INTRODUCTION
1. This statement, admittedly somewhat jarring given that so many other minorities have and continue to face discrimination in politics and beyond, is based on a good deal of data on American voting preferences collected by the Gallup Poll. See for example: http://www.data360.org/report_slides.aspx?Print_Group_Id=99. See also the following study by sociologists from the University of Minnesota, which found that Americans rate atheists below Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians, and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society”: Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Douglas Hartmann, “Atheists as ‘Other’: Moral Boundaries and Cultural Membership in American Society,” American Sociological Review 71 (2006): 211–34.
2. See Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, American Religious Identification Survey 2008, Summary Report (Hartford, CT: Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, Trinity College, 2009).
3. See Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
4. Joss Whedon, speech for the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, Memorial Church, April 10, 2009.
CHAPTER I: CAN WE BE GOOD WITHOUT GOD?
1. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002), 38.
2. Ibid., 37.
3. C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man in The Quotable Lewis, ed. Jerry Root and Wayne Martindale, pp. 72–80 (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndae House, 1990), 29.
4. Albert Mohler, “Can We Be Good Without God?” http://www.albertmohler.com.
5. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones, quoted in Gustav Niebuhr, Beyond Tolerance: Searching for Interfaith Understanding in America (New York: Penguin, 2008), 61.
6. Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 45–46, 220.
7. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. R. Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 1:65.
8. Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story (San Franciso: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 7.
9. Ibid., 5.
10. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (New York: Norton, 1996), 5.
11. Ronald W. Clark, Einstein: The Life and Times (New York: Avon, 1984), 502.
12. See Paul Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith (New York: HarperCollins Perennial Classics, 2001) or John Shelby Spong, A New Christianity for a New World (San Franciso: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001).
13. Tillich, The Dynamics of Faith, 4.
14. See “Oprah Winfrey’s Commencement Address,” Wellesley College, May 30, 1997, http://www.wellesley.edu/PublicAffairs/PAhomepage/winfrey.html.
15. Sherwin Wine, “Reflections,” in A Life of Courage, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Harry Cook, and Marilyn Rowens, 284 (Farminton Hills, MI: The International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism and Milan Press, 2003).
16. Christopher Hitchens, “The God Hypothesis,” in The Portable Atheist (New York: Da Capo Press, 2007), 235.
17. See Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (New York: Viking, 2006), 199.
18. For the article from which these five rules are taken, see Nowak’s “Five Rules for the Evolution of Cooperation,” Science (December 2006), 1560–63. For a more in-depth look at the evolution of cooperation, see Nowak’s Evolutionary Dynamics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
19. Nowak, “Five Rules,” 1560.
20. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (New York: Penguin Classics, 2004), 137.
21. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin talked about spandrels first in “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences (1979): 205, 581–98.
22. For a more in-depth but still very accessibly written summary of these ideas, see Robin Marantz Henig, “Darwin’s God,” New York Times Magazine, March 4, 2007.
23. Hitler, Mein Kampf, ed. Ralph Manheim (New York: Mariner Books, 1999), 152.
24. See David Van Biema, “Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith,” Time, August 23, 2007.
25. John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). Quote is in an excerpt from the book in an article by Haught, “Amateur Atheists: Why the New Atheism Isn’t Serious,” Christian Century, February 26, 2008.
26. The Dialogues of Plato, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1902), 290.
27. Paul Chamberlain, Can We Be Good Without God? (Downer’s Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1996), 188.
28. For more on this topic, see the rather creatively titled online forum http://whygod-hatesamputees.com.
CHAPTER 2: A BRIEF HISTORY OF GOODNESS WITHOUT GOD, OR A SHORT CAMPUS TOUR OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HUMANISM
1. I’m thankful to my friend and colleague Dr. Adam Chalom, a Humanist rabbi from Deerfield, Illinois, who often teaches the history of Humanism, for pointing out the example from Friedman and coloring it with this Yiddish saying.
2. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty, The Rig Veda (New York: Penguin Books, 1981), 25–26.
3. Madhava Acharya, Sarva-Darsana-Samgraha, trans. E. B. Cowell and A. E. Gough (London: Trubner and Co., 1882), 10–11.
4. Ibid., 10.
5. Sarepalli Radhakrishnan and Charles A. Moore, eds., A Sourcebook in Indian Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 233–34.
6. This saying, sometimes known as the Tetrapharmacon, does not appear in the few extant writings of Epicurus, but is an Epicurean formula generally considered to date to Epicurus himself. This translation appears in Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Doubleday, 1955), 205.
7. Epicurus, “Letter to Menoecus,” trans. Robert Drew Hicks, http://classics.mit.edu/ Epicurus/menoec.html.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Mahapurana 4:16–31, in Sources of Indian Tradition, 2nd ed., ed. Ainslie Thomas Embree, Stephen N. Hay, and William Theodore DeBary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 1:80.
11. As my friend Matt Cherry has pointed out in an excellent essay, “Introduction to Humanism: A Primer on the History, Philosophy, and Goals of Humanism,” accessible at http://humanisteducation.com/demo.html.
12. Jennifer Michael Hecht, Doubt: A History (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 216.
13. Ibn Warraq, Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), 52.
14. F. Gabrielli, “La Zandaqa an 1er Siecle Abbasiole,” in L’Elaboration de l’Islam (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1961).
15. Abu Bakr al-Razi, The Spiritual Physick, trans. A. J. Arberry, as cited in Warraq, Leaving Islam, 55.
16.
Hecht, Doubt, 228–29.
17. Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short. Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, collected and edited by Paul Leicester Ford (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 143.
18. Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, collected and edited by Paul Leicester Ford (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1899), 185.
19. As cited in Brooke Allen, Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 96.
20. Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1893).
21. Frances Wright, Life, Letters, and Lectures, as cited in Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition (Madison, WI: Freedom From Religion Foundation, 1997), 34.
22. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as cited in Gaylor, Women Without Superstition, 129–30.
CHAPTER 3: WHY BE GOOD WITHOUT A GOD? PURPOSE AND THE PLAGUE
1. Warren, The Purpose Driven Life, 27.
2. See Michael Slackman, “Fashion and Faith Meet, on Foreheads of the Pious,” New York Times, December 18, 2007.
3. Based on Donald A. Crosby, “Nihilism,” Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1998).
4. Ibid.
5. See the BBC documentary The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear, written and produced by Adam Curtis (2004).
6. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 219.
7. Daniel Handler, Adverbs (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), 19.
8. Stephanie Coontz, Marriage: A History (New York: Penguin, 2006), 23.
9. Eva Goldfinger, Basic Ideas of Secular Humanistic Judaism (Farmington Hills, MI: International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, 1996), 10, 18.
10. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Kensington, 1976), 105.
11. Albert Camus, The Plague (New York: Vintage, 1991), 306.
12. Sherwin Wine, “Personal Ethics,” Humanistic Judaism 12, no. 2 (Summer 1984).
13. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself (New York: Fawcett Premier, 1965), 249–50.
14. Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis, 238–89.
15. These quotations are from the very good film version with Kenneth Branagh and Robert DeNiro. The lines do not appear in Mary Shelly’s original text.
16. Thomas Friedman, “A Poverty of Dignity and a Wealth of Rage,” New York Times, July 15, 2005.
17. See Jean Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 353.
18. de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Citadel, 2000), 86. All rights reserved. Reprinted by arrangement with Kensington Publishing Corp. www.kensingtonbooks.com.
