Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Hoepfl-Wellenhofer, Susanne,  "From Duality to Polarity in the Works of Jean Gebser" Quest 110:2, pg 32-34

By Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer

The words duality and polarity are often used interchangeably, but discerning between these two concepts is extremely important in the metaphysical sense. Knowing the difference enables us to avoid misunderstandings and half-truths and clearly align our consciousness. This became clear to me when I discovered the writings of Jean Gebser (1905–73), a German-Swiss poet, cultural philosopher, historian, and intellectual mystic. Reading Gebser’s work is no easy task, and it took me many years to study all his books and lectures. But I was so intrigued by his concept of integral consciousness that I stuck with it.

Gebser concluded that human consciousness has transitioned through four levels: the “archaic,” the “magical,” the “mythical,” and the “mental-rational,” and is now transitioning towards the “integral” level of consciousness (Gebser, Ursprung, 83–164; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35). He pointed out that this level must go past the rationalistic unambiguity and the dualistic either-or dichotomy of the mental-rational consciousness and into a both-and way of thinking (Gebser, Verfall, 39).

Gebser calls these transitions “mutations” and believed that they involve structural changes in both the mind and the body. He explained his thesis in his work, Ursprung und Gegenwart, which was published in various editions from 1949 to 1953 and translated into English as The Ever-Present Origin. 

The archaic structure is almost completely instinctual, zero-dimensional, nonperspectival, and there is a total absence of differentiation or sense of separation. Humans and the world are identical.

The magical structure marks the first step toward a waking human consciousness. It is one-dimensional and egoless, a preperspectival state of timelessness and spacelessness. The magical man was part of his environment and felt secure only within his group.  Its deficient form results in serfdom and collective trance (Gebser, Ursprung, 87–106; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35).

In the mythical structure the soul experiences something as an other and lives in a two-dimensional polarity. It unfolds in symbols rather than in calculation. Its deficient form inflates symbolism and uses tales in an addictive way (Gebser, Ursprung, 106–25; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35).

The domain of the mental-rational phase of consciousness is the thinking mind. The world is seen as an object. It is three-dimensional, and cognition operates on the principle of duality. The deficient form of this structure is a dissociation from the unity of experiencing and thinking and an overemphasis on logic. (Gebser, Ursrpung, 125–64; Fuhr and Hellbusch, 22–35).

The characteristic of the integral structure, which Gebser also called the aperspectival structure of consciousness, is a transparent lucidity capable of seeing through all dimensionalities and time forms (Gebser, Ursrpung, 165–72). In Jeremy Johnson’s words, “space is no longer empty of value or opaque as it is in the perspectival world but full and transparent. Integrality, then, is the fully expressed and innate wholeness of all the mutations” and “sees through to the spiritual reality that substantiates all worlds and all time forms: the ever-present reality of origin” (Johnson, 130). For the integral level of consciousness to arrive, we must discover what it means to be space-free and time-free, which, for Gebser, is learning to be ego-free.

For Theosophists who have read about the stages of human evolution in H.P. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and the timelines for the different root-races, it might be interesting to know that Gebser is deliberately vague about those time periods.  Ken Wilber, an integral theorist who acknowledged Gebser as an important source for his model, estimates that the archaic level of consciousness began 3 to 6 million years ago and lasted to around 200,000 years ago (Feuerstein, 58). The mutation of the magical consciousness coincided with the appearance of Homo erectus. This human species was the first to use fire (Feuerstein, 75). Feuerstein argues that the early, mythical structure could be placed around 20,000 to 12,000 BC (Feuerstein, 76). The entire period from around 10,000 BC to 500 BC, which may be the time of transition from the mythical to the mental-rational consciousness, was marked by tremendous upheavals (Feuerstein, 95).

 In his book Verfall und Teilhabe (“Decline and Participation,” which has not been published in English), Gebser emphasized that reaching the integral structure of consciousness required understanding the difference between duality and polarity.  He criticized the belief that these terms are interchangeable and supported his opinion with quantum theory and discoveries by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and others. He said that we must overcome Aristotelian determinism and its dualistic thinking—the belief that a given entity must be one thing or another (Alternativdenken)—the three-dimensional geometry of Euclid, the atomic theory of Democritus, and the heliocentric view of the universe, pioneered by Aristarchus of Samos in the third century BC. We must also overcome the belief that duality entails a negative and a positive that conflict with each other. Seeing polarity as complementary forces, in which the negative and positive attract each other and work together to create balance, will help us make our transition into the integral structure of consciousness (Gebser, Verfall, 39).

Gebser supplies specific examples for the transition from the mental-rational structure of consciousness to the integral one, such as: “Haste is replaced by silence and the capacity for silence”; “goal-oriented, purposive thoughts are replaced by unintentionalness” (Absichtslosigkeit); the pursuit of power is replaced by the genuine capacity for love; quantitative idle motion (Leerlauf) is replaced by the qualitative spiritual process. Prejudice is replaced by the renunciation of value judgments, manipulation is replaced by the patient acceptance of providential powers, action is replaced by poise/attitude (Haltung), and Homo faber, the human being as artificer, is replaced by Homo integer, the integrated human (Gebser, Verfall, 62; Feuerstein, 170).

In another lecture, Gebser mentions that he had received statements from young people who “distinguish themselves with a fundamentally new attitude. Compared to the previous deficient mental rationality, it expresses integral consciousness, although they do not harbor any resentment” toward the earlier mode (Gebser, Verfall, 59). He writes that these are “more self-critical; they know more about their weaknesses, which they openly admit and are working to overcome, and they make demands on themselves and not on the environment.” He states further that they are “open, in a completely unsentimental way, tolerant, capable of loving, not arrogant, silent, and shielded from the inside against the lure of money, property, power, fame, and no longer are exposed to the flight into the means [of escapism], the lie, the split, and mere sexuality” (Gebser, Verfall, 60).

