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The supernatural of no account . . . .
myself waiting my time to be one of the supremes

“Song of Myself” Section 41, Line 1045
— Walt Whitman

    I. Introduction
    Atheist poetics is an advocacy of the human and the natural in poetry and the elimination of the religious and the magical. Atheist poetics is not simply a reflexive rejection of notions of god/s or religion, but an affirmation of poetry (and literature) expressed through human understanding and experience. The aim of atheist poetics is to focus thought and expression in the experiential world (material and mental) and to call out the open-ended attribution of causality and wonder to an imaginary force or being.
    Defining what constitutes poetry is a notably difficult task. Definition after definition seems to invite a contradiction that is poetry of a different sort, but poetry all the same. Published poetry and performances provide a range of examples that demonstrate the variety and breadth of poetic expression that fit under a recognizable rubric, but complicate a concise definition. Perhaps it is more productive to think of poetry as a set of linguistic devices rather than as an aesthetic, the aesthetic results deriving from the artistic use of poetic elements of language. This definition is intended to be more openly inclusive of poetic, and by extension, literary forms.
    Likewise, religion is understood broadly in terms of belief systems, the religious experience of individuals, and the physical expression or portrayal of beliefs. In the first case, religion refers to beliefs regarding a divine being or beings, the philosophy advocated by a divine being, and the narratives, such as origin stories, lives of saints, moral tales, history, and mythologies, of the religion. Personal experience includes feelings and emotional states attributed to an interaction with a divine or the sense of a divine presence, for example through an appreciation of nature. The physical expression of religion refers to ceremonies and observances, but also includes architectural structures (such as temples and holy sites), amulets, trinkets, and items used in ceremonies. The organizations of religion, such as denominations, synods, congregations, and priesthoods, are also included.
    In regard to literary allusions to religion, atheist poetics argues that the speculative and unsubstantiated reference set afforded by religion is invalid as a source of analogy. Referencing religion invokes illusory assumptions and attributes. In some cases, primarily monotheistic, poetic references to the divine are sweeping and vague. In other cases, particularly in polytheisms, the references access a world of supernatural powers and feats that are more specific, but no more credible. Atheist poetics advocates empirical experience that does not applaud, but does not exclude, fantasy, except where that fantasy involves concepts dependent on divine powers, eternal life, or any religious practice or doctrine.
    It may be argued (with merit) that religion is itself a human fantasy. The distinction for atheist poetics is that science-based fantasy adheres to quantifiable worlds whereas religious fantasy posits belief in spiritual, mystical, and magical powers that elude human explanation — the work of god/s. Religion is taken on faith and believed to be indisputable. Fantasy is speculative and bounded by stated physical parameters; its readers know they encounter an imaginary world.
    The prescriptive side of atheist poetics is partially summed up in William Carlos Williams’ notion of “no ideas, but in things,” (see Ed Wickliffe, “Historical View of W.C. Williams’: ‘No Ideas But in Things’” https://triggerfishcriticalreview.com/historical-view-of-wcwilliams-no-ideas-but-in-things-by-ed-wickliffe/ for a review of how Williams’ statement has been interpreted.) However, as much as atheist poetics emphasizes human and material elements, it does not exclude ideas, concepts, philosophies, and speculations based in human experience, except those that provide or speculate on some divine essence or supernatural explanation, unless it is to challenge those concepts. Satires of religion or works that convey an explicit or implicit critique of religion express one objective of atheist poetics, but are not the full extent of its aesthetic. Atheist poetics proposes a poetry of the real world as understood through human perception and experience.
    Establishing the objections of atheist poetics to religious reference constitutes an implicit critique of religion and engages religion as both belief and practice. The basis of religious belief is speculative, and its expression in religious narrative and ceremony elaborates that speculation to its detriment as a source of poetic allusion. Establishing the case against religious representation in poetry (and other forms of literature) delineates a variety of ways in which religious reference underperforms in poetic and literary settings.
    Following the essay, three appendices take up religion as a product of narrative; the relationship between atheist poetics and humanism; and belief versus lying.

    (A usage note: the word God will be capitalized when it refers to a specific deity, but not when it refers to a general concept of a deity.)

