Less God, More Singing; Brooklyn Fathiests Get That Old Time Religion

I feel a Sunday Styles feature coming on (.pdf):

Gina Duclayan lights one candle and then another and intones a familiar sounding prayer.

“Baruch ha-or ba-olam (radiant is the light within the world),” she says, closing her eyes and moving her hands from the candles to her chest, if inviting in some higher power.

“Baruch ha-or-ba-shabbat.” It is Friday night and Duclayan and husband Daniel Radosh are lighting Shabbos candles and saying a prayer over challah and wine (substituting grape juice for wine, so their children can also partake) like many Jewish couples all over Brooklyn.

But there is one main difference: Duclayan and Radosh don’t believe in God. Call them “the new fatheists,” growing number of Brooklynites who are turned off to organized religion — there’s just too much “God begat this” and “God smote that” for them — yet still need spirituality in their lives.

. . .

[Religion inspiring the best in Mankind is] what drives atheist Arthur Strimling to services at Kolot Chayeinu, a Jewish congregation in Park Slope that’s so liberal that the mission statement says, “Doubt can be an act of faith.”

“My grandfather and father were staunch atheists, and so am I,” Strimling said. “But am of the generation that saw Martin Luther King and other ministers defending the best values, with courage and fortitude, in the name of God.

“You don’t need God to do those things, but it proved to me that spiritual hunger is not something I wanted to fully extinguish in myself.”

So when Rabbi Ellen Lippmann talks about the Torah, Strimling finds himself interested, even if he doesn’t believe the passages.

“Reading the Torah is about examination,” he said. “It’s creative and humanizing process and I love that. In the Torah, God is a complicated idea. If I believe in anything, it’s that humans’ hunger for God is so universal that it can’t be ignored. It must be in the DNA.”

Or as atheist Lee Pardee, who attends Unitarian services, put it: I may be an atheist, but I love singing in the chorus!

“When I first joined this congregation, I was so pleased by the songs. There’s no God in them! It’s just like church, but all the words have been fixed,” Pardee added.

“I can actually sing the hymns and believe in them.”