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  Praise for Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart

  “It is welcoming and refreshing to see a book on atheism that is not a polemic but a respectful and reasonable discussion of how a nonbeliever might engage the large questions that every human faces. Readers might discover that believers and humanist atheists share more in common than they think.”

  —Dudley Rose, associate dean at Harvard Divinity School

  “Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart delivers compelling answers to the simple question of what we should each believe. This easily understandable yet profound guide will leave you inspired to define your own beliefs.”

  —Peter Boghossian, Portland State University, author of A Manual for Creating Atheists

  “The authors approach their very readable and engaging refurbishment of the Ten Commandments with wisdom, intelligence, accessibility, lucidity, and almost pious sensitivity. However, to increase the sum of human happiness, I would add one non-commandment to their ten: Thou shalt read this book!”

  —Peter Atkins, Lincoln College, University of Oxford

  “Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart exemplifies a welcome new trend in secular America—the turning of attention from all that’s wrong with religion to a positive vision of what nonreligious people can be for and about. With clear heads and good hearts, Lex Bayer and John Figdor articulate a way to be secular that is not just rational but also compassionate and devoted to expanding the public good.”

  —Tom Krattenmaker, USA Today contributing columnist, author of The Evangelicals You Don’t Know

  “What a smart and joyful read—like a flight over the terrain of my own mind and heart with intelligent guides to point out what I’ve never noticed before.”

  —Dale McGowan, 2008 Harvard Humanist of the Year, author of Parenting Beyond Belief, Raising Freethinkers, and Atheism for Dummies

  “Conversational, thoughtful, inviting. A very reasonable, very sound, and at times quite visionary offering.”

  —Phil Zuckerman, Pitzer College, author of Living the Secular Life

  “An excellent book; worth reading regardless of one’s religious or a-religious inclinations. Delicate, fair, courteous, the authors are expressing their humility and courage, not confrontation or condemnation. They face every issue in a penetrating, transparent, and down-to-earth way. It is unreservedly honest, written with genuineness, and holding nothing back.”

  —Raymond F. Paloutzian, coeditor of Handbook of the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality, 2nd Edition

  “Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart is a wonderful exploration of life as a religious skeptic. Truth, meaning, and fulfillment—Bayer and Figdor show that there is much awaiting those who step away from superstition and embrace life in the real world.”

  —David Niose, president of the Secular Coalition of America, former president of the American Humanist Association, author of Nonbeliever Nation

  “I’ve devoted my adult life to encouraging everyone to check society’s work: How do you know there is a god or gods? What makes you think that democracy is the best form of government? Figdor and Bayer have done a beautiful thing in Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart as they have presented their moral theory. They have shown their work. In doing so, they have presented moral problems as something that all people must and can engage personally. I love it!”

  —August E. Brunsman IV, executive director of Secular Student Alliance

  “With more and more young Americans abandoning organized religion today, toward what values and institutions can—and should—they turn to construct a morally coherent world? This gently voiced but finely crafted book offers answers that may surprise you and will certainly engage you. If you are among those who want to know more than what you don’t believe, Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart offers a rich opportunity to discover what’s worth believing—and why—in a world moving past traditional religious institutions and creeds.”

  —Richard Parker, Harvard Kennedy School

  “Starting with a simple question, ‘What do I believe?’ the authors take us on a delightful journey to uncover the truth behind what forms our core beliefs.”

  —David Silverman, president of American Atheists

  “This book is NOT the Ten Commandments 2.0. It’s what you get when you use the tools of reason and humanism to rationally craft and promote better ways of life for everyone in the modern world and beyond.”

  —David Fitzgerald, author of Nailed and The Complete Heretic’s Guide to Western Religion

  “Okay, so you’ve become an atheist. Now what? Read this book. That’s my recommendation. It will help you build a new foundation for thinking and living a good life without God.”

  —John W. Loftus, author of Why I Became an Atheist and The Outsider Test for Faith

  “Atheists need to begin constructing positive principles to live by—and Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart provides a thorough demonstration of how to do just that.”

  —Paul Chiariello, cofounder of Yale Humanist Community, editor of Applied Sentience

  Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart

  Rewriting the Ten Commandments for the Twenty-first Century

  Lex Bayer and John Figdor

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  16 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BT, United Kingdom

  Copyright © 2014 by Lex Bayer and John Figdor

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bayer, Lex.