    II. What’s Wrong with God (as a Poetic Reference)?

    The problem with religious reference in poetry can be explained through both an internal and an external critique. Internal critiques come from religionists who object to the use of religious reference, roughly speaking, because it represents a form of hyperbole. The external critique comes from an atheist perspective, which points out the numerous unfounded claims of religion and thereby forms an implicit recognition of hyperbole.

    II.1 Two Internal Critiques
    The poet Richard Wilbur offers one example of an internal critique of religious reference in poetry. Although Wilbur self-identifies as “some sort of Catholic Christian,” he notes that his poetry does not “make much use of Christian symbol or doctrine.” The reason is, “because I cannot bear to borrow the voltage of highly-charged words,” (Butts, ed., 1990, p.42). Wilbur adds that a reader sees through such language “as one sees through the panoply of a stupid ceremony,” (op. cit.). In his perspective, “Poetry full of ready-made emotional value will also not represent the movement of the mind and heart toward understanding and clarification, and poetry has to be discovery rather than the celebration of received ideas,” (op. cit.).
    This “sort of Christian” poet’s aesthetic is in step with the atheist poetics view of appropriating readymade religious language to stand as poetic images. Religious imagery becomes a focus of atheist poetics as one particular category within the larger understanding that appropriating any readymade image weakens and impairs poetic expression, something of a given for writing better poetry.
    A second internal critique comes from Samuel Johnson. In Lives of the English Poets, Johnson argues that while a poet may describe any number of the wonders of nature, “that of the description is not God, but the works of God,” (Bennett, p.136). He adds that the effort of the poet is misplaced, or perhaps misapprehended, in making references to nature as god. Johnson’s distinction between god and nature is well taken (an issue addressed below).
    Johnson also observes that, “Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer,” (op. cit., p.137). The merits of this argument may hold more interest for those with a vested religious position than for a critique based on atheist poetics, but that aside, it may be noted Johnson lays the fault with poetry for being unworthy to express the sublimity of religion, not with religion itself. That said, Johnson’s summary dismissal of religious reference in poetry arrives at the same conclusion as the atheist critique: religious reference in poetry is unwarranted.

    II.2 External Critique
    Atheist poetics argues against the validity of poetic (and literary) allusions to divinity and religion. The short of atheist poetics is that literary allusions to the divine are a technique of cheating — an appeal to broad, ambiguous assumptions and attributes that draw on an unsubstantiated reference on the one hand and constitute an under-specified analogy on the other. In contemporary terms, “god” is a trigger word, as are other religious words such as, “heaven,” “hell,” etc.
    The external or atheist critique of religious reference in poetry builds on a number of objections taken up in the following sections:
    II.2.1 — the unfounded assumption of a god or gods,
    II.2.2— the supposed higher powers and mysterious abilities attributed to divinity,
    II.2.3— the assumption that the powers of the divine are absolute,
    II.2.4— that nature is not a product of god, exists with or without the human presence, and does not exist to serve as an object for human wonder.
    II.2.5— the assumption that every reader associates the same abilities and attributes to this higher power, or stated another way, that every believer believes in the same god, and
    II.2.6— that god or the gods represent an indefinite reference.

