Fred Sneesby - Observations on Culture, Faith and Politics

What Do Atheists and Agnostics Believe In?

March 3, 2007

How many agnostics does it take to screw in a light bulb?
I don’t know, how many agnostics does it take?
I don’t know.

Get it? Hey, what do you want? It’s not as if there’s a “100 Best Agnostic Jokes” around for reference. Which is not to say that agnostics aren’t funny or don’t have a sense of humor. Religious people usually have the best senses of humor, but it is possible for agnostics to have one too, although I don’t know for sure. (Get it?!). It’s all about perspective and critical distance with humor. People with religious faith have it; agnostics can have it.

Atheists, on the other hand, are fairly humorless. Maybe I’m being a little too hard on them, and I must say that I haven’t known a great many atheists, but they strike me as dreary and heavy-handed.

The atheists and agnostics have banded together, though, in a lawsuit that has found its way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The “Freedom From Religion Foundation”, based in the “Eat Cheese or Die” State of Wisconsin is challenging the Bush Administration’s acknowledgment of Faith-Based Initiatives as possible recipients of grants – mostly for social services (think of drug treatment programs that are based in religion). They claim, of course, that it violates the separation of church and state envisioned by the Bill of Rights.

As I think about this lawsuit and this group, I find myself distracted by thoughts of their meetings. They must be short. They don’t begin with a prayer, that’s for sure. The atheists must bully the agnostics because the atheists seem very sure of themselves and very sure that everyone else has to cater to their particular world-view. The agnostics are, well, unsure. I don’t imagine that they reach any shared conclusions. The atheists have little time for rival conclusions and the agnostics feel entirely comfortable with no conclusions. Whatever time they may spend in discussion must be given to fuming about finding religious people’s beliefs out there in the public forum. Part of their group looks down on religious people for believing in things that don’t exist and the rest resent the certitude religious people have about the unknowable.

But what do they believe in? What do atheists and agnostics believe in? Agnostically speaking, I can’t say for sure because they don’t really let on. It seems they believe that only beliefs that can be labeled “religious” do not belong in the public forum. These particular beliefs cannot be taught in government schools, they cannot be the basis for law or public policy, and they cannot be too widely heralded as motivation for civic action. They also believe that their own beliefs, because they are “non-religious,” are qualitatively different from religious beliefs.

I would contend that, when it comes to the public forum, that is not true. In the worlds of politics and policy and law, beliefs are beliefs, whether or not they can be categorized as “religious.” Religious people are more out in the open about having beliefs and so their presence and influence can be more easily detected than the beliefs of atheists and agnostics and other closet believers. But it would be foolish to think that, having removed religion from public life, we would be living in a world unswayed by beliefs.

It’s common sense to say that the government should not be promoting a particular religion and that any faith should have standing in our country. It’s another thing to systematically push out religions from the public arena and then claim that we are in a “belief-neutral zone.” The fact is that the beliefs of the atheists and agnostics now reign in the village commons of the country and that everyone else is forced to live by those beliefs.

The missing civic virtue is tolerance, a virtue in short supply at the meetings of the “Freedom From Religion Foundation,” a group that should instead be called the “Freedom From Religion Except Our Religion Which Cannot be Labeled a Religion and Therefore Can Foist Its Values On Everyone Else Under the Guise of Separation of Church and State Foundation.”

Tolerance respects every person’s convictions and the freedom to express them and live by them. This is not to say that one cannot disagree and argue, even vehemently, against another’s view. In the end, though, let each person live by his or her conscience. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the religious person to do that in this country.