  Atheist mind, humanist heart : rewriting the Ten commandments for the twenty-first century / Lex Bayer and John Figdor.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4422-3679-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-3680-6 (electronic)

  1. Atheism. 2. Conduct of life. 3. Ethics. I. Title.

  BL2747.3.B39 2014

  211'.8—dc23

  2014025506

  ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  In tribute to:

  My father, who taught me to have a curious mind

  —Lex Bayer

  My parents, for the education and encouragement they gave me

  —John Figdor

  Contents

  Contents

  Introduction: Questioning Everything

  Chapter 1: Rewriting the Ten Commandments

  Part I: A Framework for Facts

  Chapter 2: The Paradox of Belief

  Chapter 3: The Reasoning behind Reason

  Chapter 4: Beliefs about the Unknown

  Chapter 5: The Assumption of a God

  Chapter 6: Putting Factual Beliefs to the Test

  Part II: A Framework for Ethics

  Chapter 7: From Beliefs to
Behavior

  Chapter 8: How “Ought” One Behave?

  Chapter 9: Moral Happiness

  Chapter 10: Societal Happiness

  Chapter 11: Putting Ethical Beliefs to the Test

  Chapter 12: Finding Your Own Non-commandments

  Appendix A: Common Religious Objections

  Appendix B: Our Ten Non-commandments

  Appendix C: Theorem of Belief

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  About the Authors

  Introduction: Questioning Everything

  In order to determine whether we can know anything with certainty, we first have to doubt everything we know.

  —Descartes

  Lex Bayer

  I was standing in my high school synagogue in South Africa, waving my clenched fist in a circle above my head. Seven times we were supposed to wave a coin above our heads while chanting a special prayer.

  I was fulfilling the Jewish practice of Kapparot. On the morning preceding Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, tens of thousands of Jews perform this ceremony. The ritual is supposed to transfer one’s sins from oneself to the coin.

  There I was, performing this ritual, surrounded by nearly nine hundred other students all twirling our hands above our heads and loudly chanting the same ancient prayer. Peering around at all those waving hands, my own twirls began to slow. What am I doing? I asked myself. Why am I doing something so weird?

  I slowly lowered my hand. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

  The school was a secular Jewish day school. Science and literature were as much a part of the syllabus as Jewish studies. What had caused me and all these other well-educated, rational young adults to do something so strange, simply because we had been told to do so? As it turns out, the ritual is even more bizarre in its original (and still practiced) form—the believer swings not a coin but a live chicken.1 Yes, the picture in your mind is correct—the more religious Jews swing a live chicken above their heads to rid themselves of their sins. The coin is just a modern alternative for those without ready access to live poultry.

  I can still picture myself standing in the synagogue, staring in disbelief at all those waving hands. That wasn’t the first time in my life that I had questioned my religion. But on that day I crossed an invisible line, one that would change the way I acted and believed for the rest of my life. I decided from that moment forward that I would formulate my own beliefs and not just blindly adopt those of others.

  Over the next several years, I tried to make sense of my religious doubts. What began with questioning Judaism soon expanded to questioning all religion and ultimately to questioning the very existence of God.

  This last conclusion didn’t come easily. I analyzed the arguments in favor of a belief in God, as well as the arguments against it, and wrestled with the ramifications of both for some time. In the end, I arrived at the only rational conclusion: God does not exist. I had become an atheist.

  My acceptance that God does not exist didn’t result in despair or anguish, as religious people often assume. Rather, like most new nonbelievers, I felt an initial wave of relief and liberation. Satisfaction, too. I had earnestly analyzed this mighty metaphysical question and arrived at a conclusion that I both understood and could rationalize. I felt the weight of thousands of years of religious belief lift from my shoulders. The comfort of knowledge remained.

  Sadly, the comfort didn’t last long. Soon I found myself facing an even bigger problem. I had figured out what I didn’t believe, but I didn’t know yet what I could believe. I discovered that while atheists are steadfast in denying the existence of a God, we often lack a strong assertion of the alternative—what exactly do atheists believe? Without a comprehensive system of assertive beliefs, I felt that any criticism of God and religion was spurious. The practicality of life requires that we each believe something. What is it that I believe?