    II.2.1 The Assumption of a God or Gods
    The unquestioned assumption of a god or gods underlies any atheist objection to religious reference. If religionists demand to be taken at their word, or on faith, that their beliefs are valid, atheists demand proof. Atheist objections to belief in a divinity and the practice of religion fall broadly into four categories: 1) the shared understanding with agnostics that humans are not capable of discerning whether anything such as a divine entity exists, 2) the doubt that, despite not being able to answer the question of a divine existence, divine creation is not a cogent explanation for the physical world, 3) the wide range of definitions of the divine in various religions offer an array too broad and contradictory to rationalize, and 4) all reifications of the divine are anthropomorphic or humanized zoomorphs.
    II.2.1.1 Humans Are Incapable of Discerning the Divine
    As agnostics, and some schools of philosophy, correctly point out, humans have to recognize there are things in existence we cannot perceive, and things we can perceive but cannot explain. Those conditions can be frightening. The desire for the comfort of religion is easily understood. However, this understanding does not validate a belief in divinity — only the desire for it.
    The existence of a perception or condition that is not readily accessible to logical explanation is not evidence that the perception or condition is mystical, magical, or generated by some extraterrestrial cosmic being or force. Religionists who argue in favor of the idea of religious mystery and the necessity of faith tacitly acknowledge that the full nature and extent of “god” cannot be known, which is essentially the agnostic argument.
    Any number of occurrences and conditions that were once beyond rational explanation are now easily understood. As knowledge expands, things that were mysteries at one time, even for centuries, are now accepted as routine — gravity and heliocentrism are two well-established examples. Conditions that exist beyond ready, logical description do not validate speculative explanations as a convincing rationale. This is especially true of religious rationales that attempt to interpret difficult-to-comprehend phenomena with preexisting formulae.
    Given this basis of understanding, for atheist poetics, references to god are without foundation, because the notion of god is without foundation. As Kurt Vonnegut illustrated with his analogy to god and religion as a cat’s cradle in the novel of the same name, “Where’s the cat? Where’s the cradle?”
    II.2.1.2 Divine Creation Is Not a Cogent Explanation
    Among the numerous explanations inaccessible to human perception is the question of the world’s origins. Mystical, magical, imaginative, or religious exegeses do not become definitive ontologies merely by asserting their authority. Simply stated, divine creation is not a credible explanation for the world’s existence — whether it is the six days of creation described in Genesis, the ancient Greek notion of creation gelling from chaos (not unlike the first day in Genesis), or the Hopi explanation of an earth of receding waters populated with animals formed from clay and brought to life by deities of hard surfaces (a familiar motif from Genesis, though it must be noted that the Greeks and Hopi and many other cultures with similar myths utilized these tropes independent of Hebrew mythology).
    A much wider sample of origin stories could easily be argued, but the essence of citing any of them is this: all origin stories derive from explanations based in fantasy. There are no known generative forces that can replicate the feats described in any religion’s creation story. The discoveries of science — in particular geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology — have demonstrated fact-based explanations, that may not be absolute and definitive to the minds of resolute religionists, but are far more credible and demonstrable than the origin myths of any religion. Atheist or not, it is safe to say the world was not created by magic, and therefore, poetic assertions of that trope do not bear validity. Further, it is telling that so many origin myths begin with some inchoate, swirling mass, a tacit admission of not understanding where the known world came from.
    II.2.1.3 Widely Varying and Contradictory Notions of the Divine
    The wide range of definitions of the divine in various religions offer an array too broad and contradictory to rationalize with an unqualified reference to “god.” Who god is, or what god is, depends on whom you ask. Every religion has its notions of the nature and attributes of god, but as the various religions and the divisions within them demonstrate, the range of divine identities is broad, widely varied, and contradictory. Examples should not be necessary to contrast the familiar conceptions of a supreme being in the contemporary monotheisms of Judaism (Yahweh), Christianity (Christ), and Islam (Allah). Within those monotheisms (a term that loses its descriptive rigor considering the various schisms that divide them) there are three or more sects of Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform); Protestant and Catholic Christians, with multiple subdivisions under each; and three or more divisions of Islam (Sunni, Shia, Wahabi, plus smaller sects).
    Likewise, a relatively educated reader can reference from memory the characters of divinities in the mythologies of historical religions (Greek, Norse, Celtic), and those with anthropological knowledge, the characteristics attributed to divinity in surviving ethno-religions (Native American, African, Australian Aboriginal). Given this large and varied pool of reference, allusions to “god” point to a vague, or at best, an ill-defined, referent.
    II.2.1.4 Anthropomorphic/Zoomorphic Gods
    While agnosticism — a cautious “I don’t know” — may be the only logically sustainable position on religious belief, atheists argue the falsity of religion on additional grounds. “A-theism” — without theism — is a rejection of religion, religious belief, and religious practice because, among other reasons, all gods are unbelievable projections of human characteristics onto some imaginary super-being. As has been observed by Voltaire and numerous others that god made man in his image, and man returned the favor. It is this anthropomorphism, this projection of human traits onto a supposed divine, in such allusions as “the hand of god,” “the mind of god,” “the will of god,” or any of a number of tropes, that exposes the human invention of divinity in human form.
    The notion that god made humans in his image is a reverse formation, a post hoc rationalization to elevate and validate humans’ self-image, and possibly to justify human dominance of the natural world. The anthropomorphization of divinity offers the understanding that humans are trapped in a hermeneutic of self-reference and cannot invent outside their own reference set.
    The supposition that the world was “created” is a further extension of human methods to the divine — that is, the assumption that for the universe to exist, it had to be made. Given the limits of human perception and understanding, we cannot (yet?) know how the universe was formed or what preceded it. Therefore, notions of a humanlike creator stand as suspect formulations that can only prompt a false reference.
    The zoomorphic gods of animistic religions demonstrate a secondary form of anthropomorphism when they display human characteristics and perform human roles and behaviors. Even more clearly than with polytheistic gods, such as those of the Greek and Roman pantheons, spirit animals evidence the mapping of human traits and behaviors onto imaginary divine beings.

