This is part of the continuing guest posts by Brittany in the Different Perspective series.
As an atheist, I have kept my beliefs to myself for a long time, because I was afraid what people would think about me. Atheists are one of the most disliked and least trusted groups in America according to public opinion polls. Because of an obnoxious minority of smug and anti-religious atheists, Christians I don’t even know feel perfectly happy or even justified to question or even berate me for my beliefs, and the Christians who love me berate me and question my beliefs because of concern for my eternal soul.
As for me, I mostly don’t want to talk about it. I am afraid of the baggage that comes along with the term “atheist.” I am afraid that to religious people, my atheism is synonymous with the view that they are stupid or, worse, Satanists (a belief held by a not-insubstantial group of people).
I believe what I believe, because, as a social psychologist who studies human behavior, I am aware of and conduct experiments on a variety of judgmental and perceptual biases that are usually great, but lead people astray in certain situations.
This does not make them stupid. I believe that people who believe in the supernatural have many reasons to do so; we’re programmed to see patterns in our worlds; we’re particularly likely to see intentionality where none exists. Look at all the people who act like their pets or even inanimate possessions are people, for example.
We naturally assume that people’s behavior was intentional and reflect underlying traits. We have a fundamental problem understanding what randomness looks like, we think things are linked more than they are, and we don’t understand covariation. This doesn’t make people stupid; it makes them human. Of course some people see the caprices of fate and invent a benevolent god who will look out for them and help them when they really need it. I see nothing wrong or stupid about believing the world is a better place than perhaps it really is. I just don’t have the same belief myself. I don’t think of it in terms of who’s right at all, and I certainly am not secretly laughing at people who are religious.
In next week’s post, Brittany will share why she doesn’t think religion is bad.
Wow. This one was a hard one to read. But what a good look into your perspective. Your bolded intro is something we have in common. I too have been afraid to speak up for my beliefs at times because I too am afraid of what people think about me. I never really thought about how that feeling can be shared. We really should not ever be afraid, but we are. That commonality struck me.
Again, thanks for your posts.
I’m unfamiliar with the studies, but I have the opposite experience. I know far more people who are openly contemptuous or religion than who are openly religious. Even at the work place, I’ve had conversations where someone said implied or outright stated that religious people are stupid or how great it would be if religion disappeared.
I don’t actually practice a religion myself; in fact I’ve identified as an atheist most of my life. Over the years my views have softened toward religion, though, which has led to … I guess you could call it a crisis of lack of faith. 🙂
I applaud your civility, and your bravery in tackling this subject in this venue, but I think the last paragraph comes off a bit condescending. It’s as if you’re saying, “You’re not stupid, you’re just too ignorant to know how superstitious you are.”
I’m sorry that you found me condescending. I don’t think that religious people as a group are systematically ignorant; I’m just explaining why I personally find the psychological explanations for belief in the extraordinary more compelling than believing in the extraordinary myself. It’s a hard line to walk, trying to explain my beliefs, but not offend people. Especially because I really do think that there is something fundamentally human about believing in the divine, but I place it with a number of other (inevitable) judgment errors. I’m probably digging a whole here, but I can only say what I think. And for the record, I don’t think religious people are ignorant. If they were, all it would take is mandatory psychology class and poof! No more religion. That’s clearly not the case, it’s a matter of personal belief.
I wish I had your experience with the lack of openly religious people, although I think I would be less insulted if someone called me stupid (it’s happened before and will happen again), than if I was discriminated against or told that I am immoral because of my beliefs. I do think there’s a certain trend these days to be contemptuous or poke fun at religion, but I think “you’re stupid, haha, just kidding” is a lot better than “I hate you, and we’re enemies.” Of course, this relates to an overarching point that I have: those people who hate atheists (or anyone based solely on a demographic characteristic) are jerks, and none of us, Christian or atheist or what-have-you, should like them.
I think interpersonally, though, we’d all be a lot better off if we left the religious talk where it belongs (like on Sarah’s blog 🙂 ). I personally don’t spend an awful lot of time talking about religion, except with people I know well. There’s just to much room for offending someone.
