Why Did God Create Atheists? - from Tales of the Hasidim

Why Did God Create Atheists?

There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson.

One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?” The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”

Martin Buber. Tales of the Hasidim. Schocken Books. (1964)

Trying to stay human while watching the Israeli - Palestinian conflict

Watching the most recent violence in the Israeli - Palestinian conflict is gut-wrenching. 

Nations that identify with a particular religion make me uncomfortable - the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Islamic Republic of Mauritania, the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan... as much as I understand the desire for a Jewish homeland, given the centuries of persecution people of the Jewish faith have experienced, let alone the Shoah itself, there is a part of me that isn't comfortable with a Jewish state, just as I am not comfortable with all those Islamic Republics. 

Still, I get it: various people, communities and civilizations have tried to murder all Jews for centuries. I see why there is a desire for a country that is dedicated to the preservation of all who identify as Jewish, which is more than a religion for many people - it's an ancient diverse culture and people who identify with it may not be religious at all.

But even if I agree that the Jewish state of Israel has a right to exist, I am absolutely opposed to the settlements in the West Bank. I am appalled at the continuing land grab and the violence regularly perpetuated by Jewish settlers against Palestinian Muslims and Christians who have been on that land for generations, who have every right to be on that land. The expulsions of Palestinians from land Israel claims is abhorrent. 

And with that said, I am beyond disgusted, outraged, appalled and horrified at this latest Hamas act of terror and murder: the attack on attendees at the Supernova music festival. This violence is INEXCUSABLE. If you believe that Hamas and Israel are at war, then you must also acknowledge that this attack was a war crime. It most definitely was a crime against humanity. 

And with all THAT said, Israel's murderous response isn't going to make any Israeli safer. It is an act of vengeance, not a war strategy. 

I hear both sides talking about the eradication of the other. I hear both sides saying their dead children matter and the other side's dead children aren't their fault. I hear both sides characterizing the other as animals, as sub human. 

This sums up how I'm feeling:

To the people celebrating the mass murder of Israeli civilians, you have lost your humanity. To the people enthusiastically calling for Israel to decimate Gaza, densely populated with 2 million Palestinian civilians, you have lost your humanity. Israelis and Palestinians are real people, just like you and me.

- Dov Waxman, Professor @ UCLA; Gilbert Foundation Chair of Israel Studies, & Director of Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies.

I don't know what the answer is. But I'm going to do all I can to stay human and hope that there are people in Israel and Palestine who don't hate each other, who believe it's possible to co-exist, and who are ready to call out the crimes of their own people. 

Wildly impractical moments

There's a good essay in the Washington Post, published in August of this year by a woman who is dying from a rare and aggressive cancer. It sounds like that she both found out she had the disease and that it is advanced, incurable and that she has just a few months to live all at the same time. 

She notes, "My prognosis has left me shocked, sad, angry and confused. I wake up some mornings raging at the universe, feeling betrayed by my own body, counting the years and the milestones I expected to enjoy with my family... I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my life, and in addition to the horror, a surprising feeling has taken hold: I am dying at age 49 without any regrets about the way I’ve lived my life."

I don't expect people who have disabilities or who are terminally ill should ever expect to be an inspiration for the rest of us. Not all of them have this person's perspective nor experience. But I find her outlook on her life's choices really inspiring. 

After noting her very happy marriage and a particularly successful career pursuit, she says,

I’ve always tried to say yes to the voice that tells me I should go out and do something now, even when that decision seems wildly impractical. A few years ago, with very little planning, my family and I got in a car and drove 600 miles to a goat farm in central Oregon, where we camped out for four days to watch a solar eclipse. I once jetted off to Germany on two days’ notice, spending a week exploring Dresden and hiking through the Black Forest...

The end of my life is coming much too soon, and my diagnosis can at times feel too difficult to bear. But I’ve learned that life is all about a series of moments, and I plan to spend as much remaining time as I can savoring each one, surrounded by the beauty of nature and my family and friends. Thankfully, this is the way I’ve always tried to live my life.

Of course not all of us can do what she's done, like live in one of the most unaffordable parts of the USA, or even run off to Germany, for that matter. Not caring about money isn't just a choice - it's a luxury not everyone can afford. She could buy that airline ticket, she could pay for that gas to drive up to Oregon and back - so many cannot. 

But I'm focusing on the idea that, indeed, sometimes, doing something that is wildly impractical is just what you need. It doesn't have to come with a big bill either. 