    II.2.2 Supposed Higher Powers and Abilities
    The supposed higher powers and mysterious abilities attributed to various manifestations of the divine are supernatural and/or magical. Whether it is the Old Testament god parting the sea, Zeus shapeshifting into a swan or white bull, Shiva assuming any of sixty-four forms, or any of a vast number of divine inventions from the mythologies of all religions, the powers are fantastical and reside outside the capabilities of human beings and thus lack credibility within human experience. (With regard to magical powers cited in the Old Testament, it might be noted that the parting of the sea has also been attributed to a land bridge that was exposed at low tide, as are the land bridges to Lindesfarne Island and to the Broch of Birsay, north of Orkney Island. The story of Lot’s wife turned to salt has been attributed to a place legend attached to a geological formation of salt near the ancient sites of Sodom and Gomorrah that resembles the shape of a woman.)
    As to the attributed powers of various gods, superpowers are just that: beyond the capability of human beings. It may be an appealing fantasy that a god can hurl lightning bolts, change humans into animals or plants, affect the weather, send guidance, or foretell the future, but those attributes remain fantasies. Using them as poetic allusions merely engages Wilbur’s admonition against accessing “readymade emotional value[s].”
    Aside from physical feats, another manifestation of magic is found in notions of an afterlife and powers of redemption. Most, but not all, religions offer some form of life after death, but as no one has come back to confirm that supposition. Heaven, hell, purgatory, nirvana, Valhalla, Hades, Elysian Fields, the Happy Hunting Grounds, and other afterworlds remain speculative projections, as does belief in redemption from sin or some other form of cleansing of bad behaviors in life. Referencing them remains a false allusion.

    II.2.3 Divine Authority: Ultimate, Absolute, and Unquestioned
    The poetic weakness of vague and undifferentiated references to god as the infinite degree of comparison or the ultimate metaphor are compounded by the assumption that the powers of the divine are absolute: if god said it or did it, it must be true, sublime, unassailable. This assumption compounds the false authority described above.
    With god, mysterious abilities don’t need to be explained. As the ultimate source of power and authority, what could be more or better? When this underlying assumption is presented as a validation of allusions to the divine, the inference is that the association cannot be challenged: referencing god is the ultimate statement. Except not everyone believes in god, and those who do have some widely divergent concepts of who and what god is.

    II.2.4 Nature Is Not the Work of God
    The wonders of nature are frequently cited as the work of god, as evidence of god, or as a sign of god’s benevolence toward humans. While Samuel Johnson, among numerous others, may assert that god is the source of nature, he, she, or it is not. In Western tradition, this negation goes back at least as far as Lucretius’ De Rarum Natura (c. 60 BCE), which memorializes the philosophy of Epicurus (d. 270 BCE), and likely much farther. (See Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Doubt, A History for a catalog of opposition to religious belief in cultures around the world.) Among other observations, Lucretius points out that the universe has no creator or designer, nor is it about or intended for humankind, a point addressed below.
    Reference to nature as the work of a god is a false attribution. Scientific explanations may not have nailed down an incontrovertible understanding of the universe, its origin, and the place of our planet in it, but the fantastical etiologies of various religions provide no heuristic substance. Nothing in any religion’s origin stories or mythologies regarding the creation of individual items in nature offer credible evidence of the “hand” of god/s — an anthropomorphization we accept without second thought.
    The natural world was not created to inspire human delight and awe. The “wonders of nature” remain the same with or without human observation and the human-imposed perception of beauty. Nature is what it is and does what it does for reasons that have nothing to do with divine authorship or creating beauty and wonder for humans to observe.
    Moreover, beauty, as has long been remarked, is in the eye of the beholder. What is beautiful to one observer may be ordinary or even repulsive to another. In addition to the dubious question of divine creation, to ascribe the beauty of nature to a god, or some divine force, begs the question of the subjectivity of beauty. To have a god create an object that is beautiful to one person but without merit to another negates the concept of god/s as a source of natural beauty.
    In short, atheist poetics would agree with Samuel Johnson that nature is not god, but draw the line at regarding nature as the work of god, thus invalidating poetic attribution of the beauty and wonder of nature to divine creation and dismissing the proposition that nature’s beauty was created for the benefit of humans. As Thomas Gary proclaimed in “Elegy in a Country Church-yard,” (cited somewhat ironically here),
    “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
    And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”