  When a colleague heard I had abandoned my belief in God, he challenged me to respond to the assertion, attributed to Christian apologist G. K. Chesterton, that “when a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing, he believes in anything.”2

  I’d like to say I fired back a witty response, but that wasn’t the case. The claim brought me up short. I still had precious values, of course, but once the familiar religious foundations were stripped away, I didn’t quite know how to ascribe any sanctity to those values. I was in effect living my life according to anything. Historian and author Will Durant, himself an atheist, offered a similar concern when he declared that “the greatest question of our time is not communism vs. individualism, not Europe vs. America, not even the East vs. the West; it is whether man can bear to live without God.”3

  The more closely I looked at the values I’d acquired during the course of my life, the greater my awareness of the weakness of their foundation. I didn’t know what I thought I knew. Without a belief in God—an almighty deity who decides what is right and what is wrong—how could I know why any value should be more or less valid than any other? How could I justify the continued importance of morality in my life? Should I even be moral?

  John Figdor

  I was eight years old. It was snowing heavily in Scarsdale, New York, in the earliest hours of December 25, 1992. The light outside the window was casting a faint yellow glow on the frosted glass, but I wasn’t focused on the still beauty of this Christmas night. Instead, crouched at the top of the stairs like a cat burglar, I peeked through the banister toward the living room. Muted conversation filtered up the stairs, along with some rustling in our downstairs hall closet, just out of view.

  I crept down one step, two steps, three steps, like a ninja in footie pajamas, until at last the hall closet came into view. I saw my mom and dad chatting quietly as they retrieved the Christmas presents from their secret hiding spot in the closet and placed them under the tree in our living room. I crouched in the shadows, my heart beating out of my chest. I’d just caught my parents in flagrante delicto putting presents under the tree! I gloated silently. I had definitive proof I could share with my friends. As I watched, my dad took a bite out of one of the cookies I’d left for Santa before returning to the hall closet to collect a few more presents.

  I wouldn’t say that disbelieving in Santa made me an atheist, but it did make me realize three things: first, things aren’t always what they seem or what people say they are; second, supernatural explanations are suspect; and finally, if you want to find out the truth, you can’t just go asking other people—you have to investigate for yourself.

  That Christmas night episode was the first of a long series of insights that slowly transitioned me from a believing Christian to an atheist. What began with belief in a naïve version of Christianity (often referred to in divinity schools as “Sunday school Christianity”) was irrevocably damaged that night with the discovery that Santa wasn’t real.

  My faith in Christianity continued to diminish during high school, especially during confirmation class in the United Church of Christ, the church in which I was raised. Confirmation class was required for all fourteen-year-olds who wanted to become members. The class was led by a wonderfully progressive Christian minister who didn’t shrink from addressing the controversial parts of the Bible. We would have Bible readings and discuss them, talking about what we found compelling and what we found suspicious.

  As the class progressed, I realized that I found most of the book tedious and the rest of it morally and factually suspect.

  It was in this class that I abandoned my faith altogether. The occasion was a discussion on the problem of evil—or why bad things happen to good people. As it happens, I was studying the Holocaust at the same time in my social studies class at school. During the discussion, my faintly Christian beliefs were utterly unable to explain why a benevolent God would allow the radical evil of the Holocaust to happen.
Worse, I discovered apologists arguing all sorts of insane things, such as:

  Jews deserved the Holocaust for being insufficiently holy.4

  The Bible’s answer was in the Book of Job, which suggests that human beings cannot question God’s morality because God’s infinite ways are so far beyond our human comprehension.5

  I was appalled. The absence of intellectual rigor in the arguments, the transparent lack of real compassion for the victims of the Holocaust, and the inability of the apologists even to consider the possibility of God’s culpability in the world’s horrors6 opened my eyes to the lack of serious answers to this critical problem. The deeper I dug, the worse it became. Not only did I discover a foundational problem with Christian theology (the assertion that God is omnibenevolent, or “perfectly good”) but, worse, I found myself turned off by a church that seemed more interested in preserving the dignity and moral purity of God than concerned for the systematic murder of millions.

  But in turning away from one problem, I found myself facing another. I had discarded my religious faith but found myself asking the question, “Now what?” After all, realizing that there isn’t an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent deity watching over the good and punishing the wicked is just the first step. Having figured out what I didn’t believe in, I now had to investigate what I should believe in. I found myself faced with a whole new set of questions:

  How does morality work without God?

  If I’m not a pawn in God’s experiment, what should I do with my life?

  How can I tell what is true and what is false?

  What happens after you die?

  I dived into these questions as a philosophy major at Vassar College, then volunteered in a domestic violence shelter in Butte, Montana. But the big questions continued to rattle around in my mind, and after a year in Montana I enrolled in Harvard Divinity School. Before long, I was serving as president of the Harvard Atheists, Skeptics, and Humanists society.