Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of

What’s the point?

1. Evangelicals are constantly mischaracterizing non-theists. We need to listen and not preach.

2. There is some common ground of concern here for many of us, especially in the area of the ethical practices of religions that seek to convert.

3. We need to measure our responses against reality. Some of our typical talking points aren’t very impressive, so we might consider retiring or reworking them.

4. I want to build a bridge. Dr. Tarico is very open to that kind of dialog.

Dr. Valerie Tarico is a former evangelical who now describes herself as a spiritual nontheist. Her book The Dark Side distills her moral and rational critique of Evangelical teachings. Tarico is a graduate of Wheaton College. She obtained a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Iowa before completing postdoctoral studies at the University of Washington. She writes regularly for the Huffington Post and hosts a monthly series on SCAN TV Seattle: Moral Politics – Christianity in the Public Square. Last year Tarico founded WisdomCommons.org, an interactive website with quotes, stories and poems from around the world all promoting shared ethical values. Her essays about society, faith, and family life can be found at Awaypoint.

Dr. Tarico, welcome to the Internet Monk.com interview.

1. Tell the Internet Monk.com audience the basic story of how and why you left evangelicalism. I’m particularly interested in any significant books or authors that were part of that journey.

Hmm. Books and authors. I think I ended up falling from faith mostly in spite of the books I was reading to shore up my faith! I grew up in a non-denominational Bible church, and my relationship with Jesus was at the very center of who I was. In high school I was proud to stump my biology teacher with ideas from the Creation Research Society, and when I arrived at Wheaton College I think I was more devout and conservative than the school was. (I mean, they let post-millennialists and Lutherans in the door.)

Even so, I would say that from adolescence on I struggled to fend off moral and rational contradictions in my faith, evolving more and more idiosyncratic ways of holding the pieces together. In particular, I couldn’t understand how I was going to be blissfully, perfectly happy — indifferent to the fact that other people were experiencing eternal anguish.

The final straw came while I was completing a doctoral internship at Children’s Hospital in Seattle. My job was to provide psychological consultation to kids and families on the medical units. I was working with kids who were dying of cancer or enduring horrible, frightening treatments in order to survive it. As I listened to the explanations offered by people who believed in an all powerful, loving, perfectly good interventionist God, it seemed to me these “justifications” were comforting, but they didn’t make things just. I re-read The Problem of Pain, and the resident rabbi offered Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. Both rang hollow.

Finally I said to God, “I’m not making excuses for you anymore.” And suddenly it felt like I had been holding my God concept together for so long with duct tape and bailing wire that all I had left was tape and wire. So I walked away. I didn’t really re-engage with Christianity in any systematic way until it became clear about five years ago that Biblical ideas were dictating social policy — and killing people.

2. Anti-theists (or non-theists) of various kinds are now making their numbers and voice heard in the public square. What are two or three of the primary myths/truths about non-theism that people of traditional religious faiths are going to have to get rid of and/or adjust to in the future?

Well, first of all let me say that not all nontheists are anti-theists. Most nonbelievers are simply not interested in religion. Many see it as a benign force that contributes to stable moral communities. Those who are vocally outspoken against supernaturalism are a minority. I think this is important to emphasize because the silent majority is, well, silent and so not noticed.

Humanists who join inter-spiritual dialogue or nonbelieving parents who are busy reading bedtime stories and making cookies for school bake sales don’t tend to make their voices heard on these issues. Mostly they just want to be left in peace — to not have Christians witnessing to their kids or interfering with their medical decisions.

The myth I am confronted with most frequently is that non-Christians (especially those who have left the faith) are indifferent to morality or they reject the gift of salvation because they don’t want to be morally accountable. Because Christians self-perceive as a city on a hill, a light shining in the darkness, they assume they have the moral high ground. Some think that there is no basis for morality apart from the Bible and a redemptive relationship with Jesus. So what they fail to recognize is that much of the critique of Christianity is a moral critique, and much of the outrage is moral outrage.

Another myth is that non-theists broadly and anti-theists particularly have little interest in spirituality. In my experience many are profoundly concerned with issues not only of morality but also of meaning and unity and wonder: the small humble delights that that makes life a joy to live, the willingness to give yourself to something bigger than yourself, the beauties of love.

3. How do you feel about the high profile of atheists like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens who consistently oppose religion of any kind as an unquestionable evil? Is there any feeling in the non-theist community that they are being portrayed as “fundamentalists” as well?