The last book I read by Gebser was his first: Rilke and Spain, a short monograph on the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In this book, Gebser shows that he grasped that the troubled times he lived in contained the embryonic beginning of the integral consciousness. We encounter Gebser’s first tentative explorations of this theme in this book (Feuerstein, 128). In discussing Rilke, Gebser writes: 

The notion of objects has lost its significance, together with perspectivity, achieved using adverbs by which objects were meant to be deepened or interpreted according to the viewpoint of the observer. What is gaining importance now is the spiritual light that prevails between objects—the tension and relation between them. (Gebser, Rilke, 41–42; Feuerstein, 128)

Gebser is pointing toward a mode of consciousness that is no longer based on perspective, as it is in the mental-rational structure. Gebser describes how Rilke’s great existential crisis eventually led him to come to terms with the phenomenon of death, leading him toward a nondualistic type of thought:

The Yes to life becomes at the same time a Yes to death. More than that, it is in two at the same time because it has erased the boundaries: It is a single space, a single world, which at every moment encompasses the two phases of development, because time, the organic component, has become the fourth dimension. (Gebser, Rilke, 46; Feuerstein, 128–29) 

Gebser emphasizes that the integral level of consciousness, which in his opinion has been constellating since the turn of the twentieth century, depends on each individual person for its full emergence. All must do the work of self-transcendence, which, as he admits, is the most difficult of all human tasks.

All work, the genuine work which we must achieve, is that which is most difficult and painful: the work on ourselves. If we do not freely take upon ourselves this preacceptance of the pain and torment, they will otherwise be visited upon us in individual and universal collapse. (Gebser, Ursprung, 676)

Studying Gebser and trying to get a deeper understanding of his thought eventually led me to Theosophy and helped me understand the difference between duality and polarity on a spiritual level. In The Secret Doctrine, Blavatsky explained that the manifested universe “is pervaded by duality, which is, as it were, the very essence of its existence as ‘manifestation.’” She added that the opposite poles of subject and object, and spirit and matter, are but aspects of the One Unity, in which they are synthesized. She went on to observe that “evil” merely denotes the polarity of matter and spirit, a struggle for life between the two manifested principles in space and time. But these principles are ultimately one, being rooted in the Absolute (Blavatsky, 1:15–16).

In simpler terms, duality implies separation, meaning that the two are separated. But polarity tells us that they are two poles of the same thing. Thus we are talking about polarity within unity.  That is the secret: understanding that we are all one with the Absolute and thus with all else.

It is not enough to merely understand the difference between polarity and duality. We must live this polarity within unity, think it, breathe it. That takes tremendous effort, and the path to integrating it into everyday life is different for everyone. As Pablo Sender explains in Evolution of the Higher Consciousness, in order to “stabilize the perception of unity,” we must gradually integrate it into daily life (Sender, 171). The concrete suggestions in Sender’s book have helped me to work on this goal daily. They have helped me understand that polarity is the dyad of equal, mutually complementary poles, based on the natural balance of the divine order.

Sources

Blavatsky, H.P. The Secret Doctrine. Two volumes. Wheaton: Quest, 1993.

Feuerstein, Georg. Structures of Consciousness: The Genius of Jean Gebser. Santa Rosa, Calif.: Integral Publishing, 1987.

Fuhr, Reinhard, and Hellbusch, Kai. “Jean Gebser: Das integrale Bewusstsein: English Summary of Jean Gebser, ‘The Integral Consciousness.’” Integral Review 1 (June 2005): 22–34: https://integral-review.org/issues/issue_1_jun_2005_full_issue.pdf.

Gebser, Jean. Rilke und Spanien [“Rilke and Spain”]. In Abendländische Wandlung [“Western Change”]. In Gebser, Gesamtausgabe [“Complete Works”], volume 1. 3d ed. Schaffhausen, Germany: Novalis Verlag, 2003.

———. Ursprung und Gegenwart [“The Ever-Present Origin”]. In Gebser, Gesamtausgabe, 3d ed., volumes 2 and 3.

———. Verfall und Teilhabe [“Decline and Participation”]. In Vorlesungen und Reden zu “Ursprung und Gegenwart” [“Lectures and Discourses on ‘The Ever-Present Origin’”]. In Gebser, Gesamtausgabe, volume 5:2. 2d ed., 1999.

Johnson, Jeremy. Seeing through the World: Jean Gebser and Integral Consciousness. Seattle, Wash.: Revelore, 2019.

Sender, Pablo. Evolution of the Higher Consciousness. Ojai, Calif.: Fohat, 2018.

Susanne Hoepfl-Wellenhofer was born in Austria and has been living and working in the U.S. since 1986. She is currently the president of the D.C. Lodge, contributes to the Theosophical Wiki and the Online School of Theosophy, and mentors prisoners.  She retired from the German department of the George Washington University in 2019. She still translates from German to English and teaches yoga.

Printed in the  Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Kezwer, Glen,  "Duality: The Problem and the Solution" Quest 110:2, pg 29-31

By Glen Kezwer

Two polar opposites: duality and oneness. The first is the problem confronting humanity; the second is the solution.

Duality is the vision which accepts two different realities, taking both to be equally real. These realities can be described as consciousness and matter, the inner Self and the world, the seer and the seen, the knower and the known, I and you. In other words, duality is the sense of otherness.

In one sentence, duality means that as soon as you wake up, there are two separate things: one is the body, and the other is your “I”—your inner consciousness, your Self. In terms of everyday perception, duality is the mechanism with which we normally view the world. This mechanism involves two elements: the seer who sees, and the world the seer experiences. Duality is the understanding that these two elements are separate. When we look at the world in this way, we do not perceive the underlying oneness. Yet this oneness is the essential truth—unperceivable to the senses—which underlies the physical universe in which we live. The Theosophical Society brands oneness as “the Unity of all life.”

Duality can be called difference. In fact, difference and duality are synonymous, and they come from the mind of a human being. 

Differences begin when the waking state of consciousness begins . . . You too have never found any differences while in the state of deep sleep. Even if you choose to differ with what I am saying, in order to make that choice you must resort to your waking state of consciousness, because this is where your mind arises. This shows that the waking state and the mind are one and the same reality. (Swami Shyam, 52)

This quote contains two important elements. The first is that we don’t experience duality while we are asleep. Most people tend to dismiss sleep as irrelevant, a state of unconsciousness or nothingness, which gives our physical and mental systems their needed rest but otherwise has no practical value. But let’s look a little deeper. No matter what we may be suffering from—a painful disease, mental anxiety or worry, grief at the passing of a loved one—that suffering completely vanishes as long as we are asleep. This is not a trivial point. It shows that we have the power within ourselves to be free from all suffering during those hours. The question is, can we create a state of freedom that is free of problems as deep sleep is, yet also embodies awareness? I will return to this question later on.

