No Invisible Means of Support
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
February 23, 2003

	I can’t really address this morning’s topic until I’ve told the story of the atheist and the loch ness monster. It seems that this atheist was out fishing in a small boat in Loch Ness when he felt the boat rocking and saw the water churning and then was amazed to sig this huge scaly head and neck rising out of the water.  His fascination turned to terror as he realized that the thing was after him.  The monster lunged at the stern of the boat, and the atheist just barely jumped out of the way, but the force of the impact drove the stern under and flipped the atheist high in the air.  He looked down and realized he was going to fall right into the open mouth of the monster.  He yelled out God, help me.  All of a sudden everything froze, and a booming voice came out of the clouds, “What did you say?  I thought you didn’t believe in me!” The former atheist replied, “gimme a break, until 10 seconds ago, I didn’t believe in the Loch Ness monster either.”  God says “what do you want me to do?”  The atheist says, “can’t you just make the monster disappear?”  God says, “no, you atheists always misunderstand.  I don’t interfere in the laws of nature.  The only thing I can do is change the heart.”  The atheist thinks for a moment, and says, “all right, make the monster a Christian.” With that, there is a thunderclap and he starts down again towards the water.  The monster gets a beatific smile on his face, folds his hands and says, “Lord make me truly thankful for what I am about to receive.”
	God Bless the Atheists!  Now there’s a sentiment you don’t hear too much these days around UU churches.  Those who would accept the label of atheist for themselves have always been a substantial portion of the makeup of our churches, but many of them – many of you – may be feeling a little beleaguered lately. 
	In the days after 9/11, vocal belief in God seemed to be almost a requirement of citizenship in every town and city in the nation.  Public prayer services were convened and the notion of separation of church and state seemed to have taken a back seat in the nervous rhetorical rush to ensure that God, whoever or whatever she was, was on our side in the war against terrorism.  Another scare occurred this past summer, when the Federal Appeals court in California ruled that the words “under God” as used in the Pledge of Allegiance were unconstitutional.  Politicians of all stripes fell over each other in denouncing the ruling and loudly reciting the pledge in its theistic form.
	Then here in our own movement, our UUA President Bill Sinkford was recently quoted – he says mis-quoted – by the Forth Worth newspaper as saying he wanted to put the word God back into the principles and purposes of the UUA.  Christian UUs are more aggressively demanding space and recognition within the movement.   And much of the attention of the movement these days seems to be geared to welcoming those who are seeking an undefined spirituality.  Atheists and humanists, once the dominant theological faction in our movement, may be pardoned if they feel not only under attack in the public square but less at home in the churches they did so much to build in the 60's and 70's.
	Today I want to lift up and celebrate the atheists among us, to reaffirm that they are valued members of our community, to extol the positive contributions their viewpoint makes to our overall richness and growth.  And I want to express my concern for the treatment of nonbelievers in society generally, for I see an ominous trend from the White house to the City Hall to exclude nonbelievers from the body politic and make discrimination against atheists respectable.
	First, let’s come to grips with the slippery matter of definition.  An atheist is someone who positively denies the existence of God, right?  Seems simple enough.  But what does it mean?  Well, I looked it up on Van Harvey’s Theological dictionary, a useful little reference work on my desk, and it points out an interesting thing about this definition: since the term is defined in the negative, the scope of atheism will vary with the scope of the word God; the mathematically inclined among us would say it varied inversely.  If you have a narrow conception of God, such as Jahweh of the Hebrew Bible, then atheism is correspondingly broad.  A naturalistic pantheist might be considered an atheist under this definition.  If, on the other hand, you have a broad conception of God, such as pantheism or transcendentalism, then atheism is correspondingly narrow.  As William Sloane Coffin used to say to people professing not to believe in God, “tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in; there is a good chance I don’t believe in him either.”
	Historically the term atheist is a weapon used by any kind of orthodoxy against someone who holds to a different view of the divine.  The classic example is Socrates, who was executed on the charge that he was corrupting the youth of Athens by turning them away from the classical pantheon, when in fact he was espousing a different conception of God.  It is one of the ironies of history that this conception, through neo-Platonism, later found its way into mainstream Christian theology. Early Christians were called atheists by the pagan Romans.
	My own mind likes to put things in categories.  Categories can be overdone, but here are mine: the non-theists among us break down into about four categories:  there are the atheists, who positively deny the existence of god; there are the agnostics, who profess  not to be sure of God’s existence; there are the  humanists, who believe that whether God exists or not is largely irrelevant because humans are the measure of all things; and there are the naturalists who say that the humanists err in putting humanity in the center of things, when humans are only a peripheral part of all nature.
	I should say at this point that I speak of atheism as a sympathetic outsider.  My own theology ranges from agnosticism, to an experiential mysticism to process thought and panentheism, if you will excuse a little jargon.  My feelings about ultimate being vary with what I’ve had for breakfast that morning and the ideas of the person I’m talking to.
