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The power of reason
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Freethinker Stephen Nugent at his Phaneromeni home which is dominated by the nearby church
Religion’s unanswered questions have led to the formation of a group known as Cyprus Freethinkers. THEO PANAYIDES finds out more
Years ago, Michael Aristidou was lecturing on atheism at Louisiana State University when he noticed a line of 17-year-old freshmen in the front row. “I’m an atheist!” cried one of the excited youngsters. “I’m an atheist too!” Michael shook his head. “No you’re not,” he told them with a touch of wry humour; “You just hate your parents.”
It’s a joke, of course, but there’s truth in jokes. Just as the religious are frequently accused of deluding themselves, atheists have to deal with charges of being rebels without a cause, cocking a snook at God just because they’re misfits or worse. Believers often treat them like lost sheep who’ve strayed from the fold, adding that they’ll ‘pray for them’ – a form of condescension that must make Michael’s blood boil, especially since he calls himself an “academic atheist, one who’s studied and read all positions, and decided that there’s nothing”. The difference between Christians and atheists, he goes on, “is a matter of knowledge. We know their stuff very well – at least I do – and I reject it for various reasons… but I claim that most Christians do not know what’s in their own holy texts.”
Michael’s 35, with oval glasses, close-cropped hair, a thin beard and sideburns. He looks a bit like what he is, a Professor of Mathematics who lived in the US for 11 years and came back to Limassol (for good, or so he thought) in June 2010. A few weeks before coming back, he hit on the idea of creating an atheist group in Cyprus –only to find that such a group already existed on Facebook. Cyprus Atheists had been started in 2008 by Kyriacos Papaspyrou, a 30-year-old graphic designer, born in the village of Athienou and now living in Nicosia.
The two men emailed back and forth and decided, in the months since Michael’s return, to make the group more organised. Now re-named Cyprus Freethinkers (to be more “inclusive”), the Facebook group has around 1,250 members as well as an associated website, www.cyprusfreethinkers.org – but plans are underway for a more physical presence, “on the ground” as opposed to online. The plan is to create a full-fledged club, organising lectures, readings and so on – though also a place, says Michael, “where people could call and tell us their problem, if there is discrimination.”
Is there really discrimination against atheists? Not officially, admits Kyriacos – a lively talker with a bright, good-humoured style – “but you can sense that subtle discrimination: ‘Wait a second, you’re not one of us’ … Cyprus, as we know, is one of the more theistic countries in the EU, and if you are outside this theistic umbrella you’re an outsider, and often you get discriminated”. Not that people are losing their jobs because they’re atheists – at least not openly – but talking about such beliefs in the office is a “sensitive subject”, as if it were something awful.
Michael goes further: “I faced discrimination for my beliefs when I was in Louisiana, from other Greeks and Cypriots,” he tells me. He was both President of the Hellenic Students’ Association (he was doing his PhD at the time) and Vice-President of the Atheists’ Club – a combination that incensed certain people, especially when he also changed the constitution of the HSA so that money left in the Treasury at the end of the year wouldn’t automatically go to the Orthodox Church in New Orleans (instead it would go wherever the majority decided, which seemed – and is – fairer). There was harassment, name-calling, finally an incident where another Cypriot tried to attack him physically. The police were called in, and Michael also sent the issue to the UN as a case of discrimination against his beliefs.
That said, atheism isn’t really a “belief” – and certainly not a cult, as some people imagine. “It’s questioning your belief, not trying to impose my belief onto you,” explains Stephen Nugent, a relatively recent convert who calls himself a “non-dogmatic atheist”. Unlike Michael, who’s lectured on atheism, and Kyriacos, who’s written articles in Politis, Stephen isn’t actively involved in Cyprus Freethinkers – but he did take part in the recent T-shirt contest on their website, submitting possible designs for the group’s official T-shirt logo.
Looking through the list of submissions (not just by Stephen) is instructive. They range from confrontational – a black T-shirt with the caption “Burn Your Local Church”, another reading “Too stupid to understand science? Try religion!” – to playful, like a meditative Jesus who turns out to be praying for kebabs. But the front-runner is a logo with a giant human brain, underlined with a quote from Carl Sagan: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” – because that’s ‘free thinking’ in a nutshell, a belief in the power of reason plus a call for believers to prove their case. Stephen is clear on his own “non-dogmatic atheism”: “My definition is this: ‘Bring me scientific arguments and facts, and evidence [of God], and I will consider it’.”
He’s 33, an award-winning filmmaker, a shambling, amiable presence as he walks, barefoot and ginger-haired, through his small flat in Old Nicosia. He’s half-Irish, which coloured his early experiences of religion. His mother would go to church, mostly for show, while his father – barred from going in, being a Catholic heathen (though in fact completely non-practising) – would “hold my hand outside the church and ridicule the hocus-pocus that was happening”. That explains the atheism, you might think – but in fact it’s only in the past year that he’s settled the question in his mind, and early experience seems to count for little in any case. Kyriacos, growing up in a village, was very religious till the age of 16 or 17 (“that’s all I knew”) when he started reading widely and concluded that religion was a myth. For Michael, the turning-point was a fascination with ancient Greek philosophy – the moral scepticism of Socrates, the implicit atheism of Carneades and Democritus – coupled with Religious Education class in high school. The contrast between the open-mindedness of one and the dogmatism of the other forced him to take sides – though it was only when he went to the States, and started hanging out with militant atheists, that he stopped believing altogether. “One does not become an atheist from one day to the next,” he explains. “For me it took years and years of studying, and rejecting and accepting, and moving in an existential search.”
