Den of Atheists

Sydney, Australia
June 2007

Coming out of Indonesia, there's something refreshing to me about the religion (& lack thereof) in Sydney. Even Australia’s colonial history is fairly irreligious, too. To me, some atheism can tail the same coin that fundamentalism heads. Nevertheless, it's awfully nice to see them again. I've so very much missed the Nothings.

With few exceptions, I don’t find reason to believe that there are significantly more or any fewer true believers in Indonesia than anywhere else in the world. The difference is the public role of religion in daily life. Here in Sydney, religion feels purely personal again, rather than this giant, active organ of the state that’s making laws & infrastructure & sumptuary codes. It's your life, maybe your whole life, but here religion (which I distinguish from faith & God) feels like a chosen, communal path rather than the air we all breathe. The difference is enormous.

At the giant, ‘den-of-atheists’ Sydney Writers' Festival, I found books & discussions of atheism & agnosticism strikingly common. It was an inadvertent theme: a reflection of the times. After Indonesia this was riveting, even alarming, to me. So many discussions of losing faith, lost faith, no faith, missing faith, & anger against the wrong-turns of religion, the role of religion in war & science & policy & personal lives....

Some of these reactions themselves, like the extreme religious views they push against, conspicuously "Lack ironic detachment," as Rachel Kohn suggested. Richard Dawkins, for example.

Under current events, Kohn said, complacent secularists feel embattled by the rise of fervent & powerful religious forces. It makes people feel a need to take a public stand & to object in similar tones & terms. Moderates tend into atheists & fundamentalists, when they’re likely actually neither.

Communism has collapsed as former vehicle of anti-religion, she pointed out, so now it’s pure atheism.

I'd come to similar conclusions at the Festival. I say ‘den of atheists’ here partially in jest, aware of the irony, because when I listen closely: it’s largely a rhetorical atheism. A reactionary recoil again organized religion & the commercial god on whose name so much is traded; not actually against God.

Quite to the contrary, actually. The Sydney Writers' Festival (among many other things) brought into sharp relief for me a large & vocal western demographic that is deeply nostalgic for faith & for God. But soured on religion.

For some, the old paths to God have been tainted. To some—& not a few—organized religion has grown to mean terrible things. This group has wearied of religion, which in some lights, some days, is also used as a smuggling route for human folly: war, killings, the blurring of church & state, vicious politics, winning elections, black & white morality, demeaning social doctrines, second class citizenry, compulsory sumptuary codes (clothing). Too often it smacks of ideologues willing to commit acts of terrorism in the name of God, to teach hate, to teach intolerance, to teach ignorance, to teach Us & Them, to advocate war, to compel ‘prayer’, to encourage vigilantism (women stoned, decapitated, beaten, splashed with acid, killed for wearing the wrong clothes), to conflate faith with political parties & patriotism, to make houses of God into bully pulpits. Organized religion—Oh, oldest of ironies!—has become associated with brain washing, with fundamentalism, with communities persecuting the outsider, with racism, with hate and hate and hate.


Which is to say: life as usual, eh? Nothing new, anyway.
In important ways, it’s been like this since homo sapiens could make intentionally rude gestures.

Every generation we raise & obliterate gods with the hypocrisies of man, with
scriptures writ larger than love, louder than peace, sharper than faith, tighter than prayer. The paths obscured, we set off into the Wilderness all over again.

Humans crave the divine. Whether you yourself are a believer or not, this is a fact of our species. Some of us remember organized religion as a peaceful experience about helping others & living rightly. Now droves have left their holy houses & wandered outside exactly because we do not wish to be infidels: we are searching for lost faith.

Or, as most people I know do: we would really prefer not to think about this or discuss it anymore at the dinner table, or to take it quite so seriously, please.

[That sort of FREEDOM--to express such things in public, to anyone, without fear--that freedom I'd too long taken for granted. ]

One day, in the middle of a series of readings at the Sydney Writers Festival, the host put a paper number on my table. She held her finger on it & looked at me questioningly: Would I like to participate in the 1-minute pitch?

I had no idea what she meant.
There was to be a contest, she explained. They’d draw numbers. As numbers were drawn, each contestant would come up to the microphone & make a 1 minute pitch for a story in front of a panel of literary editors, & the audience of a hundred or so. They would vote on their favorite, there were prizes.

“You want to do it, I can tell,” she said.
I had not prepared for this, but my suddenly racing heart said yes. Microphones can be better than coffee.

So I did this & won. They gave me a set of books (which I later sold). I prefaced my pitch with the observation of reactionary atheism & nostalgia for faith that I’d observed here. Then, completing the minute (or so) I pitched a novel about a man who could induce relig-...well, you’ll have to read it someday. I’m excited. So were they.
Just remember: the second novel was conceived in a den of atheists.


EPILOGUE:

One day in Sydney I lunched at an excellent vegetarian restaurant where a waitress in jilbab served food to 3 elderly Buddhist monks dressed in red robes, while a Chinese guy ate lunch alone, & a bunch of us white, female Christian / agnostic / atheist types browsed the bean curd. It was so peaceful & simple.