[ExI] In Europe and U.S., Nonbelievers Are Increasingly Vocal

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In Europe and U.S., Nonbelievers Are Increasingly Vocal
By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 15, 2007; A01

BURGESS HILL, England -- Every morning on his walk to work, high school
teacher Graham Wright recited a favorite Anglican prayer and asked God for
strength in the day ahead. Then two years ago, he just stopped.

Wright, 59, said he was overwhelmed by a feeling that religion had become a
negative influence in his life and the world. Although he once considered
becoming an Anglican vicar, he suddenly found that religion represented
nothing he believed in, from Muslim extremists blowing themselves up in
God's name to Christians condemning gays, contraception and stem cell
research.

"I stopped praying because I lost my faith," said Wright, 59, a thoughtful
man with graying hair and clear blue eyes. "Now I truly loathe any sight or
sound of religion. I blush at what I used to believe."

Wright is now an avowed atheist and part of a growing number of vocal
nonbelievers in Europe and the United States. On both sides of the Atlantic,
membership in once-quiet groups of nonbelievers is rising, and books
attempting to debunk religion have been surprise bestsellers, including "The
God Delusion," by Oxford University professor Richard Dawkins.

New groups of nonbelievers are sprouting on college campuses, anti-religious
blogs are expanding across the Internet, and in general, more people are
publicly saying they have no religious faith.

More than three out of four people in the world consider themselves
religious, and those with no faith are a distinct minority. But especially
in richer nations, and nowhere more than in Europe, growing numbers of
people are actively saying they don't believe there is a heaven or a hell or
anything other than this life.

Many analysts trace the rise of what some are calling the "nonreligious
movement" to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The sight of religious
fanatics killing 3,000 people caused many to begin questioning -- and
rejecting -- all religion.

"This is overwhelmingly the topic of the moment," said Terry Sanderson,
president of the National Secular Society of Britain. "Religion in this
country was very quiet until September 11, and now it is at the center of
everything."

Since the 2001 attacks, a string of religiously inspired bomb and murder
plots has shaken Europe. Muslim radicals killed 52 people on the London
public transit system in 2005 and 191 on Madrid trains in 2004. People
apparently aiming for a reward in heaven were arrested in Britain last year
for trying to blow up transatlantic jetliners. And earlier this month in
Germany, authorities arrested converts to Islam on charges that they planned
to blow up American facilities there.

Many Europeans are angry at demands to use taxpayer money to accommodate
Islam, Europe's fastest-growing religion, which now has as many as 20
million followers on the continent. Along with calls for prayer rooms in
police stations, foot baths in public places and funding for Islamic schools
and mosques, expensive legal battles have broken out over the niqab, the
Muslim veil that covers all but the eyes, which some devout women seek to
wear in classrooms and court.

Christian fundamentalist groups who want to halt certain science research,
reverse abortion and gay rights and teach creationism rather than evolution
in schools are also angering people, according to Sanderson and others.

"There is a feeling that religion is being forced on an unwilling public,
and now people are beginning to speak out against what they see as rising
Islamic and Christian militancy," Sanderson said.

Though the number of nonbelievers speaking their minds is rising, academics
say it's impossible to calculate how many people silently share that view.
Many people who do not consider themselves religious or belong to any faith
group often believe, even if vaguely, in a supreme being or an afterlife.
Others are not sure what they believe.

The term atheist can imply aggressiveness in disbelief; many who don't
believe in God prefer to call themselves humanists, secularists,
freethinkers, rationalists or, a more recently coined term, brights.

"Where religion is weak, people don't feel a need to organize against it,"
said Phil Zuckerman, an American academic who has written extensively about
atheism around the globe.

He and others said secular groups are also gaining strength in countries
where religious influence over society looms large, including India, Israel
and Turkey. "Any time we see an outspoken movement against religion, it
tells us that religion has power there," Zuckerman said.

One group of nonbelievers in particular is attracting attention in Europe:
the Council of Ex-Muslims. Founded earlier this year in Germany, the group
now has a few hundred members and an expanding number of chapters across the
continent. "You can't tell us religion is peaceful -- look around at the
misery it is causing," said Maryam Namazie, leader of the group's British
chapter.