Those guys definitely are anti-theists and taboo breakers to boot, which makes people love to hate them. (“The Missionary Position”?) But I think they change the dialogue in important ways. To cite a provocative example, Dawkins has said that religious indoctrination of children is child abuse. In reality, all education of children is indoctrination at some level. Every parent or teacher has to wrestle with the balance of top-down mind control vs open inquiry.

But if we push past knee-jerk reactions to Dawkins’ assertion, he raises a serious moral question for believers: Is Christian indoctrination abusive more often than people like to think? Psychologist Marlene Winell, who specializes in recovery from fundamentalism, would say yes with three exclamation points.

I personally find the “fundamentalist” label a bit of an eye roller when applied to Dawkins or Harris. It’s childish. “You stink.” “No, you stink.” The word fundamentalism has a specific history and meaning. It is about having a core set of dogma-based assertions that are nonnegotiable, and historically these fundamentals are the central tenets of Christian orthodoxy. It’s not a synonym for strident or uncompromising.

A quick glance around any department store will give you an idea of how easily we humans confuse the quality of packaging with quality of contents. The same is true for communications. In my experience, Dawkins et al are more nuanced and thoughtful in their actual analysis than what the public reaction would suggest, and I wonder how many of their critics have actually read them versus reacting to their posture.

Other atheist and agnostic writers love to define themselves by saying, “I’m not like those guys.” It’s a way of positioning as a moderate and gaining access to an audience that feels conflicted about the role of religion in society. Tangentially, I think that within Christianity, people often fail to recognize theological fundamentalism if it is wrapped in rock music and skateboard art or in warm, loving community.

4. Setting aside the obvious issue of breaking the law, at what point does an evangelical parent, in the religious training of their own children, cross the line into what you consider the abuse of that child?

Imagine you work in a mental health center and a woman says to you, “My husband says he loves me unconditionally and if I don’t love him back he is going to torture me to death as slowly as he can.” Some theologies are inherently abusive.

When I was a teenager my youth group showed a movie called “A Thief in the Night” about the rapture, and a few years back, churches were creating “hell houses” for Halloween. In both cases, the blood and gore and implied violence were meant to be shocking and emotionally traumatic — all justified morally because shock and trauma right now are better than having people tortured forever. But a therapist like Marlene Winell, who I mentioned before, routinely sees people who developed panic disorder or chronic depression and anxiety in reaction to hell and rapture threats.

Because of my writing I sometimes receive stories that make me as a mom want to cry. One child became hysterical whenever he called out and his parents didn’t answer because he thought they’d been taken. Another repeatedly prayed the prayer of salvation — never sure that it had “taken,” until she ultimately became distraught and suicidal.

I wonder how many children in the coming up generation were traumatized by being exposed to Mel Gibson’s blood orgy, The Passion. My mom’s old church took a busload including pre-adolescents — kids who largely had been sheltered from Hollywood violence and had no way to have hardened themselves against it. If it wasn’t a religious theme, the parents themselves would have thought it abusive.

Here’s the challenge, though: Causing trauma isn’t necessarily abusive. I had my appendix removed when I was five, and it was absolutely terrifying because I was in pain and tied to a hospital bed and left alone. But I don’t think of it as abusive because it was necessary. Is scaring people into salvation necessary or abusive? When you intentionally cause harm or trauma in order to prevent a greater harm, it’s not enough to be well intentioned. You also have to be right. And if you’re not, the rest of society has a responsibility to weigh whether you are causing trauma unnecessarily—especially when those being harmed are children.

5. When you see a church spending large amounts of money on children’s ministries and activities, do you believe this is ethical or unethical? Why?

If you heard that Scientologists were spending large amounts of money on outreach to kids would you believe this was ethical or unethical? What if they offered a subsidized summer camp to inner city kids like Child Evangelism Fellowship does? What if they had a storefront alcohol-free bar for underage skateboarders like City Church does in Ballard, Washington? What if they had teenage tutors slipping colorful invitation cards to kids in public middle schools like Foursquare Church does in Seattle?

Children are hard wired to be credulous, to believe what they are told by adults who have authority over them and who nurture them. It’s the only efficient way for them to pick up all the information they need. They can’t afford to question and test when we tell them stoves burn you or cars squish you, so they’re built to trust us. Because they are vulnerable in this way, we have a particular responsibility not to exploit or abuse that trust. If you believe the exclusive salvific claims of Christian orthodoxy, then the end justifies the means. That, I think is at the heart of children’s ministries. But it’s only fair to admit that children are being offered metaphorical candy – and the ultimate goal of conversion isn’t always up front. One Jewish neighbor sent her daughter to a playful, wholesome outreach ministry at a local mega church because she thought “nondenominational” meant interfaith.

