AGNOSTIC, ATHEIST, HUMANIST: WHAT DO THOSE WORDS MEAN? LESS -- AND MORE -- THAN YOU THINK
Written by Nancy Haught

In the past 50 years or so, Jeff Strang has been a churchgoer, an agnostic, an atheist and a humanist. If anyone knows what these words mean, it ought to be him. But the president of Humanists of Greater Portland is quick to say that there's a lot of "fuzziness" around the terms.

Strang has his own working definition: "A humanist is an atheist or an agnostic with a social conscience," he says. But then he can't help contributing to the fuzz: "Some people say there's room for religious humanists, too," he adds.

As religious and secular values clash in the Middle East, in Iraq and in our own country, what we believe -- or whether we believe -- often becomes a point of conflict. The words we use to characterize our beliefs often mean more -- and less -- than we might imagine.

An agnostic "believes that the human mind cannot know whether there is a God or an ultimate cause or anything beyond material phenomena," Webster's says. But some people use agnostic to mean that they don't know whether there is a God or not. Others think it means they are seekers, or open to such proof whenever and wherever they may find it.

A humanist believes in "any system of thought or action based on the nature, interests and ideals of man . . . a modern, nontheistic, rationalist movement that holds that man is capable of self-fulfillment, ethical conduct, etc. without recourse to supernaturalism." But, as Strang observes, people may have religious beliefs and subscribe to key humanist principles.

Strang says he was raised in a Presbyterian home. His parents made him attend Sunday school and church until he graduated from high school.

"I never connected with Christianity," he says now. But he was interested in other religions, approaching them as a skeptic. Over the years, he never found the scientific evidence he was looking for.

"By the time I turned 40, I had had enough experience in the world to declare myself an atheist," he says. Then, in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he wanted to be part of a broader humanist community.

The Humanists of Greater Portland (www.portlandhumanists.org) includes about 150 members, who meet at 9:30 a.m. on Sundays at Friendly House Community Center, 1737 N.W. 26th Ave. They define themselves with seven key points, Strang says. A humanist:

applies reason, science and free inquiry to solving human problems.

advocates freedom, happiness and progress for all humanity.

uses the democratic process to seek justice and fairness in all societies.

supports moral principles that have been validated by consequences.

accepts kinship with the natural world.

holds humans responsible for human destiny.

and seeks natural, rather than supernatural, explanations.

Many humanists also see themselves as atheists, people who believe that there is no God. Webster's lists a handful of synonyms for atheist, including "unbeliever," which it describes as a "more negative term," and "infidel," defined as "a person not believing in a certain religion or the prevailing religion." But all three words, in actual usage, connote negative images, given the Western context. That is part of the problem.

"Context is important," says Courtney Campbell, head of the philosophy department at Oregon State University. "These words presuppose a Judeo-Christian-Islamic context," implying "a set of beliefs about the world and a divine being, about how the workings of God get manifested through institutions."

But they don't always work in other contexts, he says. In Eastern traditions, where Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism and Taoism are long-standing ethical systems, the issue is not one of believing or not believing.

In Eastern contexts, human beings are considered to be "confused from the outset," Campbell says. "All of us are agnostic, in the broad sense of the term. We don't have true knowledge of authentic reality, no true understanding of universal consciousness." That comes only with the practice of a belief system, he says.

His point is that words such as atheist or agnostic may "work" in describing a Western perspective, but they may not work in an Eastern context. They may be of little global use, but they are used here in the United States, especially now.

"What's happened in popular culture, is that the terms used to be descriptive, and now they are evaluative," he says. "That leads to some confusion, stereotyping and mislabeling."

If, for example, an agnostic defines knowledge of the divine as "empirically demonstrable proof," he or she is at odds with religious people who say that such evidence must take a back seat to belief.

"Faith is often seen as the prelude to knowledge," Campbell says. "You have to act on your faith, have your faith tested and then you gain - not empirically demonstrable knowledge -- but experientially validated knowledge."

So, agnostics and believers are defining knowledge in different ways, he says. And agnostics and atheists sometimes separate themselves by degrees.

Dave Silverman, a spokesman for American Atheists (www.atheists.org), has heard atheists described as "stubborn" agnostics and agnostics characterized as "wimpy" atheists.

"People don't know the difference," he says. "Atheists equate all gods and deny them all. God is equal to Zeus is equal to the Easter bunny. It's a definitive statement."

An agnostic argues that whether or not there is a god is unknowable, Silverman says. "But, no, it's knowable and it's not there," he adds, reflecting his certainty.

His organization was founded 40 years ago by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, one of the most famous -- or infamous -- of American atheists, who traced atheism's roots back to ancient Greece.

"Atheism is based upon a materialist philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but natural phenomena," she wrote in 1962. "There are no supernatural forces or entities, nor can there be any."

Today, Silverman says, many groups of atheists, agnostics and humanists work together to support humanitarian causes such as blood and food drives and to advocate for tolerance.

"There's no way to overstate the amount of prejudice" that atheists face, Silverman says. "We are the last group that it's politically OK to discriminate against."

A University of Minnesota study supports his claim. In a sampling of more than 2,000 households, researchers discovered that Americans rank atheists below Muslims, immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in "sharing their vision of American society," according to the research report.

"Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years," says Penny Edgell, an associate sociology professor and leader of the study, whose preliminary results were announced in March.

Many of the study's respondents associated atheism with a range of "moral indiscretions" from criminal behavior to "rampant materialism" and "cultural elitism." That tendency to link -- or leap -- from atheism to questions of morality is evidence that many Americans are not using words such as atheist, agnostic or humanist in descriptive ways anymore.

"The terms come out of contexts that are value-laden," says Campbell, the OSU professor. "That's why they become very controversial. . . . It's hard to get a one-sentence definition that covers every possibility."