I have a friend that has always wanted to learn Italian. She loves all things Italian. When I said, "Why don't you sign up on Duolingo and learn Italian?" she replied, "I really should learn something useful, like Spanish. They only speak Italian in Italy." If you feel inspired to learn Italian, LEARN ITALIAN! Just do it for the sake of doing it! 

Take class on baking. Or wood working. Or smithing. 

Go see that band you have ALWAYS wanted to but keep thinking, oh, it's so much trouble and I can't afford it - cancel all your streaming subscriptions for a couple of months and DO IT. 

Always wanted to learn to play piano? Whether you are 20 or 50 or 70 - do it! Free pianos are easy to find - so many people want to get rid of pianos. All you have to pay is the movers to get such to your house. Buy some how to books and get going! 

And say "yes" to more invitations. Say yes to going to dinner, say yes to going to the movies, say yes to going for a walk, say yes to going somewhere for a cookout. There are a limited number of beautiful days. There are a limited number of days you will be able to walk. There are a limited number of days you will have with family and friends. I know it's fashionable to celebrate being an introvert, and certainly you should avoid toxic people, but the people I know who always say no to everything are miserable. I love cocooning at home too, more often than I should, but I have been so thankful when I've gone out, whether for a walk around a lake or to go see Barbie. 

I know that I have lived more than half of the life I will live. I can't say I don't have any regrets. But I can say that I've experienced many wonderful things. Some of those pursuits have gotten mocked: I'll never forget the sibling who dressed me down for traveling so much ("An absolute waste of money!"). He's wrong, of course. I love looking at photos from my life. I love reading journal entries I've written over the years. And I'm looking forward to more wildly impractical moments. 

Some recommended readings from two other atheists

Some recommended readings from two other atheists:

Bruce Gerencser is a blogger, a humanist and an atheist. He pastored evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a He's 62, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 41 years. He and his wife have six grown children and twelve grandchildren. 

Here's one of his blogs from 2019 I just discovered and I really love: Christian Explanations for Why Bad Things Happen. If you grow up in a Bible-believing society, as I did, you get all the reasoning he lists thrown at you whenever something bad happens in your life. The mental and spiritual gymnastics of believers is astonishing - and so profoundly hurtful when you are going through a crisis. 

And in the Richard Dawkins is still a dick department, we have this blog from the Friendly Atheist noting that Richard Dawkins used his new podcast to promote more transphobic lies. 

I remain flabbergasted by that man's refusal to believe in science. He's a freakin' scientist! He's supposed to be a biologist - and he ignores biology! Regardless of how you feel about people identifying as transgender - and for the record, I have some feelings about it, feelings that I know would hurt the feelings of some of my more activist friends - no one can say with any grain of truth that transgender doesn't exist in humans and other species. Even if you think some people who say they are transgender aren't really transgender, you cannot honestly deny that transgender does not exist in other species! Because IT DOES EXIST. Regardless of your feelings, that FACT is undeniable. If you are transgender, especially if you are a young person, please hear me clearly: not all atheists are assholes like Richard Dawkins. You exist, you are real, you are transgender, being transgender is not imaginary or a fad, I will use whatever pronouns you want me to, and I hope you are pursuing living your best life. 

Humanism from the Holocaust

I think that the absence of God can be really beautiful. It means it's our responsibility to take care of each other on this earth. And everything courageous and beautiful that we do is on us. And so I see my atheism very much as an act of optimism, that it is our job to make this world as good of a place as possible for as many people as possible.

-- Vanessa Zoltan, in an interview with NPR. Zoltan is a humanist chaplain who describes herself as an atheist chaplain. She is the chaplain at UnityPoint Health – Meriter, a hospital in Madison, Wisconsin. Martin says that the religion she was raised in, the theology she was raised in, was the Holocaust. All four of her grandparents were Auschwitz survivors and her parents were born right after World War II.

"..every law I was taught, as to how to walk through the world, was through the orientation of the Holocaust." She calls it the "theology of the Holocaust." She says in the interview that, because of this theology, taught through her family's experience, that her family had certain core values they lived by: that you always get involved if you see anything going on with your neighbors. That you question bureaucracy before you follow it. And you look at friends and neighbors and wonder whether or not they would hide you if you ever needed to be hidden.

I LOVE her statement about the absence of God being beautiful. Because it is. I wrote back in 2015 why I love being an atheist, so I won't repeat myself but, yeah, I still love being an atheist, and I'm not using the word love lightly.

