Greta Christina recently wrote a much-discussed blog post asking (and answering) the question, “What Are the Goals of the Atheist Movement?” In this piece, Christina argues convincingly that much of the internal debate over what kinds of tactics help or hurt “our cause” stems from the fact that “we may not be talking about the same one.” I think this diagnosis is dead on.

The two main “causes” Christina focuses on are “[reducing] anti-atheist bigotry and discrimination, and [working] towards more complete separation of church and state,” and “persuading the world out of religion.” Not only does Christina think the latter is “a hugely worthwhile goal just for its own sake,” but she also thinks it is “the best strategy for achieving our other goals.”

I’m not convinced that ending religious belief would be easier than cooperating with religious believers toward shared goals, but I’d like to set aside the question of achievability for the moment and focus instead on what goals are worth pursuing and what tactics are worth using, assuming all are equally effective.

Chris Stedman has already written eloquently for the Huffington Post about his opposition to the second goal: “If being an atheist activist means ‘persuading more people out of religion and into atheism,’ as Christina wrote, than I am not one.” Chris has been weirdly accused of surrounding himself with a wall of young people (the NonProphet Status panelists) who defend his every move. If the following bombshell doesn’t put an end to that stupid idea, I don’t know what will:

I subscribe to both of Christina’s goals.

This seems like a good time to remind everybody that the opinions expressed in this piece reflect only the views of the author, and not of Chris Stedman, the other NPS panelists, the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard, the Interfaith Youth Core, or anybody else.

Now that that’s taken care of, let me reiterate, just so I’m extra super clear.

I wish religion would go away. I think it’s wrong, I think it’s a net negative presence in the world, and if all else were equal, I would prefer a world without religion to one with it. I agree whole-heartedly with Voltaire’s warning that “qui est en droit de vous rendre absurde est en droit de vous rendre injuste” (whoever has the power to make you absurd can also make you unjust). I fully support “persuading more people out of religion and into atheism.” I am, you might say, an evangelical atheist.

If you’re surprised by hearing this from somebody who spent the last year heading up her college’s Interfaith Council, organizing interfaith service projects and discussions, working with chaplains and students of many different beliefs, and volunteering at leadership institutes with the Interfaith Youth Core, you’re not alone.

A few weeks ago, I was talking with my friend John Figdor, the Assistant Humanist Chaplain at Harvard. John, like many (perhaps most) atheists, is used to distinguishing between “New Atheists” (or “anti-theists” or “confrontationalists”) and “accommodationists.” (He considers himself emphatically the former.) He was absolutely shocked when I, the interfaith kid, told him I thought the world would be better off without religion. Many atheists assume that those of us who engage in interfaith work “believe in belief,” or wish we were religious, or otherwise relegate our atheism to a dark and lonely corner.

But I’m just a pragmatist. I wish religion would conveniently disappear, and if there’s anything (see below for qualifiers) I can do to help make that happen, I will. But I certainly won’t see that in my lifetime, so I might as well try to find the most constructive ways to deal with religion as long as it’s around. Interfaith work – bringing people of all beliefs together to respectfully work toward common goals – seems to me like a great way to do that.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine. She recently founded and currently writes for two other blogs, The Unelectables (following religious minority candidates in the 2012 election) and Blogging Biblically (documenting her attempt to read the Bible in a year). She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, the former President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council, and a Volunteer Ambassador for the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (hasty breakfast? more like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. This summer she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.

This week, I was shocked to discover that I sort of agreed with PZ Myers about something. I figured that constituted some kind of faitheist existential crisis, so I did what all good atheists do when a thought of some kind enters their heads: I decided to blog about it.

If we need a Nones-Pope, I vote for Randall Munroe.

Last Sunday, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Eric Weiner entitled, “Americans: Undecided About God?” In the piece, Weiner discusses “the nation’s fastest-growing religious demographic,” commonly known as “the Nones, the roughly 12 percent of people who say they have no religious affiliation at all” when they respond to the sort of surveys that ask people about such things. (Having never been asked to respond to one of these fabled surveys, I sometimes question their existence while sitting alone in my room eating ramen and feeling unloved. I rather suspect somebody just makes up the numbers and changes them every now and then to keep people on their toes.)