19. Fromm, Man for Himself, 219.
20. Steven Pinker, e-mail message to author, March 7, 2008.
CHAPTER 4: GOOD WITHOUT GOD: A HOW-TO GUIDE TO THE ETHICS OF HUMANISM
1. See Alexander Stille, “Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran,” New York Times, March 2, 2002.
2. Lloyd and Mary Morain, Humanism as the Next Step (Amherst, NY: Humanist Press, 1998), 1–2.
3. Adapted from an exercise on the commandments taught in the “Jewish Cultural School” Sunday school of Machar, Washington, Congregation for Secular Humanistic Judaism. Find Machar at http://www.machar.org.
4. See Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology’s New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of Its Sacred Texts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2002).
5. Yehuda Amichai, “When I Banged My Head On the Door,” in The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, rev. ed., ed. and trans. Chana Bloch and Stephen Mitchell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 118–19.
6. Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 167.
7. Anna Dreber, David G. Rand, Drew Fudenberg, and Martin A. Nowak, “Winners Don’t Punish,” Nature 452 (March 20, 2008): 348–51.
8. Amy Sutherland, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage,” New York Times, June 25, 2006.
9. See “Reluctant Vacationers: Why Americans Work More, Relax Less, Than Europeans,” Knowledge@Wharton, July 26, 2006.
10. Dr. Joseph Gerstein, e-mail to the author, October 22, 2008.
11. Ibid., October 23, 2008.
12. Tony Judt, “Europe vs. America,” New York Review of Books, February 10, 2005.
13. Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Washington, DC: Humanist Press, 1997), 225.
14. Erich Fromm, Man for Himself (New York: Fawcett Premier, 1965), 27.
15. Steven Pinker, “Ethics: The Moral Instinct,” New York Times Magazine, January 13, 2008.
16. Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 2.
17. Ibid., 8–9.
18. Richard Gregg, “The Value of Voluntary Simplicity” (Wallington, PA: Pendle Hill, 1936).
19. Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich, (New York: Quill, 1993), 30.
20. Gordan Kaufman, In the Beginning…Creativity (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2004), 38.
CHAPTER 5: PLURALISM: CAN YOU BE GOOD WITH GOD?
1. Kenneth T. Jackson, “A Colony with a Conscience,” New York Times, December 27, 2007.
2. Remonstrance of the Inhabitants of the Town of Flushing to Governor Stuyvesant, December 27, 1657. New York Historical Records.
3. Gustav Niebuhr, Beyond Tolerance (New York: Viking, 2008), xxxiv.
4. Sarah Vowell, “Radical Love Gets a Holiday,” New York Times, January 21, 2008.
5. Eboo Patel, “Religious Pluralism in the Public Square,” Debating the Divine, no. 43 (Washington, DC: Center for American Progress, 2008), 21.
6. Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (New York: HarperOne, 2008), 14.
7. Ibid., 222.
8. Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (New York: Viking, 2006), 327.
9. Niebuhr, Beyond Tolerance, xix.
10. These do’s and don’ts were originally developed for a workshop I led along with Hemant Mehta, “The Friendly Atheist.” Visit his excellent blog, www.friendlyathe-ist.com.
11. See Jeff German, “Brown Vindicated in Legislative Prayer Battle,” Las Vegas Sun, June 3, 1997.
12. See the LCCR Web site: http://www.civilrights.org/about/history.html.
13. Boyce Upholt, Philadelphia City Paper, August 6, 2008.
CHAPTER 6: GOOD WITHOUT GOD IN COMMUNITY: THE HEART OF HUMANISM
1. Mason Olds, American Religious Humanism (Minneapolis, MN: Fellowship of Religious Humanists, 1996), 185.
2. Corliss Lamont, The Philosophy of Humanism (Washington, DC: Humanist Press, 1997), xvi.
3. Ibid., xvii.
4. See Humanism and Education in East and West: An International Round-Table Discussion Organized by UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1953).
5. Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York: Doubleday, 2004), 192.
6. For examples of such discourse, see Assaf Moghadam, “A Global Resurgence of Religion?” Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Working Paper No. 03–03 (August 2003) and Rodney Stark, “Secularization, R.I.P. (Rest in Peace),” Sociology of Religion (Fall 1999): 249–73.
