c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In the past 50 years or so, Jeff Strang has been a churchgoer, an agnostic, an atheist and a humanist. If anyone knows what these words mean, it ought to be he.

Yet even he admits to some “fuzziness” around the terms.

Strang has his own working definition: “A humanist is an atheist or an agnostic with a social conscience,” he says. But then he can’t help adding some fuzz: “Some people say there’s room for religious humanists, too.”

As religious and secular values clash in the Middle East, in Iraq and in our own country, what we believe _ or whether we believe _ often becomes a point of conflict. But the very words we use to characterize our beliefs sometimes seem to mean more _ and less _ than we imagine.

A humanist is an adherent of “any system of thought or action based on the nature, interests and ideals of humanity; specifically, a modern, nontheistic, rationalist movement that holds that man is capable of self-fulfillment, ethical conduct, etc. without recourse to supernaturalism,” Webster’s says.

But, as Strang, who is president of a humanists group based in Portland, Ore., observes, people may have religious beliefs and also subscribe to key humanist principles.

An agnostic “believes that the human mind cannot know whether there is a God or an ultimate cause or anything beyond material phenomena,” Webster’s says. But some people use agnostic to mean that, while they now are personally uncertain about the existence of a God, they are seekers after such knowledge.

Strang says he was raised in a Presbyterian home. His parents made him attend Sunday school and church until he graduated from high school. “I never connected with Christianity,” he says now. But he was interested in other religions, approaching them as a skeptic.

Over the years, he never found the evidence he was looking for. “By the time I turned 40, I had had enough experience in the world to declare myself an atheist,” he said. Then, in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he wanted to be part of a broader humanist community and now leads Humanists of Greater Portland.

Many humanists see themselves as atheists, people who believe that there is no God.

Dave Silverman, a spokesman for American Atheists, based in Parsipanny, N.J., has heard atheists described as “stubborn” agnostics and agnostics characterized as “wimpy” atheists.

“People don’t know the difference,” he says. “Atheists equate all gods and deny them all. God is equal to Zeus is equal to the Easter bunny. It’s a definitive statement.”

An agnostic argues that whether or not there is a god is unknowable, while atheists, Silverman says, are certain: “It’s knowable and it’s not there.”

His organization was founded 40 years ago by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, perhaps the most famous American atheist. “Atheism is based upon a materialist philosophy, which holds that nothing exists but natural phenomena,” she wrote in 1962. “There are no supernatural forces or entities, nor can there be any.”

Today, Silverman says, many groups of atheists, agnostics and humanists work together to support humanitarian causes such as blood and food drives and to advocate tolerance.

“There’s no way to overstate the amount of prejudice” that atheists face, Silverman says. “We are the last group that it’s politically OK to discriminate against.”

“Atheists, who account for about 3 percent of the U.S. population, offer a glaring exception to the rule of increasing social tolerance over the last 30 years,” says Penny Edgell, an associate sociology professor at the University of Minnesota.

Edgell says preliminary results of a study she led, which included a sampling of attitudes in more than 2,000 households, showed many respondents associate atheism with a range of “moral indiscretions” from criminal behavior to “rampant materialism” and “cultural elitism.”

That tendency to link _ or leap _ from atheism to questions of morality is evidence that many Americans are not using words such as atheist, agnostic or humanist in purely descriptive ways anymore.

“What’s happened in popular culture is that the terms used to be descriptive, and now they are evaluative,” says Courtney Campbell, head of the philosophy department at Oregon State University. “That leads to some confusion, stereotyping and mislabeling.”

(Nancy Haught writes for The Oregonian of Portland, Ore.)

KRE/RB END HAUGHT