February 1997: Ellen DeGeneres tells Oprah that she (Ellen) is gay.  Bad career move for Ellen… for a few years.  Now Ellen has a successful afternoon talk show.  Time marches on.

December 2012: Craig H. Collins tells anyone listening that he is… atheist!  Atheist!

Oh me of little faith!

Like Ellen, I must have forgotten to step away from the microphone when I said that.  Did I really mean to reveal this dark secret?  I can’t take it back now!  What have I done?

So I am out.  This, the 200th post of The 100 Billionth Person, is as good a setting as any. And Christmas, America’s most beloved quasi-religious holiday, is just around the corner.  What can I say.

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I resist having any label attached to me, whether it is engineer or liberal or retired or funny. Labels summon up preconceptions in other people’s minds, making it easier for a person to be categorized rather than considered.  The atheist label in particular tends to provoke strong and overriding emotional responses: some people recoil and prepare for counterattack, while others feel pity and pray for the poor soul’s redemption.  But today (for this post anyway) I will accept the label, if only to end any ambiguity.¹

Misconceptions about atheists are widespread, so let me set your mind at ease:

• I am not angry.  I don’t live in despair.  I don’t hate everything you stand for.
• I don’t eat atheist peanut butter and atheist jelly sandwiches for lunch.
• I dont flip coins over to avoid seeing the words “In God We Trust”.
• I don’t melt into a puddle of plasma when I walk into a church.
• I never met Madalyn Murray O’Hair.

Unlike the other angry atheist tracts you have read², I am not going to either defend it or explain it or pick fights with the more-enlightened (the last is especially futile).  But I will cherry-pick a few facts.  A 2008 study ranked various nations by their disbelief in God: 52% of East Germans say they do not believe, compared to 23% of the French, 18% of the British, 9% of Japanese and 3% of Americans.  Scarce as we are, there are twice as many American atheists as American Jews and four times the number of American Muslims.  String up those garlic cloves: we walk among you.

Three out of four Americans profess the same faith as the one in which they were raised, whether Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or Jew.  I was not born an atheist³ but evolved into one through a deliberate process over a number of eons.  In the end, I decided that the universe is either explainable by physics or it is not — I cannot accept the co-existence of physics and magic.  I don’t believe in any type of spirit, extra-sensory communications, prayers, vibrations (good or bad), superstition or luck.  Coincidences are only that.  And I cringe when someone says, “it was meant to be,” because it implies that some “meaning” permeates the cosmos.  “Meaning” is a mental construct that entirely depends on who is doing the constructing.

But don’t I find the lack of meaning depressing?  (As if avoiding depression would justify my believing something that isn’t there.)  No, but it would depress me if it were true that people cannot be moral without believing in some supernatural being.  Although 57% of Americans subscribe to this notion, I am not depressed, since I know by counterexample that it simply isn’t so.

Defenders of the faith like to point out that scientists don’t know everything, that scientists disagree with each other, and that scientists change their minds whenever some new bit of evidence destroys the old paradigm.  OK, guilty as charged.  They also say that whatever scientists claim to know are simply “theories” — i.e., provisional truths, not absolute ones.  Faithsayers see this as demonstrating the fragility and unreliability of science, but this is its very strength: scientists make falsifiable statements and challenge others to falsify them, whereas institutions of faith make unfalsifiable statements and often threaten those who do not accept them.  You know where I stand.

One thing I do have in common with religious people is that I think the world would be a better place if more people agreed with me.  The religious feel the same way.

• • •

So Merry Christmas and Happy Kwanzaa to you all.  May you enjoy the holidays as much as I will.  If you like, you can return the sentiments on March 20, General Relativity Day.  (March 20, 1916, is the day Einstein’s masterwork, “The Foundations of the General Theory of Relativity,” was published in Annalen der Physik.)  That is probably the closest thing to Atheist Christmas there is, other than the one we are all about to celebrate.