I wonder what would happen if you told the “religious people are stupid” faction that you disagree? I wonder whether they just assume you agree, and that you welcome these comments.
“I really do think that there is something fundamentally human about believing in the divine…”
I’ve always wondered about this. I suspect that if every parent on the planet refrained from mentioning or demonstrating their religious beliefs to their offspring, until their children had reached adulthood, religion would be effectively dead within two generations.
Well, ‘religion’ as we currently have it, at any rate: codified and regimented.
It certainly does seem to be fundamental to my perspective. I think that we would still have many of the universal moral beliefs like not harming people, respecting adults, charity, cooperation, empathy, etc. These seem to be things that most people, religious or not, teach their children (or are learned through culture at large). I think that you’re totally right that some of the regiments might be gone. Things like religious traditions have to be taught, which is the purpose of religious instruction for kids. It would be such an interesting social experiment.
It does seem, though, that many people would still feel that there was some force “out there” that had a hand in their lives or that their deceased loved ones were watching over them.
There’s a recent study, which I could try to dredge up, that shows that less religious people tend to be better educated and more intelligent, which is taken as evidence that atheists are more “evolved” than believers. This fits in, I think, with the idea of belief as somehow fundamental, but goes a step further and says that the next stage in human evolution might be getting rid of this belief. Personally, I don’t know that this conclusion is warranted (while I am not skeptical of natural selection, I am skeptical of using it to explain social behavior in humans, so this may be a bias on my part), but it is interesting, nonetheless. I think that people who are intelligent also are often more educated and are therefore trained to use logic more than emotion, which may explain this correlation, but that’s just my two cents.
Sorry for the digression; I have this bad habit of bringing up “this study that’s interesting and kind of related to what you’re saying.” It’s actually a really exciting time for me because social scientists are starting to pay a lot more attention to religion as a empirical phenomenon.
It’s a fascinating subject. I don’t go along with everything that Richard Dawkins argues about natural selection and human social behaviour, but there’s much that you can point to and say that evolution has formed our gregariousness, curiosity, ability to cooperate and plan jointly, etc. I’m no expert, but I don’t remember hearing about a human society that has no form of religion whatsoever, which suggests there’s something pretty hard-wired going on, but I think of it as internal to homo sapiens, rather than reflecting an external truth.
Don’t apologise for digression – it’s the joy of discussion!
Ugh. Don’t get me started on selfish genes, haha. I am careful with using evolutionary arguments for behaviors, because it’s hard to tell what’s genetic from what’s socialized. And all the research is correlational, and can be more about plausibility than actual evidence. Also, I don’t like the idea that evolution could give us an excuse not to change problematic behaviors or rise above limitations. My college anthropology professor used to say that human genetic evolution slowed down once cultures started, and that now our cultures evolve, and we stay the same. I don’t know that that’s completely true, but I think that the idea that groups or entire cultures adapt is entirely plausible 🙂 So, that’s a really long way of saying that I completely agree with you about the internal reasons for religion. I don’t know of any religion-free societies, either. There’s even some evidence that Neanderthals practiced some form of worship or at least honoring kin after death (i.e., they seem to have ceremonially buried their dead). So maybe even advanced hominids practice religion, not only homo sapiens, although some people consider humans and Neanderthals both sapiens, and not separate species. But anyway, I do think that we can say for sure that humans have to have other humans to survive. So, anything furthering that goal is adaptive, even if we can’t say for sure that it’s hard wired and not socialized. So, religion is adaptive, because one of the functions of religion seems to be tying people together. It seems like a useful cultural adaptation would be a belief system that conferred certainty about the world, a set of rules for behavior, and social identity. I think about it like tool use, to use a *rough* analogy: teaching your offspring religion is like teaching them to use/make a physical tool (like knifes, which also seem to be universal). Humans don’t have genes for knife-making or religion, even though both are either nearly or completely universal.
I love talking about this, BTW. Thanks for replying!