Spiritual care for the hurting or seeking atheist

Atheist stickers. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Please.

Just please.

I am not going to advocate proselyting to atheists. Nor am I going to  attack, insult, belittle, or cast blanket aspersions against people who identify as atheist. I have a great deal in common with and much sympathy for those who do not profess a belief in God. I have commented before on the decline of manners and increased intellectual lassitude or ineptitude among some minority of people identifying as atheists on message forums and blogs. The ones who at times turn to the same over-generalizing, trivializing of others, lazy or dishonest quote mining, and other tactics often employed by hard-core proselytizing  religious fundamentalists.

What is the point of behaving like the very religious people who love to mock and ridicule the philosophy, ideas, and lives of atheists?, I wondered. I asked if this was a real trend and if so what might be behind it.

Some people like to use terms such as "atheist fundamentalist" or "new atheist" to loosely refer to such people. For reasons that should become clear, I think a more apt term is shallow atheist.

Now I've lectured on deviance and one of those lectures was on atheism, and we came to a sympathetic understanding of why those who feel stigmatized and persecuted might try to neutralize this feeling by reversing it. By over-generalizing about, demeaning, and belittling religion and religious people. By questioning their morals, their certainty, and even their sanity in order to establish the atheists' own. No, WE are the decent people. The ones who have logic and knowledge and facts on our side. We are the ones who are free of delusion.

Now, sometimes this is because someone is still shaking from having left a form of fundamentalist religion or is constantly being harassed because they live in a community that doesn't trust or tolerate those of a different or of no religion. That doesn't justify bad behavior, but it can explain a good bit of it.

But what about those who never continue to heal and get stuck in the mentality that all religion is the same and its all one very narrow thing? Who never move on and instead continue to need to feel better about themselves through crude and offensive slights and put-downs of anything remotely associated in their minds with religion?

Or those who may or may not have never really felt persecuted (even if they may have felt slightly awkward on occasion) over their atheism and who see it as a hip, misunderstood social identity for smart people and iconoclasts? The ones who are too cool in their own minds to ever have anything to do with those backward and outdated fools who are remotely connected to whatever might be associated with religion or spirituality?

No, not everyone knows God is real

Creation of the Sun and Moon by Michelangelo, face detail of God. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is more or less a dogma among some people that deep down everyone knows God is real. Aside from the question of what role that would leave for faith (which cannot exist without doubt--some people confuse faith with certainty), another question is what is means to know that God is real.

This is trickier than it sounds for skeptics and believers alike. Belief has several important shades of meaning, depth, and conviction. Is belief assent or agreement with an intellectual proposition such as "Korea is currently divided into two nation states and is located on a peninsula south of China" or is it an opinion such as "Rat terriers are the best dog breed"? Is it an intuition or a choice?

And upon what is a particular belief grounded? Is it an assumption you picked up as habitus because the people around you seemed to think and act like it was true? Has it been confirmed by your own experiences, and how do you know your perceptions and conclusions surrounding your experiences weren't biased by your pre-existing beliefs or those of the people you've encountered in your life?

This is especially tricky when it comes to belief in God because of differing perceptions on the nature of God and how God interacts with people. If God is within then is that warm glow you feel in your chest a sign? If God is without, then was your prayer answered when you asked for something and it happened? Or was that just a coincidence? And on it goes.

Then there are categories of connections to the divine such as peak experiences and a sense of the numinous. These can include the sensation or perception of non-dual unity with the universe, possession by absolute acceptance and bliss,  an overwhelming sense of wonder and awe generating a sense of connection to a larger mystery. And while they don't have to be interpreted as incontrovertible proof of a higher power, arguably these events are less ambiguous than other experiences that are taken to be signs of God.

Still, there are those who have no convincing sensations, serendipitous occurrences, or extraordinary shifts in conscious awareness. They have no felt sense of the presence of God and no intuition of an overarching purpose to either the universe or their own lives. And regardless of whether the personal testimonies of others or intellectual arguments about the reality of God sound convincing, there is nothing of substance upon which they can sincerely claim to know that God is real.

Let's explore some common themes that arise when expressing such lack of knowledge of God's reality.