Or whether you see religion primarily as a way of
11:09seeking connection to and understanding of the less empirical parts of consciousness, in which case
11:16atheism is a rejection of religion and best considered outside of it. And if you think I'm going to come
11:22to a firm conclusion here, you haven't been watching the rest of this series. Next time, we're talking about
11:28religious texts, who wrote them, who's equipped to interpret them, and how they influence our lives.
11:34I'll see you then.
Be the first to comment