Her statement about the Holocaust being her theology really struck me. I am not Jewish. I have no Jewish ancestry. I would never assume anything about my experience is anything like hers or her families. But there's no denying that learning about Holocaust when I was a teenager played a MASSIVE role in my finally embracing not just my atheism, but my humanism. It was not Christianity that taught me of the utterly vital importance of believing in the equal and inherent dignity of all humans. It was not Christianity that emphasized the vital importance, the essential nature, of a concern for all humans and a belief that we must look out for our neighbors. It was the Holocaust. 

I grew up in rural Kentucky, in an overwhelmingly evangelical Christian area. I grew up being told repeatedly that Jesus was a Jew, but I wasn't entire sure what that was. My first Jewish experience was probably when I read the play The Diary of Anne Frank in junior high school - and it hit me like a ton of bricks: I was immediately horrified and terrified. I could not understand why I had never heard of the Holocaust. I thought not only what I would do in hiding but how I would or could hide someone. I understood, for the first time, that your own country and neighbors could turn on you. I have no idea how many times I read that play outside of school hours and then, in high school, it was not only again something we read in an English class, it was not only the play we did my junior year of high school (I was Miep), but it was the prelude to an entire semester where we studied the Holocaust in my Kentucky pubic high school. 

Yes, the only high school in a county in Kentucky, in the early 1980s, made every student, no matter what academic track they were on, study the Holocaust. The films we watched were tied to our English classes instead of history classes, because not every student had a history class, but every student had an English class. We watched at least two documentaries, including one I saw again, decades later, when I visited Dachau. We watched Playing for Time in class. Sophie's Choice came on one of the movie channels my parents subscribed to and I watched it, alone. At university, still in Kentucky, I attended a talk by Alfons Heck, who at one time was the highest ranking Hitler youth, at the end of World War II, and and Jewish Holocaust survivor Helen Waterford. They visited more than 150 universities over nine years, urging us to avoid Hitler-type brainwashing. I took the message to deeply to heart. It's dominated my thinking ever since. (I highly recommend you read Heck's book, A Child of Hitler: Germany in the Days When God Wore a Swastika).

I've never stopped thinking about the Shoah. And its framed my outlook on the world ever since. I've never stopped thinking about how I would flee nor how I would help someone hide and flee. I have taken to heart what I read once: "Do you wonder what you would have done in Germany in the 1930s? You're doing it now."

The Holocaust, and all genocides that I've studied, have changed how I view the enslavement and oppression black Americans - and in understanding what the underground railroad really did, what that work really entailed, and the risk the participants were really taking. What would you have done in the 1850s and 1860s in the USA? You're doing it now. 

My studies of the Holocaust has made me go down many a rabbit hole in trying to learn what happened to neighbors and communities that lead to the purges in Cambodia and the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia. I am appalled at the murders of the Rohingya in Burma and the denial of it by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, someone once celebrated as a champion of human rights - how does that happen? The Holocaust makes me see the demonization of immigrants world wide, not just the USA, the rise in nationalism in so many countries, not only the USA, requiring people to not question nor criticize their governments, the celebration and election of people who are Nazi-adjacent and Nazi-friendly in my own country as well as in others, and the massive rise in anti-Semitism globally, including in my own country, and it has me horrified and terrified.  

But I also come back to my humanity. My humanism. In all those horrors, I do read hope, like the Muslims who hid Christian Tutsis from death squads and murderous mobs. Or I see it for myself, when I went to a local mosque in the county where I live, for a meeting to show support for Muslims in the face of comments and actions by the then President of the USA, and there were members of a Jewish congregation there, and one of them standing up to say, "We will encircle this mosque if we have to. They will have to get through us to ever get to you." 

What would I have done in Germany in the 1930s? I like to think I'm doing it now. But I know I come up short. I could do more. I should do more. I write my elected officials and I show up at their pubic town halls. I use my privilege to ask tough questions of the police in public forums. I don't push my views on everyone - but I also don't hide them, and it's cost me friends, friendly relations with some neighbors and regular visits with much of my family. And those are real costs, costs I sometimes mourn. But not worth betraying my humanism. 

More about Vanessa Zoltan.

Also see:

I have hope but not faith.

Magic, Kindness and Hope.

The power & the glory of hope, WITHOUT a God.

The atheist response to a national crisis

I've read it many times: participation in a religious community - a church, a temple, a mosque - generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, with higher financial generosity, and with more stable families. And I get why that's probably true because of what I experienced growing up and what I've seen so often in communities where most residents are religious. 

Most of my church experiences weren't negative - most were, in fact, quite good: I loved the sense of community, the sense of welcome, the sense of quiet comfort and the food at potlucks. And that background in attending not just church but church-related gatherings has helped me easily navigate a variety of cultures, ceremonies and gatherings, often much better than my colleagues who don't come from a religious background.  

