Religion for Atheists

Davidson Loehr

October 22, 2000

Listen to the sermon by clicking the play button.

This is an old sermon that seems more relevant each year. It is not a defense of atheism; I think “atheism” only makes sense at the level of fundamentalism. The “God” atheists don’t believe in is one only a fundamentalist would care to defend (and not many of them, at that). It’s a deeper question arising here, the question of whether there is something built in us as humans that is deeply and irreducibly religious–older than the gods–or whether “religion” is just a bag of beliefs picked up at a church. If we are profoundly religious people, there’s hope for our dreams of peace and justice. Otherwise, I’m not as sure. Still, I think the real religion of atheists–assuming that I have it right–may surprise you.

STORY: “The Raft”

The Buddha said, “A man walking along a highroad sees a great river, its near bank dangerous and frightening, its far bank safe. He collects sticks and foliage, makes a raft, paddles across the river, and safely reaches the other shore. Now suppose that, after he reaches the other shore, he takes the raft and puts it on his head and walks with it on his head wherever he goes because of the important role that raft once played in his life. Would he be using the raft in an appropriate way? No; a reasonable man will realize that the raft has been very useful to him in crossing the river and arriving safely on the other shore, but that once he has arrived, it is proper to leave the raft behind and walk on without it. This is using the raft appropriately.

“In the same way, all truths should be used to cross over; they should not be held on to once you have arrived. You should let go of even the most profound insight or the most wholesome teaching; all the more so, unwholesome teachings.” (Stephen Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus, pp. 135-6.)

SERMON: Religion for Atheists

No matter how intelligent or sophisticated we think we are, it has always been the case that good stories teach us better than a slew of philosophical footnotes. And the more important an insight is, the more likely we have learned it from a story.

During my very first year of graduate studies in religion over twenty years ago, I had an experience that came wrapped in such a story. It came at the end of a course on constructing worship services that was taught for both University of Chicago Divinity School students and students from Meadville-Lombard, the small Unitarian seminary a few blocks away. The Divinity School students were all getting ministry degrees rather than academic degrees, and preparing for some brand of Christian ministry. Meadville’s students were also getting ministry degrees and preparing for the Unitarian ministry. Since I was a Divinity School student getting a Ph.D. rather than a ministry degree, and preparing for the Unitarian ministry, I usually found myself between or outside both those camps.

Our teacher was a gifted pastor and preacher, with a remarkable ability to bring others to a quick and powerful appreciation for what religion is really about. For our final assignment, he told us to plan and conduct a worship service together. Then he left us to our task, eavesdropping from the other side of the large room as we proceeded to make fools of ourselves.

The fights were about language, and they began when the Christians wanted to put in an intercessory prayer to Christ. Whereupon the Unitarians threw a fit, insisting that this “Christ” character wasn’t a part of their religion, and wasn’t welcome as a part of this joint worship service, either.

The Christians put up some struggle, but did agree that for this particular service they could leave Christ out. After all, one of them said, the purpose of Christ was really to point to God, anyway.

Whereupon some of the Unitarians again complained. “Let’s not call it God,” said one woman. “That’s so archaic and patriarchal and all. Couldn’t we just call it “the sacred”?

This time, the Christians fought quite a bit longer and harder. Some said that a worship service that left out God was a contradiction in terms. After all, this was to be a worship service, not a discussion group. But the Unitarians dug in too, and after one woman suggested that we might bring God in as long as we also had a prayer to the Goddess, the Christians relented, and agreed that in this increasingly strange service we were planning, there would be neither Christ nor God. One of them, trying to lighten things up a bit, quipped that we had just wiped out two-thirds of the Trinity. “At least,” she said hopefully, “we’ve still got the Holy Spirit.”

Whereupon – yes, one of the Unitarians objected to that word “Holy.” “It sounds so pre-modern,” he said. “Why don’t we just call it “The Spirit,” or maybe “Spirit of Life”?

This time, however, the Christians would not give in. One shouted something about flaky New Age Unitarians who were frightened of anything remotely religious. Another wondered why the Unitarians were even bothering to go into the ministry, rather than just joining a book club somewhere. And one passive-aggressive woman sweetly suggested that we all needed psychological help.