6. I’m sure that you’ve got a good response to the frequent evangelical contention that non-theists have no morals. What do you say? (And what is the mistake evangelicals are making with that objection?)

I’m kind of embarrassed for people who say this, because it means they know so little about morality and about child development. Morality doesn’t come from religion. Healthy human children come into the world primed to become moral members of society, just like they come into the world primed to acquire language. Moral emotions like empathy, shame, guilt and disgust begin to emerge during the toddler years regardless of a child’s culture or religion.

A toddler may pat an injured peer or offer a grubby toy to an adult who is distressed. A preschooler may hide behind a couch to cover a transgression. As a child’s brain develops, moral emotions are joined by moral reasoning. By age five or six, kids have a large moral vocabulary and can argue long and loud about fairness.

Research is just starting to show how our moral emotions and reasoning are guided by powerful moral instincts. I think these instincts are the reason that across secular and moral traditions we humans share some basic agreements about goodness. The golden rule appears in some form or another in every ethical system. Sometimes it emphasizes proactively doing good. Sometimes it is only about avoiding harm. Sometimes it applies to even the smallest sentient creature, sometimes only to males of a single religion, but it’s there.

For the last year and a half I’ve been working on a project called the Wisdom Commons, an interactive website that gathers quotes and stories and poetry from many traditions as a way to “elevate and celebrate our shared moral core.”

7. Why would any evangelical want to read your book, The Dark Side?

Well, I have at least two siblings who would tell you that I’m a pawn of Satan, and you shouldn’t read it! On the other hand, several Christian friends read and provided feedback on the manuscript. Their perspective is that God doesn’t need us to cover for him or to hide from complicated realities.

I am a non-theist and my conclusions follow my thinking, but The Dark Side is less a challenge to Christianity than to bibliolatry. I was taught, and still believe, that to worship human decisions and creations is idolatry. So in terms of whether someone would want to read this text, I would ask: Do you really worship God or are you getting caught by the worship of traditions and texts? Which do you twist to fit the other? When your deepest best understandings of Love and Truth bump up against creeds and canons, which win out? Given that there are human handprints all over evangelical practices and teachings, how much time have you spent learning to spot them?

In reality, this kind of analysis and critique is very much in keeping with the Christian tradition. The writers of the Old Testament took the Akkadian and Sumerian traditions and asked themselves, Which pieces are merely human? What is our best guess about the divine realities that lie beyond? They gleaned and wrestled and kept some fragments of the earlier stories and said, “This is our best understanding of what is Real and what is Good and how to live in moral community with each other.” The writers of the New Testament look at what the Torah had become and saw idolatry.

Again, they gleaned and culled in light of how they understood Jesus and then offered their best understanding of God and goodness. Same with the Protestant Reformation. The reformers scraped away at obviously human encrustations like indulgences and cult of saints until they came to what they thought was the heart of the revelation. I think that the deepest challenge of the spiritual quest is not to defend the answers of our spiritual ancestors but to do as they did — to dig and scrape and take ourselves into that uncomfortable space where growth happens.

8. How would you handle it if your child became a Bible toting member of Campus Crusade for Christ? In the same vein, how should evangelicals respond if their child takes the anti-theist road?

It would be hard. My daughters are both passionate about making the world a kinder place — primarily for weird animals like sharks and manatees and kakapos and factory chickens. But more recently they got wonderfully caught up in microcredit (through Kiva.org) and started directing their birthday money toward humans. I’d be grieved to see their passion and compassion channeled by an ideology.

My biggest grief would be if one joined a religious organization that discouraged deep loving relationships with outsiders, including family. An elderly couple I met at a humanist gathering are not allowed to see their evangelical grandchildren because they are retired scientists with a secular world view.

When my younger brother came out as gay, it pitted my mom’s theological fundamentalism against her love for her son. Love won out. That is what I aspire to, and it is what is would hope for any parent in a similar situation.

9. Christian apologetics and cultural communication today have taken several major turns since your days citing creationists to Wheaton profs. For example, Tim Keller, a PCA pastor in Manhattan, has earned a broad hearing from the culture in his book “The Reason for God.” Keller is not Josh McDowell, it’s safe to say. Younger evangelicals are anti-culture war and many were pro-Obama. Many evangelicals accept evolution, although quietly, and many more distrust “Creation science.” Do any of the changes in apologetic methods and approaches since your loss of faith interest you when you are portraying evangelicals in print or speech?

