What is an Atheist?

Dan Beecher I feel like what we've done is make everything worse for everybody. This whole episode is just about making everything worse.

Dan McClellan No, I will frequently say if I just come in and muddy the water and then run away, I've done my job. Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. And today, we're going to be focusing on the latter end of that mission statement a little bit, aren't we?

Dan Beecher Whoo. Yeah, man. I'm looking forward to this conversation. Are we even going to talk about the Bible? We might not.

Dan McClellan We might brush up against it.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Maybe one or two passages, but that's it.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So we're doing two What Is That?

Dan McClellan segments.

Dan Beecher We're going to ask some pretty big questions, and they're questions that are sort of increasingly important in today's kind of cultural landscape, I feel like.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Yeah. So we're going to start with the question of, and this is a big one, what is religion? Because we all think we have a handle on that word, but I think we need to kind of define our terms on that.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And then the one that I actually feel like I might actually have something to say is we're going to ask, what's an atheist? So, a lot of interesting stuff coming up. Let's just dive right in.

Dan McClellan Let's do it.

Dan Beecher What is that? And our first What Is That?

Dan McClellan is religion.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Like I said earlier, it almost feels like intuitively we all seem feel like we have an understanding of that word- Yeah ... until you start to break it down. So why are we asking this question?

Dan McClellan I think we're asking this question because where the boundaries of the concept of religion are, are increasingly contested and are becoming increasingly important. Not just on social media and in general social discourse, but even in the law and in the way that our governments function. And in a lot of different ways, it is becoming increasingly important to be able to determine what is and is not a religion. And different countries have different degrees of clarity regarding that. There are some countries where there are certain groups that are considered religious groups by the state, the government here, but in other countries, they're like, "Nope, not religious groups, sorry."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so this has far-reaching implications. But you mentioned it seems kind of intuitive that we know what a religion is. And this is common for most words that we see used frequently. If we have a backlog of experiences hearing words being used in reference to certain concepts or items or entities, we just intuitively kind of generate a concept of what that thing is. And so a lot of people, when they try to think about what a religion is, what they're going to do is just retreat into their mind and just try to imagine the imagery, the conceptual field that is evoked by that word, and then try to describe or define that. And people think, "Okay, that's religion." The problem is, as we've talked about before, I think we've talked about prototype theory and- Mm-hmm ... cognitive linguistics a little bit before. The problem is that that's entirely relative. It's going to be different for every person because we all have different experiences.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so if we try to retreat to, this is the conceptual package that is evoked in my mind when I hear that word, great. That doesn't really have any authority outside of your mind.

Dan Beecher So- Yeah. It's that definition of... I can't remember which senator said the definition of pornography. "Well, I don't know how to define it, but I know it when I see it," sort of thing.

Dan McClellan Yeah. That was a Supreme Court justice.

Dan Beecher Was it?

Dan McClellan Yeah. And it actually raises a very good point, that you can't define conceptual categories, at least not in a way that is analytical and objective and clear. And this, I get flack every time I bring this up. You just can't. It's just an impossibility, and people are like, "I can do it."

Dan Beecher Great.

Dan McClellan Knock yourself out. You will never succeed. You will convince yourself you've succeeded, and I bring up things like furniture or a game, or we could even go to pornography, or you go to a lot of different things, and I challenge people to define them, and usually they'll just look in a dictionary and then they'll come up with something, and it's like, okay, great. Except for, there are a bunch of exceptions to that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan That definition ropes in a bunch of things that are never referred to by that term, and it also leaves out a bunch of things that are commonly referred to by that term.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so you have not defined the term. You have just arbitrarily set up boundaries based on this false presupposition that all conceptual categories are reducible to necessary and sufficient features, which is, and please excuse me if I'm getting a little heady, but which is an Aristotelian assumption about typologies, about how categories function. Because we tend to think of categories as boxes. It's either in or out. The reality is our minds create and curate and use categories by focusing on the prototypes, the centers of the category, and kind of ignoring what's going on in the periphery, where the boundaries are, they don't exist until you create them, and they're usually contested.

