SPECIAL BOOK EXCERPT
From the forthcoming book GOOD WITHOUT GOD: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe by Greg Epstein. Copyright © 2009 by Greg Epstein. To be published on October 27, 2009, by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
By Greg Epstein
“It’s not easy to live a good life or be a good person—with or without a god,” writes Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein in the introduction to his new book, Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.” Tolerant, fair-minded people of all religions or none do not dwell on the question of whether we can be good without God,” Epstein continues. “The answer is yes. Period. Millions and millions of people are, every day. However, the question why we can be good without God is much more relevant and interesting. And the question of how we can be good without God is absolutely crucial. Those are the questions in this book—the essential questions asked and answered by Humanism.”
[The following section is excerpted from Chapter 6, “Good Without God in Community: The Heart of Humanism,” with permission of the author and the publishers.]
Art, Nature, and Being Alive Twice
Another important and Humanistic alternative to prayer you don’t need me to tell you about—but which is important to mention—is the appreciation of nature and the arts. Just as frequent reminders of the importance of compassion and the golden rule can be helpful (see chapter 4), we secular people can’t be reminded too often that art and the natural world are always there waiting for us to appreciate and take part in them. A psychologist friend of mine likes to say that every Sunday he attends the “Church of the Blue Dome.” Or as the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po said to his friend and colleague Tu Fu, “Thank you for letting me read your new poems. It was like being alive twice.” What, after all, is making or appreciating art if not taking what we find in the world around us—its radiant natural glory and toxic ugliness, our own love and hate, passion and ambivalence, anger and humor—and transforming it all into something that makes life more beautiful, more worthwhile? One finds this kind of sentiment again and again among great artists and Humanist lovers of art. Katha Pollitt, whom the right wing has labeled the “Atheist in Chief” at Nation magazine,has in fact written sensitively that atheism alone, as the rejection of gods and the supernatural, cannot meet our deepest human needs for connection and inspiration, but “perhaps art can go where atheism cannot.” And musicologist Daniel Levitin gets at a similar idea in a beautiful chapter entitled “Comfort” in his book The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature. The chapter is subtitled with some words a Joni Mitchell fan blurted out to her in gratitude while Mitchell and Levitin were eating dinner together one night. Explaining that Mitchell had helped her get through a rough decade in the 1970s, the fan said, “Before there was Prozac, there was you.”
Levitin’s story reminds me of a conversation I had with a fan after I quit the rock band I’d been singing with for a few years and announced I was headed to graduate school to study Humanism and religion. “Religion?” He asked incredulously, his disappointment in me palpable. “But music is religion!” I don’t think I mustered much of a response at the time—hell hath no fury like a music fan scorned—but upon reflection, I can say I love music as much as ever today, but the problem with the idea of music as a secular religion is that a concert is not a community. As “cultish” as the fans of some contemporary musical acts or artists can be, such cults rarely get to the point where their members are inspired by their common fandom to support each other in living well and meaningfully, or to come together to help others and make the world a better place.