The world is changing, and the changes have everything to do with religion. Increased knowledge is driving a trend away from traditional religious worldviews.
Fourteen percent of all people now claim to be “nonreligious.”
The trend is stronger in industrialized nations. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life reported last year “The number of Americans who do not identify with any religion continues to grow at a rapid pace. One-fifth of the U.S. public - and a third of adults under 30 - are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever.” As one example of this secularizing trend, my experience might be enlightening for others.
My parents regularly attended a Presbyterian Church in our city, Philadelphia, but they didn’t take me. One morning, I rode my tricycle to the Episcopal Church across the street and walked in on a Sunday School class. Finding it congenial, I continued attending most Sundays and joined the children’s choir. I liked the stories but didn’t believe the miracles any more than I believed the Santa Claus stories my parents lovingly foisted on me. Neither my parents nor the Episcopalians were “pushy” about religion. I liked the music, was inspired by the “do unto others” idealism and appreciated a good sermon. I attended services until I was 24, even getting baptized at age 19 (my parents wisely didn’t decide that for me).
In high school and college, I sampled liberal Protestant churches, looking for ministers with interesting philosophical and social topics on their mind.
Eventually, a friend asked me, “Art, why do you go to church? You don’t seem to be getting much out of it.” She was right: It had become boring. Since then, I’ve occasionally attended Unitarian fellowships, which are less boring, but I basically dismissed organized religion. Like many people, I became a religious generalist and definitely not a Christian.
By then I was an aspiring physics student, and it seemed to me God was to be identified with nature or maybe with my “inner self.”
During my 20s, I developed a philosophy of life that has always worked for me. Everybody needs principles to give their life direction. Mine is really simple, involving only one belief and no fuzzy “spiritual” notions. It’s called the “greatest happiness principle.” It says I should try to conduct my life in such a way as to promote the happiness of myself and others. There’s a nice defense of this view in the Dalai Lama’s 1999 book “Ethics for the New Millennium.” Among its advantages, it’s not likely to inflict the horrors that religious creeds, especially fundamentalist ones, often inflict.
By then I knew “miracles” - virgin births, people rising from the dead - don’t really happen, just as Santa doesn’t really come down chimneys.
I knew religion - especially the fundamentalist variety - can be dreadful. I doubted life after death, but I still had this notion of nature as God. I thought of myself as nonreligious but “spiritual.”
During the past 10 years, I read good books by Richard Dawkins and other atheists, and I had good talks with my wife, Marie, who was brought up within the fundamentalist Catholic tradition and who therefore had reason to rebel - something I had not had. She’s been a convinced atheist for decades. I realized several years ago my notion of God made absolutely no difference in my life; it was merely excess verbiage having no concrete content and was misleading because my vague notion of God was nothing like the “God” of most people. It was unnecessary baggage.
Giving up all the “God” notions has been a relief. It leaves me more free to think about the things that really matter. As Henry Thoreau said, “Simplify, simplify.” As the Fayetteville Freethinkers (who gather monthly to exchange views) put it, “Believe less, think more.”
“But Art,” you say, “surely you need God to give your life meaning?”
My response: How can you, possessing the gift of life, not realize its obvious “meaning?” The meaning of your life is surely embodied in the living of your life.
Your life is what you make of it. I can imagine God, if there was a God, responding, “I’ve given you a glorious planet, your senses, a fantastic brain, lovely surroundings, wondrous fellow-creatures and endless possible adventures, and still you ask me what it all means? You even ask for more life, after life? Get outta’ here.”
If there is a heaven, it’s here on Earth, and it’s now.
ART HOBSON IS A PROFESSOR EMERITUS OF PHYSICS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS.
Opinion, Pages 11 on 02/10/2013