In the first paragraph of this article, I called duality the problem of humanity. By this I mean that when we are under the influence of duality, we experience all of the pain and suffering, but also the joy and happiness, of the world. We undergo duality from the moment we wake up in the morning until the moment we fall asleep at night. The world is entirely composed of differences. We see a multitude of objects that are separate from one another and especially from ourselves: human beings, cars, trees, mountains, milk cartons, and so on are all distinct and separate entities. Time and space separate all things and events. And this is the only way it could be; otherwise, there would not be a universe in which we live.

Why is this a problem? Simply put, duality creates pain and suffering, and human beings want to remove pain and suffering. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali call the suffering we want to avoid heya, which is echoed in the first of Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. The essence of the world is suffering, and human beings wish to avoid it.

The opposite of duality is oneness. (Actually, there is no opposite of oneness, since it is absolute, but for the purposes of our discussion here, this definition is useful.) Oneness is the ultimate goal of the path of spiritual pursuit, which unites everything into one seamless, undivided reality. This reality is the essence of all human beings, all living creatures, and all of creation. It is beyond space and time, birth and death, and all other pairs of opposites. It cannot be perceived by the senses or the mind, yet is the source of all. Oneness is poetically described by the Sanskrit mantra 

Om poornamadah poornamidam poornaat poornamudachyate
Poornasya poornamaadaaya poornamevaavashishṣyate
The inner world is oneness. The outer world is oneness.
If you take from oneness, oneness remains, and that which you take is oneness. (my interpretation) 

Since there is nothing in ordinary human experience to compare to oneness, to understand it, we can make use of the metaphor of the waves on the surface of an ocean. From the surface, all the waves appear different. They move at different speeds and come in different sizes and shapes, and some are breaking and some are not. Yet if we go down to the deeper water beneath the waves, all is still and calm. The waves represent the infinite forms which comprise the universe. They all look different, but just as the essential nature of each wave is water, which is one and the same everywhere, the essential nature of all the forms is universal oneness. If we plunge beneath the mind’s surface of thoughts, we find stillness and peace.

The dictum of Adi Shankaracharya, the chief formulator of the Advaita Vedanta, sums up oneness: brahm satyam jagat mithya. Brahm, the highest consciousness, which is the unchanging source of the universe, is real, and the world is an illusion. Essentially Brahm is one without a second, and the world exists only as long as one has not realized this truth.

How do we proceed from duality to oneness? To answer this question, I would like to introduce the four premises on which this article is written: (1) Duality causes pain and suffering, and at the same time happiness and joy. Happiness and unhappiness are just opposite sides of the same coin; both result from the experience of duality. (2) The mind is the creator of duality. (3) The mind is equivalent to the waking state. (4) The waking mind and the differences it creates can be transcended or overcome by observing them in meditation from the perspective of our essential inner being, the Self or Knower.

Our examination of duality and oneness should not merely be abstract philosophy. It should be relevant to our daily lives. As an example of how this works, let’s look at Patanjali’s three broad categories of pain.

1. Parinaam: pain due to our interactions with the constantly changing world in which we live. I recently had an interaction with an old friend who spoke rudely to me. It was definitely unpleasant and took some time to recover from. This is an example of pain caused by a change in my environment, from a state of being easy with my friend to uneasiness.

2. Taap: pain caused by worry or fear concerning possible future events. Many people are fearful of losing their home, job, or family or of becoming ill.

3. Sanskaar: pain resulting from the memory of a past unpleasant event. A friend of mine once sold his house, and shortly afterwards the housing market skyrocketed. Had he waited just a little while, he would have sold it for a much higher price. He lamented over this for years.

These simple examples represent the myriad types of pain a human being can experience.

Considering the second premise, that the mind creates difference, my starting point is the state of dreamless sleep. As I stated above, while we sleep, we experience no differences whatsoever—no worries, no happiness, no unhappiness, no disease, and in fact no world at all. In the state of deep sleep, nothing we experience while we are awake or dreaming appears. Of course, the entire gamut of the world returns to our consciousness when we wake up, which means that our minds return. With the appearance of the waking state, everything is created simultaneously. In an instant, you are a human being lying in a bed. Everything around you is familiar or unfamiliar, as the case may be. All that you perceive is different from you—your bed, your surroundings, the clock on the night table, the window looking out onto your backyard, and even your thoughts. The mind and the waking state are the same thing. Upon awakening, we are embedded in a world of duality, residing in time and space, which we call the waking state.

Is there a problem here? Well, yes, because in the waking state we suffer, both physically and mentally. I remember my father referring to the world as a “vale of tears.” I think his attitude is quite common. Of course, we also experience happiness, joy, love, and beauty in our lives, and we don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Furthermore, we do need duality in order to survive. I’m going to the dentist this morning. I have to know that I have a tooth problem, that the dentist is the person who can take care of it, where the dentist’s office is, how to pay him (often the hardest part), and so on.

The problem arises when we believe duality to be real. The mind says it is located in your head, and everything you perceive outside of you is not you. This is the essence of difference. It is the source of problems, the creator of friction, of rubbing: I like something; I don’t like something else. This leads to suffering and joy or conversely happiness and unhappiness.

It is important to dispel any notion that the mind is bad or somehow should be destroyed or eliminated. The eyes see, the ears hear, and the tongue tastes. In the same way, the mind generates thoughts on the basis of the sensory input it receives. That is what it is supposed to do. You need your mind to order from a menu, use your credit card, drive your car, or talk to your friends. It is simply doing its job, which is essential to our existence as human beings. The problem comes when we interpret the thoughts of the mind in either a positive or a negative way.

Happiness is decided upon by the human mind. The World Series is on now. When a game is over, the fans of the winning team celebrate and those of the loser are dejected, but there is only one game. So the problem must ultimately be handled on the level of the mind, which can be transformed, and not on the level of the events of the world. This is not to say that we don’t make every effort to improve our situation in life, but ultimately the mind must be transformed.

How do we get away from this problem, since the mind created it in the first place? Here I will return to the question I posed above: is there a state that is problem-free, as in sleep, yet also contains awareness?

This state is meditation, which creates a new perspective on the mind. In meditation your awareness turns into a sense that nothing is separate from you. In a scientific experiment, we need an observer and something observed. In meditation I will call the observer the Knower, which observes the thoughts that come and go in our minds. The Knower can also be called the witness or watcher. It provides an entirely new outlook on the mind. It perceives the mind and everything it creates, yet at the same time is free and untouched by all of its perceptions. As a free being, the Knower can choose to accept or not accept what the mind says. In other words, the Knower is free of the pain-producing thoughts of the mind.