    II.2.5 Readers Bring Different Associations to Religious References
    The use of god and religious imagery as canned references is an easy, but sloppy, device, as any given allusion may have a variety of meanings for different readers — or no basis for recognition at all. The supposition that every reader associates the same attributes to a particular religious allusion is inherently unsustainable given the wide range of denominations and divisions of belief. For example, past editions of The Handbook of Denominations have listed more than 600 Protestant denominations in the United States alone, each with enough doctrinal differences from other denominations to be considered a standalone entity. The diversity only increases with consideration of non-Christian religions, such as Judaism and Islam, the polytheisms of ancient Greece and Rome, and other historical religions, as well as the beliefs of vestigial and tribal cultures.
    More directly, what association is any individual poet attempting to access within a chosen reservoir of religious references? Does it become necessary for a reader to know the poet is “some sort of Catholic Christian,” or a Church of England quasi-evangelical, as John Newton was, a Buddhist ascetic, or a conflicted Jesuit, to be able to interpret their poetry? Poetry would lose some, if not all, its aesthetic effect by having to explain doctrinal stances in verse, although, to Samuel Johnson’s chagrin, there have been rhetorical poems that offer something of that approach. (John Newton’s “Amazing Grace,” is but one example.) More commonly, references to god are generic, which intensifies the question of just what a religious allusion made by a poet means, and to whom.
    The argument here has to do with ambiguity of reference as opposed to polyvalence, which becomes a strained concept in the context of religious allusion. As Aldous Huxley has Mr. Proper point out in After Many a Summer Dies the Swan (1993, p.136), “spirit” is “about the most ambiguous word in the language.” By extension, as much may be said for spirituality.
    In contrast to the argument presented here, and to give the devil his due, Anthony Burgess professes in Urgent Copy (1967, p.86) that “the symbols of Christianity are drenched with suggestive richness, and any Western artist who rejects them is a fool.” With full respect to Anthony Burgess, he was an avowed, if lapsed, Catholic, so he is inherently biased toward Christianity, more particularly Catholicism, which is rife with appropriations from pagan religions, as evidenced in the de facto polytheism of Catholic saints, so hardly an original source of symbols, which at any rate are religious and susceptible to the critiques of this essay.
    To further the point, considering the decline in religious affiliation in the western world and the increased mobility of global populations, how valuable are “the symbols of Christianity” in a time when societies are becoming less religious and more heterogenous — more a mix of cultures and declining religions with less depth of mutual knowledge or understanding?
    It is an obvious point, standard to all poetic reference, that the more broad, offhand, or reliant on received notions an allusion is, the less poetic significance it will achieve. That understanding is particularly relevant in referencing religion. The more specific a reference is to a god, gods, other aspects of belief, the more effective it is as a poetic trope. However, the underlying unsustainability of the notion of a divine power and the associated claims of religions remain to undercut the allusion.

    II.2.6 The God Dodge: God as Hyper-allegory
    Atheist poetics argues that god represents an indefinite reference — in practical usage, a catchall category. References to god provide vague and unsustainable attributions and analogies. Who or what is being referred to? Whose notion of god is being accessed and for what rhetorical intent? Referencing god or the gods is the rhetorical equivalent of saying, “you know what I mean” or “and all that stuff.” The reference is indefinite, broad, and open-ended. It draws upon some supposed general and unarticulated understanding of godly powers and attributes.
    When poetry (and other forms of literature) deal with emotion, the expression of feelings can be difficult to quantify in explicit terms, as opposed to describing a material object, for example. Analogy and metaphor can provide models for conveying an understanding of an emotional state, but even then, may have difficulty expressing the magnitude or force of feeling. Allusions to religious terms — god, heaven, hell, eternity — can imply a referent for large and vague emotions, but that is the root of the problem: sluffing off expression into nebulous references or references based on illusional concepts.
    It is the nature and strength of allegory to associate an extended set of references to a given referent. When the referent is vague or underdefined, the impact of the metaphor is diluted and the resulting connections are indistinct. A semantic disconnect can happen with any vague analogy, but it is endemic to religious analogy.