Dan Beecher So- Yeah. And the minute you write a solid boundary- Like you say, somebody's going to come up with something and then you're going to, "Okay, well, we'll do a little carve-out for that." And then somebody's like, "But wait, inside the boundary that you said, there's this and that's not right." "Oh, yeah, let's carve out. Let's change the..." You're always going to be changing your boundaries.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And this is something that Wittgenstein noticed 80 some odd years ago in his philosophical investigations. He said, well, originally it was in German. I don't remember the direct translation, but basically said, "Can you draw a boundary around the concept of game?" No, because you've never had to.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan You can create one, but you don't discover one. You don't- Right ... dig one up. You create one if you need one.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But until you need one, you don't need a boundary.

Dan Beecher And you start asking your question, does it include both board games and baseball? Does it include... Okay, well, it includes that, and it gets bigger and bigger, and then eventually- Yeah ... you get to, does Russian roulette count? And I don't know. That feels not like a game.

Dan McClellan And basically what we're doing is we're taking all the things that have been given that label, and then we're trying to find features that are shared by all of them and only by all of them.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And that's the presupposition that they can all be reduced to necessary and sufficient features. But that's not how categories develop. That's not how the category of religion developed. And so when we're talking about religion, this is another thing where we can't define it, and it's not because there's anything wrong with the category. It's not because there's anything special about the category. It's a conceptual category and it can't be defined. Only it's a lot more critical to a lot of people today to be able to create those boundaries than it is for the concept of game or furniture. Not high stakes for those words.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But when it comes to religion, there are stakes. So I want to- There- Go ahead.

Dan Beecher Yeah, I was going to say that one of the things I recently, not all that recently, but fairly recently on my other show, "Thank God I'm Atheist" we talked about some right-wing groups here in the US that were political groups. They're political activism groups from a Christian right perspective- Mm-hmm ... that have now decided that they are, or have declared themselves to be religions, so that there's no scrutiny of their finances. Because while they were already 501 [c] [3] organizations, meaning they were nonprofit organizations- Right ... here in the United States, if they declare themselves to be religions, not religious in their purpose, but actually religions, then they don't have to do filings with the government about what they're doing with their money.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So that's a real-world consequence to realizing why we might need to define these terms a little bit more specifically.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Now, when we go back into the ancient world, a lot of people want to start with the etymology of religion.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Most scholars would say it seems to come from this Latin word religio. But there are a handful of other words that are understood to kind of occupy the same conceptual space. Pietas, fides, lex, secta, cultus, these are all Latin words that kind of are surrounding the concept of religion. And then in Greek, we have threskeia, which is the word that we actually find in the Epistle of James, and then an adjectival form in the Epistle of Peter. Latria and eusebeia, and these have to do with laws or worship or something like that. But religio is the base, most likely, for our English word religion. And so people say, "Oh, we've got that word in ancient Rome." And it's like, okay, well, let's look at the way that word is used in ancient Rome. We've got a play, a comedy called "Curculio" written by Plautus, and there's a part where somebody is telling a story, and he says he was going to leave, says, "Somebody calls me back directly and invites me to dinner." He says, "I had religio, so I could not decline." And so how is religio being used here? If you look at the way that religio is used in Latin, it's almost like scrupulosity.

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan It's this notion that I feel an obligation to meet a bunch of social standards and expectations in relation to my relationship with other people as well as with God.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So it's basically observation of social expectations and standards in relation to people or to God.

Dan Beecher And so there is a- So it's like I must follow the dictates of my priest and dear Abby.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Or the guy invites you to dinner, and it's like, "Ah, I've been placed in this situation where I am obligated by- Right ... my scruples." And if you look this text up, a lot of places will translate religio as scruples.

Dan Beecher Mm-hmm.

Dan McClellan And so there are other places where it is used, it seems to be used more in reference to a type of scrupulosity, like I've just got this thing where I've got to do all this stuff because it just has to be done.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And it's not necessarily in relation to any kind of god, it's just kind of a scrupulosity. So you have folks like Lucretius who says that this is a superstition ... kind of equating it with scrupulosity to some degree. For Cicero, or Cicero as he's also known, it was a virtue, and it was contrasted with superstition.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so it's being used to refer to kind of secular ideas as well as things in relation to a deity. And you have one scholar, Ernst Feil, who's kind of done the most comprehensive survey of how this word is used, says that it means "The careful and even fearful fulfillment of all that man owes to God or to the gods, and also to humanity." And when we get into early Christianity, when Latin is starting to take over from Greek, you have folks like Augustine saying, "We don't want to refer to following Jesus as a religion because it doesn't necessarily have to do only with our relationship with God." He says, "Religio is to be observed in dealing with human relationships, affinities, and ties of every sort, not just with our relationship with God." And so he thinks religio is not applicable to Christianity, to the followers of Jesus.

