Jillettean Atheism

In Penn Jillette's best-selling book, God No!: Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales, he poses a simple question before the table of contents.  Titled "You May Already Be An Atheist!" he writes: "If god (however you perceive him/her/it) told you to kill your child - would you do it?  If your answer is no, in my booklet you're an atheist.  There is doubt in your mind.  Love and morality are more important to you than your faith.  If your answer is yes, please reconsider."

I will get to the underpinnings of his logic in a bit, but first let me strongly recommend this book to anyone.  Not just anyone interested in atheism or religion, but anyone who loves good nonfiction writing.  I would argue that the book is not mainly about atheism or religion.  To paraphrase Mr. Jillette again, it's more about how one atheist magician has lived his life in Las Vegas, Nevada.  To be clear, there is plenty of profanity, some very graphic scenes, and even some (sober) bacchanalia.  But what really comes across is Penn Jillette's love of life, and that is beautiful to behold. [More below the fold.]

To return to the matter at hand, the link between a "no" answer to his question and being an atheist is the doubt that answer expresses.  To many people, doubt in the existence of gods means that you are an agnostic.  To Penn Jillette, however, "agnostic" is a "weasel word."  He also asserts that agnosticism does not answer the question "Do you beleive in god?".  Instead, agnosticism answers the question "Does god exist?".  I believe most people, atheists and theists alike, answer "I don't know" to this question.  But to the question of belief, I completely agree with Jillette that we should not allow wiggle room for any adult.  Belief is an active state of mind, so one must know whether or not he/she believes in anything.

Jillette goes on to argue that once you admit to not knowing anything about X's existence, you are probably an atheist with respect to your belief in X.  Since this has proven to be one of the more controversial elements of God, No! (see the comments here for example), I want to apply this type of logic to an everyday example: Is the current Teller the only Teller, or have all the previous Tellers been killed by Penn Jillette (à la The Prestige)?*  Most likely, you do not believe there have been multiple Tellers; you are agnostic with respect to Teller being killed in some of the tricks.  This doubt leads you pretty quickly to not believing that some Tellers have died in the course of the Penn Jillette's career.  This brings us to what I would like to define as Jillettean Atheism: the simple recognition that your lack of knowledge of god's existence, implies that you should be an atheist.

Another reason to trash the label of agnosticism is political.  Jillette likes to talk about how what allowed the various sects of Christianity to consolidate power was politicians beginning to describe themselves as "Christian."  This simple idea, using a blanket word that has been around for millennia, prevents the various sects from discriminating against one another.  The point being that, before the 1970s, Roman Catholics didn't want candidates to be strongly Protestant and Lutherans didn't want Catholics or other Protestants.  This detente actually kept religion off the national stage.  Presidents as late as William Howard Taft were elected without believing in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth.

Jillette says during the video that he is not interested in politics, and, if he were, he would recommend "free thinker" or "open-minded."  He makes a good point that if we pick the term "atheist," the other side can pick "theist." And there are a whole lot more theists than atheists in the world.  However, fracturing the collection of non-believers by things that are not differences does not do us any favors either.  So let's all stop dodging the ontological question and use the term "agnostic" only when it is appropriate.

I believe Jillette's goals are apolitical.  I think that he wants people to be honest with themselves and others.  This seems to be the major goal of much of his work to date, and I greatly respect Penn Jillette for promoting these ideas.  So whether it's the Mayor's office destroying books, or simply talking to other people, let's try to be more honest.

[*Note: As hypothesized in the "Hello Gutter, Hello Fadder" episode of The Simpsons]