Reed Secular Alliance

How I Live Out My Secular Values

By:  Leslie A. Zukor

Leslie Zukor proudly wears an irreverent t-shirt

Editor’s Note:  Leslie Zukor is the founder and President of the Reed Secular Alliance at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.  She is a Senior Anthropology major and an avid photographer, squirrel enthusiast, and baseball fan.  Zukor aspires to be an author and social activist.

Before I was an atheist, I didn’t believe that people could be good without god. In my conservative worldview, humans were divided into two camps, those who were good and those who were evil. Prisoners were all evil people, whose sinfulness had condemned them to a life of harsh punishment. After all, they needed draconian penalties to correct their immoral actions. Only those who had faith in an all-just and all-powerful god and lived a perfect life were worthy of my respect. However, by the time I graduated from high school, my right-wing worldview had begun to crumble.

Although I was a conservative during high school, it was reading Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian the summer before college that led to the undoing of my religious faith. Through perusing freethinking authors, I learned that atheists were not all dirt-worshiping materialists. In point of fact, non-believers had the same moral aspirations as did everybody else. Armed with this new-found understanding, I put my theistic beliefs under the microscope. And upon further inspection, I concluded that the preponderance of the evidence pointed toward there being no god.

After my atheist transformation, I understood that there was no god to rescue me, no divine being to reward good people with heaven and punish the wicked with hell. Rather, I had to take my own initiative here on earth to create a more just society. Furthermore, as the result of my experience with people, I have learned that “good” and “evil” are merely approximations of an individual’s total moral compass. People are shaped by their biology, the environment, and their own free choices, making them complex beings who are hardly wholly heavenly or heinous.

As a result of my new-found understanding about human nature, I wanted to help people who are often neglected by our society. Thus, as a sophomore in college, I started the Freethought Books Project, to give atheist, humanist, and freethinking literature to inmates and others in need across the United States. Freethinking literature had opened up a whole new world of human-based ethics in my life, and I believed that it had the same potential among prisoners. And it was through corresponding with the incarcerated that I truly lived out my secular values.

After corresponding with thirty inmates, I realized that the incarcerated are not all evil sociopaths, destined for divine punishment. Rather, there are a million possible reasons for why someone could be in prison, including victimless crimes such as cannabis use. While it is sometimes taxing to communicate with those who have committed great crimes, the best we can do for inmates is to inspire the critical inquiry that leads to minds being freed and rational thought about their current condition. Personally speaking, my non-theist creed is to promote justice in this our only shot at life on earth.