    III. One God, Many Gods: Atheist Poetics and Polytheism

    Atheists tend to be defined as people who don’t believe in god, a definition that derives from a monotheistic perspective — from people who believe in only one god. Atheists may equally be defined as people who don’t believe in “the gods.”
    The charge that god is an indefinite reference applies less to polytheistic religions because the individuated gods have specific characteristics and powers, and therefore, more definable points of reference. Polytheistic religions provide much more specificity in the natures, powers, and acts attributed to their pantheon of gods. Each god is afforded particular areas of protection and supernatural abilities. Many have some special tool or material symbol — from Roman mythology, for example, Vulcan the blacksmith with his hammer; Ceres, the goddess of the harvest with her sheaf of wheat. With these attributes come associations that provide allegorical range.
    On the other hand, the arguments that poetic references to the divine cheat by accessing a supposed higher power and by positing an incontrovertible source of authority are multiplied in a polytheistic context: one, because of the supernumerary cast of characters; and two, because each god bears an associated and differentiated array of powers and protections. In addition, the gods of polytheistic religions have a set of narratives that enumerate their exploits and delineate their interactions with humans and other gods: their alliances, their feuds, their contests, triumphs and defeats, their imposition of divine retribution on humans or on some aspect of nature. Some ready examples from Greek mythology are Prometheus chained to a rock where an eagle tears out his regenerating liver day after day or the change of seasons attributed to Persephone’s return to Hades once a year.
    The opportunities to reference the divine are multiplied with a pantheon, but the basic objection that the gods and their superpowers are illusory are multiplied in direct proportion.

    IV. Divine Illusions, Literary Allusions

    It could be argued that there is no distinction between making allusions to religious texts and to literary texts since in both cases, from the atheist perspective, the characters and stories are human generated. The difference, however, is concrete. Human characters have human dimensions, not magical or supernatural powers, not mystical domains, not omniscience and omnipotence. Humans have nothing beyond human range and capacity. Therefore, references to secular literary figures, aside from characters in fantasy writing, access attributes of human capability. While concepts of god and their elaboration in religion are also creations of human fantasy, and in that respect, referring to myth or sacred writing merely refers to another text, there is a significant contrast. Religious texts are mythical or magical in character: unfounded and unattested in any verifiable manner — not based in human experience, but in speculative fantasy.

    V. Human Experience as an Alternative to Religion

Well, I coulda had religion before my dying day,
but whiskey and women would not let me pray.
“Rollin’ and Tumblin’”
— Skip James

    Given that people invented gods and the words of gods, it follows that the guidance offered in religious sayings and maxims was also invented by humans. Consequently, good deal of what is presented by religion as moral insight is the essence of folk expression and common sense. Unsurprisingly, those same rules for order are codified in civil and criminal law, as well. That is because both religious and civil law are derived from the residue of human experience.
    Folk wisdom and common-sense values stand as the root of truth in human behavior and are verified by their persistent incorporation in culture. If the “folksiness” of the folk and their folklore have dwindled under the rise of industrialization and urbanization, the gist of folk wisdom remains in popular use, disguised in modern dress. Expressions so familiar they are labeled clichés are the guideposts of human behavior. Call them traditional wisdom.
    Further proof of the demotic origin of what is purported to be religious wisdom is evident in parallels with the law. Civil law and criminal law closely mirror religious proscriptions on human behavior, and that is because all arise from the same base — the literal sense of common law. Religious instruction on moral behavior is simply common sense — the logic of living in a communal group — which is then formulated in recognizable narrative forms and enforced with the threat of damnation. (Beyond civil and criminal restrictions, religions add prohibitions and punishments for violating a given religion’s principles, but that is self-preservation, akin to every religion’s demand that it be believed without question.)
    The key recognition is the congruence between what religion claims is right behavior and what the state claims is right behavior. The match is nearly perfect — not because the law follows religion, but because both sets of behavioral codes are generated from the same base conditions and the affective reactions produced by encouraging positive social behavior and punishing negative behavior.
    Some of the most obvious examples of parallel proscriptions on behavior in religious and secular law are don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t lie, don’t break up stable mating couples and families. All animals that live in herds or bands or flocks follow much the same restrictions, though without a written code.
    Simply stated, there is no divine source of law. References to the incontrovertibility of divine law or divine order evoke the same questionable authenticity as references to a divine being. As much may be said for any claim of religion’s moral authority or the divine origin of moral behavior.
    To argue that a work which displays the moral principles of a religion, or of religions in general, is inherently based on religion makes the false claim that morality is a product of religion. What is regarded as moral behavior is a product of rules for maintaining order in a gregarious species. Religion coopts those functional behaviors and enforces compliance with penances in the living world and threats of punishment in a supposed afterlife.

