My second day of the conference begins with a speech from a Washington University physicist. The subject: "Why does time move forward and not backward?"
The answer, I think, has to do with quantum entanglements and the superposition of particles. Or something like that. It's the first moment of conference where it seems like we're finally approaching "meaning of life" territory, something that addresses the big picture and doesn't merely tear down an evangelical strawman.
But it's a tease. Several more speakers unleash stale criticisms of Bible-inspired lifestyles, sometimes with the help of lengthy PowerPoint presentations. The highlight of the day's slate is Dan Barker, a former preacher who now serves as co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation.
"We atheists truly have the good news, and the news is this: There is no purpose to life," Barker says triumphantly. "Thinking that there's a purpose of life is to cheapen life, but there can be meaning and purpose in life. Usually you don't find it. It finds you."
The downpour of platitudes is thankfully short-lived, and during the break I retreat (again) to buy junk food and schmooze with the godless convention-goers. That's how I meet Stacey Holland and her husband.
Born into a Mormon community in Utah, Holland realized she was an atheist at age seven, one year before her baptism. When her parents divorced three years later, her father fled the influence of the church. Her mother had other plans.
"When I was twelve the temple in Las Vegas was being built and dedicated, and you needed to have a recommendation from the church to go in," Stacey tells me. "So I was brought into this guy's office. The door is shut, my mom's out in the lobby, and he's asking me if I've ever had sex, have I masturbated, did I do drugs, watch pornography, smoked, the whole thing."
Holland wanted nothing to do with that scene. She moved back to the St. Louis region to be with her dad, but the church still wasn't ready to let her go.
"They keep finding me," she says. "We had moved a couple different times, and they would track me down each time. They keep going back to my dad's house, monthly, asking for me. We ended up threatening restraining orders."
But there are moments, as when she lost her job two years ago, when Holland entertains the thought of going back. Her mother, of course, urged her wayward daughter to return to the fold. You're a full member of the Mormon church, she told Stacey. They can find you a job. They can put you back on your feet.
Holland didn't want that life. But at the same time, she fantasized about that life.
It's a uniquely atheist bind. An Orthodox Jewish community may be stitched together with Sabbath meals and prayer services, but it wasn't the rabbi's sermon that delivered home-cooked meals for my mother after she underwent surgery. Matzo ball soup didn't land me or my friends summer jobs. Whether Judaism or Mormonism, organized religion provides an unmatched safety net.
Surprisingly, Holland points to Gojko standing on other side of the room.
"That young lady over there," she says, "she's been dealing with her own personal stuff, and people here are saying, 'Yeah, we'll help you, we've got your back.' That's what has to be broken down, the feeling that we're the only ones out here. There's real safety in numbers."
Holland has a point, but the hard truth is that atheism, in its current forms, can't match the benefits package available at the nearest church.
Tamatha Crowson, a "relatively new atheist" from Cape Girardeau, has the same thing on her mind as she browses pamphlets for the Foundation Beyond Belief's Humanist Disaster Recovery Teams. The organization, the first of its kind, aims to train groups of atheist first responders all over the world. Crowson says it's exactly what she's been looking for.
"I've been really interested lately in secular charity work," she says. "I have a friend who is in the last stages of cancer. He's a single dad of a couple girls, and I recently did a pretty large-scale fundraising mission for him. I felt very useful, so I've been thinking: How can I rally people that are not in churches to help people in need?"
Crowson has gone through different stages of religious observance. When she had her kids, she worried that she didn't have any value system to offer them. So she became a Southern Baptist, but later left religion after she was expelled from a faith-based addiction treatment program.
"I was so disappointed, not because I was kicked out, but because everything I'd been told about love and charity and grace and help — it didn't apply when you didn't fit into their mold anymore. That really set me off on a mission to spread some other kind of love."
On Sunday, Crowson is in the audience when Hemant Mehta, a blogger and activist, echoes her wish for a more proactive and engaged atheism.
"We have to find a way to make people feel important, like they're part of something, to give them a purpose. We as atheists don't do that as a whole. We're not good at that. We like to come together, we like to laugh at religion, and then we leave."
Religious communities, on the other hand, offer daycare, youth activities and mission trips — a sense of belonging and contribution. Answers to the Big Questions. Weekly potluck dinners.
"I can rattle off a bunch of reasons why God doesn't exist, but it's really hard, from what I've seen, for atheists to connect on a more emotional level," Mehta continues. "Why are we here? What's our purpose? Where are we going to go after we die? We all know the answer the church offers to those questions. Now, it's wrong, it's not true, they're selling you this lie and they're offering false hope. I don't want to do that. I want to offer words of honesty, but honesty doesn't always make us feel better. So how do we overcome that? How do we talk about death so that people actually listen? How do you talk to an atheist about losing a child?"
