Atheist groups 'springing up all over'

Oakland Tribune

Sept. 29, 2006

by Rebecca Rosen Lum
Staff writer

When Richard Golden put the word out that he was starting a group for atheists in Walnut Creek, about a dozen people showed up.

Two years later, 80 are dues-paying members and several more drop in on twice-monthly meetings to chew on everything from particle physics to court cases.

Horrified by escalating religious violence and alarmed by the Bush administrations faith-based initiatives, which make government money available to religious organizations, atheists are coming out of the closet -- and organizing.

Local groups "are springing up all over the place," said Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheists. Active groups have grown by about 90 percent over the past six years, she said.

In the past few years, groups affiliated with American Atheists have taken root in Walnut Creek, Berkeley, San Francisco, Davis, and Silicon Valley. East Bay Atheists has grown to more than 300 members.

California membership in the Freedom From Religion Foundation, a group of atheists and agnostics that monitors the separation of church and state, increased from 900 to 1,200 in one year. Nationally, it grew from 5,000 in 2004 to 6,400 members by the beginning of 2006, said co-founder Annie Laurie Gaylor.

Meetings and rallies, once the province of older folk, now include younger people with tattoos and dreadlocks. The Internet, radio spots during Al Franken's Air America radio show and campus groups are responsible, Johnson said.

"They don't have the baggage that someone my age does," Johnson said. "Atheism was such a dirty word -- associated with communism. Plus, this is a very scientific era. They are not afraid to say what they think."

But atheism appears to be gaining ground as a belief, not just a wave of political activism by those who fear the wall between church and state is being disassembled."The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins appeared at No. 5 and No. 23 on the Amazon.com bestseller list Sept. 20.

"Our primary conviction is that there is only one world -- there is no supernatural world -- the world that is the subject of scientific investigation," he said. "We are focused, as the humanists are, on having our human potential increased in this world, rather than working everything out in the world to come."

Two UC Berkeley sociology professors found that the proportion of Americans with no religion doubled from 1990 to 1998, but has leveled out at 14 percent.

"We argue that . . . reflects a growing backlash against the role of organized religion," said Claude S. Fischer, one of the authors. "People on the political left have reacted against the organization of churches on the right. Their statement is a reaction: If that is what religion means, than I am not religious."

Studies suggest the surge in interest is more a wavelet than a tsunami. The Baylor University Institute Religion Survey, released Sept. 11, showed 10.8 percent of the nations population, or some 10 million Americans, do not adhere to some faith. The majority of the 1,721 respondents who were unaffiliated with a religion said they believe in some higher power.

On Oct. 6, many atheists will head to the Freedom From Religion Foundations convention in San Francisco to hear author Sam Harris ("The End of Faith") speak and to watch comic Julia Sweeney perform her solo opus "Letting Go of God."

The Foundation has brought 30 First Amendment lawsuits since 1977 and has more percolating through the courts. Among its victories: winning the first federal lawsuit challenging direct government funding of a faith-based agency.

Sept. 11, 2001 hammered home the dangers of religious fundamentalism for Larry Hicok of Berkeley, who describes the terror attack as an ultimate faith-based initiative.

Now he chairs East Bay Atheists, whose membership has been growing over the past five years.

One of the most recent developments to galvanize activists is the Public Expression of Religion Act, sponsored by U.S. Rep. John Hostettler, R-Ind.

The bill would deny attorneys fees and damages to those who successfully argue against violations of the church-state separation. The House Judiciary Committee passed on a party-line vote, Republicans for, Democrats opposed.

"There is no other time in American history where the wall between church and state was in such danger," Gaylor said. "We could be taking a faith-based case every day if we had the resources. This is the time to come out swinging."

DEBATING VALUE OF RELIGIOUS FAITH GROWS CONTENTIOUS

Contra Costa Times

May 26, 2007

By Rebecca Rosen Lum

Times staff writer

The tipoff came before the debate between authors Christopher Hitchens and Chris Hedges started: The emcee asked the Berkeley audience to restrain from heckling.

She forgot to address that comment to Hitchens, who ran away with the evening and bolted off the stage before the event officially ended.