The Unitarians, for their part, tried to say that they liked the idea of having the “spirit” in the service in some way, they just didn’t want to call it “Holy.” This time, the Christians would not yield.

Finally, when the harangue had reached a completely embarrassing level, the professor, who had been listening in from across the large room, made his dramatic entrance. He got up slowly, walked toward us very deliberately, sat on the corner of a table in the middle of our space, gave us that “Father-is-displeased” look, and said sternly “What is your problem?”

Immediately, we all began acting like six-year-olds trying to shift the blame, pointing to the other side and complaining about their unfair demands.

He glared at us: “And the only thing you have been able to agree on is that you would like the Spirit to be a part of your worship service?”

Yes, we all stammered: “But we don’t know what to call it.”

Still the stern father, he shot us a punishing glance and said three words: “Call it forth!”

“Call it forth.” Unless you can call forth the quality of spirit that is rightfully called holy, you don’t have a chance of staging a worship service anyway.

For me, that story is about the very soul of religion, and the core of what it means to be a human being. For all of human history, we have tried to call forth more in life: deeper and more enduring meanings, causes and ideals to serve that can survive us, and grant us a feeling of immortality. We have tried to “call forth” a larger and more encompassing context for our lives, and to claim that we are intrinsic parts of this larger reality. We’ve always done this.

We have discovered Neanderthal burial sites in China, for example, from 100,000 to 200,000 years ago, in which the dead were buried in fetal positions, in womb-shaped graves, facing east, toward the direction of the rising sun. It looks like they were trying to call forth the invisible powers of the sun and the earth to give their dead people a kind of rebirth. So some of the oldest evidence of human activity we have found shows these early two-legged animals treating the ground as Mother Earth, and burying their people in styles and positions suggesting that they believed they were parts of a benevolent cosmic whole that might, somehow and somewhere, let them be “born again.”

More than thirty thousand years ago, primitive hunters painted hundreds of pictures on the walls of an underground cave at Lascaux, France. This cavern system was used for nearly fifteen thousand years, and has been called the world’s largest and oldest religious shrine. The pictures still exist, and were only rediscovered during this past century. They show the animals that tribe hunted, but among those ancient colored drawings was the drawing of one of their shamans. In hunting cultures, a shaman was a highly intuitive man who had a kind of sixth sense about successfully hunting the animals on which they relied for food. The picture of this shaman showed him to be composed of the parts of a dozen different game animals. Here was one of our most ancient efforts to claim a transcendent kind of relationship with the other animals on earth. Here were our ancestors, trying to call forth those unpronounceable spirits that seemed to guide both themselves and the animals they hunted for food.

Also around thirty thousand years ago or more, others among our ancestors made a lot of small “Venus” statues that our modern archaeologists have unearthed. They were small stylized figures of women without heads or arms, but with large breasts and hips. We’re not sure how they used these symbolic figures — though one woman scholar told me a dozen years ago that we are sure than men controlled both the societies and the symbols then, because only men would reduce the visualization of women to faceless, armless breeders! But the statues imply that they had already identified human females as possessing the same kind of generative powers they found throughout their world. Here were our earliest statues showing that some more of our ancestors had conceived of “Mother Earth.” And to do this, they had to assume that they were somehow part of a cosmic style of communication that included not only animals, but even the plant kingdom — indeed, all the creative life forces on earth.

And the human animal hasn’t changed much since then. Back in 1972-3, we sent the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 rockets up, the first spacecraft intended to go beyond our solar system, our first such attempt to communicate with whatever other intelligent life there might be in this corner of the universe. And on these spacecraft, we included small gold plaques with crude drawings of a human male and female. The male has his right hand raised in what we must assume all life in the universe might recognize as a peaceful gesture. We still assume that we are, somehow, small parts of a great and wondrous reality that beggars our imaginations, and yet with which we can somehow, intuitively, communicate.

We have called these unseen dimensions of life by many names, and depicted them in many ways. But always, those who were the most religiously musical or imaginative have tried to call them forth, to make the greater context of our lives visible and memorable.

