God is a human invention. We made him up—we’ve been making versions of him up for millennia— because life is difficult and death is scary. Naturally people want to believe that someone is in charge and that, contrary to the evidence before us, we won’t truly die.
I am in no way scornful of these desires; I am awed at the effort that has gone into satisfying them. The characters and plots, the regulations and rationalizations, the books explaining why this story is the true story and the books arguing no, actually, this other story is the true one. The paintings! The hymns! The costumes! The tortured explanations for why the (supposedly just and good) Main Character permits …torture.
I find it impressive, fascinating, moving. Just not true.
I’ve never found it true. Even when I was a child in synagogue saying prayers and singing songs of praise (the Jewish God demands heaps of it), I always thought God was a character rather than an actual being.
Why did I start life outside the bubble of belief even though I was technically raised inside it? Maybe because my father was an English professor and my head was full of other literary characters. Maybe because my parents didn’t believe— not really. I never witnessed them praying to God outside of prescribed ceremonial times, and they never scolded their children with reference to Mosaic Law or instructed us with Bible stories. Maybe because I was always a writer. An observer. I watched my congregation pray— watched myself pray—rather than feeling what I imagined people felt when they genuinely prayed.
For whatever reason, I didn’t have to reason myself into being an atheist. It was just always there, in my understanding of God as a made-up thing.
What I did have to reason myself into was saying I was an atheist. Why would I do that? I was a good student, a good daughter, a good girl. What could possibly inspire me to pipe up after my family lit the sabbath candles and say, “Just to be clear, this ‘Adonai’ we’re thanking is pretend, right?”
I don’t think so.
Outside our little congregation, in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, churches and crosses dotted the rolling farmlands as plentifully as cows. Christianity was so pervasive in that part of the world as to be almost invisible—until, that is, a horse-drawn buggy pulled up in the next lane, carrying Mennonites in bonnets and black hats. Being Jewish in this context meant being different, but acceptably so; we existed recognizably within the dominant mythos.
I was not thinking any of this when I decided not to tell anyone I didn’t believe. In fact, “decided” is the wrong word. I just instinctively sought love and approval and carefully guarded my interior life.
As the years passed, I was more conscious of pretending to believe and also more ambivalent. I didn’t feel great about lying or misleading or withholding—wherever I currently landed on the spectrum of dishonesty—but I imagined I’d feel worse about coming clean because people would think less of me. “InGod We Trust,” said my money; “one nation under God,” said the Pledge of Allegiance; “God Bless America,” said even the politicians that I respected. Whether or not my country was tolerant of diverse faiths, it absolutely presumed faith was a fundamental element of good citizenship.
What finally convinced me to give up being a good girl was the desire to be a good parent.
I found I couldn’t lie to (or mislead or withhold information from) my children. My job was to teach them to navigate the world, but how could they navigate a world they didn’t see clearly? Worse, how could they navigate a world when the people they trust the most are purposely misinforming them?
So I felt a grave responsibility to tell my children the truth as I saw it. I told them God and religion were human inventions. And that is when I truly began thinking of and calling myself an atheist.
Why didn’t I call myself an agnostic? Technically, we are all not-knowers. What we don’t know for sure vastly surpasses what we do know for sure. God’s existence cannot be proven, and neither can his nonexistence.
But to say one is an agnostic is to imply that one has weighed the options—God Is Real vs. God Is Made Up—and come up fifty-fifty. That’s not how I feel. I look around me, and I see a long history of religions that have been downgraded to myth— or worse, literature; a grand variety of currently active God stories, each of which, if true, would render the others invalid; and no concrete evidence of any God, each of whom is conveniently invisible, inaudible, and inscrutable. So I’m pretty confident concluding—without technically knowing—we’ve collectively made up comforting “truths” about the nature of existence. Leave “agnostic” for the literalists, the believers who have doubts, and the nonbelievers who are being polite. I’m an atheist.
Why choose a term at all, though? Why make a point of it? I don’t go around calling myself nonQAnon or a nonastrologist or a Holocaust-acknowledger. Why claim a label that identifies me as someone who hasn’t accepted a counterfactual view of the world?
The answer is, of course, context. It never occurs to me to insist on the essential roundness of the earth, but at a flat-earth convention, I would call myself a glober. In a country that grants all kinds of privileges and exemptions to religious institutions, that regards religious belief (at least the Christian kind) as uniquely ineligible for criticism, that behaves—despite the vaunted protections of its First Amendment— as if “God’s will” were pertinent to public policy…I’m going to say I’m an atheist.
I’m a secular humanist, too, a nonbeliever, and a cultural Jew. But “atheist” is the clearest, least apologetic term, so “atheist” is what I will call myself until the threat of Christian Nationalism subsides. Until we get our reproductive rights back. Until U.S. public schools are fully secular and U.S. health care is based on science and not on the supposed opinions of a character in a book. Until Americans stop presuming that every good American—every good girl— believes in a supernatural being who controls the universe.
I know none of that will happen right away. But the more we call ourselves “atheists,” the sooner it will.