A friend of mine, I forget who, submitted that America is essentially a secular society in spite of its intense and much reported-upon religiosity, in that (he or she submitted), of the 98% or however many people say that they believe in God, probably not nearly that many actually believe. I'm not sure I agree (I don't think I should underestimate my ignorance, as a New Yorker, of the United States), but it does seem clear to me that "I believe in God" is often not merely a statement of belief: it's like a speech act, a pledge of allegiance.
A lot atheists I know would be slow to self-identify as atheists, partly because of the sentiment articulated above by my antitheistic neighbor narrator [kept the typo instead of just editing it out because, I mean, wow]—it is indeed hard to answer the question "Do you believe in God?" because it's never clear, these days, what is even meant by "God"—and partly because in our country being an atheist is almost considered rude.
Why would it be rude not to believe? You might think the fact that atheists are a tiny minority (America's most hated, according to at least one recent poll)—particularly combined with the religious person's conviction that she has the omnipotent ruler and creator of the universe on her side!—would make religious beliefs pretty sturdy and religious people pretty confident about those beliefs, such that criticism and skepticism and doubt would be water off a duck's back... And yet almost the opposite is the case. This seeming paradox might have its root in the religious prohibition of blasphemy and heresy, but that begs the question because the prohibition itself is nothing if not the codification of insecurity. So: why must a belief be protected against questioning, particularly if it is absolutely true and, you could say, cosmically insured against loss or damage?
But religion is one of those topics that leads me down the path into "opinionation," so I'd better put on the brakes a little, here...particularly since the validity of religious faith is not even my focus: what concerns me is the tendency of atheists and agnostics* to tiptoe around the question of belief in God—their own belief in God—out of I think either uncertainty as to meaning of the question or a kind of weird cultural protectiveness (ultimately condescending, actually) of other people's rationally indefensible beliefs.
Seems maybe I'm not ready yet to talk about this without slipping into my old ranting style and going too far. Let's try this:
A few centuries ago—and to this very day, in some parts of the world (I suspect that my friend is right at least in that this is not especially true in the United States—but, again, I live in New York...)—if someone asked if you if you believed in God, he meant, "Do you believe in an all-powerful being [probably as described in the Bible] who is conscious and either is or could be watching you right now?" In fact, he'd probably even be referring to the "man in a cloud," very likely with a big white beard, that I think few people today would actually reference.
I ask you: why has the question's meaning shifted? Why does it now mean anything from "Do you believe in the guy in the cloud" to "Do you believe that there is order and value in the universe"? Seems clear to me that this is thanks to science: God has evolved to survive a changing intellectual climate. No longer can the educated and rational religious person say without embarrassment that God is sitting in one of those clouds—not if she's ever flown in a plane—and but so God's too strong to get knocked out by that alone, so suddenly, well, of course God isn't a dude in a cloud, he's like a force, a power! Isn't it a little suspicious that suddenly God is something totally different? Sure, you can say he was that all along, but then you're getting into Stalinist revisionist history, erasing God's hand from the Sistine Chapel, transforming literal truth into metaphor like an honest-to-God miracle. And, look, I have nothing against finding meaning in the Bible: I find meaning in fiction all the time. Human beings have come up with all sorts of brilliant, meaningful stuff. I even like it when somebody can spin a way that a geocentric or flat-earth worldview is actually profoundly meaningful and even somehow true in spite of being literally, scientifically, factually inaccurate. But when it becomes a kind of desperate ruse to save God...smuggling him out of the building through a secret back entrance, huddled under a big jacket, to avoid the mob outside...
But again I'm afraid I'm slipping into the old mode. Leave it at this: if you don't think God is a conscious being who literally, literally, created the world and runs it, then why be afraid? Call it like it is. You do not believe in God.
* And by the way, I used to think, with so many others, that it was a little crazy, overly radical, even a little stupid, to identify as an atheist because obviously there's no way of knowing for sure that God doesn't exist: agnostic, then—which different people use differently but which I take as signaling a lack of concrete knowledge in either direction w/r/t God—was the more reasonable and accurate choice. In retrospect, I think that's a cop-out. There's no way of knowing for sure about any belief; indeed, the whole reason we have the word belief is that you can think something, confidently, without knowing absolutely for sure. (Stephen Jay Gould came to my high school to speak, once, and said that scientists do not deal with facts; they deal with things that it would be perverse to doubt.) So if you don't think God exists, why not just call yourself an atheist?
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