When you talk with people who are grieving, you want to make them feel better. At the very least, you don’t want to make them feel worse. This isn’t always true (as you’ll find out in some of these stories). But in general, in the face of grief, the point of comfort and consolation is to relieve some small part of the grieving person’s pain. And I’ll assume that the last thing you want to do is add to that pain.
The bad news is that, if you’re a religious believer, the chances are excellent you’ve done exactly that.
You almost certainly have non-believers in your life. While many of them aren’t public about it, around five to 10 percent of adults in the United States are non-religious. When they’re grieving — whether it’s a personal death or a public tragedy—they want and need comfort. But the standard ways of dealing with death are often religious. When these are offered to nonbelievers, they typically don’t help, and they often make things worse.
I’ve written before with advice about what nonbelievers what they want to hear when they’re grieving. This is the flip side of that coin. I reached out to members of Grief Beyond Belief (the online support group for grieving nonbelievers), as well as nonbelieving readers of my blog and Facebook page, and asked them to share the things they heard from believers that they wish had never been said.
I did a podcast interview with photographer and filmmaker Chris Johnson, creator of the book and the film A Better Life.
We talk about the strange circumstances in which he and I met; how skepticism can help us cope with hard times; whether arguing about religion is valuable; the stages many atheists go through when they leave religion; how writing my new book (The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life) shaped my thinking about atheism; how my ideas about critiquing and mocking religion have changed over the years; why social justice is important for organized atheism; why the “mission drift” argument against intersectionality is bullshit — and who gets to define the mission in the first place; how atheist organizing is becoming decentralized; what I would say to myself if I could go back in time to when I first became an atheist (especially about mortality); and more. Check it out!
“Understanding the world doesn’t remove the mystery, except in the narrowest sense. It enhances it.”
-Greta Christina, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life
(from Chapter 4, “The Sweet Mystery of Life”)
(Image description: above text, juxtaposed next to image of Earth seen from space)
I’m making a series of memes/ inspirational poster thingies with my favorite quotes from my new book, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life. Please feel free to share this on social media, or print it and hang it on your wall if you like. (The image above is pretty big: you can click on it to get a bigger size if you like.)
The Way of the Heathen is available in ebook on Amazon/Kindle and on Smashwords for $7.99. The audiobook is at Audible. The print edition is at Amazon and Powell’s Books, and can be ordered or carried by pretty much any bookstore: it’s being wholesaled by Ingram, Baker & Taylor, IPG, and bookstores can buy it directly from the publisher, Pitchstone Publishing. Check it out, and tell your friends!
Content note: sexual harassment and assault, denial and gaslighting of same.
The dam is bursting.
In the last few days, several accusations of sexual misconduct on the part of Richard Carrier have been made public. Stephanie Zvan has collected and summarized the current ones to date; Skepticon has banned Carrier from their conference, “partly because of his repeated boundary-pushing behavior, including towards someone involved in Skepticon.”
I want to take a moment to talk about why we publicize these accusations. Tl;dr: We do it because we’re trying to make the community safer.
Those of us who talk about sexual harassment and assault, and other problems in the organized secular movement (and everywhere else, for that matter), are often accused of doing it for our own gain. We’re accused of doing it to increase traffic and boost our careers. And we’re accused of doing it to bring down people we don’t like. I’ve already addressed the first accusation: today, I want to speak to the second.
Richard Carrier was a friend of mine, as well as a colleague. We weren’t close friends, but we had a good social relationship and a good professional relationship. He’s been to multiple parties at our house (a fact that now gives me the creeps: I hate the thought that I may have exposed my friends to his behavior). We worked together at Freethought Blogs for a long time; we collaborated; we promoted each others’ work. And he was a public advocate for feminism and social justice within organized atheism. I was extremely distressed when I started hearing these accusations, and at first I didn’t want to believe them. But I heard more than one accusation, and some of my own conversations with Carrier made me uneasy about his sexual ethics. That’s when I began distancing myself from him, personally and professionally.
I’m not publicizing accusations against him because I don’t like him. I stopped liking him because I started hearing these accusations.
I’m going to say that again, in large boldface capital letters, since it seems to be all too easily overlooked:
“Yes, the human scale is small. That doesn’t make it less real.”
-Greta Christina, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life
(from Chapter 5, “Atheist Meaning in a Small, Brief Life”)
(Image description: above text, superimposed over image of a group of people in silhouette looking at a sunset)
I’m making a series of memes/ inspirational poster thingies with my favorite quotes from my new book, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life. Please feel free to share this on social media, or print it and hang it on your wall if you like. (The image above is pretty big: you can click on it to get a bigger size if you like.)
The Way of the Heathen is available in ebook on Amazon/Kindle and on Smashwords for $7.99. The audiobook is at Audible. The print edition is at Amazon and Powell’s Books, and can be ordered or carried by pretty much any bookstore: it’s being wholesaled by Ingram, Baker & Taylor, IPG, and bookstores can buy it directly from the publisher, Pitchstone Publishing. Check it out, and tell your friends!
“We have a moral obligation to understand how cause and effect works. We have to understand the world, so we know how to act in it.”
-Greta Christina, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life
(from Chapter 2, “Skepticism as a Discipline”)
(Image description: above text, juxtaposed next to image of magnifying glass))
I’m making a series of memes/ inspirational poster thingies with my favorite quotes from my new book, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life. Please feel free to share this on social media, or print it and hang it on your wall if you like. (The image above is pretty big: you can click on it to get a bigger size if you like.)
