Universalist Unitarian Church Santa Paula, California

In Defense of Atheism & Prayer
by Reverend John Alexie Crane

For the first thirty years of my life, the word “God”was almost a complete blank to me, was empty, opaque. In theological school it was my duty to study the idea, and I found the more I learned the angrier it made me. I was an active, practicing, militant atheist, all through the period of my professional education, and was delighted to find I could run rational circles around all believers, even terrorize some of them.

Still, I continued to study the matter off and on, in order to arrive at some understanding of it, as I frequently came into contact with it in the course of my daily work. Then, one rainy day a few years later, it all fell into place, and I saw, I understood, it made sense. I have felt considerable affection for the idea ever since. As a result, I am an atheist who loves God.

I don't use the word God in church very often. This is because I know many people don't feel at home with it. That's all right. I understand. Indeed, the word really isn't of much use for public communication. It is muddy in its import, vague, indefinite, contains complex and conflicting meanings. While I think I understand the idea within myself, it's hard to communicate that to others in the clutter of conflicting conceptions that swirl around the word. They keep getting in the way.

II The Meaning of Religion
The words God and religion are complicated. On one hand, our historical experience of religion in the Western world leads most of our people to think that religion is inseparably connected with churches, the Bible, Christ, and God. On the other hand, almost everybody is also aware that religion is by no means exclusively confined to churches, that actually it is a wider phenomenon than its local historical expression.

As I understand the idea, religion is a basic life-orientation and an object (or objects) of devotion, with some ultimate value, goal, or concern, which is its god. When understood in this way, it is apparent to me that everybody has a religion and a god, though they may reject both words as disgusting. All atheists serve one god or another. It's just that they do not believe in the God of their people, in the prevailing conception of God.

To take what I suppose is an improbable example, atheistic Communism was for well over a hundred years a dynamic religion, and served a god of its own choosing. Communism was a fundamental life-orientation offering objects of devotion and an object of ultimate loyalty, ultimate concern. It provided a meaning and direction for the lives of millions of its believers. A life-orientation.

Communism is a religion, and Marx and Lenin were its prophets. The works of Marx and Engels along with those of some less prominent commentators were the sacred scriptures of the religion. The dialectical process in history was the god that the adherents of this religion served. That is, they saw the inevitable trend in history of the growth, decline, decay, collapse of capitalism, then the rise of socialism and its evolution into Communism. This was the dialectical process they served.

All good Communists devoutly served this line of historical development. This ultimate concern, this god. The religion also had its saints and martyrs, had its own heaven indeed, that is, the classless society, which was seen as the ultimate and inevitable goal of the historical developments through which the world was passing. Devout Communists served this god faithfully.

It is true that the conventional understanding of religion sees it as something like belief in a divine power, who is to be obeyed and worshiped as the creator and ruler of the universe. But that, I believe, looks only at the surface of the phenomenon.

At bottom, it is a basic orientation toward life and an object of devotion, of commitment, a pattern of beliefs and loyalties and ideas that give form to the life of an individual or of a people. I did not invent this understanding of religion. A substantial number of competent thinkers have also understood it in this way.

In this sense it seems to me manifestly clear that Communism was a religion, even though it never did appeal to me as such. It was for me much too dogmatic and evangelical. Too rigid and tyrannical. But for many years it clearly meant a great deal to the Russians among millions of others. It gave some meaning and direction to their lives, and I have no doubt that the bulk of their people had considerable commitment to it until recent years.

Religion is the attempt our species has made from the beginning to come to grips with life. Religion reflects our effort to organize in our minds what life means to us, what we mean to life. In the various religions our species has developed we have sought to pull together all the fragments of experience we contain, draw them together, give them focus, shape and form.

We have tried to bring together all our knowledge, our intuitions, our thoughts and feelings and shape them into a full and meaningful image of ourselves, set down in the world. In effect we relate all that we are to all that there is, was, and will be. We try to feel out our relationship to other people, to ourselves, to the world, to eternity. We try to decide what really matters in this life.