You are right. Many of the conditions that pushed me to join the public dialogue have shifted, and when I engage secular audience I quite often bring up these changes. I love it that evangelicals like Jim Wallis are complicating that dialogue from a social standpoint, and a new generation of evangelical ministers like Rob Bell are complicating the dialogue theologically.

I see the theological dialogue as most important. Unless we understand that our theological agreements are provisional and open to growth, social change is just a matter of Christianity fluctuating in response to social conditions. There have been many times in history when the balance shifted between personal /doctrinal purity and compassion/love. Then conditions change and the pendulum swings back, in part because bibliolatry and what I call ancestor worship keeps people from growing beyond the understanding of the Bible’s authors and the councils that decided the creeds and canon. My hope is that we will come to understand our spiritual heritage and our own minds well enough that the cruelties perpetrated in the name of God become a part of history.
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I’d like to thank Dr. Tarico for her time and effort in helping all of us understand this new relationship between evangelicals and non-theists. I know the vast majority of my audience is appreciative as well. Hopefully, we will hear from Dr. Tarico again as some of these issues emerge in other contexts.

This one is for the ex-Muslims out there, the struggling ones, the ones at a cross roads. I left Islam over what ended up being a period of several years. I learned some things in that time, and I’ve learned from the experiences of friends who have quit the deen as well. There’s not very much out there for us, is there? I scoured the internet for hours, days looking for advice. I wanted to connect with others who’ve been here. I have found some connections, but it’s a quilt. Patchworks of friends, forums, blogs, books. There is no ready made ex-Muslim community. We are as diverse now as we were when we were Muslims, and still as disconnected from one another in many ways just as we were then.

She recommends a few guidelines, which I think some of my ex-Christian friends might find useful:

Embrace Your Anger
You’re going to feel like you were lied to, betrayed, bamboozled. This is natural, and you have to confront it and deal with it. I guess there are a few people who can walk away cleanly, and my hat is off to them. But for the most part, you’re going to have some very negative emotions to deal with.

Regret is a Bitch
You’re going to feel regret. A lot of us did things in our pursuit of faith that had serious consequences on our dunyah, our earthly lives. We quit jobs or gave up promotions that would have given us more pay and benefits and prestige for ‘the sake of Allah’. Because we wanted more time to spend reading Quran or doing zikr, or because the job would have required being subordinate to a woman or having close contact with the opposite gender.

Kick yourself in the ass a few times. Mourn everything you lost.

But you have to pick yourself up and get on with it. You already wasted time — don’t waste more drowning yourself in your sorrows.

Hold Steady
Create a support network, and try to stay away from intense debates with Muslims. For the most part, these debates are utterly pointless and you may open yourself up to harm. Pace yourself in terms of how you explore your new world.

Going Godless
In my limited experiences so far,  most of the people who leave Islam tend to not take up another religion later, and most are agnostic or atheist. However, even if you still believe in some sort of god or gods, you should probably take it easy with religion, at least for a while. Otherwise, you may be setting yourself up for a pattern of devotion, disillusionment, and disbelief.

Life Your Life in Colour
Life without Islam can be a marvelous, beautiful thing. I urge you to take the opportunity to do things you couldn’t or wouldn’t do before when and how you can. This doesn’t mean you have to go crazy. Sometimes, it’s the little things that make your day.

Rediscover music. Movies. Have a glass of wine with your dinner. Perhaps some bacon? I have to tell you, one of my great pleasures has been reintegrating adult language into my vocabulary.

You will have regret, anger, sadness on your plate for a long time. But in my experience, and those of my friends, you will also experience relief, and joy. Speaking for myself, I have never felt so unburdened, and so happy as I am now.  Hold fast to your true friends.  Rediscover the joys of life.  Never stop questioning, especially when they tell you ‘Cos god said so’.

Paid “friendship missionaries” on the University of Arizona campus scan for lonely foreign students, who get invitations to dinner with a side dish of salvation. Are the missionaries and their sponsors generous, predatory, or both?

Several studies (e.g. here and here) show that religious people give more dollars and volunteer hours to charity than do nonbelievers. Evangelical Christians have been trumpeting these findings: No matter what you may think about our exclusive offer of salvation, our religion is a social good.

As a former Evangelical I tend toward skepticism, especially when it comes to data that have been assembled and promoted by ideologues. And yet I’m inclined to suspect that these results tap something real. Sociologists have found that tribal identity increases altruism toward other members of the tribe (though at the expense of outsiders). In many ways, a religion functions as a tribe. Besides ordinary in-group/out-group effects, religions explicitly teach that we are made to serve something larger than ourselves. They encourage members to give of themselves to gods, co-religionists and others — in part by promising deferred compensation. But perhaps even more importantly, they provide a community and structure for doing so.

