By Victor Greto
They’re wallflowers, looking with a critical eye toward classmates smoothly dancing together at a nationwide prom.
Out of place, but part of the class.
Comfortable with themselves, but feeling persistently slighted.
Atheists in South Florida have felt more slighted than usual in the past two months, noting that many of their fellow Americans have rashly united both God and country to express their patriotism.
It’s an atmosphere that has implicitly excluded a segment of the population, which says it feels just as passionately American.
“The feelings that everyone had after Sept. 11 were the same,” says Rebeca Porto, a Cuban-born, Miami-based pathologist.
“I was in the lab when a technician told me that a plane hit the World Trade Center. I was in tears. Upset for days.”
The event reinforced how she feels about her adopted country.
“I love this country,” Porto says. “I was born in Cuba. My family came to escape communism to be free.”
Just as importantly for Porto, however, freedom also means liberty from religion, if not both subtle and overt peer pressure.
Porto says she began questioning her Catholic beliefs when she found out the truth about Santa Claus.
“They tell you, the people you trust, that there was one. Then, all of a sudden, there’s no Santa Claus. So, you think to yourself, what else is not true?”
Heady stuff for a small child, but there seems to be more at stake now for the 45-year-old.
“I get concerned when a political person invokes a deity,” she says. “Because it seems like everyone is then under this umbrella of `God bless America.’ Does that mean if you don’t believe in God you don’t love America?”
She is obviously no communist. Nor is she a Satan-worshiper, she says, another assumption people make because of the depth of her atheism.
“The way I see it,” she says, “religion creates artificial separations between people, when really all our basic human aspects are the same.”
John Kieffer, a retired Army lieutenant and Vietnam veteran who lives in Tampa, is not so subtle in talking about what he sees as the insidious effects of religion.
The people who participated in the terrorist attacks, Kieffer says, “were basically people who believe in God, who believe in heaven, who believe in Satan and the whole general package of mythology — not much different than what the general public in the United States believes.”
War experience
Kieffer says he resents those who mingle religion and patriotism, if only because he sees himself as “very patriotic.”
“I put my life on the line in Vietnam as an infantry lieutenant for the ideals of our Constitution,” he says.
He lost his faith during his service in Vietnam, when the arbitrariness of war convinced him that religion meant nothing.
“When I saw the priest setting up the communion out in the field,” he says of a Mass celebrated outdoors during the war, “I realized: This is how they get people willing to die, by making them believe they’re going to live.”
Though Kieffer frequently writes letters to his hometown paper expressing his views, since Sept. 11 he often finds himself alone.
“Unfortunately,” he says, “the critical thinkers and leaders are silent. How politically correct can you be at a time like this, arguing not to go overboard because it’s this God-belief that started everything? What we have now is a herd mentality.”
Some atheists have felt the pressure to remain silent.
A doctor’s view
Take, for instance, a 47-year-old Palm Beach County doctor who requested anonymity because he fears he might lose patients if his atheism became known.
“People equate [atheism] with communism,” he says, “or say you’re immoral. I don’t want it to hurt my practice.”
For this doctor, arguments among believers and non-believers are not about the issues.
“When you attack someone’s core belief system, they don’t know how to handle it,” he says. “The world is much more ambiguous. Instead of dealing with it critically, they take it personally, and it’s a no-win game.”
In spite of his fears about his economic well-being, the doctor doesn’t seem to be bothered by the mingling of God and country in the population at large.
“It doesn’t make me feel alienated,” he says of the recent surge in hearing God Bless America, either sung at public events or intoned at the end of presidential speeches.
“I think we should stay united, and picking those petty fights is counterproductive. I fly a flag on my car, but I don’t put a deity on it.”
But he does confess he’s annoyed at the persistence of what he sees as the illogic of religious belief and how that belief rationalizes evil.
“It just irks me sometimes,” he says, “when I see these excuses that theologians come up with, including free will. Theologians can’t explain it. There’s nothing to support their claim. I would love to have seen the second plane go right through the building and leave it unscathed, and then I would have thought, `Wow, that’s supernatural.’ But the laws of physics are never violated.”
Church and state
Brent Yaciw, 46, a college teacher who lives in Wesley Chapel in Pasco County, says religion causes people to look in the wrong direction for answers.
“I don’t think we’re going to solve our problems by looking outside when the problems are coming from inside,” he says.
“We have to change the way people think. Once people have accepted an outside authority to allow them to do anything, that leaves them open to that behavior being OK. I’m not saying you’re not going to find an atheist who doesn’t do bad things, but no one is more cheerfully willing to do horrendous things than someone who believes they’re doing them because their God told them to.”
Nor does Yaciw accept the proposition that religion comforts people, even — and especially — at this time.
“It was religion that caused this problem in the first place,” he says. “These guys thought their religion gave them the right to crash these planes, and they killed thousands of people who didn’t even know they existed.”
Unlike the doctor from Palm Beach County, Yaciw says he feels negativity in “the extremism of patriotic expression and the lack of separation of church and state” in the current atmosphere of the country.
But he doesn’t blame the country at large for it.
“You can’t blame the general population when the president is saying God bless America and acting like the preacher-in-chief and not the commander-in-chief,” Yaciw says.
It isn’t just a question of President Bush’s freedom to express his own beliefs, either.
“His beliefs are his right, but when he’s representing himself as president of the country with religious overtones that may be misinterpreted by other countries, then it’s something else again.”
As many other atheists have expressed it, Yaciw says he wants his country to stand for something quite different from “In God we trust,” or “God bless America.”
“I want the U.S. to be more like the founding fathers envisioned it,” he says, “a country of tolerance and understanding and openness to reasoning and thinking. I have no problem with persuading someone to think my way but never would consider legitimate a situation or system that would force my viewpoint on someone else.”
A natural debate
Porto says the debate between atheists and believers is supposed to exist because of the nature of the country.
“We live in a democracy, and everyone is entitled to his or her opinion,” she says. “But don’t assume because we don’t believe in God that we don’t love this country or we’re not patriotic or we’re not behind the government.”
For those who fear speaking out about how they think or what they believe in, Porto says she understands. But the fear needs to be overcome.
“When people are afraid to speak up, it’s sad,” she says. “Coming from Cuba, I know that’s the way it is in Cuba.”