What is the one major point you would like people to take away from your book.

Well the major point is that a lot of atheists have psychological and non-rational reasons, often reasons that they are not aware of, for their position. And a sort of sub-category of that is one of the major reasons is a dysfunctional father and their anger and disappointment with father figures as represented by God and the Church.

 

Another is people who are suffering from autistic spectrum disorder and can’t even have a relationship very reliably or empathic and interpersonal with probably anybody and, therefore, a personal God seems unbelievable

 

and the third reasons is that a fair number of atheists are not that intense about it are there because of two reasons that they haven’t quite dealt with, one is sometimes they are sort of embarrassed by their family background which is religious but sort of, lower class and not sophisticated. Their fundamentalist parents, their catholic ghetto parents from immigrant backgrounds or maybe their and in some way they are embarrassed socially and they have gone off to college and they are not part of the new sophisticated people and they are sort of embarrassed by their background. They want to assimilate into the more sophisticated culture. And also related to that is the fact that for many people atheism is just more convenient as a style of life.

 

 

You know it is funny you say that, isn’t that one of the reasons that Isaac Asimov gave for being an atheist?

 

I did not know that.

 

He said something like, I know that atheism is ultimately an assumption, I just don’t want to do all the work around the assumption or something like that. It was that exact point, it was “Yah maybe it is an assumption but I jam just too busy to try to work it out. … I see that whole understanding that atheism has a much deeper dimension than someone deciding well science tells me there is not God therefore there can’t be a god.

 

Right

 

I was fascinated by some of your anthropological material and this fascinates me anyway. You have these early religions and they all would understand the ultimate god as father and they would use those terms, rarely creator you say, but mostly father.

 

Yes

 

And how much the father figure really plays itself in religious belief.

 

Yes

 

One of the things that popped in my mind, is how manipulative and dangerous is that saying: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”

 

Well that is a kind of a weird as a supposed analogy. I see they are saying they are a fish, and in that metaphor.

 

That is interesting, I never thought of it that way.

 

 

. . .The psychology behind that is that so many men today are withdrawing and rejecting women in many ways. That a good man is becoming impossible to find. And so I see that women responding to bad behavior on the part of men toward them. I mean the whole gay movement is a withdrawal from women and the whole pornography movement is a withdrawal from women.

 

That is an interesting point. Especially, I am here in the Boston area, when the feminist movement was really strong in the 1970’s if a man held a door for a woman she would yell at him right in public. I don’t think people understood at the time how much an effect that had on men just trying to do a civil act and he literally got yelled at in public.

 

Some men have withdrawn from women for all kinds of reasons. Here is the way men treat feminists generally. They ignore them. You cannot get into an argument with a woman. A man can’t because if he wins, he is being man unchivalrous and besides he defeated a woman. But if he wins there is no plus and if he loses he is castrated. So it is a no win situation that is why in universities, in fact, men have not been debating feminism. It is just “Let’s have a woman’s department and let them be in the woman’s depart so they put them off over there, but men don’t debate feminists.”

 

I’ve actually taught from the altar that if there is a woman involved in a fight [argument] a woman has to fight the woman. The man can’t do that because the man will always lose. and women have told me that too.

 

 

 

You have to have women fight women and the best critics of feminism have been a good number of sensible women. Men aren’t the critics of feminism because they can’t win because it does not make any sense for them. If they win “you are being mean, overbearing alright you defeated this poor woman because she did not have much of a rational argument . . ., if you lose, you lose.”

 

 

On another level, first of all you, you make an interesting point you grew up in wishy-washy Christianity which was not a match for the academic world, and so you went through atheism but you came out of atheism realizing that this ultimately was not the answer and I know that simplifies is a bit and you made some powerful points. And one of the most powerful is that these major atheists in our history like Nietzsche and others was that they did not ask “why did people believe in god?” but they promoted their own idea of atheism

 

And He said “I am atheist by instinct,” whatever the hell that means. He said that he could never get to it by a process of reasons. And I even quote a contemporary atheists who is fine professor of NYU in philosophy and she says “the plain and simple fact is that I don’t the world to be that way. I don’t want there to be a god I don’t like a world to be like that. “

 

Which is probably something that would come out of Marx and Nietzsche and everybody else like that.

 

Yes, I am convinced what they really don’t want is world in which there is an omniscient God who knows what is happening with them and knows them. One of the great things that men like to be all the time is independent and autonomous and God is in someways a threat to that.

 

 

They don’t want anybody telling them what to do.

 

One of the things that I’ve taught is that the American Culture tends to be one of control and that is why there is a struggle with many aspects of religion because you have to let go of control.

 

Right.

 

I love the story you told of Hitler being in one point of his life where he could have gone one way or the other in light of this conversation with this cardinal.

 

Yes

 

That was just fascinating because it was before the fall of the reich in 1935 and there would have been no reason for him to be shaken up. And this cardinal had put the Jewish arm band on all the statues of his church.

 

Yes

 

That was Cardinal Faulhaber in Munich and Munich was a major city for not just in German but of course for Hitler. And so he put the arm bands on all the Jewish figures in the Cathedral, Jesus, of course, Our Lady and most of the apostles. He really shook him up.

I got that anecdote by Father Benedict Groeschel.

 

Powerful story. There is point where you kind of point out you can say that he had this abusive father and that is being a little light on it and that is my term. But it was more than that, it was this self hating that drove him.

 

Yes, where are all the rest of his psychology comes down, I don’t know, but he had a chance then to choose to move in the other direction.

 

That is such a powerful, powerful story. I’ve greatly enjoyed this talk, but I wish I could go on more. The book is Faith of the Fatherless and this is from Ignatius press. The Psychology of Atheism. I really enjoyed talking with you Dr. Vitz

 

Well thank you and God Bless everyone up in Boston.