Let’s assume that religious people are more generous or altruistic. An interesting follow-up question is this:

Where is this generosity directed? Does it serve the cause of goodness? By a scientific definition of altruism, suicide bombing is an altruistic act supported by religious attendance. It is the individual sacrificing his life (and reproductive potential) in the service of another individual or the greater collective — in this case Allah, Islam, the Muslim brotherhood. But is it as a social good?

Within conservative Christianity, a tremendous amount of donated time and money is solicited for conversion activities: “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” Is religious recruiting a social good? On this, most evangelists and I would have opposite opinions, at least about Christian recruiting. (We might be more in agreement about the proselytizing done by Hare Krishnas or Scientologists.)  It is only fair to give evangelical missionaries credit for their intentions. If you truly believe the unsaved are going to be tortured eternally, then there is no greater good than to spend your life saving their souls. By comparison, nothing else matters. A missionary, operating on this premise, may experience herself as highly generous, because she is.

She also might protest that independent of afterlife benefits, accepting Jesus makes people happy in this life, here and now. This is true.  Sometimes. Jesus worship can fill people with deep joy. It can get alcoholics to stop drinking and abusers to stop abusing. It can save marriages.  But sometimes the opposite happens. (See thousands of testimonials at exChristian.net). Pentecostals point to happy African church-going children singing and dancing. A former Pentecostal might point to the African children who have been kicked out of their communities or killed because new converts to Pentecostalism saw them as witches and took their took their Bibles literally. The net here and now benefits of proselytizing are arguable.

A darker way to look at Christian “outreach” is as an example of how viral beliefs, sometimes called meme complexes, can exploit the human tendency toward altruism. What I mean is that a belief set can redirect altruistic do-gooder impulses away from activities that actually serve human well-being and onto activities that serve to replicate the belief set itself. When the Asian tsunami hit, a highly successful Seattle mega-church directed members to do three things: pray for people who were affected, give to Mars Hill Church, and give to the Mars Hill church-building work in India. Why not reverse this — pray for Mars Hill church, pray for our missionary work, and give money to the people who were affected? Churches that make suggestions like these are, on average shrinking. Churches that follow the Mars Hill model are growing.

Daniel Dennett in the first three pages of his book, Breaking the Spell, beautifully narrates how a similar redirection occurs in nature. An ant climbs to the top of a stem of grass and lingers there. Why? Not because it is adaptive for the ant. Rather, another organism has take charge of the ant’s brain and to reproduce it needs the ant to be eaten by a cow. When a person’s altruistic impulses are directed toward winning converts, it is valid to ask whether they are actually serving human well-being or simply serving a mind virus.

If we don’t count their recruiting activities, do Evangelical Christians actually give more than non-religious? Do they give more to things that we humans pretty much agree are social goods? Sorry, all you fellow secularists, thought the gap narrows the answer still appears to be yes. Think first about money given to churches. Besides outreach, church moneys fund what economists call “club goods“. Churches often do a wonderful job of providing and organizing members services: warm meals for kids with a sick parent, adventures for teenagers, housing for young adults, support during bereavement, even free counseling or legal services. And with regard to outsiders, even if food, medical care, or friendship is offered primarily as bait to set a fish hook, the food and medical care are real.

But even beyond the money given to churches, religious people appear to give more to ordinary charities than secular folks do. At least based on self report data, religious participation and religious giving are positively correlated with giving to nonreligious charities like educational institutions, social services, even blood banks. Although the gap gets smaller the harder you look at it, this appears to hold true for the 40ish percent of Americans who self-describe as Evangelical or born again as well as their more theologically open counterparts.

If this makes those of us who are freethinkers squirm a bit, perhaps it should.

You might protest that that charity should be only a way station on the road to justice, and that your energies are better spent working for structural change. Many secular folks and liberal people of faith believe this is true. I know I do. As a non-theist, I once sat on the nonprofit board of an organization called the Washington Association of Churches because their mission was my mission: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. Like me, they sought solutions that went beyond charity.

But even if justice is the destination, those way stations are still needed. Most of us agree that both generosity and justice are virtues. We prefer to live in a world where both are in rich supply. Maybe, now that freethinkers are coming out of the closet it is time for us to begin thinking about how to create our own communities and structures that empower personal generosity. Since we don’t have to be a sales force with a promise of treasure laid up in Heaven, we are free to give without expecting something back except maybe a bit of good will.