Dan Beecher That makes sense. So- I mean, for that use of that word, which is a different word than our word religion.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So that's the Latin from which we get the word religion, but we also have already within Christianity, the Latin "fathers" who are responsible for developing the use of this word within Christianity. Later on, in Latin and in other languages, they're going to start talking about how true religion is Christianity. But we got a ways to go to get there. When we get into medieval Christianity, this Roman usage is still in vogue, but then you also had an additional sense because religion refers to kind of the scrupulous observation of these relationships with humans and with gods. Religious begins to describe those who dedicated their whole lives to the scrupulous and withdrawn service of God. In other words, a religious person was a member of the priesthood. But you could also- Oh. So to become religious was to join the priesthood- Right ... and become a monk or something like that.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Oddly enough, you had two different tracks within the priesthood. You could become a religious member of the priesthood, or you could become a secular member of the priesthood.

Dan Beecher Oh.

Dan McClellan They both referred to the priesthood- Yeah ... and being some kind of monk or priest or something like that. In fact, we have a text from Canon 13 from the Fourth Lateran Council says, "Whoever wants to convert to religion should enter one of the already approved orders." So the monastic orders. There are religious and secular monastic orders within medieval and later Christianity. So in this sense, religion is not what we widely understand it to be today. And we begin to have religion kind of interiorized and universalized in the 14th and 15th centuries as we have humanist Christians applying Neoplatonic frameworks to Christianity. And a lot of this is coming in reaction to what's going on with the Crusades and with the fighting with Islam and stuff like that. And so two that stand out are Germany's Nicholas of Cusa and Italy's Marsilio Ficino. They were Neoplatonist Christians, and they both talked about religion as something that was innate to everybody. And this is an innovation.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And one of the reasons they're doing this is because they're seeing Islam and Christianity going to battle. A lot of people are dying. There's conquest, there's property and land changing hands and everything, and they're trying to find a way to kind of harmonize things. They're the why can't we all just get along folks- Right ... of this time period. And so, we have religion as this scrupulous observation of responsibilities towards God. And this is somewhat related to the idea that if you're a member of the priesthood, then you could be a member of a religious monastic order. And so, Cusa talks about trying to end violence by suggesting that the different rituals and rites and cultural conventions between Islam and Christianity are reducible to the same religion. He says there is only one religio in a variety of rites. And so he's talking about religion as an interior innate impulse to observe these responsibilities related to God. But it gets shown through a sociocultural filter that's different for Islam than it is for Christianity.

Dan Beecher So we're getting to an idea that could almost be described by the modern word spiritual or something, where there's some- Yeah, like piety or something like that. There's an innate sort of connection to the divine, and the outward expressions of those things can be different in different groups.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher But the religio itself is this thing that lives inside everybody, and- Yeah.

Dan McClellan An internal, innate kind of pull towards God.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then about 20 years later, we have Ficino describing religio as a universal constant, as natural to humanity as barking is to dogs and neighing is to horses. So it's an intuition.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's one of those things. And so, despite the illusion of all kinds of different rites and rituals, he writes in one place, "All human opinions, all responses, all customs change except religione."

Dan Beecher Interesting.

Dan McClellan That impulse to God is shared by everyone and is the same.

Dan Beecher So we're still not- I will say that my experience is that that impulse toward divinity is probably more present in dogs- ... and barking is just as likely in humans.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher So that would be my quibble with that person, whoever it was.

