Can You Be Good Without God?
This is a book about Humanism. If you’re not familiar with the word Humanism, it is, in short, goodness without God. This is a book about the values, the history, and the future of the world’s hundreds of millions of atheists, agnostics, and nonreligious people.
This is not a book about whether one can be good without God, because that question does not need to be answered—it needs to be rejected outright. To suggest that one can’t be good without belief in God is not just an opinion, a mere curious musing—it is a prejudice. It may even be discrimination. After all, would you ever ask: Is it possible to be a good person if you’re Muslim? Or Buddhist? Or Jewish? Or Christian? Would you feel comfortable working for an employer who implied that all gays and lesbians were immoral? Or all Democrats? Or all Republicans? How would you feel if your daughter were planning to marry someone who claimed that all Catholics were lousy, unethical human beings? Or all Protestants? This is the sort of all-or-nothing condemnation of a huge population one is making if one suggests that goodness and morality require belief in a deity.
And it’s hardly a hypothetical suggestion: over decades of polling, a majority of Americans have consistently indicated a negative opinion of atheists and nonbelievers. Even in this enlightened twenty-first century, where we’ve proved ourselves ready for a black president and welcomed elected officials representing every group, approximately half of all Americans say they would refuse to vote for a well-qualified atheist candidate for public office. In other words, one out of every two Americans admits to being prejudiced against fellow citizens who don’t believe in God. No other minority group in this country is rejected by such large numbers.1
This prejudice ought to concern us all. Because prejudice anywhere endangers not only its targets, but all who believe that we should be judged not by the color of our skin, or our gender, or sexuality, or by our religious preference or lack thereof, but by the content of our character. If we can convince ourselves today that one entire group comprising millions of people might be incapable of goodness, might be “no good,” then we harbor inside us the ability to turn against and hate any other group as well, and no one should feel safe.
It is not easy to live a good life or be a good person—with or without a god. The fact is that life is hard. Living well and being a good person are difficult to do. But that doesn’t mean we should give ourselves permission to judge an entire group of people as incapable of goodness unless they’re being good the majority’s way.
Tolerant, fair-minded people of all religions or none do not dwell on the question of whether we can be good without God. The answer is yes. Period. Millions and millions of people are, every day. However, the question why we can be good without God is much more relevant and interesting. And the question of how we can be good without God is absolutely crucial. Those are the questions in this book—the essential questions asked and answered by Humanism. I invite you to explore these questions, and Humanism’s answers, with me.
Are You Religious?
If you’re not religious—if you don’t believe in God, you’re not sure you believe in God, or if you think you believe in some kind of higher power but you know you don’t fit into any organized religion—you’re not alone. Here’s the good news: over a billion people around the world today are like you. All the major studies of world religious demographics, despite different methodologies, indicate that there are somewhere around one billion people on earth who define themselves as atheist, agnostic, or nonreligious. Even if we exclude the approximately half of nonreligious people who say they believe in some form of “spirit”—though I think it makes sense to include many of them—there are still more than half a billion people in the world who live without belief in God. And even in the United States of America, which we’re told is the most religious of all the world’s developed nations, the nonreligious now represent approximately 15 percent of the population, or approximately 40 million Americans. “Nonreligious” is the fastest growing “religious preference” in the United States, and the only one to have increased its percentage of the population in every one of the fifty states over the past generation. Almost one in four American young adults today has no religion, which suggests not only a growing trend but also that an even larger percentage of the United States as a whole may be secular in another generation. Granted, when pollsters ask Americans to identify themselves as atheists or agnostics, only a few million answer affirmatively. But those terms are attached to a stigma. When poll questions ask in a more roundabout way, such as “Do you believe in God?” the number who say “no” or “not sure” is much higher. And the number of Americans who don’t expect to have a religious funeral is in the stratosphere—nearly a quarter of us.2
What’s more, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that nonreligious people are being good en masse. It has long been known that Humanists and nonreligious people have made extraordinary contributions to science and philosophy as well as to philanthropy and social justice. But sociologists have recently begun to pay more attention to the fact that some of the world’s most secular countries, such as those in Scandinavia, are among the least violent, best educated, and most likely to care for the poor.3 And as scientists are now beginning to document, though religion may have benefits for the brain, so may secularism and Humanism. Atheists meditating on positive secular images can gain the same benefits that religious people do from prayer. Strongly convinced nonbelievers may be among the least depressed people—along with strongly convinced believers. Nonreligious Americans have even been shown to be far more likely than regular churchgoing believers to oppose U.S. government-sponsored torture or “advanced interrogation techniques.”