Recently Seattle Atheists organized a blood drive for members. Now, that’s what I’m talking about.

[Ed. note: Not only do both Seattle Atheists and Tacoma Atheists have an ongoing food-drive in place, but Seattle Atheists has a bi-monthly blood drive, Christmas wrapping (of which 100% of the proceeds go directly to the Seattle Childrens Hospital), and a Day of Reason blood drive.]

Prometheus Books is interested in publishing a book of testimonies of college students who have left the fold, including the testimonies of founding members of the various freethought campus groups that have sprung up across the country in the last decade or so. There will also be room for testimonies by “leavers” from Christian colleges, even ex-seminarians. Though most of the contributors ought to still be fairly young. Anonymity will be maintained.

Contact Edward T. Babinski (editor of Leaving the Fold: Testimonines of Former Fundamentalists, Prometheus Books, 2003)

Atheists are arrogant. Who hasn’t heard it?

Arrogance is just one of their repellent qualities, of course. They are also ungenerous, cold, lonely, untrustworthy, amoral, and aggressive. You shouldn’t leave them around children. When I spoke last week to a group called Seattle Atheists, the organizer positioned me far from the door, and I speculated aloud about whether I should be worried for my safety, given what we know about atheist ethics.

But the most common accusation hurled against atheists is that they are insufferably arrogant. In my experience, this accusation is rarely about a specific encounter: I was talking with Joan, my atheist neighbor down the street last week and do you know how I was treated by that insufferable witch?!

No, it is more like a mantra.

In Seattle, there’s a chain of hamburger joints called Dick’s. People who find themselves on the topic of hamburgers will say, “Dick’s is great” almost as an opener, before they move on to the details of the conversation. Amazingly, I’ve heard this even from folks who have never eaten there. Dick’s is great. Atheists are arrogant.

The unflinching tones adopted by The Four Horsemen are not more harsh or critical than what we accept routinely in academic debate or civic life. It is the subject matter that is the issue. The accusation provides cover for those who want dismiss thinkers like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, or Christopher Hitchens. I’ve often marveled that anyone could read Harris’ manifesto — written as graduate student’s post-9/11 cry of anguish, or Hitchens’ litany of social corrosion and atrocity in the names of gods, or Dawkins’ urgent appeal to evidence and reason, or Dennett’s nerdy analysis of human information processing, and find themselves reacting above all to perceived arrogance. Images of people jumping from fiery buildings. Mutilated genitals. Radically cool glimpses of our mental circuitry — and the dominant reaction is disgust about arrogance?

Interestingly, the accusation also provides cover for those who agree with the Four Horsemen. Young non-theists writing even for edgy places like Wired Magazine or The Stranger go to some lengths to say “I’m not like those atheist guys. We all can agree to loathe them. Mind you, they do make a decent point or two…” The ugly atheist stereotype is so strong, that people feel like they need to distance from atheism’s iconic figures if they want a shot at being heard — or perhaps, even, liking themselves.

But what’s underneath the stereotype? For years, as a practicing psychologist, it was my job to listen for the feelings and needs behind the tone, and I think a host of feelings and yearnings are obscured by the “arrogance” label. Below are some of the emotions I hear in the writings and conversations of self-identified atheists, and some my imperfect hypotheses about where they come from:

RESOLVE
Nobody calls him or herself an atheist in our culture unless they are “out” for a reason. It’s like looking white in Alabama and making a point to tell people about your black father. Freethinkers who adopt the label publicly have decided for one reason or another to take the heat, and they are not necessarily representative of the broad range of freethinkers who may choose other labels or none at all.

For some people, being out as an atheist is personality driven or developmental. (All of us know natural born contrarians; many of us experiment with identities on the way to adulthood.) For some it is political. For some it comes from a deep conviction that we must find some way to change the public conversation about what is good and what is real and how to live in community with each other. All self-labeled atheists are braced, steeled against the stereotype, but they have varied reasons for looking society in the eye and saying, This is who I am. What they have in common is a sense of determination, and the willingness to pay a price.

FRUSTRATION
Theism gets a pass on the rules of reason and evidence that normally guide our social discourse. In a boardroom or a laboratory, we don’t get to say, “I just know in my heart that this product is going to sell,” or “This drug works even though the experiment didn’t come out that way.”