We have created gods in human form or in animal form, and invented a thousand rituals — from lighting a fire to reciting the same words in the same ways to begin and end ceremonies. It may look like we are worshiping those gods, whether drawn as an ancient shaman made of animal parts or created in our own image, like the gods of the Greeks, Jews, and Hindus. But we are not necessarily worshiping those gods or enslaved by the rituals. Instead, the gods are among the vehicles we have created along the way to carry this great burden of ours.

That “great burden” is the unending quest that lies at the heart of religion. In our society, where fundamentalists have taught most of us our basic understanding of religion (even atheists are atheists in a game invented by fundamentalists), we’re used to hearing this quest called the longing for salvation. But even the two words “religion” and “salvation” give the game away. “Religion” comes from a Latin word meaning “reconnection,” as though we were once connected but have somehow come loose. And “salvation” comes from the same Latin root as the word “salve”: it means to make healthy, to make whole. That is the quest that has defined our magnificently flawed species since before we could even formulate the question: how to get reconnected to a larger kind of reality than our daily lives usually show us.

And we come to churches, including this church, still hoping that somehow something might happen this Sunday to help us find the path between who we are and all that we are meant to be. We come hoping that greater set of possibilities and connections might somehow be called forth.

Unfortunately, we also have an equally deep and ancient flaw. And that flaw is our inability to tell the difference between the sacred quest, and the temporary vehicles we have used in pursuit of it. The quest, the continual human search for greater connections or enlightenment, is sacred. The vehicles are not. Yet we generally exalt the vehicles — and forget the search. Religious wars are the most violent and comic examples of this. We kill one another in the name of our peculiar gods, the same gods whose primary purpose is to help us see that we are all brothers and sisters.

We worship the doorways rather than going through them. Symbols and metaphors seem to confuse us completely, and we are forever mixing up dreams and reality, imagination and fact. In some ways, we are a terribly primitive and unformed species.

When you look at human history, from the caves in Lascaux, France to the Greek gods and goddesses, one of the loudest lessons we learn is that eventually all gods die, all religions pass into other religions, or pass away. Finally, all the vehicles fail, and we are left to go on alone — sometimes, comically, still carrying the dead vehicles on our backs, like lucky charms, or for old times’ sake. Then the spirit has gone out of the religion, and what’s left is little more than a potentially dangerous social club.

Maybe we shouldn’t call it the “spirit.” We tend to be such literalists that we might try to imagine some kind of a ghost, or a cosmic consciousness sort of hovering about, and that isn’t what it is about at all.

So I’ll put it a different way. The ancient Chinese sage Lao-Tzu spoke of “the Way,” which is usually called the Tao, as in the religion of “Taoism.” But he was writing about this same deep quest, this same journey, that has identified the religious dimensions of humans since the beginning. This “Way” is the way of living that we’ve always sought, a way of living that reconnects us with that Spirit, makes us whole, makes us one with the way things really are. Here is how Lao-Tzu put it 2500 years ago:

The Way is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.

Lao-Tzu might have added that it gave birth to God, or that it created all the gods as temporary vehicles to carry us on our searches for this Way. But it is that Way of living and being that we have always been trying to call forth, through all the religious and poetic and ritual languages humans have known. And the way you can tell when someone has found that Way, or is nearing it, is through the quality of their character. Martin Luther King Jr. used to say he dreamed of the time when we would all be known by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin. The content of our character is the clearest measure of whether or not someone has found the Way, or is still lost. And there is something terribly deep within all human beings that knows this instinctively.

A few years ago, people the world over were willing to overlook Princess Diana’s adultery and other nude chicanery, because of her many humanitarian activities on behalf of the poor and disadvantaged. People saw her as a vehicle for a sacred kind of concern for others. And they were willing to accept imperfections in the vehicle because it was a vehicle that seemed to have found the Way.

Mother Teresa was recognized by many as a saint, and it had nothing to do with her religion, only with her actions. Gandhi the Hindu was revered by Christians, Jews, Muslims and others all over the world because there was something sacred about him, too. He had “found it,” and we recognized it. He had found that reconnection, that wholeness, that “Way,” that we all recognize as the most sacred of all human quests. Tibetan Buddhism’s Dali Lama is likewise recognized by people of all faiths as one who has that special dimension, one who has called forth that elusive Spirit, found the Way.