	But though I am not myself an atheist, some of my best friends are.  I want to introduce you to a couple of them here, from that buckle of the Bible belt, the birthplace of both secession and the civil war it spawned, Charleston, South Carolina. The first to hold up the problems atheists face in this overwhelmingly theistic landscape we inhabit, and the second to lift up the value of the atheists in our own movement. 
	The first Charleston atheist I want to lift up for you this morning is Herb Silverman, who teaches mathematics at the College of Charleston.  One day in 1990, Herb walked into my law office and asked if I was aware that there was a provision in the state constitution that said no one could be governor who denied the existence of a Supreme Being.  I looked it up and he was right. 
	Think about that for a minute.  You can’t be governor if you deny the existence of a Supreme Being.  How would that make you feel if you were an atheist?  It was like a throwback to the bad old days after the American Revolution when almost all the states would only let you vote or hold office if you were white, male, protestant, and a property owner. That smacked of patriarchy; this smacked of theocracy.  Only this provision was still on the books.  I was outraged, and agreed to represent him in cooperation with the ACLU in getting the provision ruled unconstitutional. 
	It’s a long story, the details of which are probably interesting only to the lawyers among you.  We first ran him for governor, and sued in federal court.  We ran into every kind of stratagem to keep the issue from being decided, and finally got bounced out of court on our ear on what we call ripeness grounds – since the State was to smart to keep him off the ballot on the basis of his religious beliefs, the court ruled that we couldn’t challenge the Supreme Being requirement unless he won the race for governor.  To  no one’s surprise, he also lost his write-in campaign for governor.
	Then we tried a different tack.  The Supreme Being qualification applied not only to Governor, but also to all offices arising under the constitution, which included the lowly office of Notary Public.  Now Notary Public is like a Justice of the Peace in Massachusetts; the office gives the person the power to notarize documents, administer oaths and perform weddings, and they are normally obtained just by going down to the courthouse and filling out a form.  
	We filled out the form, but Herb was so adamant in his atheism that he struck from the oath at the bottom the words, “so help me God.”  To make sure the state knew what was up, we sent the form in with an affidavit from Herb saying he was an atheist.
	This time the state did deny the application, but it refused to say why.  We sued again, this time in state court. After a bunch of wrangling, including the deposition of the former governor, we finally got a trial judge to rule the Supreme Being provision unconstitutional and to order the state to give Herb his commission as a Notary Public.  That judge, by the way, is now a staunch member of the Unitarian Church of Charleston.
	About that time, the state appealed, and I decided to go to Divinity School.  The local press considered it  a rich irony that the advocate for South Carolina’s most public atheist should himself be seeking to enter the ministry.  The press, of course, does not understand UUs.
	We finally won in the State Supreme Court, the Supreme Being qualification was ruled invalid and the state was ordered to give Herb his commission.  Herb says when he went down to the courthouse to get his Notary Commission, the deputy clerk couldn’t understand why he brought his wife along to take a picture.  He framed his notary commission and displayed it in his office. A student later asked him if he had to become a lawyer to get the Notary Public and Herb said, no it wasn’t that easy.  It had been a seven-year legal battle to get for an atheist the rights that all believers had.
	Atheists are not only discriminated against under the law, but more importantly they are isolated by the pressure of public opinion.  I called Herb Silverman the other day to se how it had been going since we won our case five years ago.  He said that the organization Secular Humanists of the Lowcountry was going well, but many members could not afford to be publicly identified as atheists.  They have taken on the religious right over the issue of posting the Ten Commandments in the county office building and in schools. As a PR gambit, they have adopted a highway roadside and keep it clean, earning a place on the sign by that roadside. They try to get the message out that atheists are nice people, entitled to all the respect due anyone else.  But it’s an uphill battle.
	I asked if Herb had challenged any of the public piety so much in evidence after September 11, 2001.  He said no, they considered it expedient to keep a low profile then. While this may have been wise, it is also sad.  The more that official America, in our states, cities and towns, projects an image that “we the people” are God-fearing or God-believing, the atheist is excluded from “we the people.”
	Now to my second atheist. I came into Unitarian Universalism through the Unitarian Church of Charleston SC, the oldest Unitarian Church in the south, and a beautiful fan gothic building with lovely stained glass windows behind the altar.  
	One of the mainstays of that church, who has probable been a member there now for about 40 years, is a dentist named Bill Upshur.  Bill is a staunch civil libertarian and a thoroughgoing humanist, a founder of a group which meets in the church called Secular Humanist of the Lowcountry.  One of the nicest guys you could ever want to know, he has been everything in that church, along with his wife Jane, who teaches pathology at the local medical school.  They have a house on th beach at Edisto, about 45 miles south of town.
	Recently Bill gave a sermon in the church, and I picked it up on the Secular Humanist website.  Among other things, Bill claimed that he had done historical research on the stained-glass windows, and the six figures behind the altar were not, as I had always thought, Moses, Aaron and the four gospel writers.  He claims that hey are all humanists from classical antiquity disguised as Moses, Aaron and the four evangelists. Maybe its true.