Dan McClellan And we had one dog that never barked, and then we were like, "Hey, let's get another dog." Barks all the time. So- There you go ... we have a very religious dog, and we basically have an atheist dog. So- A secular dog, okay.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I much prefer the secular dog. Especially when I'm trying to get work done and the neighbor's dog is out back, who is also very religious. But part of what they're doing is trying to reconfigure our understanding of humanity as a way to overcome the perception of these significant differences. You worship one god, you worship the other god, and so now we get this notion of religion not only as internal, but now we're starting to loosen it from its cultural moorings. We're loosening it from its manifestation in these rites and practices. And so this is not an enormous leap conceptually, but it sets the stage for the Protestant Reformation.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan Because one of the things that the Protestant Reformation is all about is trying to dislodge the church from state power. And so if religion is now this innate impulse that is universal and is not directly tied to certain priesthoods, certain rites, certain ordinances, all that kind of stuff, then that means that the Catholic appeal to power and the priesthood and the rites and all that kind of stuff is not fundamental necessary to the practice of religion. And so this developing concept helps the Reformation along by allowing them to generate a new concept of religion as unconnected to priesthood rites and rituals and the material trappings of the Catholic Church, and also the power associated with it. Because they thought of, you had this concept of religion and secular, you had it in medieval Christianity with the different monastic orders. But around the time of the Reformation, the religious and the secular were two different arms of the Catholic Church. The religious was the ecclesiastical arm.

Dan Beecher Yeah. I'm not 100% sure that I understand what the distinction there is.

Dan McClellan So, the secular would be the police force of the Catholic Church- Oh ... whereas the religious would be the priesthood of the Catholic Church.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan But they both fell under the umbrella of the Catholic Church.

Dan Beecher Right. And both would sort of claim a devotion to the religion- Right ... to what we would now call the religion.

Dan McClellan Sorry.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And in this time period, you have a tradition about there being four laws, and they're called leges or leges. The heathens, the Jews, the Christians, and the Muhammadans- ... is how these texts are generally translated. But notice they're referring to these as laws. These are the collection of cultural conventions and requirements and everything like that, which is distinct from the developing concept of religion- Okay ... which the Reformation is trying to turn into this kind of abstraction of what the Catholic Church has long been doing.

Dan Beecher So they're trying to- And it should be...

Dan McClellan Sorry.

Dan Beecher It just occurred to me- No, go ahead ... to note that it should be said that this is a purely Eurocentric history.

Dan McClellan 100%, yeah.

Dan Beecher We're not talking about anything but just sort of how Europeans saw things through time.

Dan McClellan And this is going to be incredibly important because it's Europeans developing the concept, and then when they start realizing there are people outside of Europe- Right ... what they're going to do is basically- How dare they? They're going to take the conceptual lens that they created, and they're going to impose it upon the other people.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So, in the 19th century, you had confrontations with Japan, and America went over there and they're like, "Hey, we'd like to start up a relationship. We want to do trade and all this kind of stuff." And they're like, "Great. That sounds awesome. We do, too." And they're like, "Great. First thing we need, though, is we need to write up some rules and regulations. What religion do y'all follow?" And they're like- ... "We don't know what that is."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And they were like, "Oh, well, here's what a religion is." And basically saying, "Okay, you have to come up with something that- Yeah ... meets this set of rules." And they were like, "We don't have anything like that. Let's make something like that." And so there's a whole book on the invention of religion in Japan- Interesting ... which is about how they took certain cultural conventions, and they were kind of like, "Let's call that our religion."

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And then as Western ideas were more and more influential in the society, this thing that wasn't a religion is starting to manifest, is starting to get closer and closer to resembling what the US said they wanted them to describe.

Dan Beecher So it's- Worst export ever.