Meditation in no way means that you have to stop your thoughts from coming. No matter how hard you try, you cannot do so anyway. Unfortunately, the popular misconception that they have to stop their thoughts in meditation leads many to abandon its practice. The key is to put your attention on the Knower-Self. If thoughts come, your meditation is not disturbed. The Knower is freedom. The Knower is oneness. Let your thoughts come and go, but keep your attention on the Knower. Your attention may stray from the Knower. When you realize this, understand that nothing wrong has happened, and gently return your attention to the Knower.

You will find that with practice, when you open your eyes after meditation, the awareness of oneness that was there does not disappear. You reenter the waking state, bringing the freedom of the meditative state into the waking state and realizing that all is you.

In other words, you will realize, as the Theosophical Society puts it, that “every existent being—from atom to galaxy—is rooted in the same universal, life-creating Reality. This Reality is all-pervasive, but it can never be summed up in its parts, since it transcends all its expressions.”

Source Material

Swami Shyam. Shyam’s Philosophy. Kullu, India: International Meditation Institute, 2003.

Glen Kezwer is a physicist who has been practicing and researching the science of meditation since the early 1980s. Following the spiritual path is the central focus of his life. He is the author of Meditation, Oneness, and Physics and The Essence of the Bhagavad Gita, as well as many articles on science, meditation, and spirituality. He is a course author with the online teaching website Transformationmeditation.com. He can be reached at gkezwer@gmail.com.

Printed in the  Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Srinivasan, A.V. (Sheenu) "Dualism or Nondualism? Your Choice!" Quest 110:2, pg 25-28

By A.V. (Sheenu) Srinivasan

The kingdom of God is within you.

—Luke 17:21

History records that ancient sages in every faith have asked some fundamental questions about life on earth. They have studied the meanings of the terms “I” and “you.” When we say “I,” does it refer to my body, my mind, or any other entity or state of being that is in us?

These sages identified a concept that they claimed to be inherent in every living being and defined it as soul. As with the mind, we cannot see it or touch it, but it is there: it exists. This is a belief that every faith system has acknowledged, although they continue to argue its status in relation to the universe at large: that is, the connection, if any, of one’s own soul with every other soul and with something that encompasses all.

Along the same lines, there has prevailed a desire to know the entity behind such regular but constantly changing phenomena such as the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, seasons, the birth, growth, decay, and death of living beings. Who controls these events? Who could be so powerful? Is there a being out there that we need to revere, fear, or love in order to maintain some sort of balance here on earth?

This enquiry has led over and over to the concept of a supreme power or Supreme Being. Should such a being exist, does it have a gender or a soul? If so, is there a connection between this Supreme Soul and individual souls? The general conclusion has been that there is such a being: divine, unseen, but essentially worthy of realization. But where does such a being dwell? Can one ever see or fully comprehend this being?

The supreme divinity (paramatman, the Supreme Soul), which Hinduism defines as Brahman, is deathless, beyond time, beyond space, and not bound by any laws of causation. It has no gender or form and is beyond description.

Hinduism claims that Brahman is the only Reality, arguing that realization of Brahman should be life’s goal because it will lead to moksha: a final release from repeated life and death cycles, whereby the individual soul finally merges with the Supreme Soul after following certain extraordinary spiritual practices. In fact Hindus believe that this is truly the goal of life: to once and for all escape the suffering that is inevitable while living on earth.

The study of the connection between the soul and the Supreme Soul has given us several philosophies to consider to give purpose, understanding, and meaning to life. Such a goal was mandated with crisp aphorisms (“Know thyself,” for example) and constituted a belief system in different cultures in the ancient world.

The nature of this connection among individual souls and the Supreme Soul is the subject of this discussion, which is based on the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta (“culmination of knowledge”). Vedanta insists that you should come face-to-face with any existences beyond those you sense. You need to begin by admitting that “I” does not mean your body, your mind, or your ego. “I” refers to the soul, which is not matter. If there is a universal and Supreme Soul, you should encounter it directly and remove all doubts.

There’s no need to struggle in attempting to believe—just realize. Use the ancient tools of the six darshans (perspectives) on the Hindu Vedas—including Nyaya, logic, which has to do with sorting out the physical world and the mind-body-spirit connection, and yoga, which has to do with self-discipline. Bhakti yoga, for example, entails total devotion to the divine.

Three systems of Vedantic philosophy emerged from these considerations:

• Advaita (nondualism), propounded by the saint Shankaracharya in the eighth century CE.
• Vishishtadvaita (qualified monism or qualified nondualism) admits a personal God as ultimate reality. The proponent saint of this philosophy was Ramanujacharya, who lived in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. He acknowledged that Reality is indeed Brahman but allowed that individual souls as well as the universe are also real and separate.
• Dvaita (dualism). This system claims that the Supreme Soul and the individual soul are different. Its proponent saint was Madhvacharya, who lived in the thirteenth century CE.

The three Vedantic paths all have the same goal: reaching moksha—that is, breaking free of the cycle of rebirth and death. Hindus believe that rebirth is inevitable for those who die without moksha, but if this is achieved, all misery will end, and the soul will be at complete peace and bliss. As a result, one must strive for freedom from the cycle of birth and rebirth.

Although all three Vedantic philosophies share a belief in God, individual souls, and the associated fundamentals (such as the necessary quest for knowledge, respect for nature, devotion, dharma, karmic consequences, and so on), differences among them exist. Here we will examine only two of these three belief systems: dualism (Dvaita) and nondualism (Advaita). 

Dvaita

Madhvacharya’s Dvaita school divides individual souls into three categories:

• Those fit to be liberated through the grace of God and spiritual practices.
• Those who are interested only in the material world, with little craving for a spiritual life.
• Those who are inherently evil and end in hell. In the Dvaita, hell awaits these individuals, even if it is mainly a purgatorial interval before the next birth.     

According to the Dvaita philosophy, an individual soul has its own consciousness, willpower, and ability to learn, know, act, and experience joy. As a reflection of God, it reflects some of God’s attributes. The individual soul is forever dependent on God. Each soul residing in a body is subject to bondage. Actions affect the soul, contracting it by bad karma (actions) and expanding it by good karma.

The primary godhead of Madhvas (followers of the founder, Madhvacharya) is Vishnu, who has these divine attributes: he is merciful and lovable, and he takes on human avatars while remaining as the Almighty. No evil attributes whatsoever are attributed to him.

