I don't believe that the song is saying specifically that an atheist world is a more peaceful world. The main message that I get is that if you can imagine that all of those things that divide us (religion, possessions, politics, country borders, etc.) didn't exist, then maybe you can imagine a world that we all share peacefully together. It's not realistic to think that all of these things can go away or that people would magically be peaceful without them, but just imagine a world where they never existed...

I don't think he's calling for an atheist world or that he is even calling for us to give up gods, possessions, etc,... I think he is sorta asking us to do what James Carroll is asking... that when we deal with people that we leave our shadows laying. For example, I view the no possessions as being more like make your decisions without being motivated by greed factor.

Here's a great graphic that builds on Lennon's theme:
   http://raycastle.typepad.com/raycastle/2010/09/imagine-no-religion.html

I think you're missing the point, Dan, when you lay the blame for violence at the feet of self-interest. It certainly is not SELF interest that leads to suicide bombing (or even tithing, to quote a much less pernicious example). On the contrary, it's self-abnegation which leads to such actions, the sense that one's own self is somehow unworthy or inferior, and the only way you can gain meaning or be personally significant in this life is to subordinate yourself to some greater cause. Religion has always stood at the ready to claim the allegiance of such self-doubting, insecure people.

Does religion in and of itself lead to violence? Clearly not, as the vast, overwhelming majority of religious people are just as nice as you and I and equally horrified at all the slauters, pogroms, terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, etc. that have historically been conducted in the NAME of religion. But, while religion itself is not necessarily the motivator for such actions, it's clearly available as a VALIDATOR of them, for those who are so inclined. Hitler couldn't have waged his holy war against the Jews if he hadn't been building on a long-standing, solid foundation of anti-Semitism promoted as official doctrine by both the Catholic and Lutheran Churches in Germany.

I think Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg summed it up best: "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things, and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion."

It's an attitude or approach worth exploring in order to put the focus on getting along with everybody. Doesn't mean you can't leave school and go live your life in your religion or atheist worldview. Like a vacuum of sorts, with no hate allowed? Idealist probably. But some try.

Great question, Joshua. I think it is possible for a school to say they are neutral, but even if the school says it is neutral, you will have individual teachers who are either "for" or "against" it, which could lead to some internal struggles. On a similar subject, the military is now accepting homosexual individuals and we are receiving all kinds of training on the topic. Publicly military members are saying the right things, but privately there is a lot of resentment. I think the same type of thing would happen if schools became more accepting of religion in the classroom.

PERFECTLY neutral? No. 99% neutral? Sure. The important thing is that they have to whole-heartedly (and, one hopes, sincerely) subscribe to the GOAL of neutrality in religious matters.

But it's important to distinguish between TEACHING about religion and PREACHING it. Religion is an immensely important part of the overall human experience, and I as an atheist who spent his entire professional career in the area of education think it's appalling that our schools are neglecting the role of religion in society. Just as it's perfectly possible to state in a history class that the labor movement helped Franklin Delano Roosevelt win the presidential election of 1932 without being accused of Democratic Party partisanship, so too it should be possible to discuss the influence of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson on the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan without being accused of being in the pocket of the Moral Majority.

The place to draw the line is when the teacher starts saying things like "This religion is right, and all the others are wrong." I have absolutely no problem with the teachers or textbooks saying "This is what Religion X says about the afterlife, and this is the contrary opinion held by Religion Y, and Religion Z doesn't even believe in souls, let alone their eternal existence." Again, the difference is between preaching and teaching.

I think they're terrific. I also want to put in a good word for Sam Harris and Daniel C. Dennett. Probably the most straightforward work that sets out to EXPLAIN atheism is George H. Smith's book "Atheism: The Case against God". A really accessible book is Ruth Hurmence Green's "The Born Again Skeptic's Guide to the Bible", written after she'd spent decades as an ordinary housewife, not moved to question the accepted wisdom about religion, until one day she decided to sit down and really read the Bible cover to cover. She was appalled at what she found, especially about the way the Bible views women.

