A good way to jar yourself out of unreflective atheism is to read about contemporary science.

Taking Religion Seriously

By Charles Murray

The following is an excerpt from Charles Murray’s new book, The Curmudgeon's Guide to Getting Ahead: Dos and Don'ts of Right Behavior, Tough Thinking, Clear Writing, and Living a Good Life.


If you are a high-IQ recent graduate from a top college or university, here is where you probably stand when it comes to religion: It’s not for you. You don’t mind if other people are devout, but you don’t get it. Smart people don’t believe that stuff anymore.

Perhaps you are explicitly an atheist. Even if you are an agnostic, you don’t spend much time worrying about God, because there’s no point. If a God exists, it cannot be the kind of God who has anything to do with this flyspeck world, let alone with the lives of the individual human beings on it.

I can be sure that’s what many of you think because your generation of high-IQ college-attending young people, like mine 50 years ago, has been as thoroughly socialized to be secular as our counterparts in preceding generations were socialized to be devout. Some of you grew up with parents who were not religious, and you’ve never given religion a thought. Others of you went to Sunday school as a child (I’m going to use the Christian context in this discussion) and went to church with your parents in adolescence, but left religion behind as you were socialized by college. By socialized, I don’t mean that you studied theology under professors who convinced you that Thomas Aquinas was wrong. You didn’t study theology at all. None of the professors you admired were religious. When the topic of religion came up, they treated it dismissively or as a subject of humor. You went along with the zeitgeist.

I am describing my own religious life from the time I went to Harvard until my late forties. At that point my wife, prompted by the birth of our first child, had found a religious tradition in which she was comfortable, Quakerism, and had been attending Quaker meetings for several years. By the early 1990s, I was occasionally keeping her company. That was 20 years ago. Since then, my wife has become an increasingly serious Quaker. I still describe myself as an agnostic, but I’m shakier in my nonbelief. Watching her has taught me some things that I pass along to you with the recommendation that you don’t wait as long as I did to get serious.

Taking religion seriously means homework.

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