If ever there were a perfect spokesman for a group of atheistic, abortion-loving Satanists, it's Doug Mesner. The founder of the Satanic Temple has a gray, almost translucent pallor. He wears a black button-down shirt over dark pants. His right eye is clouded-over and unfocused; the left is green and piercing. He kind of looks like a vampire.
Up until 2013, Mesner hid his identity behind the persona of "Lucien Greaves," a suitably demonic-sounding name that allowed him to insulate his real life from the people who consider him a disciple of the antichrist.
OK, but what does the the Satanic Temple actually stand for, I ask Mesner. Is it, as others have suggested, nothing but a piece of trollish performance art, a practical joke pushed too far? A new-age cult?
"I think this is what religion is supposed to be," Mesner says matter-of-factly. "I think we're bringing it back to that kind of original conception."
I wasn't expecting that answer. This is the same guy who just two weeks prior stood on a stage in a Detroit warehouse and unveiled an eight-foot statute of the goat-headed Pagan god Baphomet. Last week, the Temple formally applied for permission to install the Baphomet statute on Arkansas' capitol grounds, a pointed reaction to the state's plans to build a monument depicting the Ten Commandments in the same location.
"I think the biggest mistake the atheist movement makes is discarding religion entirely," Mesner says. "To a lot of people, that sounds paradoxical. To them, atheism means no religion. But I don't think that's true at all. Atheism means you don't worship a personal deity. That's all it means. Religion can be something based on metaphor. It can be this cultural construct in the sense of cultural identity, and it gives you that sense of community."
Mesner is betting that he can extend this argument to the courts, and it's certainly possible that judges will balk at granting a metaphorical religion the same legal rights as followers of mainstream faiths. But this is the fight Mesner wants.
"If you concede that religion belongs solely to supernaturalists, then you're giving privilege to supernaturalism. In effect you're saying that your own deeply held values, your own sense of cultural identity, isn't as valuable as that of the superstitious."
There's something undeniably edgy and exciting in the Satanic Temple's approach. Mesner and his black-dressed colleagues are betting they can use atheistic Satanism to break through the societal walls that preserve religious privilege for a select set of faiths. If the Satanists succeed, they could fundamentally change religious life in America as we know it.
I bid farewell to Mesner and take my leave of the Gateway to Reason conference. A summer wind blows through the empty campus. In less than a month, these sidewalks will be crushed with students riding bikes and lugging backpacks.
Mesner's last point is still worming through my head. I remember myself as a 22-year-old college senior who secretly bought Jimmy John's and hid the non-kosher evidence from his roommate. Is the freedom to eat delicious sandwiches more important than following the 3,500-year tradition of my forefathers? Is the freedom more meaningful than honoring the wishes of my parents and teachers?
Oy vey, indeed.
There came a point, toward the beginning of my senior year of college, when I had to give it all up. I had stop hiding Jimmy John's wrappers. I had to stop pretending that I kept the Sabbath. I even stopped wearing the yarmulke — that was lot harder than the rabbi made it seem during his speech to my yeshiva class.
After wearing the yarmulke for twenty years, I had grown comfortable dealing with awkward questions posed by bystanders at movies or baseball games. They'd ask, "Why do you wear that thing on your head?"
"Well," I'd always answer, "Jewish men wear it as a reminder that God is always above us."
The yarmulke wasn't just a disc of fabric. It was a part of my identity, the thing that made me stand out in any crowd. It was a constant reminder to me of what my high school rabbis would say before every summer vacation: Whatever you do, don't embarrass the Jews or God, don't be a Chillul Hashem.
With the yarmulke on, I could never escape my identity as a Jew. Every action was meaningful and representational, a reflection of God's commandment to be a light unto the nations, part of a chosen people. It was a moral weight clipped to my hair.
The moment I took the yarmulke off, I looked like everybody else. Just another human.
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" wrote Hillel, the great Babylonian Torah scholar and commentator. It's the first verse of Hillel's most famous teaching, repeated in countless sermons and recited by yeshiva students for more than 2,000 years. Yet it always sounded odd to me, coming from a presumably devout and holy rabbi. Isn't God for everyone? Isn't that the point?
If time moved backward, I'd visit the dusty Babylonian study hall at the very moment Hillel wrote those words. I'd ask him about Jimmy John's sandwiches and yarmulkes and slavery. Maybe Hillel knew, way back then, what was to come. When his pen struck parchment, maybe he was thinking of people like Gabrielle Gojko, Tamatha Crowson and Stacey Holland. Maybe he was thinking of Jews like me.
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" Hillel wrote. "If I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?"
Follow Danny Wicentowski on Twitter at @D_Towski. E-mail the author at [email protected]