Invited to square off over the value of religious faith, there was plenty that separated the men, even though both are best-selling authors of books about the damaging influences of organized religion.

Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and Hedges' American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America rank among a phalanx of books with sights trained on institutionalized faith.

A longtime foreign correspondent for the New York Times, Hedges, 50, won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for team coverage of global terrorism. He also won the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He holds a master's degree in divinity from Harvard University.

The iconoclastic Hitchens, 58, has written for Vanity Fair, Slate and Free Inquiry. He abandoned his post at the Nation after a falling-out with other editors over his support for the war in Iraq. Oxford-educated, Hitchens has authored several books, including The Trial of Henry Kissinger and Why Orwell Matters.

Dressed in leather jacket and jeans, Hedges somehow appeared pressed and mannerly before a packed audience at King Middle School in Berkeley. Hitchens managed to look rumpled even in his boxy leisure suit.

After tearing off a 15-minute rant that trashed Islam, Christianity, and Judaism -- with asides to the "mush-headed" spirituality that blooms in Berkeley -- Hitchens offered his audience a challenge. He asked if anyone could name a moral stand taken by a religious person that couldn't be equaled by a person who does not believe in the existence of God.

"The whole extraordinary galaxy was created with us in mind?" he told a laughing, clapping audience. Ah yes: "The 'me' galaxy."

Religion comes "from the stupid infancy of our species," before people knew the world was round, he said.

He detailed a history of carnage, cruelty, and callousness leading to the present day, in which the Pope declares condoms more dangerous than AIDS and where, in Iran, "parties of God are set on wreckage."

But by oversimplifying faith, Hitchens himself has become a sort of fundamentalist, Hedges said.

"He sees only the chauvinistic, the bigoted and intolerant brand," he said. "It's a cheap way to avoid exploring the wide range of religious belief."

In fact, monotheistic faith created the concept of the individual, Hedges argued. With it, people acquired the freedom to develop and act upon individual conscience, the ability "to resist the clamor of the tribe."

God is not a noun but a verb, a commitment to transcendence, he said.

"Faith is what we do," he said. "Faith is the sister of justice. The danger is not in Christianity, Islam, or Judaism, but the human heart -- the capacity we all have for evil."

Hedges said repeatedly that he shares Hitchens' disdain for fundamentalism.

But the polite and civil Hedges was no match for Hitchens, who bit off the ends of Hedges' sentences to register indignation ("It's not an interruption; it's a comment") and volleyed questions from the emcee by pontificating on other points.

The rowdy audience with an obvious appetite for an intellectual feast alternately roared, applauded, booed, and cheered each thrust and parry.

The room reached its boiling point when Hedges explained suicide bombers as people whose despair has driven them to desperate acts.

In the occupied territories in 1988, he found a "strangled" people, 1.1 million "living in what can only be described as a prison," he said, "living ten to a room, no possibility of work."

"You're rationalizing murder," Hitchens cried. "You're rationalizing murder. Shame on you."

Seeking to understand the motivations of suicide bombers represents "a new fashion among the half-baked," he said.

By the time the emcee took questions from the audience, one man accepted Hitchens' challenge. He mentioned a spiritual leader who "ministered" to the Ku Klux Klan out of love.

"It's a start," Hitchens said gallantly, before suddenly souring. Better than loving them, the religious leader should have sued them, and pushed them into economic ruin.

"Love your own enemies, don't love mine," he roared.

Hitchens drew brickbats from the crowd by defending the United States' incursion into Iraq as a mission to bring democracy to that devastated country.

"Though you sneer and jeer at them -- and you have to live with the shame of that -- these people are guarding you as you sleep," he said.

"I feel like I'm reading Rudyard Kipling's' 'The Burden of the White Man,'" Hedges quipped.

"You mean you wish you'd read it," Hitchens shot back.

The real danger, Hedges said, is the conviction of people who feel they have the "absolute truth."

"The search for the truth, the examined life, requires humility," he said.

Hitchens unleashed a final firebomb, and Hedges quietly passed on closing remarks. By then, Hitchens had darted off the stage, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

--Rebecca Rosen Lum covers religion. Reach her at 925-977-8506 or rrosenlum@cctimes.com.