Cartoonist Wiley Miller captured atheist frustration perfectly in a recent Non Sequitur entitled “The Invention of Ideology:”

One caveman stands in the rain.
Another behind him under shelter comments, “Um, why you standing in the rain?”
“It not raining”
“Yes it is.”
“No it not.”
“Huh? Water fall from sky. That rain.”
“That your opinion.”
“Not opinion. Fact. See? Raindrops.”
“Don’t need to look. Already know it not rain.”
“If it not rain, then why you wet and me dry?”
(Pause) “Define ‘wet’ . . . ”
“Oww . . . Brain hurt!”

What does frustration sound like? When it doesn’t sound like brain pain, it sounds impatient,sharp and distancing.

INCREDULITY
Believers look at the dogmas of religions other than their own and see them as silly, and yet find their own perfectly reasonable. Atheists, except for those few with formal training in the psychology of belief, find it incredible, almost unbelievable that the faithful don’t perceive some higher order parallel between their religion and others — and run the numbers, so to speak. Of course that’s not how ideology works, and per cognitive scientist Pascal Boyer, rationality is like Swiss Cheese for all of us. But if you buy the Enlightenment view of man as a rational being, it’s easy to get sucked in and expect rationality and then be incredulous when you simply can’t get smart people to bind themselves to the obligations of logic and evidence.

OFFENSE
It feels obnoxious to have people assume that you have no moral core, that you rejected Christianity because you wanted to sin without guilt, or that you are damaged goods, the object of pity. Fundamentalist Christians, when they have given up on conversion, treat non-believers as agents of evil who reject God, like Lucifer did, out of willful defiance. Modernist Christians express benign sympathy — and look for early childhood wounding (in particular at the hands of fundamentalists that left the scarred freethinker unable to enjoy the wonder and joy of faith. Both fundamentalists and modernists assume that freethinkers miss out on wonder, joy and a sense of transcendent meaning. Atheists take offense, even when these assumptions are couched kindly and are well intended.

RESENTMENT
Atheists, along with the rest of America, listened to a presidential inauguration in which the preachers, combined, got almost as much talk time as the president. They help their kids figure out what to do with the anti-communist, “under God” line in the Pledge of Allegiance (Go along with it? Stand silently? Substitute “under magic”? How about “under Canada?”) They pay their bills with “In God we trust.” They listen to born-again testimonials as a part of public high school graduation ceremonies and reunions. They do twelve years of training and then twelve hours of surgery and then read in the paper that a child was saved miraculously by prayer. They get resentful.

PAIN
On websites like exChristian.net, doubters often lurk for months or even years before they finally confess their loss of faith. Because apostasy is so taboo, they struggle over how to tell their children, or spouses or parents or congregations — especially the fallen ministers. They wrestle with guilt and fear, just like their religions say they should. They deal with rejection, even shunning. Some of them come out at tremendous personal cost. See “When Leaving Jesus means Losing Your Family.” Although this doesn’t apply to all freethinkers, for those who are in the process of losing their religion, the pain is real. And pain has an edge. Try selling anything, including dogma, to a woman with a migraine.

EMPATHY
Not all atheist pain about religion is personal. Many non-theists feel anguished by the sexual abuse that is enabled by religious hierarchy, by women shrouded in black and girls barred from schools, by the implements of inquisition that lie in museums, by ongoing Christian witch burnings in Africa and India, or by those images of people leaping from windows. Even less dramatic suffering can be hard to witness — children who fear eternal torture, teens who attempt suicide because they are gay and so condemned, women who submit to their own abuse or the abuse of their children because God hates divorce. To the extent that we experience empathy, these events are can feel unbearable, the more so because they seem so unnecessary.

MORAL INDIGNATION
Atheist morality is rooted in notions of universal ethical principles, either philosophical or biological, and often centered on compassion and equity. Since the point of atheist morality is to serve wellbeing, suffering caused by religion often triggers not only horror but moral outrage. Each believer sees his or her religion as a positive moral force in a corrupt world. Most think that morality comes straight from their god. Because of this, believers fail to recognize when atheist outrage is morally rooted. They don’t understand that atheists frequently see religion as a force that pushes otherwise decent people to have immoral priorities. When, for example, the religious oppose vaccinations, or contraception, or they come to care more about gay marriage than hunger, an atheist is likely to perceive that religion undermines morality. When theism sanctifies terrorism or honor killings, atheists are morally outraged.

LOVE OF LIFE
What folks like Sam Harris and Bill Maher are saying, as loudly as they know how, is that they love this imperfect world — and they fear that anti-rational ideologies may destroy all that they cherish most: natural beauty, community, inquiry, freedom, and love itself. They believe wholeheartedly in the power of religion, and this terrifies them. Why?