Some say that all these people have nothing in common beyond their nonbelief—or that, because they don’t call themselves by the same names or join the same organizations, we should not count or study them. This is nonsense. After all, Christianity is an incredibly diverse tradition as well, encompassing beliefs, customs, and organizations that range widely, from archliberal Unitarian Universalists in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to African American Baptists in Montgomery, Alabama, to Mormons in Salt Lake City, and far beyond. If we study Christianity as a big-tent tradition, or Hinduism (with its thousands of gods and traditions, which many of its followers have trouble agreeing upon), we have to study the nonreligious together as well. We may be a diverse group, but no more so than others.
Still, up to now, only a small percentage of so-called nonbelievers have seen themselves as part of a bigger group of like-minded people, let alone a movement capable of improving people’s perceptions of them or making the world a better place.
Are You a Humanist?
If you identify as an atheist, agnostic, freethinker, rationalist, skeptic, cynic, secular humanist, naturalist, or deist; as spiritual, apathetic, nonreligious, “nothing” or any other irreligious descriptive, you could probably count yourself what I call a Humanist. Feel free to use whatever terminology you prefer—that’s not important. We don’t believe a god created perfect religions or sacred texts, so why would we believe he or she created one perfect, sacred name that all doubters were required to adopt? And as we’ve seen in recent years with the success of the GLBT movement—or is it LGBT? Or gay? Or queer?—it’s not necessary to reach universal agreement about nomenclature in order to bring a massive group together to gain influence and recognition. The point is that as a Humanist, you’d be in distinguished company, along with Thomas Jefferson, John Lennon, Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Voltaire, David Hume, Salman Rushdie, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Confucius, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Wole Soyinka, Kurt Vonnegut, Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, Margaret Meade, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Einstein, Darwin, and more than a billion people worldwide.
All this makes you and me adherents of one of the four largest lifestances on earth, along with Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. But if we are adherents, what is it that we adhere to? What, if anything, do we have in common? Do the diverse and often disparate multitudes so often dismissed as mere “nonbelievers” share any beliefs in common? Now that we are beginning to gain recognition—such as a positive mention in President Obama’s inaugural address or a story about us on the front page of the New York Times—it’s time to recognize that nonbelievers are believers too: we believe in Humanism.
What Is Humanism?
Humanism is a bold, resolute response to the fact that being a human being is lonely and frightening. We Humanists take one look at a world in which the lives of thousands of innocent children are ripped away every year by hurricanes, earthquakes, and other “acts of God,” not to mention the thousand other fundamental injustices of life, and we conclude that if the universe we live in does not have competent moral management, then so be it: we must become the superintendents of our own lives. Humanism means taking charge of the often lousy world around us and working to shape it into a better place, though we know we cannot ever finish the task.
In short, Humanism is being good without God. It is above all an affirmation of the greatest common value we human beings have: the desire to live with dignity, to be “good.” But Humanism is also a warning that we cannot afford to wait until tomorrow or until the next life to be good, because today—the short journey we get from birth to death, womb to tomb—is all we have. Humanism rejects dependence on faith, the supernatural, divine texts, resurrection, reincarnation, or anything else for which we have no evidence. To put it another way, Humanists believe in life before death.
More formally, the American Humanist Association defines Humanism as a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment, aspiring to the greater good of humanity. This approach, though affirmed by most of the world’s hundreds of millions of atheists and agnostics, is not particularly organized. And yet it can be, and it already is in many places, though some secularists bristle at the thought that this is too much like an “organized religion.” As we’ll see, Humanism is a cohesive world movement based on the creation of good lives and communities, without God.