Dan McClellan Oh, yeah. There's a great argument to make for that. But we have Calvin talks about how pure and genuine religion is confidence in God coupled with serious fear, fear which both includes in it willing reverence and brings along with it such legitimate worship as is prescribed by the law. And so it's still this kind of internal innate impulse, but it manifests in appropriate practices. And so we get ideas about genuine religion, and Christianity was genuine religion.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But then we have concepts of false religion, which is basically Christians who aren't doing it right. That's false religion.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And as we get into the Enlightenment and deism begins to take up, one of the things that the Enlightenment was really good at was trying to categorize things and describe things. So you had a lot of philosophers, you had a lot of naturalists, you had a lot of scientists going out into the world to put labels on everything and put everything in a box and collect everything. And Darwin turns this into the theory of evolution, and we have a lot of typologizing and categorization and everything.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so Europeans are, again, taking that lens of this is what we think of as religion, and now they're applying it to other societies. And they're expecting to find, because religion is universal and is innate, they need to find it in all of these societies that they come across.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so as with Japan, so too the Pacific Islands, and so too Asia. And they go in and they go, "Okay, what's your religion?" "Don't know what you're talking about." "Oh, well, what are your sacred texts? What are your beliefs about God? What are your this, that, and the other?" Basically we're imposing this framework on other nations and cultures, and we're expecting them to agree with what we have described as religion. And this is where you first get the idea of plural religions, because up until now, religion was just this innate impulse.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan This was like hunger. It's just something that everybody has. But now it's like, oh, there are a lot of different nations and cultures that don't seem to fit with this little box that we have created. And they're so different from the way we do it that we now have plural religions. And so we develop a discipline, a field called world religions, which is not really used by a lot of scholars anymore these days.

Dan Beecher Hmm. But the- Are you saying that the world religions class that I took when I was- ... in college, lo those many, almost 30 years ago, it was worthless now? Is that what you're saying?

Dan McClellan Not worthless, but the framework of world religions is one that is not really used much anymore because- Yeah ... it has a potential to kind of mislead and kind of bias the way we look at things.

Dan Beecher Well, and you can hear even from as you're describing all of these things, you describe Europeans going to these countries that don't even have concepts of religion, and just the questions that they would be asking are so Eurocentric, are so centered in their own understanding of sort of cosmology and theology that yeah, I can see those questions not making any sense to someone who, "What's your concept of God?"

Dan McClellan "Of what?"

Dan Beecher Yeah. "What are you talking about? Are you talking about my ancestors? What are you talking about?"

Dan McClellan Yeah. And you have to kind of bring the two things into juxtaposition with each other and say, "Okay, you see how we have this? Now what's your equivalent to that?"

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And what that does is that forces the one framework onto the other context. And there are a bunch of ways that Protestantism is a part of that, is presupposed in that.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because what did Protestants do? It was sola fide, faith alone. It was sola Scriptura, the scriptures alone. These were all the things that were genuine Christianity, genuine religion. And so religion became, because of Protestantism, the notion of a set of beliefs and practices related to God and your relationship to God. And so there was this presupposition that there were sacred texts, and this is the concept of scripturalization. And so we think every religion has its own scriptures, but really that's just us taking Protestantism and superimposing it upon other cultures and trying to find something that matches that datum in our framework.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so we talk about the Bhagavad Gita and other texts as their scriptures.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And it's like that's importing a whole lot of presuppositions about how these things function and their nature that might not fit how they actually came about or how they were understood before we came barreling in and said, "This is your Bible."

Dan Beecher Right. Yeah, exactly. So scripture- And you have to use it the way we use our Bible and- Right. So scripture- We'll hold you to it and we'll demand that you defend it- Yeah ... from our framework.

Dan McClellan Yeah. We expect it to function the same way, and because we're in charge, because we're colonizing you- ... or we're an empire or whatever, you have to listen to us. And so there are a bunch of ways that that fundamentally distorts how we view what these other cultures have that we have slapped the label of religion on. And even deism. So Lord Edward Herbert of Cherbury is known as kind of the grandfather of deism. But he went through and he was like, "Hey, guess what? I've got these five rules of religion. Every religion has this. The belief that there's one supreme God," monotheism.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Go figure. Two, that he ought to be worshipped. Three, that virtue and piety are the chief parts of divine worship. Four, that we ought to be sorry for our sins and repent of them. Five, that divine goodness doth dispense rewards and punishment both in this life and after it.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan You can see the Protestant outlines- Right.

Dan Beecher Yeah ...

Dan McClellan of this deist concept of what religion is.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But because deists thought, "Hey, we're not Protestants. We're better than that. This is rational religion," they go and take that rational religion and slap it as a label on everything else. And one thing that I like to point out is when it comes to trying to define religion, there's only one feature that is shared by absolutely every culture, tradition, whatever, that has been labeled religion, and that is only that it has been labeled religion. And so the one necessary and sufficient feature of all religion is that it has been given the label of religion.

Dan Beecher Sure.