Release from bondage occurs through many lives and depends upon the type of life led. Lives led with devotion to God following dharma (moral order) qualify for entrance to the heaven known as Vaikunta, the abode of Lord Vishnu. Otherwise, upon death of its associated body, the individual soul is subject to moving to another body. This cycle can continue forever, or until the soul qualifies for entrance to Vaikunta. Vishnu’s Vaikunta is full of happiness and is devoid of disease and death. It is the great end—no more births or deaths. Upon liberation, the individual soul retains its identity but becomes free of any suffering. Dvaita does not believe in liberation during one’s lifetime.

Dualists look upon themselves as servants of God. They are vegetarians on the grounds that they shouldn’t harm animals, which have souls and belong to God.

When the Dvaita speaks of God, it is referring to the avatars of Vishnu and the promise of Lord Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita that he will manifest here on earth whenever the dharma is in decline. According to the Dvaita, God descends to earth as needed because of his love for the devotees.

 Advaita

Someone saw God and asked, “Who are you?” God replied, “You.”

This brief dialogue explains the aphorism Tat tvam asi (“Thou art That”), which appears in the Upanishads, dramatizes the entire philosophy of nondualism, and summarizes all that is contained in Vedanta. Consequently, I could end the discussion right here. But to absorb all that is contained in that truth, we need to know more.

Who is Thou? What is That? How is Thou That? That, according to Advaita Vedanta, is Brahman. Thou is you. You are Brahman. You are divine. The Hindu sages proclaimed that every human (in fact every animal) is, in its essence, divine. Therefore there is no difference between the inner you and the inner me. We are the same, except that we have different bodies and different experiences. We are like passengers on a plane, all heading to the same destination.

Having pronounced that divinity is in you, the Upanishadic sages insist that you are not a sinner. Swami Shivananda Saraswathi (1887–1963), a saint who founded a religious order known as the Divine Life Society, declared that bliss is your birthright. Hindus believe that we need to enjoy life on earth while performing our duty till the end, at which time the body dies but the soul lives on.

Thou art That. If you and the next person and everyone and everything else are divine, how many divinities are there? An infinite number. Brahman contains all. If you believe you are divine (and Hindu sages say you must), your life on earth is governed by the divinity in you influencing your action, speech, and thought, all of which are divine. If everyone and everything behaved accordingly, all would be well; it would be heaven on earth, with divine actions, divine speech, and divine thoughts all around.

Is heaven on earth an unattainable dream? No, say the sages. According to them, that is what life on earth was meant to be. Thou art That. We are therefore the One. Trouble starts when we forget that inherent oneness, and the result is the imperfect world we see and live in. This, the Hindu declares, is ignorance of the Reality.

This approach lays down an ideal before us that is possible to attain: to live the divinity in us. It asks us to elevate our lives to meet that ideal and avoid the tendency to compromise it. Living the divinity within ourselves requires action that takes place amid inner calmness. This seeming conflict is insisted upon by the scriptures.

Vedanta stresses that the single most important goal of life is the realization of our true nature. We must know ourselves, know who we really are. As simple as this idea may sound, attaining self-realization is actually very hard, because we are distracted by our external focus. Such focus has undoubtedly helped humanity in many ways, such as the Green Revolution, which increased food production; the moon landing; and advances in genetics, computers, medicine, and the Internet. Yet this external engagement has also blinded us to the most fundamental need: to know who we truly are.

Although many a recent thinker has brought this lapse to our attention, it is not a new discovery. Centuries ago, Hindu sages urged, “Know thyself.” So did thinkers in other cultures. The Greek version, gnothi seauton (carved over the door to the temple of the oracle at Delphi), and the Latin nosce te ipsum all mean the same.

Hindus made a special effort to focus their attention inward for another reason: they found the inner universe equally fascinating and equally demanding as the outer universe.

The sages assured us that when we know who we really are, we will be able to assert the Truth stated in the Mahavakyas (“Grand Utterances”) this way:

 Aham brahmasmi (I am Brahman).

Tat tvam asi (Thou art That).

Ayamatma brahma (The extension of the self is Brahman).

According to the sages, “I am God” needs to be understood and repeated until it becomes an integral part of every human being. This truth, which affirms the oneness of the universe, is considered the greatest truth of Advaita Vedanta. It is also Vedanta’s mandate: realize who you are.

According to Vedanta, oneness, when realized, leaves us free. With the realization of our true identity—our oneness with everything and every being—outward differences in name, color, dress, speech, station in life, and so on become less important. The path an individual chooses to realize the self and to reach God doesn’t matter. Uniformity isn’t needed, because all paths eventually lead to the same Truth, which is why Vedantists are able to declare, “Truth is One, but the wise may express it differently” (ekam sat viprah bahudha vadanti).         

The Hindu is not concerned about how you reach this realization. He doesn’t insist that you adopt his path; he is comfortable when you follow your own. A Hindu’s wish for you is that you be a better Christian if you are a Christian, a better Jew if you are Jewish, a better Taoist if you are a Taoist. No matter what path you choose, the Hindu believes that he will ultimately meet you when you both reach your goal.

Vedanta doesn’t care who the individual is or what the individual believes in. It asks that we develop a perspective from whose height all differences, real and important though they may seem to be, diminish until we are able to view unity, harmony, and beauty. Think of being in an airplane at 30,000 feet and looking down to see a beautiful, smooth terrain.

The core message of the Vedanta is that human beings cannot achieve happiness by mere experience of physical pleasures obtained through wealth: these are temporary and cannot last long. At best, they guarantee you another turn on the wheel of rebirth.

Vedanta aims at absolute happiness obtainable only through spiritual enlightenment. Such enlightenment alone is capable of cutting the link between endless action and the corresponding consequences. When the individual soul (jivatman) is freed from this connection, it is liberated from the cycle and unites with the source, Brahman.

As mentioned previously, one is free to follow any path one chooses to find God. In this sense, Vedanta is both a religion and a philosophy, reflected in the following Hindu prayer.

OM. Lead me from the unreal to the Real.
Lead me from darkness to light.
Lead me from death to eternal life
Om, peace, peace, peace.

Concluding Thoughts

At first sight, the dualism of the Dvaita appears somewhat more realistic. You are you, a human, and there is a God who loves his devotees. Worshipping that godhead, seeking his grace, and leading a spiritual life leads you to the heavenly abode. Although this sounds simple, it is not necessarily easy to practice. Total surrender with unconditional love of the Almighty still does not exclude doing one’s duty and seeking higher knowledge.

