Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists

by Dan Barker

Yet even so, the tendency to “obey the parent” and “find comfort in the mother or the father” lingers on, and the length of time it lingers varies from person to person.

Combine this longing for a dependent and sheltered childhood with both the tendency to detect agency in nature and the evolutionary advantage of variation, and you can see how the human mind would possess a variable tendency to naturally “reach out” to an external father or mother figure.

God belief is a kind of delayed development. Again, there will be a variation in intensity of these tendencies among humans, as some will be more religious than others. But combine the tendency with cultural and social pressure and it is not difficult to see how belief is embraced and coddled.

We now have a frontal lobe in the brain that stops us, that checks our instincts. Using judgment, we can stem racism, sexism and violence. Using reason, we can rise above religion.

Atheism has no creeds, rituals, holy book, absolute moral code, origin myth, sacred spaces or shrines. It has no sin, divine judgment, forbidden words, prayer, worship, prophecy, group privileges or anointed “holy” leaders. Atheists don’t believe in a transcendent world or supernatural afterlife. Most important, there is no orthodoxy in atheism.

Canadian physician Dr. Marian Sherman, a prominent atheist from Victoria, B.C., in an article titled “What Makes an Atheist Tick?” in the September 11, 1965, issue of the Toronto Star Weekly, is quoted as saying: “Humanism seeks the fullest development of the human being... Humanists acknowledge no Supreme Being and we approach all life from the point of view of science and reason. Ours is not a coldly clinical view, for we believe that if human beings will but practice love of one another and use their wonderful faculty of speech, we can make a better world, happy for all. But there must be no dogma.”

In this ongoing effort to make our planet a better place—to have true peace on earth—we atheists and humanists are happy to work shoulder-to-shoulder with the truly good religious people who also strive for a future with less violence and more understanding.

Selected Bibliography

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Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006.

Edis, Taner. The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science. New York: Prometheus, 2002.

Flynn, Tom, ed. The New Encyclopedia of Unbelief. New York: Prometheus Books, 2007.

Hitchens, Christopher. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Twelve, 2007.

Hitchens, Christopher, ed. The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. Philadelphia: Da Capo, 2007.

Harris, Sam. The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.

Kick, Russ, ed. Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion. New York: The Disinformation Company, 2007.

Martin, Michael. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Mills, David. Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person’s Answer to Christian Fundamentalism. Berkeley: Ulysses Press, 2006

Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason. Citadel Press, 1794. First published in 1794.

Paulos, John Allen. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don’t Add Up. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008.

Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Random House, 1995.

Sagan, Carl. The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. Edited by Ann Druyan. New York: Penguin Press, 2006.

Stenger, Victor J. God: The Failed Hypothesis; How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. New York: Prometheus Books, 2008.

Weinberg, Steven. Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.

Avalos, Hector. The End of Biblical Studies. New York: Prometheus Books, 2007.

Avalos, Hector. Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence. New York: Prometheus Books, 2005.