Atheists Decry Post-Attack Focus on God

On the National Day of Prayer and Remembrance, as the president spoke from a pulpit and a heartsick country united under patriotism and God, Lydia Rice felt estranged.

Rice ached as much as anyone, but as President Bush spoke to Americans from the National Cathedral, surrounded by leaders of the country’s major faiths, she felt she was on the fringes of the conversation.

And in a way, she was: Rice, a 40-year-old Silicon Valley engineer, is an atheist.

“I felt a tremendous need for a sense of community and even ceremony,” she said, but without the religious overtones that colored the national response to the tragedy.

So on Sunday, Rice organized the Secular Memorial in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Dozens of atheists and other nonreligious people gathered to remember those lost during the terrorist attacks. They recited the original Pledge of Allegiance, which was modified by Congress in 1954 to include the phrase “under God.”

For Rice, a highlight was the playing of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” famed for this nonreligious sentiment:

Imagine there’s no countries

It isn’t hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

Many atheists, no matter how patriotic or saddened, have been disturbed at the tenor of the past three weeks. From the frequent playing of “God Bless America” at sporting events to the president’s assertion that “God is not neutral,” religion has taken center stage. Interfaith services have been the most common of communal responses.

To atheists, the response crosses a great divide. They cringe when the government rallies the country by formalizing days of prayer. They ask whether the country doesn’t risk being a bit more like its extremist enemies when God is used to claim the moral high ground. They worry that their cause of separating church and state has become a little bit tougher.

And they wonder how people could continue to believe in God after Sept. 11.

“If that wasn’t a wake-up call to a religious nation, I don’t know what is,” said Ellen Johnson, president of American Atheist, the country’s oldest organization for nonbelievers. “That said to me, ‘There is no God.’ Where was he, on a coffee break?”

Johnson said she posed that question while being interviewed on a Louisiana radio station and was struck at the different answers. “One caller said God was weeping. Another said I needed to understand God allowed this terrorist attack to happen for a reason. Another caller said [Jesus] was where he’s always been, where he was when God put him on the cross. They all seemed to know where God was.”

Johnson said she drew inspiration from the heroism of firefighters, police officers and rescue workers because they symbolized to her what atheism is about--humans acting to help humans.

Rice makes that argument by paraphrasing the 19th century American philosopher Robert Ingersoll: “Hands that help are better far than lips that pray.”

Rice said that, for a time after the events of Sept. 11, she wished she could believe differently. “I told my sweetheart, ‘I wish I were religious.’ [Religion] makes no sense to me, but I need something, and I can understand why people are religious. But I can’t.”

Henda Lea, 56, president of the Secular Humanists of the East Bay, based in Berkeley, expressed a similar wistfulness, recalling that her own mother’s death years earlier was made more difficult by the fact that Lea did not believe in God. “In my mind, she’s gone forever,” she said. “I’ll never see her again. The things that gave me comfort are the things she did in life.”

Atheist Randi Mendelsohn of Staten Island was one of those people who scattered as the twin towers collapsed. Getting home and hearing the president reciting the 23rd Psalm angered her.

“During the national day of prayer, what was I supposed to do?” she asked. “Is praying the answer? To what? Has it helped yet? Are we better now?”

Molleen Matsumura, 53, of Berkeley, said going to Sunday’s Secular Memorial fulfilled the need of any human being: to hug, shake hands, share a smile and compassion at a trying time.

She said she knows of atheists who go to church simply because they like the music or singing in the choir, and the companionship.

“The human thing is to reach out to other people,” she said.

On its Web site, American Atheist has criticized the government and religious leaders for using God as a rallying tool. The sites knocks Bush for having the government organize prayer vigils and other sectarian events. Johnson said such efforts not only flout the separation of church and state, but leave out millions of Americans who do not believe in God. (An exit poll during the 2000 election by the Los Angeles Times Poll found that 9% of voters described themselves as atheists or nonreligious.)

“We’re not going to be quiet,” Johnson said. “If they keep rallying people by using God, we’re going to speak out.”

In the 1960s, America’s most famous atheist was the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who founded American Atheists. She fought a landmark court battle that led to the 1963 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banning compulsory prayer and Bible reading in public schools. She was widely despised, and today Johnson is feeling some of those same vibes.

“So far, I’ve been told that I’m on the wrong side of patriotism, history and morality,” she said. “No more in any other time have I felt as lonely.”

‘If that wasn’t a wake-up call to a religious nation, I don’t know what is. That said to me, “There is no God.” Where was he, on a coffee break?’