    V.1 Secular versus Sacred References
    As noted above, reference to a religious source is no different from a reference to a literary work, an understanding that acknowledges literature and religion are both human creations. A singular difference, however, is that religious reference self-identifies as being above mortal awareness or the human realm and thereby more sublime, a point that rings hollow to any but a believer’s ear — and depending on the believer, may still ring hollow by referencing a tenet not accepted by that believer.
    That literary works can explore characters and discover relationships is a foundational understanding. A great number of literary works in both poetry and fiction observe the tacit recognition that human beings must negotiate boundaries to live in contact with one another. All human relationships and the thousands of authors who have written about people and how we deal with each other validate that literature can live without alluding to god or religion by relying on observation of the human condition and personal or historical experiences.
    That line of argument may marginalize some literary genres. Nature poetry becomes more a poetry of the science of nature or the forces of natural world — an appreciation of nature not as “God’s Grandeur,” but rather as the capacity of humans to perceive beauty or wonder in nature. And even for that, beauty remains in the eye of the beholder.
    Science fiction and fantasy literature are less marginalized genres. They offer human-invented worlds where supernormal beings and powers exist, but these worlds are clearly labeled by genre as fiction and fantasy, even when they may be a projection of religion onto invented worlds. Set apart from acknowledged literary fabrications by its own claims of validity and truth, religion is, nonetheless, a privileged form of speculative fiction, and the privilege is the problem.

    VI. Atheist Poetics as a Threat to Religion

    Atheism is defined in the negative from the perspective of those who believe in a god, therefore, atheism is regarded as an assault or a nullification of all aspects of belief, of all the associated tenets and practices of believers.
    The threat of atheism is that it exposes the emperor (religion) without his clothes, by asserting there is no extraterrestrial or cosmic force that drives humanity. Eliminating religion from poetry may seem nihilistic, particularly with regard to the historical accumulation of religious poetry and religious references in poetry that are seemingly dismissed out of hand.
    Instead, atheist poetics recasts the critical evaluation of poetry, old and new. Writers who wrote overtly religious work come open to question on their basic premise, but their artistry remains. If their imagery becomes negatively freighted with reliance on allusion to religious belief and doctrinal practice, their craft is still in their lines. No honest atheist critic can deny Dante, Milton, or Hopkins their literary merits. Neither can they excuse the defects of lesser poets simply because their subject matter is religious.
    Atheist poetics does not argue for the elimination of god or religion from poetry or literature, but merely points out that those references require to be recognized for the deficiencies they reflect. Religion is granted free speech, and the same right is reserved for atheist poetics. That is, while religionists have the right to reference or advocate their beliefs, non-religionists are equally free to remark on the falsity of assumptions of god/s and of divine origins, powers, or influence in human activities.
    It does not diminish poetry to banish god. The same non-comprehendible and preternatural elements that attract religious references may still enter poetry, but regarded as matters of human awe and incomprehension, not as some divine attribute. With that understanding, atheist poetics makes poetry more honest, more attuned to its methods and objectives, and deletes open-ended reference — or at least one obvious source of it.
    A great deal of existing literature and poetry already meets the standards of atheist poetics, even without possessing the concept. It would be presumptuous, and perhaps offensive, to claim that one or another author subscribes to the tenets of atheistic poetics. However, any poem or literary work that eschews reference to religious imagery or belief is in de facto compliance with the precepts of atheist poetics. The viability of this writing is attested by its resilience in both mainstream and literary works, demonstrating that atheist poetics is not an altogether radical formulation, but rather an affirmation of established practice and an acknowledgement of the validity of that practice. Evidence is abundant from both contemporary and historical examples of the viability of literature that exists without god.

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