As you can probably guess, the Nones are not a very homogenous bunch. As PZ Myers correctly pointed out in his response, “none” is the “broad catch-all category” for anybody who doesn’t fit neatly into a different box, so it’s hard to generalize usefully about them as a group. But that doesn’t stop Eric Weiner, the self-appointed spokesperson for Nones everywhere!

According to Weiner, Pope of the Nones, “We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day.” To this claim, PZ and I both responded, “WHY?” More importantly, PZ and I were both immediately reminded of the same xkcd comic, pictured left. Fortunately for my interfaith cred, that’s about where the similarities stop. (I mean, except for that whole thing where PZ and I are both atheists. But that almost seems insignificant compared to all the topics we disagree vehemently about. See, Eric Weiner? The non-religious, even when you narrow it down to atheists, are a pretty diverse bunch.)

Weiner asserts that “a growing number of Americans are running from organized religion, but by no means running from God.” He backs up this claim by pointing to another survey indicating that “just 7 percent of [the Nones] describe themselves as atheists.” The op-ed lacks citations – as op-eds are wont to do – but Weiner attributes this number to “a survey by Trinity College.” A friend of mine usefully tracked down the summary report of what she believes is the study Weiner is referring to: the American Religious Identification Survey of 2008, conducted by Barry A. Kosmin and Ariela Keysar of Trinity College in Hartford, CT.

I haven’t read the whole report, but after skimming it, it seems to tell a pretty different story from Weiner’s. By this survey’s count, the Nones constituted 15.0% of the U.S. population in 2008. But just 0.7% of the population identifies as atheist, and only 0.9% as agnostic. So who are the 13.4% of the population who are Nones but neither atheists nor agnostics? Is more than one in eight Americans an Eric Weiner, drifting from religion to religion, cult to cult, dabbling in Eastern mysticism and Western orthodoxy, waiting for the “Steve Jobs of religion” to come along and end their spiritual ennui?

No. The names people identify with don’t always match up with their actual beliefs in the ways we’d expect. When asked the (sort of) question, “Regarding the existence of God, do you think…?,” 2.3% of those surveyed responded “There is no such thing.” 4.3% said “There is no way to know,” and 5.7% said “I’m not sure.” What that says to me is that 2.3% of Americans are actually atheists, but less than a third of them are willing to identify as such. Similarly, somewhere between 4% and 10% of the U.S. population is agnostic (depending on how strictly you want to define that term), but the majority of those won’t admit it.

It’s not surprising that many people who don’t believe in God are afraid or otherwise unwilling to brand themselves atheists in a country where atheists are routinely vilified, discriminated against, and feared. Weiner should take such issues into account before dismissing the apparently small numbers of self-identified atheists within the Nones. Moreover, Weiner believes that many people “are reluctant to claim a religious affiliation because they don’t want the political one that comes along with it,” but doesn’t consider the possibility that there may be plenty of non-religious Americans who resist the term “atheist” because they don’t want to be lumped in with the New Atheists, for whatever reason.

Moreover, Weiner ignores a vital shortcoming of the Trinity study: it overlooks the fact that people might identify with more than one label. For example, many people believe it is entirely possible to be both Jewish and atheist – Greg Epstein is even ordained as a Humanist Rabbi. I also know at least one person who identifies as a Catholic-Hindu, at least one Buddhist-Episcopalian, at least one Wiccan-Jew, and at least one Omnist who aspires to believe in the truth of all religions; I know a woman who prays to both the Virgin Mary and Isis, and a man who’s about 70% agnostic and 30% Scientologist; and somebody once asked me if it’s possible to be a Christian Humanist.