In my opinion, Advaita, nondualism, is a huge leap ahead. It asserts that you must realize who you really are. You must strive to understand yourself with a focus and depth of thought until you know who you really are. Don’t give up, it says; dive deep and realize you are IT—Brahman. Once you cross that hurdle by overcoming ignorance, you are on the threshold of heaven, even in this life. Strict spiritual observances are recommended so you become free: when the body dies, the soul merges with the Supreme Soul, and you are done. No more rebirths and deaths, no more disease, no more struggle, no more conflicts. Your soul has reached its real home.

Heaven on earth will be the result if everyone reaches that state where they enjoy life on earth, with every action, thought, and utterance within the framework of dharma.

Has any human being ever been able to attain this goal? Yes, although the list is not long.

My spiritual hero, the Hindu monk Swami Vivekananda, who, while addressing the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 1893, began his speech with the words “Sisters and Brothers of America,” lived a life that is truly divine, yet he was a human being just like you and me. His contributions to Vedanta have influenced seekers throughout the world and will last forever. To this short list, we can add Mahatma Gandhi; Martin Luther King, Jr.; Mother Teresa; Pope Francis; and perhaps a few more of your choice who have revolutionized the world by giving hope and trying to attain a more equitable and peaceful world.

The list of famous individuals who disregarded every conceivable dictum and brought destruction to the world is long, and you have been reading about all of them in history. That, unfortunately, is the real, messy, cruel, dangerous world. It need not be, but humans tend to rush towards a nearby pile of coal while the pot of gold is just within reach. Every individual is important, and the choice that individuals make can influence the whole world.

That choice is yours, and yours only. Realize!

Dr. A.V. (Sheenu) Srinivasan is the author of many publications, including the books Vedic Wedding: Origins, Tradition, and Practice (which received a national best book award in 2007), A Hindu Primer: Yaksha Prashna (which won a Benjamin Franklin Award in 2016), and Hinduism for Dummies. His website is www.avsrinivasan.com.

Printed in the  Spring 2022 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Huff, Peter A. "The Current State of Unbelief" Quest 110:2, pg 20-24

By Peter A. Huff

Unbelief has no president, pope, or CEO. Many people speak as unbelievers, but no one speaks for unbelief as a whole. To understand the phenomenon today, we have to investigate a broad spectrum of interrelated dimensions of life.

The evidence, from shifting demographics and moral sensibilities to the latest publications and trends in social media, suggests that unbelief in its many forms is a cardinal feature of our time. From all accounts, the current state of unbelief is vibrant, increasingly visible, rapidly evolving, and complex.

Atheism and agnosticism, to name two familiar types of unbelief, are essential ingredients of contemporary experience. Without them, everything we call modern (and postmodern) would be different, perhaps unrecognizable. The entire modern project, springing from the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, revolves around freedom: freedom to question authority, reject oppressive institutions, and invent new ways of constructing selfhood, organizing community, and pursuing happiness. Atheism, agnosticism, and all the variants of unbelief express these defining freedoms of the modern age: inquiry, revolution, invention. They permeate every sector of modernity—from politics, economics, and science to literature, education, entertainment, art, and even religion. 

Recognizing the importance of atheism and agnosticism and cognate forms of doubt and dissent is one thing. Understanding what they are is another. Many discussions of atheism and agnosticism suffer from simplistic assumptions about the meaning of the terms and the phenomena to which they point. Atheism and agnosticism are routinely reduced to questions of belief. According to conventional wisdom, atheism is belief in the nonexistence of God or disbelief in the existence of God. Agnosticism, caricatured as timid or tepid atheism, is seen as the inability or unwillingness to believe in God’s existence or nonexistence.

These approaches tell only a fraction of the story. As intellectual shorthand, they get a conversation started. For people who identify as atheist or agnostic, they may get the conversation started in the wrong way or aimed in the wrong direction. Just as there are varieties of religious experience, there are varieties of atheist and agnostic experience. The meaning of unbelief is neither obvious nor simple.

Concentrating on belief or unbelief, in fact, contributes to distorted portraits of atheism and agnosticism. A brief review of atheist and agnostic literature reveals a number of factors shaping these distinctive outlooks and orientations: critique, defiance, disenchantment, discovery, liberation, and exhilaration, just to name a few. These themes offer not only a sense of atheist and agnostic beliefs or ideas but also a glimpse of the lived experiences that make atheism and agnosticism so multifaceted. Acknowledging that beliefs about God may not necessarily constitute the main characteristics of atheism and agnosticism is an important step toward allowing these realities to speak for themselves. Unbelief is not just about unbelief.

Language itself is a challenge when it comes to understanding atheism and agnosticism. Too often, atheism and agnosticism and their adherents have been pictured exclusively in terms of negation or lack: not believing something, not having something, not being something. A long train of synonyms with negative prefixes or suffixes reinforces this trend: unbelievers, nonbelievers, irreligious, antireligious, nonreligious, antitheist, nontheist, infidel, godless, and misotheist (“hater” of God). Even twenty-first-century nicknames such as None (as in “none of the above”) and Done (as in “done with religion”) fit the pattern. This trend goes back to the Greek basis for each word: átheos (a + theós = “without god”) and ágnostos (a + gnosis = “without knowledge”).

In ancient Mediterranean cultures, people labeled as átheos, including Socrates, promoted not a worldview antagonistic to divine beings but a critical approach to society’s unquestioned assumptions. In the first century CE, Roman pundits called Jews and Christians atheists. The allegiance to only one deity challenged the folk religions of the empire, threatened the cult of the emperor, and stumped the Roman imagination.

Once the church gained worldly power, it turned the tables and called practitioners of the older religions atheists, saying pagan gods were not gods. Three centuries later, Muslim authorities issued similar declarations. By the early modern period, Western writers and their Arab, Turkish, and Persian counterparts used words derived from átheos as all-purpose terms of abuse, not precise references to a specific point of view.

Today, any number of atheists and agnostics may capitalize on the negative charge of the root terms, defying what they take to be the oppressive nature of religion and the God idea. Some people who find religion meaningless and God a useless hypothesis, however, avoid atheist and agnostic precisely because of the negative stigmas associated with the labels. Many gravitate toward freethinker, humanist, and secularist, or the twenty-first-century neologism Bright. Some suggest that godfree may be the best way to state what appears to be a negative in a positive way.