She and other leaders of the council held a news conference in The Hague to
launch the Dutch chapter on Sept. 11, the sixth anniversary of the terrorist
attacks in the United States. "We are all atheists and nonbelievers, and our
goal is not to eradicate Islam from the face of the earth," but to make it a
private matter that is not imposed on others, she said.

The majority of nonbelievers say they are speaking out only because of
religious fanatics. But some atheists are also extreme, urging people, for
example, to blot out the words "In God We Trust" from every dollar bill they
carry.

Gaining political clout and access to television and radio airtime is the
goal of many of these groups. With a higher profile, they say, they could,
for instance, lobby for all religious rooms in public hospitals to be
closed, as a response to Muslims demanding prayer rooms because Christians
have chapels.

Associations of nonbelievers are also moving to address the growing demand
in Britain, Spain, Italy and other European countries for nonreligious
weddings, funerals and celebrations for new babies. They are helping arrange
ceremonies that steer clear of talk of God, heaven and miracles and
celebrate, as they say, "this one life we know."

The British Humanist Association, which urges people who think "the
government pays too much attention to religious groups" to join them, has
seen its membership double in two years to 6,500.

A humanist group in the British Parliament that looks out for the rights of
the nonreligious now has about 120 members, up from about 25 a year ago.

Doreen Massey, a Labor Party member of the House of Lords who belongs to
that group, said most British people don't want legislators to make public
policy decisions on issues such as abortion and other health matters based
on their religious beliefs.

But the church has disproportionate power and influence in Parliament, she
said. For example, she said, polls show that 80 percent of Britons want the
terminally ill who are in pain to have the right to a medically assisted
death, yet such proposals have been effectively killed by a handful of
powerful bishops.

"We can't accept that religious faiths have a monopoly on ethics, morality
and spirituality," Massey said. Now, she added, humanist and secularist
groups are becoming "more confident and more powerful" and recognize that
they represent the wishes of huge numbers of people.

While the faithful have traditionally met like-minded people at the local
church, mosque or synagogue, it has long been difficult for those without
religion to find each other. The expansion of the Internet has made it a
vital way for nonbelievers to connect.

In retirement centers, restaurants, homes and public lectures and debates,
nonbelievers are convening to talk about how to push back what they see as
increasingly intrusive religion.

"Born Again Atheist," "Happy Heathen" and other anti-religious T-shirts and
bumper stickers are increasingly seen on the streets. Groups such as the
Skeptics in the Pub in London, which recently met to discuss this topic,
"God: The Failed Hypothesis," are now finding that they need bigger rooms to
accommodate those who find them online.

Wright, the teacher who recently declared himself a nonbeliever, is one of
thousands of people who have joined dues-paying secular and humanist groups
in Europe this year.

Sitting in his living room on a quiet cul-de-sac in this English town of
30,000, Wright said he now goes online every day to keep up with the latest
atheist news.

"One has to step up and stem the rise of religious influence," said Wright,
who is thinking of becoming a celebrant at humanist funerals. He said he
recently went to the church funeral of his brother-in-law and couldn't bear
the "vacuous prayers of the vicar," who, Wright said, "looked bored and
couldn't wait to leave."

Now, instead of each morning silently reciting a favorite nighttime prayer,
"Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy
defend us from all perils and dangers . . . " (from the Anglican Book of
Common Prayer), he spends the time just thinking about the day ahead.

He said his deceased mother, a Catholic, was comforted by her faith: "It
kept her going through difficult times," particularly when his father left
her when he and his sister were young.

"I really don't know how I will react if something really bad happens," he
said. "But there is no going back. There is nothing to go back to."

Not believing in an afterlife, he said, "makes you think you have to make
the most of this life. It's the now that matters. It also makes you feel a
greater urgency of things that matter," such as halting global warming, and
not just dismissing it as being "all in God's plan."

He called himself heartened that the National Secular Society, which he
recently joined, is planning to open chapters at a dozen universities this
fall. The rising presence of the nonreligious movement, he said, is
"fantastic."

"It's a bit of opposition, isn't it?" he said. "Why should these religious
groups hold so much sway?"


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