(1:30) Pew Poll on U.S. Religious Landscape

For its 2008 Religious Landscape Survey, the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life asked more than 35,000 Americans about their religious affiliations and histories. The survey results found that 16 percent of those interviewed counted themselves as "unaffiliated" — more men than women — with 1.6 percent calling themselves atheist, 2.4 percent agnostic, and 12 percent saying "nothing in particular." And more than one-quarter of the respondents has changed from the religion of their birth:

The survey finds that constant movement characterizes the American religious marketplace, as every major religious group is simultaneously gaining and losing adherents. Those that are growing as a result of religious change are simply gaining new members at a faster rate than they are losing members. Conversely, those that are declining in number because of religious change simply are not attracting enough new members to offset the number of adherents who are leaving those particular faiths.

To illustrate this point, one need only look at the biggest gainer in this religious competition — the unaffiliated group. People moving into the unaffiliated category outnumber those moving out of the unaffiliated group by more than a three-to-one margin. At the same time, however, a substantial number of people (nearly 4% of the overall adult population) say that as children they were unaffiliated with any particular religion but have since come to identify with a religious group. This means that more than half of people who were unaffiliated with any particular religion as a child now say that they are associated with a religious group. In short, the Landscape Survey shows that the unaffiliated population has grown despite having one of the lowest retention rates of all "religious" groups.

(02:42) Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard

The Humanist chaplaincy at Harvard Universitywas founded in 1974 by a former Catholic priest. The chaplaincy focuses on supporting the needs of humanists, atheists, agnostics, and the non-religious within the Harvard academic community. The chaplaincy defines Humanism as "a progressive lifestance that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment, aspiring to humanity's greater good."

The New Humanism Conference commemorated the 30th anniversary of the chaplaincy's establishment in 2007. Noted attendees at the three-day event included novelist Salman Rushdie, who was awarded an Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award in Cultural Humanism, Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, experimental psychologist and author Steven Pinker, folk singer Dar Williams, and sociobiologist E. O. Wilson.

(04:01) The New Atheism

Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (Letter To A Christian Nation and The End of Faith), Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything), and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon) are a vocal group of best-selling authors who are at the forefront of a public movement called the "New Atheism." The new atheists advocate debunking and criticizing religion and its role in public life, often arguing that religion is at the core of many of the world's conflicts.

In February 2002, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins called for a "militant atheism" to assert itself in public discourse. At the time, a number of prominent religious movements were in the headlines: the burgeoning debate over the teaching of creationism in public schools; the rise in electoral power of Evangelical Christians; the threat of radical Islamism as represented by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Despite his stance against religion, Richard Dawkins considers himself a "cultural Christian" and has stated that he enjoys singing Christmas carols.

In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens outlines the reasons why he disdains religion:

There still remain four irreducible objections to religious faith: that it wholly misrepresents the origins of man and the cosmos, that because of this original error it manages to combine the maximum of servility with the maximum of solipsism, that it is both the result and the cause of dangerous sexual repression, and that it is ultimately grounded on wish-thinking.

I do not think it arrogant of me to claim that I had already discovered these four objections (as well as noticed the more vulgar and obvious fact that religion is used by those in temporal charge to invest themselves with authority) before my boyish voice had broken. I am morally certain that millions of other people came to very similar conclusions in very much the same way, and I have since met such people in hundreds of places, and in dozens of different countries. Many of them never believed, and many of them abandoned faith after a difficult struggle.

Lately, Sam Harris has written and talked about his interest in meditation and contemplative traditions:

I believe that most people are interested in spiritual life, whether they realize it or not. Every one of us has been born to seek happiness in a condition that is fundamentally unreliable. What you get, you lose. We are all (at least tacitly) interested in discovering just how happy a person can be in such a circumstance. On the question of how to be most happy, the contemplative life has some important insights to offer.

(04:06) Boston Globe Quote

The Boston Globe profiled Greg Epstein in a article titled "The Nonbelievers":

Over the past two years, Greg Epstein, 30, has become a kind of ministerial paradox, a member of the local clergy who disavows God, preaches to atheists and agnostics, and seeks to build the equivalent of a church for nonbelievers and others skeptical of or alienated by religion.

(10:20) Christian Humanism of Erasmus

Desiderius Erasmus (1469–1536) was a Dutch scholar of the New Testament influenced by the Italian Renaissance. He championed classical literature from antiquity for use in education.

(10:23) Pragmatist Philosophy of Ferdinand Shiller

Ferdinand Schiller (1864–1937) was a British philosopher of the pragmatist philosophical movement, viewing meaning and truth in relation to their practical value.