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¹ For my family, this is yesterday’s news — though I was surprised when my wife recently told me that she thought I was agnostic, not atheist.  When I showed her the Registered Atheist ID card that the county requires me to carry whenever I am within 1000 feet of a Baptist church, she was convinced.

² I am being sarcastic, of course.  But the underlying point is real enough.  In a christianpost.com blog titled “Would You Want an Atheist for a Neighbor?”, the writer was not being sarcastic at all when he lamented “the frenetic and uninformed screeds that atheists purchase and read by the truckload.”  Yes, all my neighbors are getting tired of seeing the UPS truck roll into my driveway, delivering more of those atheist screeds.  I wouldn’t want to be my neighbor either.

³ Actually, aren’t we all born that way?

The writer Christopher Hitchens, noted atheist and devotee of Jefferson, Paine and Johnnie Walker Red, died of esophageal cancer a year and a couple of days ago.  I always admired Hitchens’ ability to string together his assertions and facts in such a way that a listener could hardly help but travel with him to his intended destination.  Hitchens could argue without being (overly) argumentative.  He anchored his points to principles much like laws are derived from constitutions.  A self-described anti-totalitarian, Hitchens might appreciate that comparison, if he were looking down from heaven and reading my blog.  Which he most definitely is not — not the looking down and so neither the reading.

I recently finished his 2010 memoir Hitch-22.  I don’t intend to review the book but I will share a few reflections on him here.

1. I remember Hitchens (from television appearances) as a somewhat jowly, large man with a receding hairline and a boyish face.  In his memoir, I noted that Hitchens liked to think of himself as handsome, at least in his younger days, and he appreciated that quality in other men.  While Hitchens was married (twice) and had children, it appeared to me that his sexuality is best described as pleasure-oriented, rather than straight, bisexual or gay.  He was accustomed to being a man with looks and swagger; as he aged he mourned the loss of the former while holding onto a good parcel of the latter.

2. Hitchens was married to his second wife Carol for the twenty years preceding his death.  I know this only because I looked it up.  He does not talk about his marriages in his memoir and mentions the name “Carol” perhaps three times in the book.  His acknowledgements include his daughter and his father-in-law but not his wife.  The absence is glaring but I don’t know what to make of it.

3. Hitchens traveled in an eminent literary circle that included the novelist Martin Amis, the poet James Fenton and the author Salman Rushdie.  Much of the memoir recounts Hitchens’ exploits with them.*  Unfortunately (in my view) the book delivers a heavy dose of name-dropping of these and other once- and now-renowned literati — I suppose I might know and care about those names if I were “well-read.”  (One that I do intend to read well is W. H. Auden.)  Not that I envy Hitchens his friends: mine may not be so famous but I wouldn’t trade the experiences with my friends for those of his.

4. Along those lines, I was surprised at the extent Hitchens indulged in retelling various “you had to be there” moments within his circle.  He devoted paragraphs to a juvenile word-game they played, where the object was to substitute a vulgar word for an ordinary word in book and song titles — for example, if one replaced love with hysterical sex, the result would be “Hysterical Sex is a Many-Splendored Thing” and “Hysterical Sex Story.”  I would not have figured Hitchens would find this amusing, even after a glass of Scotch.

5. Hitchens so admired Thomas Jefferson that when Hitchens gained U.S. citizenship in 2007, he asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to personally swear him in at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., on his (and Jefferson’s) birthday.  In his biography of Jefferson, Hitchens did discuss Jefferson’s “contradictions” but it is hard for me to reconcile Hitchens’ anti-totalitarianism with his reverence for the slave-owning Jefferson.  Hitchens, like Jefferson, was not without his contradictions, as he admitted.

I liked how Hitchens spoke and how he wrote.  But simply put, it was hard for me to relate to him — our worlds were so different.  Reading his memoir put more distance between the two of us than I had imagined had been there before.

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* I have not read one work by Amis, Fenton or Rushdie, as I prefer non-fiction.  Naturally, I do know who Rushdie is.  Maybe I will read more novels in my next life.