Dan McClellan And so, as a result, I think the best way to understand and define religion is discursively. And what that means is that religion is created by and within discourse or discussion and media and stuff like that. It does not exist beyond it, and it is whatever that discourse says it is.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so a religion is whatever a group decides a religion is.

Dan Beecher And so- And that's important, right? Because if you're having a discussion with people, it's not important that everyone uses the same dictionary to define things, but it is important that everyone knows what they're talking about when a certain word is used, if we're going to have a communication that makes any sense.

Dan McClellan Yeah. And if one tries to lord their authority over the other, "My definition is the right one, and yours is the wrong one." And that happens with things like racism today.

Dan Beecher Yeah. Does there have to be systemic power asymmetries- Right ... in order for racism to be present?

Dan McClellan Awful lot of people say yes, awful lot of people say no. What's at stake? Well, it's our power. And that's true of religion as well. There's a scholar named Koku Von Stuckrad who published a wonderful paper called "Discursive Study of Religion: Approaches, Definitions, Implications," where he offers a discursive definition of religion. And I've shared this on my channel, and I can hear brains popping as people just get apoplectic about this. But he says we can define religion simply as follows. Religion, all caps religion, is the societal organization of knowledge about religion.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And people are like, "You're not allowed to use the word in the definition." It's like, well, discursively you can.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan Because basically what you're saying is religion is whatever the group decides is religion.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan And so it is relative. It changes from time to time, from place to place, from group to group. And so there's no one universal definition of religion, which is why I'm fond of telling people you can't define it. But if you do want to define it, you have to define it in a way that preserves the relative nature of the concept.

Dan Beecher Well, and you're going to have to realize that there are going to be... You talked about Sir what's-his-name's idea of religion- Lord Herbert of Cherbury.

Dan McClellan Yes.

Dan Beecher That's what I said.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And yeah. If you asked a Buddhist to define religion, none of those things that are included in Sir Chervert of Hervin Vervin- ... in his definition, none of those premises are going to be there.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher And so anytime you try to draw those lines, somebody else who practices a religion is going to disagree with your definition of a religion.

Dan McClellan Right.

Dan Beecher It's kind of like the way people want to draw lines around the word cult- Mm-hmm ... which is always an inflammatory word. It's a word that you can't use without offending somebody.

Dan McClellan And I think it's fundamentally a pejorative term.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think that's the way it's functioning. I don't think it's an analytically useful term, and a lot of scholars are on the same page there. But continue.

Dan Beecher I agree with that. It's just one of those things where it's like at some point, for most uses of the word cult, cult just means a religion that I don't like or that I'm scared of- Exactly ...

Dan McClellan or something.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan So yeah.

Dan Beecher I think that's really interesting, and I'm glad that the conclusion is, "I don't know."

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Because that's a more useful place to land than just- Yeah. At very least, we're not planting any flags, and we're realizing that people who do plant flags are doing so in the service of structuring their power.

Dan McClellan Yeah. Because it doesn't serve their interest to recognize that, hey, man, this is all relative.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because that's not going to help them much. And one example of how this relates to study of the Bible, people talk about religion in the Bible all the time, and when they do that, they approach it as a question of belief, and belief is primarily a Protestant... It is centered primarily because of Protestantism. Now, Protestantism is what developed our modern Western notion of religion, and so that's why it's central. But there is a book called "The Meaning and End of Religion" by a scholar named Wilfred Cantwell Smith- And he writes, "So characteristic has it been that unsuspecting Westerners have been liable to ask about a religious group other than their own as well, 'What do they believe?'

Dan Beecher As though this were the primary question," and certainly were a legitimate one.

Dan McClellan But when we look at these practices elsewhere, they may not have anything to do with belief. It's like, "Why are you doing this?" "Because that's what our society does." Like, "Well, what do you believe?" "Doesn't matter. It's what we're doing."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And even within Protestantism, a lot of times it's still about behavior. But we've developed a bunch of ways to try to make it about belief.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan "If you really believed this, then you would behave this way." It's like, well, that's not how human behavior works. Beliefs and behaviors, one is not downstream from the other.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And so, yeah, when we center belief about deity as the necessary and sufficient feature of religion, we're basically saying, "How much is it like Protestantism?"

Dan Beecher And- Right.

