It's Easy If You Try

-by 'tamerlane'

Define "Normal"
In his essay 'Imagine No Religion', Edgar Dahl confirms John Lennon's observation that imagining a world without religion "isn't hard to do." It's especially easy for Dahl, who was born & raised in communist East Germany, where religious belief was virtually non-existent.

Dahl begins his essay, which is one of several in 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists, by having his fellow ex-DDR citizens responding to a German census question, "Do you believe in God" with "No, I’m normal." And, while Dahl's pejorative use of the word "normal" may raise hackles, it does expose the hubris of believers who assume their way of thinking is inherently "normal".

How to Kill God in One Easy Step
For half a century, the Warsaw Bloc served as one, giant social experiment. Generations of eastern Europeans were raised and lived in a society devoid of religion. Those ancient pagan traditions, once reworked into the Christian Nativity, were reworked yet again into the secular "Winterfest". Most importantly, children were not indoctrinated in religious belief or ritual. In Dahl's world, only a very tiny, fringe minority claimed "to be in contact with gods, demons, and other beings no one has ever seen." Dahl and the other 98.7% of the population lived perfectly normal, fulfilling lives that did not include a god.

Although church activities were constrained, and atheism proclaimed, religious practice was never forbidden in the East. Even if you faced a certain amount of derision and ostracism, you were free to openly worship. Yet conversion was virtually nil in the East. In a society where the existence of God was not a given, and worship not an integral part of culture, practically nobody experienced Road to Damascus moments.

Nor has twenty years under the completely free, officially "Christian state" of the German Federal Republic changed anything. As the census numbers show, former East Germans are still perfectly content to remain god-free. Herein lies a dirty little secret the communist leaders understood well. To get religion to fade away, you don't need to ban it, you only need to stop propping it up.

Conversion of the majority is vital for a religion to survive. Christianity would still be a minor Jewish sect had it not been for Paul’s "infectious" zeal for proselytizing the entire world. No religion can perpetuate without coopting the workings of society and assimilating everyone into its status quo.

Expand or Die
This fact is borne out by cults, which must isolate themselves to survive. Had the Mormons remained in upstate New York, or made it out to San Francisco as planned, instead of getting stuck in the desert, they'd be an historical footnote today. The LDS, whose beliefs and practices strike standard Christians as decidedly "abnormal", can only thrive where three-quarters of the population are adherents.

The grand social experiment of the Warsaw Bloc proved that, unless a society pro-actively imposes religious belief on its members, most crucially on its children, and establishes religious practice as the norm, people do not, on the whole, spontaneously find belief in deities.

For any social behavior, there's a tipping point beyond which it cannot long exist. In Europe, religion is well past the point of no return. The levels there of "irreligion", defined as including atheism, deism, nontheism and agnosticism, are striking:

Country Irreligious

Sweden 83%
Denmark 80
Norway 78
Czech 74
France 73
UK 71
Finland 69
Netherlands 66
Albania 63
Belgium 61
Hungary 59
Slovenia 59
Spain 59
Germany 57
Switzerland 56
Slovakia 51

Serbia 45
Austria 42
Ireland 42
Croatia 30
Greece 30
Portugal 27
Italy 26
Poland 23
Romania 18

The real story may be more pronounced, as in many countries, people give only lip service to God. Spain, where four decades of fascist/catholic oppression was lifted in 1975, has exhibited the most dramatic apostasy. Today, barely 19% of Spaniards are practicing Christians, with an average age of 50 for supplicants. Ireland, not surprisingly, lags behind the rest of Western Europe. But even there, the loosening of religious orthodoxy portends that nation's inevitable loss of religious sentiment.

God on the Run
These trends conflict with a central tenet of belief. If God, through an assortment of tangible or metaphysical channels, makes His presence known to each individual, why does He do so exclusively in cultures where His existence has already been declared by mortal authorities? If belief in God was somehow the "norm" for a human being, then believers would have popped up like mushrooms in Eastern Europe once anti-church regimes had been overthrown. Similarly, the removal of the oppressive Franco regime in Spain, with its enforced state Catholicism, should not have precipitated a drastic drop-off in worship.

The standard rejoinder is that conventional theist practice is metamorphosing into a nuanced, and ultimately more profound, deism. Which to a certain extent is undeniably true, and, all in all, is an improvement for individuals and societies alike. Whether this trend will stabilize at deism, or will continue to plummet into general non-belief, is a question that won't be fully answered for decades.

One factor that reflects unfavorably on the prospects for a sustainable & robust deism is the tendency for deists to raise agnostic children, who in turn tend to raise atheists. This slippery slope is recognized by the traditional churches, who fight mightily to stop the slightest drift from orthodoxy.

Yet deism truly is the last resort for belief in a god. Ever since we first created them, we've had to continually relocate our gods, as our expanding understanding of our world exposed their former abodes to scrutiny. From Mount Olympus or a strange box inside a temple, then to (the) heaven(s), our deities were repeatedly uprooted, driven to increasingly ethereal homes. God has now arrived at His last stop, a non-physical dimension which, because it is unobservable, immeasurable and completely undetectable, offers Him eternal sanctuary from the prying eyes of Science and Reason.

Common Ground - For Now
For much of this ongoing divine exodus, the Deist, the Agnostic and the Atheist can travel in reasonably harmonious company-if we resist the urge either to convert or to marginalize the other. "Official" religion, whatever its irrefutable value to early civilization, is of no further use to any of us. In ever greater numbers-in modern societies-former practitioners of the public religion are turning to a private, personal deity for meaning and sustenance. In ever greater numbers-in modern societies-people are discovering they can lead perfectly happy and meaningful lives without resort to any deity at all. These trends can only be reversed through stifling Science and Reason, and by reimposing an official religion. Such desperate counterattacks, which are but the death spasms of orthodoxy, can be observed today.

I'm Normal...err...Okay, You're Okay
Whether, in the aftermath of the demise of traditional religion, the majority of people will embrace deism or atheism, remains to be seen. If the former, then it will continue to be normal (sic) for a person to believe in a god. Indeed, the believer usually claims that belief truly is the "natural" state for a person-that belief in a god is a prerequisite to a purposeful and ethical existence. That claim is belied, however, by the steadily growing ranks of nonbelievers, like Dahl and yours truly, who find it very easy to lead purposeful, ethical lives without a god. And we feel perfectly normal doing so.


(c) 2009 by 'tamerlane.' All rights reserved.