When it comes specifically to atheism, the vast literature on the subject by atheists themselves reveals more nuanced understandings of unbelief. Some writers recognize that the God denied by atheists does not always correspond to the God affirmed by believers. Aware of the complexities within theism, they share Martin Buber’s conviction that God is the “most loaded of all words.” Others, especially since Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God in the nineteenth century, have endeavored to move the discussion of atheism beyond the categories of belief and reason. They portray atheism as a life orientation or the default position of the human mind, not simply a set of ideas. Atheist novelists, playwrights, artists, composers, and poets express atheism as a cluster of moods, intuitions, and sentiments. Criticism of religion and religious institutions, especially accompanied by disappointment or outrage in light of religion’s intellectual incoherence or moral failure, can be a mode of atheism. Anger at God can be a kind of atheism.

The twenty-first century has witnessed the appearance of a new class of confident advocates for secularity and nonreligion, eager to present atheism and agnosticism in a positive light. For them, these stances are far more than a nay-saying to a question of belief or a refutation of somebody else’s worldview. Phil Zuckerman, founder of the first academic secular studies degree program in the U.S., exemplifies this approach in Living the Secular Life. He maintains that atheism is not a reversal of something or a rejection of a competing viewpoint. It is a constructive, affirmative way of being in the world, based on courage and awe and yielding authenticity and contentment. Likewise, Lesley Hazleton, in Agnostic: A Spirited Manifesto, argues that cultivated not-knowing can be the effective basis for a life marked by intellectual adventure and generous empathy for other human beings. Questioning and questing, she claims, lead to richer ends than rigid avowal or denial can provide.

Such forthright recommendations of atheism and agnosticism have been rare in history. They are stark reminders of how new open, organized, socially active, and legally protected atheism and agnosticism truly are. Our premodern ancestors could not have imagined organizations such as Humanists International or public relations initiatives such as the Atheist Bus Campaign in Britain, with its ads proclaiming “There’s Probably No God.”

The track record of atheophobia is as long as the history of atheism itself. In some countries, blasphemy and apostasy laws still inflict severe punishment on the individual who will not conform to fixed standards of belief and behavior. Even in societies with constitutional protections for free speech and conscience, outspoken atheism can wreck a career, a reputation, or a relationship.

The academic study of the history of atheism and agnosticism is in its early stages. Until the late twentieth century, it was little more than a footnote to the history of philosophy and theology. Too often it was blurred with accounts of religious heresies and other deviations from reigning orthodoxies. Greater acceptance of intellectual diversity in present-day society has fueled growing interest in unbelief’s past. Unfortunately, undisciplined quests for atheist and agnostic forebears, portrayed as pioneers or heroes, have been largely exercises in wishful thinking and anachronism.

At least three significant challenges face the historian of atheism and agnosticism. One is the convention of the periodization of history. Carving history into preconceived chapters, such as ancient, medieval, Renaissance, modern, and the like, is still standard practice in the academy and the popular media. These titles are frequently woven into the stories of atheism and agnosticism. Freighted with assumptions that may distort more than they describe, the labels should be employed with caution and self-awareness. Referring to the intellectual innovation of highly literate male European thinkers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the “Enlightenment” highlights that era’s revolutionary new ways of studying nature and imagining society. At the same time, “Enlightenment” grants dangerous cover for the cultivation of notions of race and progress that subsidized enterprises such as the international slave trade, the genocide of indigenous peoples, and Western imperialism and colonialism.

 Another challenge to the historical study of atheism and agnosticism is, again, terminology itself. Atheism first appeared in English during the mid-1500s, initially as a term of derision, not self-description. Cambridge theologian Henry More’s Antidote against Atheisme, published in 1653, was as much about witchcraft and religious fanaticism as what people today call atheism. The word agnosticism, by contrast originally a matter of self-identification, was coined only in 1869, during the initial controversy over Darwin’s theory of evolution. These terms, while remarkably flexible, have come to be seen as relatively reliable indicators of recognizable positions or mindsets in various phases of modern history. It is a matter of debate, though, whether the terms effectively correspond to states of mind harbored by some people in earlier phases of history. If no language existed to describe the state of affairs, and especially if the danger to person and freedom was so grave that admission of atheism or agnosticism would have meant possible prison, exile, or death, how can anyone point to individuals in the premodern past, individuals lacking words or safety to speak up, and confidently identify those figures as atheists or agnostics? Could there be something peculiarly modern about unbelief itself? Is modernity the age of atheism and agnosticism? Or is the modern period one chapter in the story of these worldviews?

A third challenge to the construction of atheist and agnostic lineages is the built-in Eurocentrism of most inquiries into their backgrounds. The majority of histories of atheism and agnosticism have been written by Western writers, for Western readers, about a certain set of Western people. The standard narrative, tracing skepticism from ancient Greek suspicion about the gods to twenty-first-century North Atlantic New Atheism, tends to confirm this conclusion.

Haunting every study of atheism and agnosticism, past and present, is the question of the relationship between atheism and agnosticism and the specific styles and assumptions of Western intellectual life. Are atheism and agnosticism primarily Western phenomena? If they are, then they would appear to be among not only the most important products of the Western world’s cultural economy but also some of its chief exports. If they are not, then what are the signs of atheism and agnosticism in cultures that have not been substantially influenced by Abrahamic traditions—in cultures, that is, without a history of obsession with the concept signified by the term God? Are there compelling reasons to describe certain forms of philosophical outlook in African or Australian or American indigenous cultures, or in south or east Asian cultures, as varieties of atheism and agnosticism?

Despite the challenges, a number of historians have attempted to construct a chronicle of atheism and agnosticism stretching from ancient to modern times and around the globe. Most begin their narratives in the first millennium BCE. Few examine the full time of Homo sapiens on earth. Almost none consider the lives and strivings of other Homo species, which would extend the story of the human mind to at least 2,500,000 BCE. Archaeological evidence suggests that magic and religion have shaped human experience for millennia. God and gods have been rela­tively recent additions to human cultural life.

