(2025-07-01) Barnett Are All Atheists Unhappy

Olivia Barnett: Are All Atheists Unhappy? I was raised in San Francisco by two deeply atheist parents. Needless to say, I have never been religious.

(to) my Catholic grandmother.... "Aren’t you worried Dad won’t go to heaven because he doesn’t believe in God?”
“No,” she said swiftly. “Your dad is a good man and so he will go to heaven, too.” (is that the game-rule?)

But how could she be so sure? And how could my father be so sure she was wrong? What did it mean to be good? And how could anyone not talk about this all the time, when what is on the line is eternal life, eternal suffering, the reason we are here on this Earth? Somehow, even though they disagreed about everything else — about heaven, about God, about what happens when we die — they both seemed to care about goodness. He didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in fairness, in telling the truth, in being kind. This I knew because he imparted those values to me.

I found myself truly an atheist. This opened a terrifying chasm in my heart. I would lie awake at night wondering if being dead felt like sitting in darkness forever — claustrophobic, alone, endless.

At the time, the questions atheism brought me were all deeply personal. They were about what would happen to me, and the people I loved.

In all my wrestling with belief, I never thought about whether religion was good for me — or for society. I never wondered if religion would make me a better person because belief, to me, meant knowing He was up there. My striving to be a good person had much more to do with what my parents, my teachers, my friends thought of me. Yet when atheism comes up in public discourse, the question always seems to be: is it good for us? And that question always makes me flinch — because it implies that my non-belief might be harming others, or that I’m doing something wrong just by being this way

Russell Brand, Peter Thiel, and Dave Smith... the same thrust: if you are not religious, you are at risk of worshipping something soul-decaying.

I don’t disagree with their diagnosis. Humans have a tendency towards materialism

But I don’t think this is about some innate drive to worship. I think it’s evolutionary — a craving for quick rewards over long-term fulfillment

Even if religion makes us better, what does that have to do with belief? Thiel and Brand both imply without religion we can’t truly be good. This bothers me because it treats belief as a tool, not a truth. As if belief is something I can opt into. But I can’t.

I am not anti-religion. I think that there are some incredible moral principles to be found in the Bible.

but does that mean you can’t build your own framework? Can’t those same values emerge from experience, reflection, and empathy?

Knowing that charity evolved does not cheapen it — it makes me all the more grateful for it. So when people imply atheism leads to moral decay, I bristle.

But maybe I am too far gone in my disbelief to be religious, and the point Brand, Thiel and Smith are pushing is that spreading atheism is a bad thing. That I should keep my atheism quiet and let others find comfort where they can. This may be a good point. I actually don’t want to take away something that brings comfort to someone, and I try not to. But is it true, on a grand scale, that atheism makes people less happy?

Maybe what we really need isn’t belief — but meaning, and each other.

You don’t need belief to find goodness — or happiness. Taking someone else’s word for what it means to be good feels less admirable to me than working to understand it yourself.

So, can we be moral without religion? I think we can — not by rejecting the question of goodness, but by refusing to outsource it.