Would an atheist ever pose themselves the question, and answer it immediately, “Am I religious? I’ll have to let someone else judge that.”?
Right there. No, an atheist would never do that.
Would they use the phrase “Kingdom of God” in this sentence:
“I firmly believe in the Kingdom of God.”? (emphasis added)
Would you say that, Cliffy? Is that how you use the phrase Kingdom of God when you use it all the time?
Yes, I was really trying to fool people by* linking to the quote* in context. You ‘failed to quote’ it, too, so I will.
Yep, that really cuts the legs out from under “I firmly believe in the Kingdom of God.”
It’s OK to admit you’re wrong, people. *Authoritative * - which you note Exapno’s answer was, and I’ll note he always is - is not the same as accurate. Schulz was not an atheist, nor agnostic.
I’m not seeing any indication that Schulz professed atheism. Many, if not most people change their religious views over their lifetime, and a rejection of organized religion while still maintaining a belief in a deity is common, and by no means the equivalent of atheism.
I strive to be accurate as well, so let’s look at what we’ve found.
From the evidence: Scultz was once a believer, even a fundamentalist, and was active both in his church and in declaring his beliefs. By around 1975, his beliefs had altered greatly. He withdrew seemingly entirely from organized religion. He declared himself anti-evangelist. He professed that he did not have answers for and possibly was uncertain of even the existence of many of the great questions for which religion claims answers. He believed in some spiritual domain. On more than one occasion, including an interview published just before his death, he said flatly that he was a secular humanist.
Secular humanism is essentially a tenet that one can find morality without the aid of religion. Operationally, it is normally equated with atheism or agnosticism. However, there are no rules, no overarching organization, no belief structure, nothing written in stone that compels anyone to have a specific lack of belief in a god to be a secular humanist. It would be possible to be one and have, for the lack of a better term, a Deist view of a god. I have to assume that that’s your position; it’s the one only that seems compatible with the facts we all agree on.
I personally don’t see it, but Schulz was a private man - and, I continue to emphasize, someone who would never want to offend the large religious segment of his readership - and seemed not to have talked deeply about this issue in public. Unless one of his relatives or close friends were to make a statement or we find unpublished writings, none of us can ever be both authoritative and accurate.
Still, I know what I hear when someone says they’re secular humanist. And it’s not what you hear.
The “secular humanist” quote is from ca. 1989, although the Metro article was written December 1999 or January 2000. The quote I provided is 6 years later.
“I am a firm believer in the Kingdom of God,” is, to me, a ‘smoking gun’ that he was neither atheist nor agnostic. I guess I hear *that *differently than you do.
Michaelis painted Schulz ‘warts and all.’ He talks about Schulz dropping away from *organized religion, as you say, but then is silent on Schulz’ spiritual beliefs for the rest of his life. If Michaelis had any evidence that Schulz considered himself agnostic or atheist, he certainly would have mentioned it in the book. Michaelis wouldn’t have ‘white-washed’ it away as you imply Schulz might have done for economic reasons.
I might try to email Michaelis, in fact. I know Monte Schulz, and the rest of the family, didn’t like the book, and has said there were factual inaccuracies, but I never heard them specify what the inaccuracies were, except generalities (‘Dad wasn’t depressed all the time’).
*I don’t consider agnosticism or atheism any vice or anything like that, but it’s something the family might have kept quiet about that Michaelis would not have.
I thought it was also from Johnson’s* Good Grief*, published in 1989. I guess you’re right, though - he said it more than once.
But unless he said “I firmly believe in the Kingdom of God” before* all the times* he called himself a secular humanist, if says to me that he didn’t mean secular humanist in the sense of atheist.
But I do see “I firmly believe in the Kingdom of God” as an explicit statement of belief, and it’s odd to me that apparently you and **Cliffy **don’t.
From the evidence: Scultz was once a believer, even a fundamentalist, and was active both in his church and in declaring his beliefs. By around 1975, his beliefs had altered greatly. He withdrew seemingly entirely from organized religion. He declared himself anti-evangelist. He professed that he did not have answers for and possibly was uncertain of even the existence of many of the great questions for which religion claims answers. He believed in some spiritual domain. On more than one occasion, including an interview published just before his death, he said flatly that he was a secular humanist.
