Debate and Outcomes

As I wander through Jon Meacham's American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation, I found myself wondering (sometimes out loud, my wife reports) what the potential upshot is of the current public dialog involving atheist thinkers like Dawkins, Sam Harris, and (soon enough) Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins has as one of his objectives to actually help people leave religion by showing them that reason and non-religion are better--that non-belief is morally superior to belief. Sam Harris has a kind of spiritual commitment to community and the world as a replacement for supernatural beliefs. Hitchens? I'll have to wait but am certain that it will be a rollicking and lyrical ride.

Now, Dan Dennett began his foray into the lion's den with his discussion with exceptional high schoolers and coining the term "Bright" as a replacement for the vast sea of terms that we use like agnostic, atheist, humanist, rationalist, freethinker and so forth. I consider the term unfortunate because it does cast aspersions on the religious by antonymy: they are "dulls". Dennett has tried to talk around that comparison, but the semantics are now stuck and I doubt the term will gain positive traction as far as his original goal.

Still, I do think there is merit to Dennett's core goal of outreach to young people to build awareness that there is a community of freethinkers. Far too often I suspect that young people turn their vague feelings that there is something just not quite right about the religious folks around them into equally vague religious professions simply to get along with others. Knowing that there is a public dialog and serious discussion gives them the option of thinking freely, of overcoming the stigma associated with public non-belief. That is probably the lasting effect of the public discussion, but it does need to be both sustained and managed at the local level.

It is the local level--grassroots activism--that needs effort to help overcome the tendencies for vague consumerism to be overlain with vague religiosity. Maybe the calls for studying religion in schools would be enough to demystify some of the core issues that drive this trend by showing the historical and modern facts. An even-handed approach would certainly call into question specific supernatural and moral claims by juxtaposing all of the competing ideas in the world. And then kids would start asking deeper questions.