Nonreligious people often wonder why on earth, with all the abuses and scandals and illogical ideas religion is responsible for, is religion still so powerful? The answer is that for most, religion is not about belief in an all-seeing deity with a baritone voice and a flowing beard. It is about group identification—the community and the connections we need to live. It is about family, tradition, consolation, ethics, memories, music, art, architecture, and much more. These things are all good, and no one wants to or should be asked to give them up because of lack of belief in a god.
The truth is that at the present time, the above list of social goods—family, tradition, memories, music, etc.—is difficult to find communally outside traditional forms of religious affiliation or custom. And in truth, being a good person in a vacuum is not a very satisfying experience. Those of us who don’t want to worship an invisible being or spend our days fretting about punishment in Hades do want to be able to share what we hold dear with our families and the broader world, and we want to be understood and appreciated for who we are. To do so we need community.
At the most important times of our lives—when we or our loved ones are sick and dying; when a new baby is born; when we want to affirm our love in marriage; when we want to educate our children not only about facts and dates, but also important values—we need to be part of a group. We need what, at least potentially, can be found or created in a Humanist community: a place where family, memory, ethical values, and the uplifting of the human spirit can come together with intellectual honesty, and without a god.
Is Humanism a Faith?
I’m often asked whether Humanism is a religion. Practically speaking, Humanism is not a religion, because most of us associate the word religion with a system that includes divinities and the supernatural. Humanists have no popes and no perfect people—as the intentionally silly T-shirts say, we are a “nonprophet organization.” Sociologically speaking, however, Humanism is similar to a religion in the way that it involves shared values with efforts to organize a community and is essentially a way of life. So I prefer the European term lifestance, meaning more than a philosophy but not a divine or revealed religion. In any case, asking whether Humanism is a religion or not is little more than a semantic “gotcha” game. Some ask because they’re religious and are trying to knock Humanists down a peg; others are angry at religious hypocrisy and are afraid to be associated with anything that even faintly smells of belief, a word laden with baggage and unhappiness.
But the point is not whether you believe in something, it’s what you believe in. Not believing in anything is a belief too—in nihilism. As TV and film writer/director Joss Whedon said, “The enemy of Humanism is not faith—the enemy of Humanism is hate, it is fear, it is ignorance, it is the darker part of man that is in every Humanist, and every person in the world…But faith is something we have to embrace. Faith in God means believing absolutely in something, with no proof whatsoever. Faith in humanity means believing absolutely in something with a huge amount of proof to the contrary. We are the true believers.”4
How Is Humanism Different from the New Atheism?
So much has been written about the religious people and traditions of the world. Thousands of anthropologists and sociologists have devoted their lives to studying religious traditions and their adherents. Millions and millions of pages have been written about theology—about what religious people believe. But try to go to your local bookstore or library and ask for a book about nonreligious people or what we believe. The choices have always been scant indeed. So it’s no wonder the recent spate of best-selling books by atheists attacking religion has caused such a stir.
Today, those who believe that the good life ought to be defined as obedience to God and tradition feel under siege by the forces of modernity. In their minds, certain outward signs of this modernity—whether gay pride paraders all done up in leather and fuchsia, a woman rearing a child on her own, or simply people like me who can publicly deny a belief in God and live respectable lives—are all declarations of war against the old ways. And so both fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity, among other religious forces, have declared war on secularism and Humanism. In turn, a group of bold new atheist intellectuals and leaders has arisen to declare war right back, proclaiming “God is not great!” “God is a delusion!” and “This is the end of faith!”
I admire today’s “new atheists” because they seek to right the very real and very many religious wrongs of our time. And I especially appreciate Messrs. Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens when they liberate young people to feel good and be open about their lack of belief in God at a time when many still live in communities that shun those who will not produce at least an outward display of allegiance to the old values. But atheism goes astray when it adopts a certain posture, one best captured by a cover story in Wired magazine in November 2006: “The New Atheism: No Heaven. No Hell. Just Science.”