(10:27) Humanist Political Realism of Niccolo Machiavelli

Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was one of the leading figures of the Italian Renaissance. In his seminal work of political theory, The Prince, Machiavelli acknowledged a stark political reality: that states vied for power rather than for ideals or morals. This contrasted sharply with a classical work such as Plato's The Republic, which looked to a just state ruled by a philosopher-king. The Prince outlined the means by which statesmen could gain power and maintain a stable state, sometimes by admittedly immoral means.

(10:31) Marxist Humanism of Jean-Paul Sartre

One of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) was a French existentialist philosopher who was both a supporter and critic of Marxist political ideology. In his influential work Being and Nothingness, he explores the idea of consciousness. Famously, he refused to accept the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964 primarily because he believed a writer should maintain his independence and not be obligated to an awarding institution.

(13:31) Rabbi Sherwin Wine, some of what Greg Epstein wrote about him

Rabbi Sherwin Wine (1928–2007) was an American-born secular Jewish rabbi and founder of the Society for Humanist Judaism, the International Institute for Secular Humanistic Judaism, and the Humanist Institute. On the occasion of his death, Greg Epstein wrote:

For those of us fortunate enough to know Sherwin, his excellence came as no surprise. He was not only among the greatest and most knowledgeable orators I have seen, he was also a compassionate and wise leader who showed thousands of people what it means to be good without god. Wine performed thousands of weddings, funerals, bar and bat mitzvahs, and baby-naming ceremonies based not on obedience to or praise of god but on a celebration of the human spirit.

(14:33) The Talmud

The Talmud is a collection of commentaries on Jewish religious tradition based on interpretations and deliberations of theologians from the 3rd century CE to the 5th century CE.

(17:34) Arthur Miller

Arthur Miller (1915–2005) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright. His most famous play is Death of a Salesman. He was targeted by the anti-Communist House Un-American Activities Committee, especially after writing The Crucible, a play about the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials of the late 17th century, events which Miller compared to the anti-Communist sentiment of the 1950s.

(17:38) Yehuda Amichai

Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000) was an Israeli poet who wrote in Hebrew. The following text is the full version of his poem, "A Man In His Life":

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

(22:11) Atheists Least Likely to be Voted For

In the context of Mitt Romney's campaign for the Republican Party presidential nomination, a December 2007 Gallup poll measured Americans' willingness to vote for a qualified Mormon candidate. The poll also measured the electorate's willingness to vote for a qualified candidate who was not a white male Protestant Christian, whether they were female, homosexual, black, Hispanic, Catholic, Jewish, Mormon, or atheist. Only 46 percent of respondents said they would vote for an atheist, the lowest level of support among the categories presented in the survey question.

(24:15) The Founders of Harvard University

The intent of Harvard's founders in establishing a university has been debated by historians. While Harvard now counts a Humanist chaplaincy as part of its institution, historian Bernard Bailyn and others argue that the school was not founded as a strictly secular institution:

The founders, they argue, wanted specifically to build a Puritan college that would differ radically from the religiously corrupt old schools of Europe. They were animated, too, by the "dread," as they called it, that the new colony might slip backward, that ministers might grow ignorant. Veritas, or truth, which became Harvard's motto, signified God's truth. And, in the end, Bailyn has written, "it was an intensely religious, ascetic Puritan culture that created this institution and that carried it through precarious years into the stability of the 18th century."

(25:34) Reading from Andre Comte-Sponville's Book

André Comte-Sponville (born 1952) is a French philosopher and proponent of atheism. Following is a complete excerpt of the reading from his book The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality:

Where knowledge is concerned, the loss of faith changes nothing. The sciences remain the same and have the same limitations. Our scientists are well aware of this. Their belief or nonbelief in God might affect the way in which they experience their profession (their moods and motivations, the ultimate meaning of their quest in their own eyes), but it affects neither the results of their research nor its theoretical status. Thus, it should not affect their profession per se (or else it would cease to be scientific). It can change their subjective relationship to knowledge, but not knowledge itself or its objective limits.

Where morals are concerned, the loss of faith changes nothing or next to nothing. That you have lost your faith does not mean that you will suddenly decide to betray your friends or indulge in robbery, rape, assassination and torture. "If God does not exist," says Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, "everything is allowed." Not at all, for the simple reason that I will not allow myself everything! As Kant demonstrated, either morals are autonomous or they do not exist at all. If a person refrains from murdering his neighbor only out of fear of divine retribution, his behavior is dictated not by moral values but by caution, fear of the holy policeman, egoism. And if a person does good only with an eye to salvation, she is not doing good (since her behavior is dictated by self-interest, rather than by duty or by love) and will thus not be saved. This is Kant, the Enlightenment and humanity at their best. A good deed is not good because God commanded me to do it (in which case it would have been good for Abraham to slit his son's throat); on the contrary, it is because an action is good that it is possible to believe God commanded it. Rather than religion being the basis for morals, morals are now the basis for religion. This is the inception of modernity. To have a religion, the Critique of Practical Reason points out, is to "acknowledge all one's duties as sacred commandments." For those who no longer have faith, commandments vanish (or, rather, lose their sacred quality), and all that remains are duties—that is, the commandments we impose upon ourselves.

