Religious narratives are compelling because we really want to know things and we really love stories. Cooperating in larger and larger groups is what has driven human progress and when groups of people accept a common story, this comforting certainty can be leveraged into communal action.

The problem is that there are now many stories which conflict with each other and are continually being refuted by the new knowledge we acquire. This blog and my book will make the argument that we are now ready for a new story, a story based on what we know and how we know it rather than one which attempts to explain what we don’t.

While there is no limit to the number of stories we could have, the truth is singular and therefore able to unite us in a way no other story could. While absolute truths are truly rare, we do have a way to root out what is most likely to be true: That is reason. And it’s our superpower. Almost all of the knowledge that humans possess collectively – the knowledge that built the wonders of the modern world – is what reason has revealed to be our current best explanation, the one most likely to be true.

Like other religions, New Atenism’s story includes creation, blessings, sin and redemption. The difference is that New Atenism’s story is based on our knowledge rather than mythical explanations of the unknown. Reason has now created enough knowledge to form a belief system, a religion, which will unite us behind the true story that can supercharge human progress. Like other religious narratives, this story will connect us to something larger than ourselves, raising us up to see each other and our world as one giant, interconnected organism. The launching pad for almost all religions is divine revelation, a story of one particular human having a direct encounter with God. In our story, the divine is all that ever has or ever will exist and is revealed to all of us collectively using reason. Each time we learn a new, true thing, or update an existing one, we learn one more thing about everything, about God. While this “everything” view of God embraces reason’s power, it also acknowledges its limitations. Through the narrow window of our perception, we employ our limited cognitive capabilities to uncover only a tiny slice of the infinite.

Our story begins with a description of a religious experience shared by hundreds of people and for which we have mountains of supporting evidence—including photographs and video. Viewing the Earth from space, something made possible by centuries of knowledge developed by reason, lifted the 600-odd astronauts who had this experience into a transcendent state of unity across humanity. This experience requires no belief in the supernatural and yet connected these astronauts to something far higher than themselves, an inspiring global consciousness. It also reveals how fragile life on our planet is, protected from the harshness of space by the thinnest of blue lines.

From there we’ll explore reason and religion, how they’re different, how they conflict with each other, how they are both misunderstood and ultimately, how they can work together. We will then expand and frame our story in four tenets, the core beliefs of New Atenism. We will begin with a definition of God that comes from a 17^th century philosopher, supported by a brilliant 20^th century physicist. Then we will dig up an Egyptian pharaoh who ruled 3,300 years ago who, in addition to giving us “Atenism,” made cosmological claims about the power of his sun god that reason has revealed to be true. We will also see that almost everything else he claimed has been falsified. The “New” in “New Atenism” is what reason has revealed. A belief system based on reason must always be open to being updated by new knowledge we acquire.

Our story then moves inward to the urges and instincts which drive us and how we use reason to embrace the helpful ones and reject the harmful ones. We will also see how, inside the walls of our own mind, it is very difficult to do this effectively and that it is most often collective reason that lifts us up out of the bonds of our own biases and blind spots to lead us to the truth. It is collective reason that has built a canon of human knowledge so vast that no one person could possibly possess more than a tiny fraction of it. Collective reason is both the engine of human knowledge and its quality control program, constantly testing our current best explanations to improve, expand or reject them. Like the supernatural spirits found in other religious narratives, you can’t see, taste, touch or smell reason but it is working all the time, all over the world, to develop the knowledge that brings blessings to our lives. Unlike those supernatural spirits, the evidence that reason is what provides those blessings is overwhelming.

We will also see reason’s limitations. Reason can only be applied to the reality we perceive which is likely to be only a thin layer of all there is. The fact that we’ve developed instruments which greatly expand our perceptive abilities, such as telescopes, microscopes and spectroscopes, has established there is reality that lies beyond our ability to directly perceive it. In addition, the process of reason requires us to not only question what we believe but to invite others to question our beliefs. It is both easier and more comforting to accept a compelling story we’ve heard, or an intuition we feel, as the truth than to wait humbly and patiently for the process of reason to sort it out. Acquiring and verifying knowledge can be time consuming and frustrating. Concepts get run through reason’s culture of criticism where they are either falsified or assigned some sort of likelihood of being true but rarely provide complete certainty. While you can easily accept religious narratives, compelling stories and your own intuitions as absolute truths, this comforting certainty is an illusion. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, reason is the worst way to find truth, except for all the other ones.