Dan McClellan Okay. And there's another scholar, Brent Nongbri, who wrote a book called "Before Religion" which is talking about how the concept of religion developed. And he put that in, I don't remember exactly what the words were, but he said, "We could very accurately define religion as anything that sufficiently resembles Protestantism." Because that's how the concept developed. Now, I will add one caveat. You mentioned that this is all European, and we're primarily downstream of the European development of this concept. However, medieval Islam also was developing a concept of din, that is very closely related. And so there's an argument to make that Muslims actually systematized this concept in more or less the way we understand it today, centuries before Protestantism did it. But I think we're more directly connected to the Protestant iteration and manifestation of that concept. And so I think that's more relevant to the discussion for English-speaking Westerners.

Dan Beecher Excellent.

Dan McClellan But Islam certainly has a claim to have developed the concept of religion independently, although I think in some ways it's kind of merged more recently. So what is religion? Whatever a group says it is, and also nothing.

Dan Beecher And also nothing.

Dan McClellan All right. Because I say that from time to time as well. There's no such thing as religion.

Dan Beecher Good luck with that.

Dan McClellan Not outside of our discourse.

Dan Beecher But yeah. Good luck taking that with you into a conversation.

Dan McClellan That's just how I throw bombs into things. Like, "I've got to get going." "Hey, guess what?" And the conversation's over.

Dan Beecher And then you run away.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher All right, friends. Well, if you are a patron over on our Patreon, then we'll just be moving on to our next segment. If not, you'll be hearing an ad right now, and then after that, we'll be going into another What's That? So our second What's That? is kind of about the opposite of religion, and since we just decided that religion is nothing, then the opposite of nothing is nothing or something. Anyway, I don't know. I think we're probably going to come to a similar point. But there is a lot of talk on my TikTok feed, I don't know about yours, I assume yours as well, about what is or is not properly called an atheist.

Dan McClellan Hmm.

Dan Beecher So, I don't know. We haven't really discussed how we're going to dive into this. Do you want to start the conversation? What do you want to do?

Dan McClellan Yeah, I'm happy to start. I'll make two points to start off, and then we'll just see where the night takes us.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan Or the early afternoon. So the first comment I'll make is that the word atheism actually is ancient, goes back to ancient Greece. We see it in second, third century BCE, in reference to the irreligious and specifically, and we just talked about how religion isn't a thing, but irreligious in the sense of opponents of the state requirements regarding worship and things like that.

Dan Beecher Okay.

Dan McClellan And so this is a concept with a much longer pedigree than our contemporary concept of religion.

Dan Beecher But- And as a matter of fact, I remember reading that ancient Greeks would accuse Christians of being atheists.

Dan McClellan Yep.

Dan Beecher They would term Christians to be atheists because they didn't- Exactly ... believe in the full pantheon of Greek gods.

Dan McClellan Yeah. So it generally referred to some kind of opposition to, or refusal to engage in the requisite behaviors related to specific deities, and specifically the state-sponsored deities. And one thing I want to point out is that the term atheist describing an individual, I think points out that what we're talking about is the behaviors of people. And so atheism and what it means to be an atheist is wrapped up in an identity.

Dan Beecher Hmm.

Dan McClellan And so I want to suggest that atheism fundamentally is about membership in a group and an identity. And the same is true, I think, of religious, when we talk about religious people and the adjective religious, and the concept of Christian, the concept of Jewish, the concept of Muslim. These have historically always been used to refer to people who are representatives of a group, both negatively, so from the outside, people accusing others of being atheists, and internally, people identifying as atheist or identifying with atheism. And I know that's going to rub some folks the wrong way, and I think we're going to get to- why I think that is as we get to atheism in the modern world.

Dan Beecher But- Yeah. It becomes a tricky thing, right? Because I think that most atheists now, and as we've talked about with religion, the word religion, the word atheism has meant a lot of different things going down through history.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And I think it's still evolving, and I think people want to really nail it down.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And they do it for the same reason that they want to nail down the word religion. They want it to mean what is most convenient for me.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And if the me is a Christian who wants to sort of demonize atheism, they're going to have their definition that they hold to very strongly.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher And if it's an atheist who wants to sort of lionize atheism, they're going to have their definition that they hold to very strongly.