So it has seemed to me that religion is best understood as our basic approach to life, compounded out of thought and feeling and attitude and value, which merge into a unity within us, becoming the source then of what we do and think and say. The inner source of our outer deeds and decisions. Religion is concerned with the complex inter-relationship between a person's whole being and his or her whole experience of existence.

The god of a people or a person is what they see as being of ultimate importance in their existence, whatever that may be. I think it's clear that for many people in our society (and many others) social status, money, wealth are regarded as of ultimate importance. Many of them so regard safety and security, it seems likely. For a goodly number of others it is power and recognition that matter most. For some it is love and truth.

Whatever people commit their energies and attention to above all, what they see as being of ultimate importance in their lives, this is their god. This is what gives meaning and direction to their existence.

It was something like this that I had in mind when I confessed that I wan an atheist who loved God.

There was an idea prevalent among the ancient Hebrews, during the period when the New Testament was written, that God would soon send an emissary down to earth to put things in order: to establish justice, to uplift the downtrodden, to smite the persecutors and war lords, and establish peace and harmony among the people of the world. This was called the kingdom of God. Some of Jesus' followers thought that he might well be God's emissary, sent to establish this kingdom.

One day an opponent of Jesus, in an effort to make him look foolish before a crowd, asked Jesus to predict when it was that the kingdom of God would be established on earth. Jesus answered profoundly, provocatively, that the kingdom won't be ushered in with any visible signs: "You won't be able to say, 'it has begun here in this place or there in that part of the country.' For the kingdom of God is within you."

III About Piety
I have a confession to make. I'm not very pious. I haven't ever, even as a child, been able to see much value in prayers like The Lord's Prayer, nor in praying of that kind. There is some value in such prayer, but I just do not have much enthusiasm for it.

I understand that the Lord's Prayer is familiar, is traditional, has pleasant associations, has the flavor of piety about it, that repetition may have some beneficial effects; but that kind of praying does not seem to me to be the kind that matters most.

I feel I'm in good company on this point. Jesus himself, it is clear, held similar convictions. He is quoted in the New Testament as explicity, plainly telling people that when they pray they shouldn't just use vain repetitions. He said, for heaven's sake, "don't recite the same prayer over and over as the heathen do, who think prayers are answered only by repeating them again and again."

That's how it has appeared to me. That is, it appears to me that much that poses as praying is hardly worth trifling with, but that there is a kind that is very valuable indeed.

IV Human Shortcomings
I have still another confession to make. I am somewhat shiftless, irresolute. I don't think I'm peculiar in this regard. I think you are too, that it is a characteristic of the human species.

You will have noticed this in yourselves, I am sure. We decide one day that we will set out on one constructive course or another, be determined to do that. In a moment of insight we see the importance of a course of action, and make a solemn resolution that we will set forth tomorrow and do it.

We're determined. But then the next day we get up, and we find ourselves preoccupied with another whole range of problems and possibilities, of pressures and purposes. We lose sight of what we were determined to do, let it drift away.

There is no doubt about it: human beings have a terrible tendency to shiftlessness. We drift away from our aims and intentions, our ambitions and determinations. We lose sight of what we really want or know we ought to want for our own well-being and fulfillment. We lose sight of our own most constructive hopes and aspirations in our involvement with the details and doings of our everyday lives.

The will is involved here, the human will. This isn't something concrete, is not a definite entity like the lungs, something you can point to and measure. It's not located in any specific place within us like the liver. The will is a function of the self, rather than a piece of it.

As a verb, the word means things like to wish, to choose, to desire, to be inclined toward. As a noun, will means strong purpose, intention, or determination. The will is a union within us of a wide variety of elements: of our knowledge, our thought, our feeling, impulse, awareness, drives, our understanding, perception, our aims and goals. The will is the focusing of our various impulses and ideas into a single choice. It is a focusing of our self that moves us toward a particular line of action.