Belief categories are not solid boxes with firm walls. They are fluid, mixable, mutable, and always deeply personal. Ignoring their fluidity, and discounting the experiences of everyone who has found themselves between categories, is both disrespectful and unrealistic. Being between categories is not necessarily a sign of drifting or waffling. Somebody can be very happily and firmly situated in a hybrid zone. While I sympathize with the Trinity researchers regarding the difficulty of capturing the true complexity of Americans’ beliefs, we must recognize the limitations of our current measurement techniques and adjust our conclusions accordingly.

In sum, Weiner is overly hasty to conclude that 10-15% of Americans are awaiting the “Steve Jobs of religion” to invent “a new way of being religious” so they can feel like they belong. First of all, Weiner breaks the cardinal rule of interfaith: Thou shalt not speak for an entire belief system or demographic, but only from thine own experience. I’m constantly reminding Christians and Hindus and such of this rule in the context of interfaith dialogue, but it’s almost a worse offense in Weiner’s case because he’s claiming to speak for the entire grab-bag of miscellaneous leftovers that is the Nones. Bad form, sir.

Weiner assumes that all the Nones – or at least a majority – are, like him, adrift between unsatisfactory religious labels, waiting for something better to come along. This overlooks the immense diversity of beliefs that a single person can hold. Many Nones might have very strong and very specific beliefs, drawn from a variety of religious and/or non-religious traditions, and might feel that “no religion” better characterizes their unique position than lumping themselves in with one label or another.

Finally, plenty of the Nones are quite comfortably settled on the “No” side of the God Question, and need not “hope” for anything different, thank-you-very-much. I’m already tired of hearing from religious fundamentalists that people who believe in God are better or more complete human beings than those who don’t; the last thing I need is to hear my fellow Nones join in. Et tu, Weiner?

I can’t speak for all the Nones, or even all the comfortably atheist Nones, but I can tell you that I personally don’t want “a Steve Jobs of religion” to invent “a new way of being religious.” What I think we need is a new way of being non-religious. Many Americans believe without belonging, but we need a place to belong without believing. Weiner fantasizes about “a religious space that celebrates doubt, encourages experimentation and allows one to utter the word God without embarrassment.” It sounds like what Weiner really wants is a religious community without the religion; he only envisions a “religious space” because that’s the only kind of space we’ve been taught to think can house the kind of community he wants.

But I’ve been lucky enough to find just such a space, without the religious baggage that Weiner fears: the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. Many Steve Jobses of non-religion – like Greg Epstein, Chris Stedman, James Croft, and Walker Bristol, just to name a few – are already thinking up new ways to be non-religious without being anti-religious. If this is something that excites you, check out the recently launched website of the Humanist Community Project. Weiner might not realize it, but I think this could be exactly what he’s looking for: a place to ask big questions within a supportive community; a place to be thoughtful and philosophical without being religious; a place to be good without God.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the former President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (hasty breakfast? more like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. This summer she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.

NO, LITTLE BOY! DON'T DO IT!

As we emerge from our food comas, clean up after our in-laws, and shuffle the leftovers around until we can close the refrigerator door, we are all starting to brace ourselves for the most wonderful time of the year. Whether or not you braved the Black Friday crowds and stampeded your way to a $2 waffle iron, you are probably starting to make your list, check it twice, and wonder how your dollar is going to stretch that far. And many of you are also trying to find room in your budgets for some charitable donations in the spirit of the season.

A couple of weeks ago, I tried to figure out how to celebrate Thanksgiving as somebody who doesn’t believe in a god to thank. After that, it seemed only natural to re-evaluate my winter holiday habits.

Sorry for bringing out the now-clichéd phrase, but in this economy, I’ve been thinking hard about how I use my money. Old habits tend to die hard, but now I’m trying to break one I’ve had ever since I was old enough to carry pocket change: this year, I won’t be giving my money to the Salvation Army.

Plenty of people have tried to call attention to the Salvation Army’s conservative views on sexuality, and have even urged LGBT allies to boycott the organization. The short version of the story is that the Salvation Army is an Evangelical Christian organization that believes scripture forbids homosexual relationships; they encourage people who can’t shake their same-sex attractions to “embrace celibacy.” Bummer.