This isn’t limited to religious figures. Muhammad Ali is still revered all over the world, and only partly because of his once-great gifts as a boxer. He’s more revered for his great gifts of integrity and moral courage, because those show us that he too had found the Way. How we adore and chase after those who seem to have found it! And we all know that the secret of Mother Teresa’s character, or Gandhi’s, the Dali Lama’s or Muhammad Ali’s had nothing to do with their official religions of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism or Islam. The secret of their character came from a place far deeper. It came from that place in us that preceded the gods, that identified us before any of the world’s religions were ever born. That’s why people all over the world can so easily recognize people who have found that Way, whose lives have that deep spiritual dimension, regardless of their religion: because what all religions are after is something older than religion itself: older than God, as Lao-tzu put it. And what we are after is that same quality of spirit, wherever it is found.

But do you see what has happened here? There is a rich irony here, an irony worth trying to put into words. It means that within us, within each of us and all of us, are the yearnings that gave birth to the gods. And salvation, or wholeness, or finding what Lao-tzu called the Way, happens only when we are reconnected with that level of ourselves, responding to that level in others, anchored in that level of life itself. All salvation, in other words, is salvation by character. And we know it instinctively. We admire Muhammad Ali and are repulsed by Mike Tyson because the first had a quality of character that the second did not. We neither know nor care what Princess Diana believed, because that deeper quality of character showed so brightly in her crusades against land mines and for the disadvantaged.

Some of you may have heard about, or seen televised clips from, Mike Tyson’s fight with Andrew Golota Friday night (20 October 2000). Golota was taking a beating, and after the second round he simply refused to fight any more, and left the ring — still guaranteed the three million dollars or more he received for the fight. What was most interesting about the sportscasters’ comments afterwards is that they never mentioned his boxing — only his character.

If you doubt that we know what is and is not sacred about people, go to funerals or memorial services. Imagine a eulogy saying the best thing about this person was that they faithfully recited all of their religion’s prescribed creeds. What a thunderously damning eulogy that would be! No, if we are to speak highly and warmly and honestly of people, we must speak of the quality and content of their character. They cared, they tried to serve noble ideals. They tried to be constructive parts of a world not made in their image. They showed moral courage when it counted, and so they were a blessing to the world as they passed through it. That is where salvation dwells, and we all know it. People may pass through the doors offered by their particular religions or philosophies to find that deeper level of life. But the doors are not holy, only the passage through them.

When we reach the foundations of the religious quest, we find, like Lao-tzu did twenty five centuries ago, that we are standing in a place older than the gods, older than religion. We are standing in that place from which we came, and to which we have sought a reconnection all of our lives and for all of our history.

Then we aren’t asking questions about orthodoxy. We’re asking much simpler and more eternal questions. We are asking “Who am I, and who am I called to be? What do I owe to others, even to strangers? What do I owe to my species, and to history? Where is the path I can travel to fulfill these questions? Where is the Way that can make me whole again, by reconnecting me with all others who live, all who have ever lived, and all life that ever was or ever will be? How can I live in proud and noble ways, rather than selfish ones? How can I live my life under the gaze of eternity and still hold my head up high?” Now we are looking for the Way, and calling forth the Spirit called “Holy.”

How this changes everything!

Now when we ask where the sacred dimension of life, the Spirit, the Way, is to be made manifest, the answer comes back “Perhaps here.”

Now when we ask when this sacred dimension of life is to be called forth, the answer comes back “Perhaps now.”

When we ask whose task is it to call forth this saving spirit that can make us feel more whole, the answer comes back “Perhaps it is our task.”

When we look around our world with a thousand different religions and cultures, and ask how on earth we are to accomplish such a sacred and eternal task here and now, the answer comes back “Perhaps together.”

One of the greatest ironies in all of human history is the fact that when we arrive at the very foundation of all our religious questions, we have moved beyond religion, to a place older than the gods. It is the religion of salvation by character and wholeness. It is the religion of atheists — and, ironically, it is the deepest religion of everyone else, too.