Being good without faith: review of The Young Atheist's Handbook

This review appeared on Goodreads in July 2012 while this blog was in limbo, but I had always intended to review it here, so here you are - with some additional content:



In his foreword to Alom Shaha's Young Atheist's Handbook, A.C. Grayling talks about the importance of developing a questioning mind. Shaha quotes Ani DiFranco when she asks, 'What if God is just an idea/Someone put in your head?' In The Young Atheist's Handbook, Alom Shaha asks – and answers for himself – the question, 'What if God is just an outmoded concept we no longer require now that we have generated more data about our universe than any one of us can ever hope to successfully process?' And, by implication, he is also asking, 'What will it take for us as a species to accept that no life will be filled with unalloyed joy and good luck, and how can we learn to cope with misfortune without the crutch of religion while remaining good people?' His handbook is an attempt to answer that question on a supremely personal level, although, as he admits freely, it is not precisely a handbook.

Alom takes us on his journey of loss, inconsolable grief, defiance, and ultimately the acceptance of his lack – rather than his loss – of faith. Part of that journey includes an examination of the familial and socio-cultural pressures put on children to accept and observe a faith they are not permitted to question.   Islam may be the most difficult of the world's major religions in this sense, as the form in which it is exported throughout the world often amounts to the prophet's words being repeated and  obeyed without translation, study or debate. (I should hasten to add that I am not an expert on Islam – or on any other religion, although my own defiant and questioning attitude made me, shall we say, an unsuitable candidate for Sunday School).


Growing up on a Council estate in London as the eldest surviving child of five, Shaha was one of many Bangladeshi children transplanted to the UK during the 1970s. By the time he was 13 he had experienced the death of his bipolar mother and had begun to confront his own personal truth: that if he could not believe in the concept of heaven, he did not, in fact, have faith.

'with my mother dead and a deep lack of respect for my father, I was relieved of the reason why many atheists I know, particularly ex-Muslim ones, continue to pretend to be religious. I no longer had a desire to “protect” my parents from being upset, or from being “shamed”. I was free of the pressure to believe what my parents believed. But this is a pressure that most children have to live with well into adulthood, and it helps explain why ancient religions have managed to survive into the modern world.'

The Young Atheist's Handbook is simultaneously a subtly nuanced examination of the process of intellectual and emotional development as it applies to faith, and a work of creative nonfiction in which the author's memoir is interwoven with an admittedly superficial look at the role of religion in society. Shaha doesn't claim to be either a religious or a philosophical expert – but he doesn't hesitate to try to situate his own experiences within a broader context.

The combination of a tragic death (and, let's face it, life, as Shaha's mother seems to have been neither successfully diagnosed nor treated for bipolar disorder) and lack of respect for his surviving parent led Shaha, at a time when the process of separation and individuation is probably most acute (adolescence) to seek answers in science rather than religion. And in studying science and becoming a secondary school science teacher, Shaha has been able to accept uncertainty and take consolation from the scientific process:

'science wasn't about certainty and rigid facts, but rather a process that made use of deduction, logic, rationality, observation, and experimentation to draw what are ultimately tentative conclusions, leaving the way open for better explanations or theories.... Science offers us a uniquely successful way of understanding the world and our place in it; it can provide intellectual thrills like nothing else; and it is, possible, the greatest of humanity's cultural achievements.'

While it may seem – to those of us from less rigid cultural backgrounds – that a book like this is self-evident and perhaps unnecessary in 2012, an email a friend shared with me recently leads me to conclude it is not the case. Close to 1000 words in that email were expended on the need to ensure a three-year-old wasn't abandoned to the Canadian 'public' school system but would be enrolled in a 'Christian' school instead (with fees of up to $10,000 per year). The email from the child's grandparent included an offer to help with and/or assume the tuition costs.

I have often wondered, as a person who has never had faith, how we can help ourselves and our children to create our own moral frameworks without that debate being framed by theologians of one brand or another – how do we even manage to have the debate about right and wrong, what is moral and what is immoral, if we don't even set aside an hour a week as individuals and family members to talk about these things? While The Young Atheist's Handbook doesn't precisely answer that question, I am somewhat consoled by the following:

'Scientific evidence points to the fact that our morality is a product of our biology and our evolutionary history, and research suggests that we are all endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong.... religion simply provides us with an easy way to express and share it [moral behaviour]. There is no need to invoke the existence of God to explain why humans are moral creatures.'

Disclosure statement: A copy of the Australian edition of The Young Atheist's Handbook was given to me by the author. Currently available in Canada only as an ebook, but I'm hoping that will change soon (October 2012).