	Now it is often said by those of a theistic persuasion that atheists are cut off from their hearts; they are so rational, they don’t know how to feel.  That is what makes Bill’s story so striking.  There is an old saw that there are no atheists in foxholes, and that even an atheist will reach out for divine help in an hour of need.  But Bill tells the story of the time his wife of forty years collapsed at he beach, and they rushed her to the hospital in town. She stopped breathing and had to be resuscitated. ... She was rendered unconscious with Versed and placed on a ventilator while they ran tests.  No one understood what was causing the condition.
	While Jane was unconscious, a friend who knows Bill well said, “I guess prayer is not an option.” Bill’s reaction was that it was not an option as far as he was concerned: “Now if I thought my prayer would have a one in a million chance, of helping Jane, I would have prayed, but I think that prayer is a futile, harmful and degrading gesture.”  He goes on
	“Imagine this situation that Christian myth claims an all-powerful God has created.  Anyone that knows Jane realizes that she is a beautiful, compassionate, intelligent, sensitive, wonderful woman.  Here she is unconscious and maybe dying.  In addition, here is an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good creature that is able to control whether she lives or dies.  If I pray to this creature, I might let her live, if I don’t pray to this creature, it will let her die.  I thought about this and realized ‘What a despicable situation this is!’ How could people worship such a being? Is it all just fear? After thinking this, I remembered that at one time, I also believed in the power of prayer.  Well, I did not pray, and not praying worked again!  Jane survived and the human beings involved with medical science and technology were able to figure out what was going on and bring her back to health.”	
	Now if I were attending a talkback after this sermon, I would point out that Bill’s theology of prayer seems a bit underdeveloped.  Frequently I have this reaction to an atheist point of view, that the God they set up, and the view of prayer, is intentionally not as believable as the God or view of prayer I would champion.  All this proves is that atheists are inclined to set up straw men, or perhaps, straw Gods in their rhetoric so they can knock them down more easily, but in this they are not much different from the rest of us.  As Dr. Coffin says, “tell me what kind of God you don’t believe in, because chances are I don’t believe in him too.” 
	But this is not to deny the validity of Bill’s  feelings, and the point of the story is that his atheism survived a crucial test.  It reaffirms Harry Emerson’s Fosdick’s definition of an atheist as a person with no invisible means of support.
	And the point for us here is look at what a rich dialogue this can be.  Bill poses the classic question we call theodicy – if God is all-powerful, all-good and all-knowing, why is this bad thing happening to this good person.  This question has challenged believers and nonbelievers alike since at least the Book of Job.
		There is a difference between the public square and our little UU religious movement, but there are similarities as well.  We recognize and honor atheists among us as full participants in an ongoing quest for truth.  We take these values into the public square.  This is why you will find UU ministers who are themselves theists protesting publicly against state-sponsored expressions of any kind of piety.  I haven’t conducted a survey, but I would bet that of the clergy who expressed support last summer for the Pledge of Allegiance decision, a high percentage were UUs.  
	But it is not just justice in the larger society that makes us cherish the atheists in our own movement.  Atheists bring a refreshing point of view, and though it sometimes irritates the rest of us, it reminds us that we don’t check our minds at the door.  Doubt is the handmaiden of truth, and the unexamined idea is not worth having.
	One myth about atheists is that they have no sense of mystery.  I find that atheistic scientific naturalists, on the contrary, have a keen sense of mystery.  Indeed, the theories now coming out of science seem much more counterintuitive and outlandish than any religious stories told in the Bible, Koran or Bhagavad Gita.
	George Santayana said
“My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.”
	We need atheism.  We need the occasional corrective of cold water thrown on our inclusiveness, that tends to want to adopt any path with heart in it.  We see all around us religious movements which have become destructive, if not dangerous to humanity.  Atheism calls us back to human welfare as the ground of all ethics.  As Emma Goldman said,
The philosophy of Atheism represents a concept of life without any metaphysical Beyond or Divine Regulator. It is the concept of an actual, real world with its liberating, expanding and beautifying possibilities, as against an unreal world, which, with its spirits, oracles, and mean contentment has kept humanity in helpless degradation.”
	Now it is not always easy to have atheists sit side by side in the pews with pagans, Jews, Christians, Buddhists.  In particular, atheists can’t legitimately claim a veto over what is said in the pulpit.  For the God-talk and Bible-reading and prayer which irritate or alienated the atheists among us will also feed others of us.  We strive for a worship which will feed all who come, and a good church program has something for everyone.  Most churches try to cover many bases, not all in the same service, but over the course of the year.
	For indeed our congregational polity is bottomed on the proposition that our theological differences are transcended and undergirded by our covenant to walk together.  Some questions are just too important to have only one right answer. 
	So my message to all of you who accept the term atheist applied to yourself is, maybe you have no invisible means of support, but you have the visible ones of those sitting in the pews beside you.  To the non-atheists, my message is that it is vital to our own interests and to the values we all cherish to continue to be the visible means of support for our atheist friends.  So I say with all respect as a theist, God bless the atheists! Amen.