Depending exclusively on written evidence, many historians see possible first signs of atheism and agnosticism in India’s nontheist Samkhya philosophy or the traditions of Jainism and Buddhism, dating from around 500 BCE. Some point to folk traditions in ancient China that evolved into Daoism and Confucianism, some to systems of thought that planted the seeds for Africa’s ubuntu ethic—the humanist philosophy, often translated from Zulu and Xhosa languages as humanity toward others, which has flourished in postapartheid South Africa and many other sites of the global African Renaissance. Many scholars, writing from a Western perspective, claim to find atheist and agnostic ancestors in ancient Mediterranean nonconformists: Greeks such as Protagoras of Abdera, Theodorus of Cyrene, and Diagoras of Melos, author of On the Gods; and Romans such as Cicero, author of On the Nature of the Gods, and Lucretius, author of On the Nature of Things. The difficulty with these efforts is the problem of demonstrating the connection between ancient people who thought gods irrelevant and modern people who see gods as imaginary. The quest for the world’s first atheist or first agnostic, while tantalizing, is fraught with trouble. Some critics say it is wrongheaded from the start. Atheism and agnosticism have no origins, they contend. They are names for the natural state of the human mind, as old as human existence.

The student of atheism and agnosticism is on firmer ground investigating these phenomena today. One of the most striking features of these ways of life and thought is their variety. A diversity of types of atheism and agnosticism confronts the open-minded researcher. Often the types can be grouped into pairs of contrasting forms: rational versus emotional, organic versus organized, active versus passive, naive versus sophisticated. Some unbelievers are raised in nonreligion. Some have transformations of mind along the lines of a religious conversion. Some are in the closet, some are out. Some have no argument with religion. Others wrestle with gods for a lifetime. Some insist that atheism and agnosticism have intellectual content. Others say they represent independence from all creeds, even anticreeds. Some worship science as a substitute deity. Others are suspicious of scientism. Some seek social change. Others are aloof, content with the status quo. Some are happy. Some depressed. Still others nostalgic, reluctant unbelievers mourning a lost faith. Some could not believe if they wanted to. Others, spiritually homeless, find themselves somewhere between belief and unbelief, half conscious, as Martin Heidegger put it, of the “trace of the fugitive gods.” André Comte-Sponville’s Little Book of Atheist Spirituality evokes an unbelief bordering on mysticism.

Forms of everyday unbelief include the methodological atheism that reigns in the natural sciences (evident every time researchers assume that no supernatural force will influence their experiments) and the pragmatic atheism displayed in religious communities (when, as the saying goes, people pray as if everything depends on God and act as if everything depends on them). Religion also houses more profound strains of atheism. Atheists can be found in foxholes, of course, but they can also be found in churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and covens. Jewish atheists are relatively uncontroversial, especially since the Holocaust. Christian atheists less so, even after the rise of “death of God” theologies in the 1960s. Harvard philosopher George Santayana communicated his unique brand of Catholic atheism with the memorable line “There is no God, and Mary is his mother.” Islam, still coming to terms with the Enlightenment legacy, has yet to reckon fully with what Walter Lippmann dubbed the acids of modernity.

One issue that illustrates the diversity within contemporary unbelief is morality. Critics wonder how unbelievers can be responsible without religion. Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil fueled such suspicions, as did the widely quoted comment by a character in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “If there is no God, everything is permitted.” Some atheists embrace hedonism, rejecting all values except the pursuit of pleasure. Others believe in moral relativism, understanding morality as an invention of society, constantly evolving. A significant number of atheists believe that reason and science can lead to universal ethical principles that religious and nonreligious people can share. Good without God by Harvard’s humanist chaplain Greg Epstein represents the current state of this conversation within atheist circles. A body of self-help literature, by atheists for atheists, focuses on issues such as life-cycle ceremonies and parenting. Today, atheists are active in campaigns for racial justice, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, freedom of conscience, science education, and environmental justice.

 A notable feature of contemporary unbelief is the growing prominence of women, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and people of color. Independent LGBTQ+ voices include Camille Beredjick, author of Queer Disbelief, and Greta Christina, author of Coming Out Atheist. Eminent figures associated with what Candace Gorham has called the “Ebony Exodus” from religion include Mandisa Thomas, founder of Black Nonbelievers Inc., and Sikivu Hutchinson, author of Humanists in the Hood. African American atheists, agnos­tics, and Nones of all genders represent a visible and vocal dimension of twenty-first-century nonreligion.

As it turns out, counting these diverse individuals around the world is becoming less daunting. More social scientists are specializing in the study of nonreligion. More atheists and agnostics are feeling safe enough to speak up. Nomenclature, however, remains a challenge, distinguishing between atheist and agnostic, humanist, secularist, and freethinker—terms often used interchangeably by the same person.

Self-declared atheists are easiest to quantify. Some estimates place the worldwide atheist population at 500–700 million. Others set it closer to one billion, making unbelief the third or fourth largest “faith” in the world. Factoring in covert atheists would raise the number significantly. Nations reporting the highest percentages of people who identify as atheists, all in double digits, include China, Japan, the Czech Republic, France, Australia, Iceland, Belgium, and Denmark.

In the United States, the many forms of nonreligion are rapidly growing. According to the Pew Research Center, from 2009 to 2019, the percentage of adults who identify as atheists doubled, from 2 percent to 4 percent. Agnostics increased from 3 percent to 5 percent. People with no religious affiliation, the so-called Nones, grew from 12 percent to 17 percent. By 2019, over one quarter of the U.S. adult population claimed no religion—an unprecedented moment in the history of a country still described by some as Christian. All studies indicate that the highest rates of unbelief and nonaffiliation are among young adults. Even the most sober analysts are forced to imagine a soon-to-be majority American population for whom the national motto “In God We Trust” is not only a relic of the past but a bewildering and insulting one at that.

 All of which confirms that unbelief has enormous social, political, and cultural consequences, especially, as Michel Onfray, author of Atheist Manifesto, has said, “when private belief becomes a public matter.” The growing visibility and normality of unbelief, broadly defined, affect everything we do—from the way we raise children and configure our calendars to the way we relate to our planet and respond to someone who sneezes. Especially at stake is the definition of the good life, not to mention the all-consuming question of truth. Perhaps options for all humans throughout the storied past of the species, atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of unbelief have intimate ties to modernity and the yearning for freedom at the heart of the conflicted Enlightenment project. The current state of unbelief is vast, multivalent, and unprecedented.

Peter A. Huff teaches religious studies and directs the Center for Benedictine Values at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. The author or editor of seven books, he is active in interfaith and intercultural dialogue. This essay draws from his recently released book, Atheism and Agnosticism: Exploring the Issues (ABC-CLIO, 2021).