Need we even ask? Think about the Twin Towers, the Taliban, the Religious Right’s yearning for Armageddon, the geometric progression of our global population curve and the Church’s opposition to family planning as a moral responsibility. Think about the trajectory of human religious history — what has happened in the past when unquestioned ideologies controlled government and military. Think abstractly about a social/economic/international policy approach that is unaccountable to data, one that sees doubt as weakness, agreement among insiders as proof, and change as bad. Think concretely about suitcase nukes in the hands of Pentecostals or Wahabis who believe that a deity is speaking directly through their impulses and intuitions.

The prophets of the godless are crying out that 21st century technologies guided by Bronze Age priorities may bring about a scale of suffering that our ancestors could describe only as hell. You might not agree with them, but to understand their in-your-face stridency as anything more complex than arrogance, you have hear the depth of their urgency.

DESPERATION
Have you ever had a dream in which, no matter how hard you try no-one can hear you? Many freethinkers feel like that whenever they try to talk about their journey of discovery.

“Hey,” say former fundies. “Guess what I found out. The Bible contradicts itself. Do you want to see where?”

“I never meant to end up godless,” say former moderates. “Do you want to hear how it happened?”

“‘A theory’ isn’t something we dream up afterhours,” say biologists. “Can we tell you what a scientific theory is to us?”

“We think we’ve figured out how those out-of-body experiences and bright lights work — at a neurological level,” say neuroscientists. “Care to know?”

“Religion may increase compassion toward insiders at the expense of outsiders,” say sociologists. “Are you interested in finding out?”

“What if we can no longer afford beliefs without evidentiary basis?” ask the bell ringers. “What if unaccountable belief inevitably produces some that are dangerous?”

It’s not the fundamentalists they are hoping to engage. It is moderate, decent people of faith — the majority of the human race. But are moderate believers open to such questions? Many outsiders think not, and people who feel hopeless about being heard either go silent or get loud.

Let’s come back to arrogance.

Yes. Atheists are susceptible. They think they have it right. (So do we all.) And yes, those nonbelievers who underestimate the power of viral ideologies and transcendent experiences tend to think that belief must be an IQ thing, meaning a lack thereof. And yes, dismay, pain, outrage, incredulity and desperation all make people tactless, sometimes aggressively so.

But I don’t think any of these is why frank talk from atheists so consistently triggers accusations of arrogance. The unflinching tones adopted by the Four Horsemen are not more harsh or critical than what we accept routinely in academic debate or civic life. It is the subject matter that is the issue.

I would argue that atheist talk about religion seems particularly harsh because it violates unspoken norms about how we should approach religion in our relationships and conversations. Here are some of those rules:

• It’s plain old mean to shake the faith that gives another person comfort and community, so don’t do it.
• If you doubt, keep it to yourself.
• Practice don’t-ask-don’t tell about unbelief.
• Be respectful of other people — respecting people means respecting their beliefs.
• If someone tries to convert you, be polite because they only mean well.
• Remember that faith is good and even a brittle, misguided faith is better than none at all.

Outspoken atheists break all of these rules. They do and say things that are verboten. They insert their evidences and opinions where these are clearly unwelcome. Is this the height of self-importance?

Recently I interviewed former Pentecostal minister Rich Lyons about his journey out of Christianity. We found ourselves laughing about the velvet arrogance of our former beliefs: that we, among all humans knew for sure what was real; that we knew what the Bible writers actually meant; that our instincts, hunches and emotions were the voice of God; that we were designated messengers for the power that created the galaxies and DNA code — and that He just happened to have an oh-so-human psyche, like ours.

What other hubris could compare, really?

Valerie is the author of The Dark Side: How Evangelical Teachings Corrupt Love and Truth. Despite being raised in a fundamentalist family, she received a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Iowa, a PhD from the University of Washington, and now has a private practice.

Concerned about the rise of evangelism in the U.S., she began writing and speaking about fundamentalism. She now writes for exChristian.net and the Huffington Post, and hosts a monthly series on Moral Politics Television (Comcast channel 77 or 23) in Seattle.

She speaks regionally to churches and secular groups about topics such as moral development, the psychology of belief. She is a founder of WisdomCommons.org. Her essays.

From her website:

Ideas for parents

1. Choose a “virtue of the week” to discuss at the dinner table. Why does this virtue matter? How is it honored in your family’s spiritual or cultural tradition? How have family members demonstrated this virtue recently? When have they seen it in other people?
2. Ask each child to find a quote that they really like. Have them read it to other family members and explain why they like it.
3. Make a game of reading bits of wisdom aloud together and giving each one a rating, thus prompting whatever discussion is needed to reach a family agreement or average.