Alain puts it beautifully in his Letters to Sergio Solmi on the Philosophy of Kant: "Ethics means knowing that we are spirit and thus have certain obligations, for noblesse oblige. Ethics is neither more nor less than a sense of dignity." Should I rob, rape and murder? It would be unworthy of me—unworthy of what humanity has become, unworthy of the education I have been given, unworthy of what I am and wish to be. I therefore refrain from such behavior, and this is what is known as ethics. There is no need to believe in God—one need believe only in one's parents and mentors, one's friends (provided they are well chosen) and one's conscience.

(30:35) Anti-Communist Frenzy of Senator Joseph McCarthy

The Cold War culture of the 1950s pitted the U.S. and the Soviet Union as ideological and military enemies. Communism was perceived as the enemy of American values: free market economies, popular representation, free elections, individual achievement, and religious devotion. Karl Marx, one of the ideological fathers of communism, had viewed religion as a force that pacified the working classes and prevented them from rebelling against the capitalist elite.

As the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. stockpiled nuclear arsenals, a heightened fear of Communist infiltration in the U.S. became prevalent. Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy was one of the leading figures of anti-Communist sentiment, heading a Senate subcommittee aimed at rooting out suspected Communist agents in the U.S. Army. His charged rhetoric generated enormous publicity, but slowly alienated potential political allies. In 1954, Senator McCarthy was censured by the Senate for abusing his powers as a senator.

Most recently, the conflict between American journalist Edward R. Murrow and Senator McCarthy was dramatized in the 2005 film Good Night, And Good Luck.

(30:40) Ronald Reagan's Evil Empire Speech of 1983

On March 8, 1983, President Reagan delivered one of his most memorable speeches at a meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. It became known as the "Evil Empire" speech. Reagan declared communism to be "the focus of evil in the modern world." Reagan's speech served as a pivotal reminder to Congress that he would not accept the nuclear freeze option, which would halt the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe. Reagan had delivered a similar speech in London earlier, but added several paragraphs that confronted the ideology of Soviet communism and nuclear proliferation in moral and spiritual terms.

Here, in a longer excerpt of that speech, is President Reagan's anecdote used in the program, further pitting the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R., and theistic religion versus atheistic communism:

A number of years ago, I heard a young father, a very prominent young man in the entertainment world, addressing a tremendous gathering in California. It was during the time of the cold war, and communism and our own way of life were very much on people's minds. And he was speaking to that subject. And suddenly, though, I heard him saying, "I love my little girls more than anything." And I said to myself, "Oh, no, don't. You can't -- don't say that." But I had underestimated him. He went on: "I would rather see my little girls die now; still believing in God, than have them grow up under communism and one day die no longer believing in God."

There were thousands of young people in that audience. They came to their feet with shouts of joy. They had instantly recognized the profound truth in what he had said, with regard to the physical and the soul and what was truly important.

Yes, let us pray for the salvation of all of those who live in that totalitarian darkness. Pray they will discover the joy of knowing God. But until they do, let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.

(35:03) Ethical Culture

Ethical Culture is a nontheistic religious movement founded in 1876. The Web site of the American Ethical Union explains:

Religion is interpreted as a sense of values to which human beings are committed and in terms of which they find a faith to live by. In terms of this faith they marry and bring their children into the world, raise their families and strive to achieve a better life for themselves, their neighbors and the human community as a whole. For those who hold this point of view Ethical Culture performs the functions and meets the needs of a religious life.

(36:49) Epicurus

The Greek philosopher Epicurus' (341–270 BCE) philosophy of simple community life, political disengagement, and egalitarianism gained a following in Athens at the same time that the Academy and the Lyceum were influential. For Epicurus, the physical world (composed, he believed, of atoms) was all that existed; he did not believe in gods or an afterlife. The goal of life, therefore, was the pursuit of happiness and contentment through friendship and community.

In his Tetrapharmacon, he writes:

Nothing to fear in God;
Nothing to feel in Death;
Good can be attained;
Evil can be endured.

