FOR EVERY ACTION THERE IS AN UNEQUAL AND NEAR IDENTICAL REACTION:

God, no: With so much focus on faith and religion, it's not an easy time to be an atheist (Jack Thomas, January 20, 2005, Boston Globe)

Boston and its academic ambience are a long way from the callous streets of Paterson, N.J., where Zachary Bos grew up with no athletic skills and few friends. He was a gawky, skinny kid who decided the way to survive was to study hard in school, strive as a Boy Scout, and sit up straight during Sunday school at St. Gerard Church.

He caroled at Christmas. He spent time with a nun, Sister Susan. He joined youth groups at St. Gerard, and to please his mother, he agreed to be confirmed and to receive Holy Communion.

He was an ideal Roman Catholic boy except for one thing.

He had no faith in God.

He went to confession but thought of it as an artificial exercise.

"If I were truly contrite, I would have just gone out and changed my life," he recalled the other day. "I just didn't see any benefit in talking to someone I didn't know so that, somehow, all of a sudden, everything would be forgiven."

The Boy Scouts wanted him to be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, and clean.

Fine.

But reverent, too?

Why reverent?

"If you were everything else," he says, "why would you need to be reverent?"

Questions in his head and doubts in his heart gave way to distrust of religion and then to atheism.

Having moved to Boston in 1999 to study physics at Boston University, today Bos, 23, leads one of the city's more arcane organizations, the Atheist Meetup Group, which gathers monthly at a restaurant for food and drink and for conversation not about the New England Patriots, but about moral relativism, objective and subjective probability, and Pascal's Wager on the existence of God. [...]

The Boston atheists meet under the aegis of an organization called Meetup Groups, a worldwide assemblage of cliques that meet to discuss topics of common interest, from knitting to politics to Pekingese dogs. Founded in 2002, the Boston Atheists Meetup Group is one of 405 similar cells around the world that claim 7,500 members. Although 95 are enrolled in the Boston group, the meetings attract no more than 12 people.

"What brings us together is that we take a particular interest in defining ourselves as atheists, which is a negative definition," says Bos, "but there's nothing else that draws us together. We are from very different walks of life -- a college student, a teacher, a security guard. We promote rationality, skepticism, scientific knowledgeability, secular humanism, and a positive atheistic agenda."

For atheists, the monthly meetings are an island of skepticism in a sea of religious conformity.

"They're socially gratifying," says Bos. "It's an exhaust valve just to be associated with like-minded people. I try not to be anti religious, but irritants pile up -- little reminders that we live in a culture that's not rational and, indeed, anti-rational. Walk through Wal-Mart, and they've got entire aisles devoted to religious iconography and pop cultural Jesus novels."

Honest to Darwin, this is not a parody.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 20, 2005 9:46 AM