The redemption in our story can be found in a virtuous circle of prosperity comprised of reason, knowledge, progress and belief in reason. The more individuals who believe in reason, employ it in their lives and support its collective use, the more knowledge and progress we’ll achieve. This spreads belief in reason, beginning the circle anew. Spreading prosperity and linking reason to that prosperity will bring more and more people into the paradise we already live in rather than hoping for an afterlife that is most likely not coming. Most people in the developed world lead lives which would seem like paradise to nearly all of the 100 billion humans who have ever lived. People who bask in the benefits of civilization, and there are still many today who are not yet so fortunate, often fail to connect this remarkable prosperity to its true source: reason. New Atenism describes these people as “Followers” and those who acknowledge reason’s role in creating the knowledge which produced this paradise as “Seekers.” We will see how Seekers drive that virtuous circle, lifting those who still live outside of civilization’s benefits into Followers and Followers into Seekers.    

One might argue that we already have a word for a belief system based on reason, humanism. Humanism promotes rationality by placing emphasis on the value and agency of human beings. It promotes compassion, and the pursuit of human welfare and fulfillment. At its core, humanism holds that we have the capability and responsibility to lead ethical lives and to contribute to the betterment of society through reason, empathy, and critical thinking, rather than relying on gifts and guidance from a supernatural deity. Humanism emphasizes dignity, equality, and the importance of individual freedoms, while also promoting the advancement of knowledge, science, and education for the betterment of humanity.

New Atenism is a partner philosophy of Humanism that amplifies its ideals while expanding them by offering a spiritual dimension for those who crave meaning without dogma. While New Atenism uses terms, like “God” and “spirit,” which may make some humanists a bit queasy, the “Seeker” path does not require them to accept, use, or even believe in, those terms. While we’d love for as many people as possible to identify as New Atenists, it is not a requirement to becoming a Seeker who drives the virtuous circle of human prosperity.

While there is overlap between New Atenism and Humanism, there are differences too—one of the most significant being how reason itself is viewed. Humanism traditionally emphasizes individual reason and autonomy as central to ethical behavior and social improvement. Ironically, reason has revealed, via newly acquired knowledge in psychology and neuroscience, that we’re nowhere near as good at reasoning individually as we like to think. Our instincts, urges and emotions more often hijack our ability to reason in order to rationalize our desires rather than regulate them. This is bringing change to humanist thought and a new breed of contemporary humanists, people like Daniel Kahneman and Jonathan Haidt, are emerging and gaining influence. New Atenism believes that while learning to use reason to filter and regulate our individual urges is an important task that all should undertake, the societal norms, customs and laws crafted by collective reason guide human behavior far more effectively. Members of a club that bestows benefits which are contingent upon certain behaviors have a powerful incentive to follow that club’s rules. The greater the benefits of membership, the greater the incentive to follow those rules. The direct relationship between the level of benefit club membership bestows and the level of behavioral control required of and adhered to by its members can be seen in families, neighborhoods, communities and countries.

Collective reason is the invisible force that drives human progress. The knowledge it creates and verifies and the morality it continually refines are unseen and yet we know that it is working all of the time, all over the world and has been for centuries. Reason is the agent and spirit of human progress. This spiritual element of New Atenism contrasts with humanism’s more secular and naturalistic approach. There are other differences between Humanism and New Atenism’s story, including the source and evolution of morality and a concept of the divine, which will be explored in this blog and the pages of this book. I’m confident, however, that many humanists, whether they identify as such or just hold humanist values, will realize that they are already Seekers, living in the spirit of reason.

We can have a religion that binds us together behind what is most likely to be true rather than dividing us across a vast spectrum of faiths that make truth claims unsupported by evidence. We can retain many of religion’s benefits, like communal comfort and support and becoming part of something larger than ourselves, while recapturing religion’s place as a driver of human progress. New Atenism is the religion whose story has been revealed by reason as most likely to be true. You will see how embracing the spirit of reason will lead to progress in your own life while raising you up to something larger than yourself by contributing to humanity’s progress.

Religions are fond of telling you what you should believe and New Atenism is no exception. The difference is that rather than directing you to accept a religious authority’s claim of special access to knowledge of the divine, New Atenists believe reason develops and verifies divine knowledge for all of us. The process of reason is the collective enterprise which continually builds and verifies the knowledge that brings blessings and progress. You should believe in reason because it has been proven over and over again to be the agent of progress in our world. Believing in reason also means acknowledging its limits. While reason has developed a vast canon of knowledge that has transformed our world and dramatically improved our lives, there is still far more that is unknown, and likely even more that is unknowable. In the land beyond what reason has revealed lie thousands of stories which purport to explain the unknown. While these stories can provide comfort and foster cooperation, when these different stories are accepted as divine truths, conflict, often deadly, between them becomes inevitable. Reason is the best tool humans have come up with to sort fact from fiction, so it is reason’s story that has the best chance of uniting us.

Why a new religion? Aren’t people becoming less and less religious? This will be the subject of my next post.