(38:38) Amartya Sen's book The Argumentative Indian

In The Argumentative Indian, economist Amartya Sen explores the traditions of skepticism and reason in Indian thought, dating back to the Vedas, including the Upanishads. He explains that the philosophical system of Carvaka/Lokayata flourished from the first millennium BCE onward, even in the time of Gautama Buddha. The believers of this school of thought rejected belief in gods, the soul, or an afterlife. Instead, they focused on living well in the present world.

Here is a more complete excerpt of the reading used in the program:

The powerful presence of religious scepticism in India goes — or at least may appear to go — against a standard characterization of Indian culture, which is exceedingly common, that takes the form of focusing particularly on religion in interpreting Indian traditions. The religious connection is certainly there. For example, it is indeed the case that India has a massive religious literature — perhaps more voluminous than in any other country. This is among the reasons for associating the understanding of Indian civilization with religiosity — not merely at the level of popular practice but also that of intellectual engagement. As the Reverend A. C. Bouquet, an accomplished expert on comparative religion, has pointed out: 'India in particular furnishes within its limits examples of every conceivable type of attempt at the solution of the religious problem.'

And so it does. However, these grand explorations of every possible religious belief coexist with deeply sceptical arguments that are also elaborately explored (sometimes within the religious texts themselves), going back all the way to the middle of the second millennium BCE. The so-called 'song of creation' (or the 'creation hymn', as it is sometimes called) in the authoritative Vedas ends with the following radical doubts:

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whence this creation has arisen — perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not — the one who looks down on it, in the highest heaven, only he knows — or perhaps he does not know.

These 3,500-year-old doubts would recur in Indian critical debates again and again. Indeed, Sanskrit not only has a bigger body of religious literature than exists in any other classical language, it also has a larger volume of agnostic or atheistic writings than in any other classical language. There are a great many discussions and compositions of different kinds, conforming to the loquaciousness of the argumentative tradition.

Indian texts include elaborate religious expositions and protracted defense. They also contain lengthy and sustained debates among different religious schools. But there are, in addition, a great many controversies between defenders of religiosity on one side, and advocates of general scepticism on the other. The doubts sometimes take the form of agnosticism, sometimes that of atheism, but there is also Gautama Buddha's special strategy of combining his theoretical scepticism about God with a practical subversion of the significance of the question by making the choice of good behaviour completely independent of any God — real or imagined. Indeed, different forms of godlessness have had a strong following throughout Indian history, as they do today.

(42:17) Albert Camus

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was an important French philosopher and writer of the 20th century. Camus received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Camus rejected the stark philosophy of nihilism, though he did similarly tap into the existentialist sentiment of post-war Europe. His most famous work is the novel The Stranger.

(42:41) Interfaith Youth Core Conference

Former Speaking of Faith guest Eboo Patel is the founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, an organization gathering youth of different faiths with the aim of empowering them "to work together to serve others." Krista attended the IFYC's October 2007 conference in Chicago, an experience she writes about in her journal from November 8, 2007:

I just returned from a remarkable conference hosted by the Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core run by Eboo Patel. He and his colleagues are becoming tremendous leaders, convening and equipping what is organically happening among young people — high school through early 30s — across religious divides, literally across the world.

(47:18) Ursula Goodenough reading

Following is the complete text of the reading from Ursula Goodenough's The Sacred Depths of Nature:

So we arrive here at what is, for many, the heart of it all. If there is a major tension between an approach like religious naturalism and the monotheistic traditions, it centers on the question of whether or not one believes in a personal god. Most people raised in the context of theistic traditions would probably say that "being religious" means "believing in God." Indeed, when reminded that personal gods are not inherent in such systems as Buddhism or Taoism, they would likely question whether these traditions are really religions and not something else, like philosophies.

For me, and probably for all of us, the concept of a personal, interested god can be appealing, often deeply so. In times of sorrow or despair, I often wonder what it would be like to be able to pray to God or Allah or Jehovah or Mary and believe that I was heard, believe that my petition might be answered. When I sing the hymns of faith in Jesus' love, I am drawn by their intimacy, their allure, their poetry. But in the end, such faith is simply not available to me. I can't do it. I lack the resources to render my capacity for love and my need to be loved to supernatural Beings. And so I have no choice but to pour these capacities and needs into earthly relationships, fragile and mortal and difficult as they often are.

Theism versus Non-Theism. The choice has been presented to us as saved versus damned, holy versus heathen. But when I talk to thoughtful theists, I encounter not a polarity but a spectrum. Belief and faith in supernatural Being(s), when deeply wrought, are as intensely personal and individual and dynamic as our earthly relationships. They add another dimension, another opportunity for relationship, to be sure. But those of us incapable of embracing that dimension remain flooded with opportunities to open ourselves to human relationship and hence to fill our lives with the religious experience of love.