For Stephen, the search began in earnest when he came back from the North Pole last year. He makes films for Greenpeace, spending several months in the Arctic over the past two summers – and after weeks of activism, filming eco-warriors in action and at one point jumping into the freezing water himself, he felt the need to stay home and look inward. He started studying different religions, downloaded the Koran and the Bible, watched documentaries and online debates – and concluded that “the whole thing is delusion”. Religion had too many gaps and unanswered questions. Why did Jesus only appear in the past 2,000 years if Homo Sapiens has been around for 100,000? If God created everything, who created God? Reading from a website, he lists some of the atrocities committed in the name of God over the centuries: the Crusades, the Inquisition, ethnic cleansing, fatwas, honour killings, suppression of women and homosexuals, human sacrifices, witch-burning, genital mutilation. Above all, having watched the various debates, he’s convinced there’s no way a theist can ever convert an atheist, or vice versa: “No chance you will ever find common ground.”
I’m reminded of that line when I go to the Archbishopric in Nicosia, wondering what the other side has to say. In the Office of Ecclesiastical Catechism, a group of young theologians – all in their 30s – converge on me with eyes shining. “I don’t believe there are atheists,” says one (they speak as a group, and decline to be identified by name). “There are no atheists. There are only people who become alienated from the truth, in order to discover the truth. All beings gravitate towards some Higher Force.”
Michael Aristidou found the roots of atheism in ancient Greece, but this group say it was “born in the West” (ie the Catholic Church), as a reaction to its more repressive theology of God-as-bogeyman (“In the East we speak of a God of love, who nurses Man like a mother”). All three Free Thinkers noted that science and religion are incompatible, but this group insist there isn’t any conflict. Above all, Stephen Nugent told me he believes that “Atheism should be the default position of every single person on Earth”, religion being the construct we impose on our natural innocence – or, to quote Kyriacos: “People made God, not vice versa” – whereas the theologians believe the exact opposite.
“Every man has the image of God inside him,” I’m informed, “and is created in order to seek God – because only that will complete him as a being, the presence of God in his life”. Theism is our natural condition, atheism unnatural. “It’s like telling a pregnant woman that she’s not pregnant when she can feel the child kicking inside her. ‘But I can feel it!’ [she’ll say]. One who has God inside them knows it.”
What if they can’t feel it, though? What if they seek actual proof? “Can we ever prove it scientifically? Not really,” admits Rev. John Tyrrell – better known as Father John – at St Paul’s Cathedral in Nicosia. Father John is Canadian, with the white beard of an Old Testament prophet (he’s also the only person in this article who’s over 40); he spent years in the Yukon, working in sub-zero temperatures, before ending up in Cyprus – and explains that he’s seen “what I believe to be the Hand of God working in people, in my life over the past 66 years”. Like what? Miracles of healing, he replies. Relationships mended by the power of prayer. People who had visions of “what they believed to be evil spirits” being soothed by anointing. Most of it, however, is faith – and faith isn’t logic. “When you cross the street, you don’t ‘believe’ if a car is going to come,” points out Kyriacos. “You just look right and left. And if nothing is coming, you cross.”
Trying to find a common denominator between the trio of Freethinkers is a pointless task (“Not all atheists are the same,” cautions Michael). Then again, there might be a clue in something Father John mentions. “Worshipping God is efficacious,” he tells me. “There is a tremendous positive effect from being part of the worshipping community” – and maybe that’s the point, that religion works as a kind of social glue. Polls show that 95 per cent of Cypriots call themselves religious, yet only 19 per cent go to church every Sunday. It’s like religion is the membership card to a club they only visit occasionally, yet it brings them closer to know that other Cypriots are also members.
Michael, on the other hand, is outside the club – and outside Cyprus society. By the time you read this he, his American wife and their two young children will have gone back to the States, fed up with Cyprus (albeit partly for professional reasons) after six months. Stephen, too, is something of an outsider, working mostly abroad – and even Kyriacos must’ve felt out of place in the closed religious life of Athienou. In a way, Michael’s joke to those long-ago freshmen had a kernel of truth: ‘hating your parents’ – or the world of your parents – is part of a reason for questioning, and you can’t think freely unless you first question existing society. That’s exactly why Cyprus Freethinkers is so necessary: to create an alternative community, ranged alongside the all-pervasive “worshipping” one.
Why mystify everything? Why put labels (like ‘God’) on what we don’t understand? “Let us exist in what we know!” pleads Stephen as he walks me to the door – but that’s the problem for atheists, that ‘what we know’ is so overwhelmingly religious. Outside, it’s the run-up to Christmas. Carols celebrate the Son of God, angels decorate shop fronts. I decide I’ve had enough of spiritual matters, and go to the cinema – where the first thing I see is the trailer for Transformers 3. Aliens are coming, another variation on the human desire for Something More. “We’re not alone after all, are we?” says one movie character to another. Ah, but what if we are?