7. Samuel Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 337.
8. McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism, 264–65.
9. Ibid., 265–66.
10. Cited in Jonathan Haidt, The Happiness Hypothesis (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 237.
11. From http://www.smartrecovery.org.
12. Jonathan von Breton, “Introduction to REBT,” http://www.smartrecovery.org/resources/library/Articles_and_Essays/Additional_Articles/intro_rebt.htm.
13. Herbert Benson, M.D., with Miriam Z. Klipper, The Relaxation Response (New York: William Morrow, 1975), 107.
14. Ibid., xxi.
15. Studying and practicing The Relaxation Response together can be an excellent exercise for groups of Humanists and the nonreligious wanting to experience community and connection while promoting unity with something natural yet larger than our individual selves.
16. Robert Hass, Poet’s Choice (Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press, 1998), 15.
17. As cited in Haidt, Happiness Hypothethis, 193.
18. Ibid.
19. Find one version of this reading, developed over the course of numerous services at Wine’s Birmingham Temple, in Sherwin T. Wine, Celebration: A Ceremonial and Philosophic Guide for Humanists and Humanistic Jews (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Press, 1988), 321.
20. David Brooks, “Goodbye George and John,” New York Times, August 7, 2007.
21. Wine, Celebration, 378.
22. This is from a funeral I performed, but it closely follows a suggested template for a Humanist funeral found in Funerals Without God: A Practical Guide to Non-Religious Funeral Ceremonies (London: British Humanist Association, 1998), 23.
23. Sir Salman Rushdie, acceptance speech for Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism, “New Humanism” Conference, Harvard University, April 21, 2007. http://americanhumanist.org.hnn/archives/index.php?id=295&article=0.
24. Fred Edwords, “Celebrating Our Humanism,” keynote address, HumanLight Celebration (Bridgewater, NJ), December 18, 2005. http://humanlight.org/wordpress/perspectives/fred-edwords-2005/.
25. Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man,” New Views of the Nature of Man, ed. John R. Platt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 93–118.
26. Russell does acknowledge that in a “geographical sense” he and all his peers remain Christians. For Russell’s purposes, at a time when the old powers still dominated the world cultural stage with almost unquestioned authority, this cultural reality could be easily “ignored.” But in a postmodern world where civilizations clash, ignoring geographic—or cultural—reality would seem to be about as useful an approach as ignoring the Taliban in pre-9/11 America.
27. Sarah Vowell, “Radical Love Gets a Holiday,” New York Times, January 21, 2008.
28. See Anthony Pinn, “On Becoming Humanist: A Personal Journey,” Religious Humanism (Winter/Spring 1998).
29. Ibid.
30. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Harper, 1945), 113–15.
31. Pinn, “On Becoming Humanist.”
32. Ibid.
33. See Mark Lindley, The Life and Times of Gora (Mumbai, India: Popular Prakashan, forthcoming), 27.
34. See Ibn Warraq, Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003). See also Ibn Warraq, What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, and Commentary (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002).
35. Rushdie, acceptance speech, “New Humanism” Conference.
36. See Tu Weiming, “The Ecological Turn in New Confucian Humanism: Implications for China and the World” in Confucian Spirituality, Volume Two: World Spirituality, ed. Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2004).
37. Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening (New York: Riverhead Books, 1997).
38. Sherwin Wine, A Life of Courage, ed. Dan Cohn-Sherbok, Harry Cook, and Marilyn Rowens (Farmington Hills: MI: The International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism and Milan Press, 2003), 28.
39. Wine, “Reflections,” in A Life of Courage, 291–92.
40. Howard Radest, Toward Common Ground (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969), 27.
41. Ibid., 28.
42. Ibid., 38.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 86. Not only this fact but the vibrant, thriving British Humanist Association of today ought to give pause to anyone who might suggest that in the developed West, only Americans with their fixation on the church are interested in Humanist community.
45. Ibid., 40.