This is all very fascinating, but as the OP, I have to ask: Does anybody know what happened in Schulz’s life post 1975 that made him change his beliefs on organized religion and turn to secular humanism? My personal experience with people who used to be religious but no longer are (OR for that matter, people who used to be irreligious but NOW have found GOD) is that some major event occurred in their lives to make them change from one to the other. I have to wonder what happened in Mr. Schulz’s life to make HIM change.
From Michaelis’ book, I get the impression that the change actually took place over the ten-year period 1965-1975. It was a gradual disillusionment, not the result of a major incident. I’ve certainly known people like that so it doesn’t seem out of place to me.
You can read the section by searching inside the book at Amazon. Enter “religion” into the search box and go to p351. His first wife says she’s not sure what happened either but that he was never a “dogmatic believer.” Billy Graham called him a “humanist liberal,” which is about one step short of Satan.
A few things from the book -
His daughter had an abortion ca. 1969.
He himself had an affair.
He got a divorce.
All those probably caused a great deal of reflection about who knew what, and who was in a position to pass judgment on anyone else.
Well before all that, he had been evangelical and realized he had no business telling anyone else what to do. His personality was probably always ‘ripe’ for dropping away from organized religion.
When he was with the Church of God, he started contributing cartoons to their Youth magazine in 1956. These were published in a series of paperbacks. There was also a book about pre-schoolers. I believe they were never reprinted during his life, though a posthumous compilation exists.
But note the date in your link, 1964. Schulz stopped drawing these in 1965, and that was the same period he began leaving religion.
Hmm. Propriety of resurrecting a month-old thread just to call someone a tool? Well, let’s give it a shot.
To wit:
An atheist who lived in a big ass house that was purchased in large part as a result of being really popular with religious audiences? Fuck yeah.
I submit that I’m a better authority on what an atheist might do than you are, since I have nearly 40 years experience of it.
Yes. I use phrases like that frequently, and that is exactly how I use them. Creation (see, there it is again – completely unintentional, not that you’ll believe it) is wondrous and strange, and it’s common to use this kind of shorthand about it. He didn’t say he firmly believed god created the kingdom, did he? The phrase he used is just as easily interpreted to mean that he believes firmly in the wonder of the universe, couched in a poetic phrase that is clearly designed not to shed definitive light on the question of his final religious belief – if he even had definitive thoughts at that point in his life, which neither of us knows, and which I at least do not claim to know. Whether he was obfuscating something concrete he did not want precisely known, or whether (as does seem more likely) he was trying to discuss a topic on which he had not completely made up his mind, the phrase is awfully ambiguous for a fiat statement of belief as you suggest it is. Someone who made a very comfortable living by precision of language (as well as line, surely) for decades might have been expected to be more clear, had he wanted to be. People who appreciate beautiful language have centuries of examples of poets describing the awe of the natural world in language that invokes god – we’ve rather less of it that doesn’t.
When did Linus start quoting biblical verse? I find it telling that the strip’s resident theologian is also the one who needs a security blanket. Was this a coincidence, or was Schulz (unconsciously, perhaps) making a connection between devotion and insecurity?
It may just be that Linus was the character who was the most thoughtful or “literary” or “intellectual.” On the other hand, he was the one who bought into the Great Pumpkin.
I think of the Great Pumpkin as the following happening: Suppose there was an utterly brilliant child. You kept telling this child long after you should have about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, not realizing that they were too old for that sort of thing. They then began wondering if there was also some sort of supernatural creature associated with Halloween. They then create their own “theology” or “mythology” around such a creature who they called “the Great Pumpkin,” thinking that there should be some sort of consistency about holidays.
Hmmmmm I don’t think so. It’s an odd phrase to use and your analysis of it is far too subjective and requires reading more into it then Bup’s analysis. At that point he has made a fortune and he didn’t need to pander to his audience. I’ve no idea what his religious beliefs were but reading that statement does not suggest to me that he was an atheist.
Whatever. I won’t convince you, but anybody else reading this thread can look at the evidence I presented, and the evidence **Exapno **presented, and, if they wish, what you presented, and make up their minds.