We are a nation with rising rates of loneliness, mental illness and alcohol and drug dependency, as well as incredible divisiveness. I'm do NOT think the answer is more religion, however. 

In addition to all the dogma and intolerance for non-religion members, religion comes with a commitment: to attend services, usually once a week, and to join in social activities, like choir practice and performance, software ball games, potluck suppers, camps and volunteering. The people that go to events and activities aren't usually running to them in anticipation because they are just so incredibly wonderful and fun - part of the reason they go is that sense of obligation to their community. As a result, over time, religious practitioners get the benefits of feeling that sense of communal belonging, and the benefits of regularly engaging with other people. That's not at all a bad thing. But is religion really the only way to get that sense of community?

As religious practice wanes, people could still keep that commitment to engaging with other people and creating community, and I think it would be worth it for both individuals, personally, and for communities collectively. How can we do that, especially in a world traumatized by a pandemic that killed millions, scarred others with life-long disabilities and created so much mistrust of each other?

I think it's still possible, but it would require us each, individually, to make a commitment. 

Are you willing to make a commitment to community activities not for a God, but in the faith that it's good for your mental health and your community? 

Are you willing to reserve at least six hours a month engaged in a formal volunteering practice - helping at a blood donation drive for the Red Cross, helping at events at your children's school, helping at a Habitat for Humanity home build or home repair, etc.? 

Are you willing to go to one community event at least every quarter of a year: to a community theater production, to a high school sports event, to a game night in a bar, to a concert, etc.?   

You could even be more ambitious and formally join something: a book club, a Rotary Club, a community sports league, the organizing committee of the local branch of a political party, etc. 

Don't expect to go one time and have an immediate wonderful time and be bursting with enthusiasm to go again. That's not how community engagement works. It's a cultivation process, a slow process. You will have some uncomfortable times, maybe even some negative experiences. But ultimately, over time, it's absolutely worth it for you personally. And imagine if a significant portion of us did this - imagine what it might do collectively for our communities and society. 

I'm already doing all of the above, in fact. It's not easy: there are times when I just do NOT want to go to something I've committed to or planned. Often, I'm dreading having to wear outside-of-my-house clothes, finding a parking place, and not being home in comfy clothes on my couch. But I know that making a commitment to do these activities and fulfilling that commitment has an effect on my mental health over time: I don't feel nearly as hopeless or lonely as I do when I don't make time for these activities. I'm not nearly as cranky or pessimistic as I am when I disengage over long periods. And I think I'm much more pleasant to be around in-person and online as a result. 

Give it a go. Have some faith... in community investment. 

Curious

If you haven't seen the television series Ted Lasso, stop reading now - because the following is a spoiler. And I wouldn't spoil that show for the world. If you have no desire to watch Ted Lasso, please also stop reading, because the following will mean nothing to you. 

For those of you who did watch it, or watched at least the first season: I felt like I knew who I was, for the first time in my life, when Ted Lasso played darts. 

Guys have underestimated me my entire life and for years I never understood why – it used to really bother me. Then one day I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw a quote by Walt Whitman, it was painted on the wall there and it said, ‘Be curious, not judgmental.’ I like that. 

(Ted throws a dart.)

So, I get back in my car and I’m driving to work and all of a sudden it hits me – all them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them was curious. You know, they thought they had everything all figured out, so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that their underestimating me – who I was had nothing to do with it. Because if they were curious, they would’ve asked questions. Questions like, ‘Have you played a lot of darts, Ted?’”

(Ted throws another dart.)

To which I would have answered, ‘Yes sir. Every Sunday afternoon at a sports bar with my father from age ten until I was 16 when he passed away.’ Barbecue sauce. 

(Ted throws a double bullseye to win the game.)

Some people love this scene because the person he beats in the game so deserved to be beaten, and got beaten by his own hubris - he made an assumption, he didn't to his homework. And that is delightful. But for me, I love the scene because I, too, have been underestimated all my life. I still am by a lot of folks, including some very dear to me. But it mostly happened when I was far younger, and so often belittled by neighborhood kids, some fellow students, even some teachers. Hearing that speech on Ted Lasso made me realize, for the first time, that none of them were curious. Not about anything, not just me. Later, when I started to do quite well at this or that, I would hear about their shock. "Her?! She did THAT?!? She worked THERE?!? She met HIM?!? She went to THERE?!?" And my favorite: "She sings?!"

Yes, me. I did that. Because I'm curious, and because I found other people just as curious as me. 

And if you have known me, but didn't know I sing - then you were never curious about me. 

Be kind to others. And be curious.