V Rational Prayer
Prayer is an asset here in relation to the will. I have found this to be so. It is a help in forming and focusing the will, keeping alive, keeping before our awareness the things we aim to do, things we are determined to do. Things we aspire to, would achieve.

I am an atheist, do not believe in God. But, I do not hesitate to ask for God's help when I need it, as indeed I often do. I know that's not easy to follow, to understand.

It's hard to understand because of the intrusion of the long-held, traditional patterns of thought about prayer. Most of us find it hard to get around these old patterns of understanding of the phenomenon. We find it hard to grasp the idea in any way apart from how we thought of it as a child.

In the religious tradition of the West, prayer has been taught as a means of communication with an omnipotent source of power outside ourselves. This is the way our ancestors understood what was going on when they prayed. This is the way most people understood it as children.

I do not understand the matter this way (and never did), do not see myself as praying to a great power outside myself. I see prayer as a mode of speech, a mode of communication with myself, in the deepest sense of the word self. (The kingdom of God is within me).

I see it also as an art form and a personal discipline. Neither belief nor faith is involved. It's a pragmatic matter for me. I tried it and it worked. I found it was a good thing to do, that it had meaning, was useful, beneficial, effective. It touched me, moved me.

I learned that if I used the characteristic language forms of prayer, used it as an art form, a personal discipline to express and re-express) my own needs, my purposes, my shortcomings and aspirations as I focused my attention deep within myself -- if I did this -- then the ordinarily, somewhat scattered fragments of myself were pulled together, given form. The usual disorder within myself took on concerted form, and I gained in integration, in power, in strength, in awareness.

I did not see this as deriving from a power outside myself. It was generated by the fact that the bulk of my being was moving in the same direction, rather than milling around aimlessly. I saw it as a deep centering of attention within myself, then putting into graceful moving language my own needs and aims and aspirations, my own insights. In this way I could repeatedly remind myself of the things I was determined to do, that I wanted to do, things that I knew to be important, that mattered to me.

While this is a rather unusual understanding of the meaning of prayer, there are a number of others in the Western world who have understood it in this way. For example, there is the American philosopher, George Santayana, who once spoke about what he called "rational prayer."

That's what I have in mind — rational, naturalistic prayer. Santayana put it like this: "In rational prayer the soul may be said to accomplish three things important to its welfare: it withdraws within itself and defines its good, it accomodates itself to destiny, and it grows like the ideal which it conceives."

Or again, consider Buddha, Socrates and Gandhi. None of these men believed in a personal God. Yet all of them were quite aware of the value of prayer, understood what it was for, understood its use and meaning. None of them regarded it as a mode of magic, as a means of getting around the patterns of natural law.

Just as our childish understanding of prayer gets in the way of our seeing it as a natural act rather than a supernatural one, so too does the complex, conflicting notion of God we absorbed as a child in growing up in our culture also get in the way. As a child in this culture we found ourselves wrestling with a conception of God which might be characterized something like this:

"God is a person, a man, without a body. He cannot be seen or touched, and yet he can be talked to. This is called praying. You can ask him for things, and yet you aren't supposed to exactly. If you are good, you may get what you ask for, and then again you may not. He knows what is best for you. He lives in heaven. That is where dead people are with God.

“Jesus is there, too, only he isn't dead. God is also everywhere, but especially in churches, and at the same time he is in everyone. He was also Jesus. God wants people, especially children, to be good, and he punishes bad people, and yet he forgives them. He can see and hear everything and keeps track of everything we do. He plans for everything. God made everything, and makes the rain come now and makes things grow. We aren't to blame him for hurricanes and accidents and prayers that don't get answered — we just don't know all about God yet. God likes to have people thank him a lot."

That strange old set of ideas never made any sense to me, and I suppose that's why I turned out to be an atheist. It was only much later that I learned to have understanding, to have respect and affection for God, that God whose kingdom is within us.

Dr Alexie Crane
2880 Exeter Place
Santa Barbara, CA 93105
(805) 682-3476

Lex1304@aol.com