As I was growing up, there was a push from my family for me to adopt Jewish culture, not necessarily the Jewish religion. As a child, for me, temple was a place that my family visited a couple times a year. We heard goofy stories and saw people we didn’t really know. The synagogue had really cool architecture, though. It was big, had a lot of interesting rooms, and made for a great place to pretend that I was in a spaceship. While I did have a bar mitzvah, I did not exactly learn how to read Hebrew: I memorized a whole bunch of words, which I didn’t actually understand, and recited them, pretending to read, with a metallic pointer in my hand, from the Torah. Regardless, once I passed the bar mitzvah milestone, I was considered a man in Jewish culture. In fact, that was my last experience with the Jewish religion. I was 13. Over time, any religiosity that I had in my youth gradually faded away. My brother and sister, my mother and my father, all started to become more and more secular. I identified with agnosticism for a time and decided after reading a lot about science that I was an atheist.
The most persuasive argument in favor of my atheism came from how evolution can explain how order can arise from chaos. As a teenager, I was philosophically inclined, and I wondered about the big questions of life. Becoming educated about the science behind biological evolution and cosmic evolution had a huge influence on me. I learned about the formation of galaxies and solar systems, stars, and planets. I am a skeptic, and I think that any empirical claim is testable and potentially falsifiable. When I look at the Bible, I see many empirical claims about how the universe works and most of them are false, along with many omissions about what we now consider to be basic scientific knowledge. The Bible doesn’t mention tectonic plates. It doesn’t mention volcanoes. It doesn’t mention Africa or Australia or North or South America or the South Pole. Its authors did not understand that disease is transmitted by germs and not by demons.
Despite the inaccuracies of the Jewish religion, the tradition of Judaism still interests me. In fact, one thing that people from the world’s other major religions don’t often understand is the relationship between Jewish culture and Jewish religion. Modern Jewish culture is shaped by the diaspora. Jews have been in diaspora for thousands of years. A structured state or homeland — like the state of Israel — is a recent phenomenon. There’s no central Jewish religious authority; the highest authority within the Jewish faith is generally the local rabbi or his mentor.
I similarly don’t think that Christians or secular people from a Christian background or most other religions understand the way Judaism is viewed in the eyes of other Jews. To them, I’m no less a Jew even though I’m an atheist, never go to temple, have nothing whatsoever to do with the religion, and was a church-state separation activist for several years. Being Jewish is not simply about being religious. It’s an ethnic identity. It’s like a nation in much the same way as the Tibetans or the Lakota Sioux are a nation.
While I recognize the inclusiveness of Jews to other Jews, I am not a fan of endogamy. Within more conservative Jewish culture, it’s almost unspoken that Jews will marry other Jews. Because of this clannish mentality, I ask people not to call me Jewish. I’m a human being. I’m a person. I don’t want labels. I don’t have the need for the cultural affiliation that a lot of atheistic and agnostic Jews have. In my life, I have been quite interested in combating racism by explaining human variation and by debunking the idea that, scientifically, there is any such thing as race.
While I grew up in Philadelphia and never really feel as though I’ve been discriminated against because of my Jewish lineage, there have been times when I felt threatened by rhetoric. In Philadelphia, the Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrews are both quite active and quite anti-Semitic. Although I have never been confronted by them personally, I have, with a degree of shock, watched them give their speeches outside city hall.
People sometimes ask me about the way I view the world. I tell people that I have a naturalistic concern and an evolved morality. I care deeply about the quality and dignity of human life, a care that has actually been deepened by my atheism. Overall, I find my worldview to be liberating because I know that I’m not going to be judged. I know that I’m not going to be categorized after I die. I don’t have a faith with which I need to wrestle. I have an awareness of reality and because of that, there’s a whole layer of neurosis that I circumvent. Knowing my mortality makes me think that I need to make my time on this Earth count. I try to do very worthwhile work and contribute to my community both locally and globally. I think that’s the most you can ask of anyone.
XII.
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Lucy Gubbins: Becoming a Happy Atheist
“This I believe: I believe there is no God. Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows, and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world, and everything in the world is plenty for me.
It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family that I am raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the genetic lottery, and I get joy every day. Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good. It makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.”
If a prize were awarded to the happiest atheist on the planet, Lucy Gubbins would be a frontrunner. Raised in Tennessee, Lucy had a childhood fascination with Japanese culture and all things religious. She drifted from Christianity to Wicca before advice from her brother began to lead her down a more secular life route. In college, she co-founded the Alliance of Happy Atheists (AHA!) at the University of Oregon. The group became one of the most widely-known organizations on campus within its first few years.
When she was a child, she believed that the bliss that she felt while walking through beautiful forests could only be explained through the awesomeness of a higher power. She certainly hasn’t lost her appreciation for nature or her faith in people, even though she no longer believes that God exists. She hopes, more than anything, that her efforts in organizing have helped to provide a safe and meaningful secular community in which young atheists can participate and flourish.
I grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. When I was growing up, my mom was an Episcopalian and my dad was an atheist. My parents were both very open-minded. My mom would take my brother, sister, and me to our Episcopalian church every Sunday; we would go to Sunday school beforehand and then we would go to church services. The Episcopalian Church is very accepting of people. They have women ministers. It was a great church to grow up in.
Religion was never really a conversation topic in my house. It wasn’t as though we weren’t supposed to talk about it; it’s just something that never came up. We would go to church on Sundays, and then we wouldn’t talk about religious topics for the rest of the day or for the rest of the week. My mom was quite devout, though. She would go to church on Sundays and then on Wednesdays as well for Bible study. Around the time that I was 10 years old, she started sending me to Bible study too. It was at that time that my religious questioning began.
I went to a private middle school, but when I was entering high school, I asked my parents to let me go to a public school because I wanted that experience. They let me. In the two years that I went there, I realized that it was very, very conservative. We had abstinence-only sex education. There was a creationism club. I remember seeing posters of dinosaurs with a big “X” through them. There were Bible studies. The school participated in a National Day of Prayer; it was voluntary, but everybody would go outside and hold hands around the flagpole. There was a fast food restaurant, Chick-fil-A, that would give you a free chicken biscuit if you signed an abstinence “I’ll wait for marriage to have sex” card.