RELIGION

Most of us have been taught to stay away from discussing politics and religion, so as not to disturb the dinner guests. Well, as most of you know, I've been covering politics for so long I can barely discuss anything else. And the freedom Time Goes By gives me in writing these little essays compels me to confess that I do not recall when it was that I came out of the closet. That's when I acknowledged that I'm an atheist, that I do not believe there is a God.

In fact I don't know why I capitalized the "G." Although it may be blasphemous, I have had a bumper sticker that says, "I believe in Dog." That's because I have a love affair with my two Corgis, and I generally have a higher regard for animals than many of the humans I've covered in high positions. I have wondered if the Bibles got it wrong and meant to spell it "Dog."

Seriously, coming out of the closet happened slowly. At first I suppose I was an agnostic, telling myself and others that there may be a higher power, that I could not define, for all things alive have in common a compulsion to live, survive, and grow. Where does that come from? I didn't know. I studied philosophy in university and read Aquinas' proofs for the existence of god, and understood Aristotle's idea of the "prime" or "unmoved mover." I did not know whether or not I believed in the god that hung around guiding our lives. But I could not bring myself to believe in a personal being who played magic tricks like George Burns. If man was made in his image, what must he look like? Or she.

I am told by friends that something or someone must have caused the "Big Bang," and that somebody or something or power had to be there to start things off in evolution. But I can't even imagine that possibility. Some giant hand cranking the universe into motion? I remember arguing in a philosophy class that if the universe were infinite, why did it have to have a beginning? I did not know, but neither does anyone else. But that was an agnostic cop out. Now I know; As Stephen Hawking now asserts, if there was a beginning, there is an explanation that did not need a god.

But isn't the spirituality that we all feel evidence of god? Experiencing the sublime is spiritual, but it's no proof of a god. All of us have experienced spiritual moments when we wonder what moves us to think, probe, and overcome. Music moves me. Van Gogh's "Starry Night" is spiritual and beautiful. Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" can make me cry. All men are brothers came from the Judaic concept that there is but one god. I am a Jew who takes pride in that heritage. But I cannot believe that god, looking like Charlton Heston's Moses, exists.

It is true that there is some sort of order in our universe; we can predict the movements in the solar system. But there is also chaos (see Haiti). Our bodies, the results of millions of years of evolution, are indeed wondrous, but they tend to get sick and even die from little bugs and terrible afflictions. The believers' god works in strange and mysterious ways, but what sort of omnipotent, omniscient god tolerates a child with terminal leukemia, or the holocaust of six million "chosen people" or the genocides in Bosnia and the Congo and the Sudan? Believers praise god for sparing them from the tornado's wrath (as if the tornado was anthropomorphic), but do they blame god for the deaths of those who were not spared.?

But I have digressed. I have been comforted in coming out as an atheist by the Sept. 28 Pew Research Center's survey of religious knowledge in the U.S. It turns out that atheists or agnostics scored highest on a test consisting of questions about various religions. I should note here that 95 percent of Americans believe in god; just five percent of us are nonbelievers. Jews and Mormons came in a close second or third. Indeed, the most observant or fundamentalist among us tended to know the least. Half the respondents did not know that Martin Luther inspired the Protestant reformation, or that the Golden Rule ("Do unto others...") is not one of the Ten Commandments. Atheists/agnostics knew most about religion, the survey concluded, because they tend to have more education.

I would add that atheists are unencumbered by dogma. Atheists generally are more free to think of things that no one had thought of. Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin and Einstein broke free from god and religion, and some suffered for it. Only recently has the Catholic Church recognized that the earth revolves around the sun; and Judaism forgave the philosopher Spinoza, who was excommunicated from the Jewish community in Amsterdam because he believed that god was everywhere in nature; indeed god was nature and vice versa. Oddly, the Pew people had separate categories for Jews and theists as if one can't be both; I'm with Spinoza.

I should point out here that I draw a distinction -- a sharp one at that -- between those who worship and hope there is a god, and organized religion. That's because the average believer in god stands in awe of the possibility there is a supreme being that he or she cannot know or fathom. But most organized religions have the temerity to define, limit and tell us what god thinks, and which country he/she will bless in war. Organized religions, on a personal level uses books written eons ago by uneducated (by our standards), mostly superstitious and primitive minds to tell us how to behave. And as we know, some people believe these are literal truths. I can't quarrel with the Ten Commandments, but they are honored in the breach, that is, they are broken so often by god-fearing men and women, they are not to be taken seriously.