Dan McClellan And- I would agree with that. And I get accused of being an atheist all the time. And it is an accusation.

Dan Beecher What a horrible accusation.

Dan McClellan Yeah.

Dan Beecher Well, they- You must feel terrible ...

Dan McClellan people treat it as an accusation.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan It's like when people use the word gay as an accusation.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan It's like, I'm not offended by that. I'm offended by you thinking that that's offensive.

Dan Beecher Yeah.

Dan McClellan But it's because they want to excise me from their group. Because when I say, "I'm a Christian, but I've compartmentalized my Christianity over here. Right here, I'm just doing scholarship."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And they're like, "Mm, mm, mm. You can't have that. You're an atheist. You're a closet atheist."

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan Because that's the way that they protect their worldview and their understanding of what religion is, what Christianity is.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan But there's a wonderful book, I mentioned it before we started recording. Tim Whitmarsh published a book called "Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World," which is a great discussion of how the concept of atheism seems to have developed anciently. And a lot of it has to do with the fact that within the law, within culture, within philosophy, within a lot of things as people are trying to analyze things and find origins and reasons and explanations for all kinds of stuff, including history. Historians are often trying to figure out why things happened. Between the 6th and the 4th centuries BCE, a lot of Greek thinkers started moving away from the God did it explanation and started coming up with more humanistic, more rational explanations for why some general did what they did or why a battle turned out the way it did.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan So Herodotus is one of the folks that Whitmarsh talks about coming up with explanations that don't punt to, "Oh, this was the gods responsible for all of this." And so this, later down the road, would turn into kind of we don't need the gods to explain stuff anymore because we have better explanations. But like you said, Christians were accused of being atheists because they rejected the state gods, they rejected everybody else's gods. And even though they believed quite fervently in their own deity, everybody else, not everybody else, but others accused them of being atheists because an atheist was not necessarily someone who didn't believe God exists. It was not the absence of belief in gods. It could include the presence of belief in gods, but it was opposition to rejection of specific deities.

Dan Beecher Right.

Dan McClellan And then as we get into the medieval period and into the modern period, you see it being used. It kind of gets appropriated by folks who were rejecting the existence of other gods, and it begins to be taken up as an identity for those people from the accusation. So that's one of the... You defang the accusation by adopting the identity. And then we get into the modern world. It begins to be used primarily as a reference to anti-theism, rejection of the existence of gods. And then the one I wanted to get your thoughts on and the one that I've seen, I want to say it really starts to ramp up post 9/11. That's when I begin to see it popping up the most, the idea that it's just the absence of belief in deity. And you mentioned that people understand these terms in ways that serve their interests and their structuring of power. And I see this as an example of that because it seems to me that this facilitates the argument, "Oh, everybody's born atheist."

Dan Beecher Mm.

Dan McClellan Which means that our club, our group is everybody until this mind virus or whatever takes over. And so it's a way to assert that this is the default state of affairs and any other state is a corruption or a fall from the default state.

Dan Beecher I would quibble with certain parts of that.

Dan McClellan Okay.

Dan Beecher Quibble. What I would say is that that definition of atheism, and it's one that I probably would use myself with maybe some difference, but we can get to that. But my idea is I think that what happened was towards the end of the 19th century and into the 20th century, there became a lot of question in the philosophical world- Okay ... about how do we ask the questions about God and about whether there exists a God. And it became a philosophical question rather than anything else. And how do we prove that God exists? And rather than it being just an assumption that God does exist, how can we philosophically explore this idea? And I think that it became a question of what does the evidentiary landscape tell us about the existence or non-existence of a god or gods? And that's, I think, where people started to become more interested in aligning themselves with a position along that spectrum.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Rather than a religious position, it's a position of when I assess the- It's an epistemological- Yeah. When I assess the evidentiary landscape, where do I fall?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher And so I think that I just had a conversation in preparation for this discussion with a friend of mine who's a philosophy professor. And because I kind of wanted to steel man my own arguments about the word and really know what my thoughts were. And actually, as of this morning, I've kind of changed my thinking about- Okay ... the definition of the word atheist and agnostic. Because up until this morning, I was kind of using the words separately as sort of asking two different questions, right?