The Salvation Army insists that they oppose the mistreatment of LGBT individuals (how nice of them!), and that their services are “available to all who qualify, regardless of sexual orientation.” However, there is anecdotal evidence that this policy isn’t always carried out in practice. For example, one formerly homeless man shares the story of how he and his boyfriend were denied aid by the Salvation Army because of their “sinful homosexual lifestyle.”

So if you consider yourself a supporter of LGBT rights, or if you would rather support an organization that assists all those in need without discrimination, you can surely find a charitable organization more in line with your values to give your money to. If you need ideas, try the Trevor Project on for size.

If you happen to be a godless heathen like myself, that’s all the more reason not to support a religion-based organization like the Salvation Army. In fact, I think that, in general, non-religious people should not donate to religiously affiliated charities if a comparable secular alternative exists. I know this might come as a surprise coming from me, the touchy-feely interfaith girl. I love interfaith stuff, and I totally believe in supporting people and communities of other beliefs, financially and otherwise. And, of course, many religious charities do fantastic work that secular people can completely get behind. But let me explain.

When we give our money to religious charities, we give certain religious people ammunition to claim that the godless aren’t charitably inclined. Not all religious people are antagonistic to the non-religious, of course! But those who are tend to be loud, and they often dominate the cultural conversation on belief. So don’t inflate their data on religious charity; instead, support the many excellent secular charities in the world, and don’t be shy about telling people why.

For bonus points, support an explicitly non-religious organization. There’s still time to help the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard cover the cost of the food we packaged for hungry children on November 20. The Foundation Beyond Belief is an exemplary secular charity that works on a wide variety of issues. If you want to get in people’s faces a little bit – and hey, sometimes it has to be done – you might want to fund the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s defense of the separation of church and state.

By drawing attention to the charitable habits of the non-religious, I’m hoping we can clear up some of the misconceptions that surround atheists in general – and hopefully challenge the Salvation Army’s status as the default charity of the holiday season. Aside from the fact that they might not be worth your money, their cultural dominance has led to at least one instance of faulty research on generosity trends.

The most academically respected research institution in the world, ABC’s “20/20,” performed an extremely scientifically rigorous analysis of charitable giving by measuring how much money was collected by the Salvation Army in liberal San Francisco and conservative Sioux Falls. Because Sioux Falls exceeded San Francisco in such donations, “20/20” concluded that conservatives were more charitable – ignoring the possibility that liberals simply don’t support the Salvation Army’s conservative agenda.

There is other (real) research out there that further explores the relationship between political inclination and charitable donation; as it turns out, that relationship would be best described on Facebook as “It’s Complicated.” But hopefully the “20/20” incident illustrates one unfortunate result of the Salvation Army’s long hegemony, and motivates you to stage a charitable coup.

I know I’m going to look like a Grinch when I walk past the red buckets and jingling bells with my hands firmly planted in my pockets. But that’s why I’m trying to educate people about the reasons behind my choice, so the Salvation Army can stop being the default charity and people can start putting more thought into where their money goes.

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (Hasty breakfast? More like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. This summer she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.

I’m off to New York in a few hours to speak at Park51 about Humanist community and interfaith work. Besides that, I’ll be spending most of my week preparing for the Harvard Interfaith Collaborative’s Thanksgiving hunger relief service project this Sunday. So, for today’s brief post, here are five reasons why you should donate at least $10 right now to support hunger relief for food-insecure children in the Boston area.

5. I am a college student, and I found room in my tight budget to donate $10. It’s a modest amount, but think about how quickly it adds up if ten or fifty or a hundred people do the same. And remember that $10 buys 40 nutritious and non-perishable meals for children who might not otherwise be fed.

4. Selling the Vatican to feed the world sounds really fun, but probably won’t pan out anytime soon. If you’re frustrated by the hypocrisy of this situation, be the change you want to see in the world and set a positive example for the Catholic Church by feeding the world yourself.