If they were truly observed as the Bible and Quran admonish, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof told us in his own test of religious knowledge that the Old Testament stipulates that a girl who does not bleed on her wedding night should be stoned to death. Kristof notes that Jesus made no comment on homosexuality, but the Old Testament says "if a man also lies with mankind as he lieth with a woman" both shall be put to death. All this is silly and outdated for most of us, even those who believe in god.

But for about 20-25 percent, who are fundamentalist Christians or if they are ultra-orthodox Jews and Muslims, they believe their scriptures are literally true and the word of god. But, alas, they also believe literally that nonbelievers are infidels and therefore a threat. And if there is no wall of separation between the religion and the state, then a threat against the religion becomes a threat against the state.

When I visited Israel as a journalist with U.S. secretaries of state who were there for the first time, Israeli officials took us on a tour of Yad Vashem, the somber and heartwrenching memorial to the Holocaust that cost the lives of six million Jews, not to mention gypsies, Russians, Poles and anti-Nazi Germans. In Damascus we were taken to the mosque where Saladin is buried, and there we learned that the crusaders who came from England were not the heroes of Christendom who we studied in school or saw in romantic movies, but bloodthirsty rapists and conquerors wielding the cross as a reason to slaughter Muslims and Jews. Saladin, a moderate and even chivalrous ruler who treated his captives well, at last defeated the Third Crusade in the 12th century. But the memory of the crusades among Muslims lingers and has been seen in the reaction to American aggression in the Middle East.

Indeed, as I think on it, much of my reporting has been about religious-based conflicts, between -- Hindus and Muslims in India and Pakistan, the semi-secular state of Afghanistan and the Taliban, which would resurrect the 10th century, the Shiites of Iran and the Sunnis of Iraq, Israel and its Muslim neighbors, some of them secular like the Palestinians, some deeply religious like Hamas, the Protestants and Catholics of Northern Ireland; the Serbian war against Bosnia pitted Catholics against Muslims; Hitler was Catholic, raised in an anti-Semitic environment; Stalin was raised in the Russian Orthodox tradition and he attended seminary, from which he was expelled, in backward Georgia.

It seems the more devout the religion, the more violent its actions against its perceived enemies. Kristof points out that using suicide vests and women for terror bombings began, not with the jihadists, but with the Tamil Hindus in Sri Lanka. I think it can be said that more people have been killed or subjugated in the name of an organized religion than in the name of atheism. When the state religion or church has been attacked, the motives of the opposition were generally political, as when Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth replaced the Catholic Church, with the Church of England; and when the Bolsheviks who overthrew the Czar and all but outlawed the Russian Orthodox Church that supported the monarchy. Similarly, the reactionary and corrupt Catholic Church in Latin America became a target of revolutionaries. Wasn't the attack on the World Trade Center and the deaths of thousands a religion-based initiative? I do not believe, however, that any nation has gone to war or committed atrocities in the name of atheism.

Yet even now, in this country, the legal wall of separation between church and state is hacked at by religionists who hold atheism almost a crime. We are told by the rabid right that liberals and other nonbelievers are trying to kill Christmas, as if the merchandisers have no responsibility. These Christian fundamentalists, the American Taliban, would figuratively stone the homosexual or the kill the doctor who performs abortions. One Pew poll in 2006 found that more than 40 percent of Americans don't believe in evolution and that included prominent Republicans running for president two years ago. These fundamentalists, according to the poll, deny the science that tells us the earth is millions of years old. In lockstep with the Republican Party they deny climate change and man's role in global warming. I suppose god has decided to kill the polar bears.

So it was a comfort to see that I had admirable company when I came out as an atheist: Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Dawkins, Katharine Hepburn, Warren Buffett, Salman Rushdie, Diane Keaton, Bill Gates, Gene Roddenberry, among dozens of celebrities who you can find at www.celebatheists.com/wiki/Main_Page.

Finally, there are many quotes from prominent writers, artists and statesmen, proclaiming their atheism, but my favorite came recently from the great novelist Philip Roth during an interview on CBS' Sunday Morning. Roth, who grew up in New Jersey, said, "I don't have a religious bone in my body." "So do you feel like there's a god out there?" he was asked.

"I'm afraid there isn't, no... When the whole world doesn't believe in god, it'll be a great place."

First published in HuffingtonPost.com.

AUTHOR
Friedman also writes for www.timegoesby.net. Follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/saulfriedman