Political muscle?

By Rey Zaldy Serna

IN practice, what is an atheist? An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the Golden Calf.

It has been said that we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. It’s surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non-citizen.

Nevertheless, it’s an undeniable fact that to own up to being an atheist is tantamount to introducing yourself as Mr. Hitler or Miss Beelzebub. And that all stems from the perception of atheists as some kind of weird, way-out minority.

But actually, how do Philippine atheists stack up numerically? The latest survey makes surprisingly encouraging reading. Christianity, of course, takes a massive lion’s share of the population with nearly 83 million. But what would you think was the second largest group, convincingly outnumbering Muslims, El Shaddai,  Iglesia ni Kristo, Aglipayan and all other religions put together? The second largest group, of nearly 10 million, is the one described as noneligious or secular.

You can’t help wondering why vote-seeking politicians are so proverbially over-awed by the power of, for example, the El Shaddai lobby. Some senators seem to owe its very existence to the religious El Shaddai vote while at the same time consigning the noneligious to political oblivion. This secular noneligious vote, if properly mobilized, is almost thrice as numerous as the El Shaddai vote. Why does this far more substantial minority not make a move to exercise its political muscle?

So much for quantity. How about quality? Is there any correlation, positive or negative, between intelligence and tendency to be religious?

The article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine sends laughter to my heart. Mensa, as you know, is an international organization for people with very high intelligent quotient (IQ). And from a meta-analysis of the literature, Bell concludes that of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one’s intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one’s intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious.

Now we’ve reached a truly remarkable situation, a grotesque mismatch between the Philippine intelligentsia and the Philippine electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the vast majority of top Filipino freethinkers and probably the majority of the intelligentsiagenerally, is so abhorrent to the Philippine electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public.

I may conclude, this means that high office in our country is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it, the intelligentsia, unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it sourly, Philippine political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest.

I suggest that something needs to be done. And I’ve already hinted what that something is.

On the contrary, atheists are often the kind of people who could serve as decent role models for your children, the kind of people an advertising outfit could use to recommend a product, the kind of people who are enchanted while reading this article. There could be a snowball effect, a positive feedback.

I suspect that the word “atheist” itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves. So, what other word might be used to smoothen the path, oil the wheels, sugar the pill?

How about humanist?

This has the advantage of a worldwide network of well-organized associations and journals and things already in place. You are all elite readers, and I would therefore expect about 10 percent of you to be religious. Many of you probably subscribe to our polite cultural beliefs that we should respect religion, but I also suspect that a fair number of those secretly despise religion as much as I do. If you’re one of them, and of course many of you may not be, but if you are one of them, I’m asking you to stop being polite, come out and say so, and if you happen to be rich, give some thought to ways in which you might make a difference.

The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations, institutions and organizations to say nothing of all the tax benefits.

If I am financially capable, I’d do it myself but that is not the case.