It is true and important that Humanists don’t adhere to the idea of a heaven or a hell, and it is also true that we value science as the best tool humans have for understanding the world around us. But “Just Science”? Such language raises concern that the new atheism is cut off from emotion, from intuition, and from a spirit of generosity toward those who see the world differently. While nonreligious people often value science highly, many deeply religious people value and study it as well. So surely valuing science cannot be a way to distinguish religious people from nonreligious people. Besides, books on science, though often containing much useful information about the world around us, can less often say important things about what we ought to value most in life, or why. Science can teach us a great deal, like what medicine to give to patients in a hospital. But science won’t come and visit us in the hospital.
This may seem like just a cute play on words, but when I was a young boy in a nonreligious family, I had to spend a fair amount of time in hospitals, and they were often lonely places for me and my family. When I was eighteen and my father finally died after battling lung cancer for years, I knew he missed the religious communities he had left behind earlier in life. Though he was not exactly the greatest at communicating his feelings of isolation, you could tell he longed for community because when the Jehovah’s Witnesses would knock on our door to try to convert him, he would always drag himself out of his sickbed, a little of his gloom lifting at the opportunity for companionship and serious conversation with new people. Still, the young men did not come often, and in any case, given their wildly different worldview from his own, they were not ideal companions. So my father died feeling quite alone, never having heard of the idea of Humanist community.
I myself, despite having majored in religion in college, only learned of Humanism after graduation, because of a chance run-in with a great Humanist leader, the late Sherwin Wine. Sherwin, to whom this book is dedicated, was a Humanist rabbi (more on what that is later) who visited thousands of congregants over his long career as a clergyman who believed—openly—in good, not God. It was Sherwin who first answered many of my early questions about Humanism—the basic questions that are the subject of the first chapter of this book, “Can We Be Good Without God?”
The history of goodness without God as a world tradition has roots in the ancient East and West. Humanism traces its story back not only to the European Enlightenment and to ancient Greece, as many assume, but also touches cultures from India, China, and the Middle East. It is a belief held by American Revolutionary patriots like Thomas Jefferson, leading women’s suffragists of the nineteenth century, civil rights leaders of the twentieth, and on to the original new atheists—not only Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Harris but Freud, Marx, Nietzsche, and Darwin.
Chapter three is an exploration of the question why are we good without a god? Religion is a profound source of meaning and purpose for many people—even for those who, despite more than a little bit of skepticism about its supernatural claims, fear that without religion there is simply no reason to live, or at least no reason to live morally and ethically. But a Humanistic approach to life can provide nonreligious people with a profound and sustaining sense that, though there is no single, overarching purpose given to us from on high, we can and must live our lives for a purpose well beyond ourselves.
But it’s not enough to just “discover” the meaning of life. What really matters is whether we live according to our values, and that takes hard work and a hundred hard choices every day. What is good without God? From learning how to put the golden rule and human compassion into action more often, to exploring innovative and sustainable answers to new human problems such as climate change and other bioethical dilemmas, Humanism is concerned with one of the most important ethical questions—what we do once we’ve found purpose in life.
It’s also important to acknowledge people who consider themselves religious. Welcome. I hope Christians, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Baha’is, and many others are reading, and will read on—not to be converted, or deconverted, but to gain understanding of loved ones and neighbors who may be Humanists. I want to offer an affirmative response to the question can you be good with God? I urge atheists and agnostics to strive for what Steven Prothero calls religious literacy, and I implore religious people and Humanists to enter into deeper dialogue and cooperation—because we live in a world that is flat, interconnected, interdependent, not to mention armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction—a world where we can no longer afford to misunderstand one another or to be ignorant about what makes each other tick.
I believe that community is the heart of Humanism. In the past century, God was supposed to be dead, but too often it has seemed that Humanism died instead. What will it take for a new Humanism to arise—one that is diverse, inclusive, inspiring, and a transformative force in the world today?
If this book accomplishes one thing for or on behalf of the billion nonreligious people, let it not be that we learn how better to convince others that there is no God, or that religion is evil. May we encourage more hospital visits by the nonreligious, both literally and metaphorically. May we do more good work together and build something positive in this world—the only world we will ever have. May we focus more on the “good” than on the “without God.”