The Way of the Heathen is available in ebook on Amazon/Kindle and on Smashwords for $7.99. The audiobook is at Audible. The print edition is at Amazon and Powell’s Books, and can be ordered or carried by pretty much any bookstore: it’s being wholesaled by Ingram, Baker & Taylor, IPG, and bookstores can buy it directly from the publisher, Pitchstone Publishing. Check it out, and tell your friends!
Podcast fans — check out my interview with the Atheists Talk radio show! We talked about how atheists have a sense of mystery (and why so many believers think we don’t); why I hate the word “spiritual”; experiencing interconnectness as an introvert; why it’s difficult to accept the reality of social injustice; different ways to be a good person; and more.
Enjoy! And many thanks to Dave Pacheco and Minnesota Atheists for hosting me.
“If religion is just a story, why does it upset people so much when atheists say it isn’t true?”
-Greta Christina, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life
(Image description: above text, juxtaposed above image of unidentified book)
I’m making a series of memes/ inspirational poster thingies with my favorite quotes from my new book, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life. Please feel free to share this on social media, or print it and hang it on your wall if you like. (The image above is pretty big: you can click on it to get a bigger size if you like.)
The Way of the Heathen is available in ebook on Amazon/Kindle and on Smashwords for $7.99. The audiobook is at Audible. The print edition is at Amazon and Powell’s Books, and can be ordered or carried by pretty much any bookstore: it’s being wholesaled by Ingram, Baker & Taylor, IPG, and bookstores can buy it directly from the publisher, Pitchstone Publishing. Check it out, and tell your friends!
“Perspective — stepping back and examining our beliefs — is more than an intellectual discipline. It’s a moral obligation.”
-Greta Christina, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life
(from Chapter 2, “Skepticism as a Discipline”)
(Image description: above text, superimposed over image of New York City buildings seen from above)
I’m making a series of memes/ inspirational poster thingies with my favorite quotes from my new book, The Way of the Heathen: Practicing Atheism in Everyday Life. Please feel free to share this on social media, or print it and hang it on your wall if you like. (The image above is pretty big: you can click on it to get a bigger size if you like.)
The Way of the Heathen is available in ebook on Amazon/Kindle and on Smashwords for $7.99. The audiobook is at Audible. The print edition is at Amazon and Powell’s Books, and can be ordered or carried by pretty much any bookstore: it’s being wholesaled by Ingram, Baker & Taylor, IPG, and bookstores can buy it directly from the publisher, Pitchstone Publishing. Check it out, and tell your friends!
This is the introduction to my new book, The Way of the Heathen. It’s available in ebook on Amazon/Kindle and on Smashwords for $7.99; the audiobook is at Audible; the print edition is at Amazon and Powell’s Books, and can be ordered or carried by pretty much any bookstore.
So you’ve decided to be an atheist.
Okay, that’s silly. No, you didn’t “decide” to be an atheist: you decided to ask questions, look at evidence, prioritize reality over wishful thinking, and quit pushing your doubts to the back burner. And you’ve concluded that there are no gods. We don’t “decide” what to believe: atheists can’t decide whether we believe in God, any more than we can put our hand over a flame and decide whether we believe in heat. But we can ignore doubts and difficult questions — or follow our ideas to their logical conclusion. You’ve done that. And you’ve come to the conclusion that there are no gods — not Jehovah, not Shiva, not Zeus. Zip squat in the “gods” department.
What now?
Living without religion is not always so different from living with it. Atheists and believers are all human: we laugh at jokes, listen to music, care about our loved ones, get angry at injustice, grieve when people die, try to be good.
But there are real differences. When you think the meaning of your life is handed to you by Zeus or whoever, you’re going to live differently than if you think we create our own meaning. When you think God is your co-pilot and your life is planned by this perfect, all-knowing creator (who still gave you sinuses for no apparent reason), you’re going to live differently than if you think nobody’s driving the bus and you’d better grab the wheel. When you think you and your loved ones are going to live forever in a blissful afterlife where everyone somehow magically gets along, you’re going to live differently than if you think this short life is our only one. There are differences between a religious life and a godless one, and they’re not trivial.
These differences can be unsettling, whether you’ve just started questioning religion, or have already rejected it and are grappling with non-belief. Even if you’ve been an atheist for a while, these questions may trouble you. Many atheists were brought up with religion, and were brought up framing life and death in religious terms. Many customs, rituals, and daily habits are rooted in religion, so when atheists reject these, we often don’t know how to replace them. When we’re confronted with a situation that our culture typically handles with religion — birth, death, marriage, coming of age, suffering, gratitude, sneezing — we sometimes feel stymied.
This book may help.
I’ll get this out of the way right now: Yes, the title is a joke. There are approximately 57,852 books titled The Way of the Something: The Way of the Pilgrim, The Way of the Master, The Way of the Warrior, about 57,849 more. This title is a slightly snarky joke at the whole idea of one person telling another, “Here’s the one right way to live your life.” A more accurate title (although a crappier and less funny one) would be Some Ways of Some Heathens. If you disagree with some of this book — awesome. Ten years from now, I probably won’t agree with all of it. I want people to think for themselves, using the best evidence, rationality, and compassion they can muster. There isn’t a right way to be an atheist, and this is not an atheist bible: take what you need, and leave the rest.