3. If you were able to eat every time you got hungry this week, you are more fortunate than a lot of children in Massachusetts. Give thanks for your good fortune, then share a little bit of it with somebody who isn’t as fortunate.

2. Your belief system, whether religious or not, almost certainly places a high value on service. Maybe you believe in tithing. Maybe you believe in tikkun olam. Maybe you believe in zakāt. Maybe you believe in your own ability and responsibility to lead an ethical life of personal fulfillment that aspires to the greater good of humanity. Maybe you just feel responsible for justice because you’re not convinced that God will take care of it. Whatever your beliefs, take a minute to think about what they say about service. Then, when you find your inspiration, donate.

1. I don’t even know why we are having this conversation, because you really should have donated all of your disposable income to this project the minute you learned that Chris will shave his mustache if we reach our fundraising goal. Don’t you want to see what that looks like?! Don’t you?!?

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (Hasty breakfast? More like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. This summer she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.

Last week, I had the privilege of writing a guest post for the Social Action Massachusetts blog. They often have people of different faiths blog about what, from their tradition, motivates them to work towards social justice. But Caitlin from SAM realized they’d never had a nonreligious perspective on that topic, so she asked me to contribute. This is what I wrote.

This summer, a Christian student at my school told me that if he found out God didn’t exist, he would kill himself.

I was horrified, of course, but also simply confused. If this student stopped believing in God, would his world really look that bad? Would it suddenly look that different? Would it cease to be worth living in?

That world is my world. I live every day of my life assuming that God doesn’t exist, and I’m having a grand old time.

But I was even more confused when the same student went on to say that, if he didn’t kill himself, he would at the very least become a heartless monster; he would stop doing community service, stop caring about the wellbeing of others, and devote the rest of his life to selfish and radical hedonism.

As somebody who has lived through exactly the process he is hypothesizing about – the transition from a theistic worldview to an atheistic one – I can testify that my commitment to serving others only became stronger when I stopped believing in God.

I’ve always believed in the importance of community service. But, for most of my life, it didn’t seem particularly urgent. It will all be evened out eventually, I figured. It’s nice to do what you can, but no matter what we do in this life, God will sort it out in the next. Justice will be served regardless of my participation in it.

When I became an atheist, I suddenly lost recourse to this comforting thought. I became painfully aware of the very real possibility that justice might never be served. With that awareness came the unshakable conviction that I must do everything in my power to ensure that people do, as nearly as possible, get justice in this life. If I don’t do it, I can’t assume that it will get done.

Rabbi Hillel famously asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” I ask, if we are not for ourselves, who will be for us? And if I am not for my fellow humans, who will be for them?

Thus, the idea that atheism dissolves responsibility is baffling to me. On the contrary, the way I see it, responsibility is a constant; the question isn’t whether it exists, but who bears it. You can only abdicate responsibility if you have somebody to foist it off on – somebody like God. When God is removed from the picture, the weight of the world falls squarely and irrevocably on our own shoulders.

That’s why I, as an atheist, am committed to working as hard as I can for social justice.

I believe in the religion of reason – the gospel of this world; in the development of the mind, in the accumulation of intellectual wealth, to the end that man may free himself from superstitious fear, to the end that he may take advantage of the forces of nature to feed and clothe the world.

– Robert Ingersoll

Chelsea Link is a senior at Harvard University, studying History and Science with a focus in the history of medicine, and minoring in Mind/Brain/Behavior. She is the Vice President of Outreach of the Harvard Secular Society, and the President of the Harvard College Interfaith Council. She also writes for the Harvard Brain and volunteers with the Be the Match bone marrow donor registry. She likes to cook while pretending she’s on Top Chef (Hasty breakfast? More like Quickfire Challenge!), adores word games of all kinds (and was once the President of the illustrious Harvard College Crossword Society), and tends to kill the mood at parties by unnecessarily reciting Shakespeare. This summer she interned at the Humanist Chaplaincy at Harvard. You can ask her what she’s doing after graduation, but she’ll give you a different answer every time.