But the best book of all for atheists? American science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov aimed us straight at it: "Properly read, the BIBLE is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." Once you review all of the atrocities either committed or commanded by the Hebrew war deity, Yahweh, it should be enuf to turn your stomach and renounce him forever as the most cruel, bloodthirsty, egomaniacal, sadistic fiend in all of fiction.

"As a source of objective morality, the Bible is one of the worst books we have. It might have been the very worst, in fact -- if we didn't also happen to have the Koran." -- Sam Harris, author of "The End of Faith"

It was a gradual thing, probably starting somewhere around junior high and really settling in as a solid worldview by the time I was a freshman in college. During that entire time, I was still doing churchy things in the Midwestern Presbyterian Church in which I was raised. I was a Sunday School teacher, president of the church youth group, passed the collection plate on Sundays, etc. But I kept asking these questions, and nobody had any good answers for them, and finally I just realized that the whole shebang was just a "go along to get along" exercise that I didn't really need.

What I lacked was any source of information or role models about atheism. I wasn't even familiar with the word itself, let alone its history or philosophical basis. I had absolutely no idea that there was an organized atheist movement (or associated movements such as humanism or ethical culture, or even the watered-down religion of Unitarianism). Certainly the church didn't spend any time even mentioning the existence of (let alone promoting) its intellectual competitors. And my parents, both wishy-washy Sunday-only Protestants, would have been of no help. So I was on my own, a kid full of questions with no idea where to turn for answers. (This was, you understand, well before the age of the Internet.)

My mom grew up in Chisholm, Minnesota, back when the Mesabi Iron Range was the wellhead of the American industrial explosion. She was raised in the Eastern Orthodox Church, but it was hard to find any such in Wisconsin, so she ended up attending the Presbyterian Church, which was where my dad had been brot up. This wasn't the fire-breathing authoritarian flavor of Presbyterianism, it was the bland, generic Protestant kind, largely indistinguishable from the Congregationalists and Methodists, with somewhat worse hymns than the Lutherans. I was your basic good, well-behaved kid, so I went along with what the folx told me, including going to Sunday School and then, when I got older, regular church services.

But I was also inquisitive, really into science and science fiction, and I kept asking questions that nobody had the answers to. For instance, one day near Xmas we were reading Biblical accounts of Jesus's birth, and we got to the end of the very 1st chapter of the very 1st book of the New Testament, Matthew 1:23 ("Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.") and 1:25 ("And knew her not till she had brought forth her firstborn son: and he called his name JESUS."), and I asked "So why didn't she name him Emmanuel?", and not only could nobody answer the question, most of them had NEVER EVEN NOTICED THE CONTRADICTION. And they were TWO VERSES APART from each other! The more I looked, the more stuff like that I found, and it just astonished me that nobody else seemed to either notice or care. (Don't even get me started on the 4 different versions of the Easter story.)

So I was loaded with doubts, but I kept chugging along, hoping that someday somebody would be able to explain them to me. But nobody ever did. That's because, as I came eventually to realize, nobody ever can. It's a book of fables — a work of fiction — and we shouldn't expect truth or consistency.

I am in favor of students learning about it the same way they learn about other horrible historical mistakes, such as the Supreme Court's Dred Scott and Korematsu decisions, namely along the lines of "Can you BELIEVE that people once actually DID stuff like this!?".

1st off, a coerced loyalty is a fake, fraudulent loyalty. 2nd, my allegiance is not to a piece of cloth, a symbol, but to the PRINCIPLES on which this nation was founded. 3rd, it is a lie that this nation is "under God"; the supreme law of the land is the Constitution, and if we are pledging allegiance to anything (not that I think we should; see Point #1), it should be to that. 4th, as a matter of literature, the original (1892) version of the pledge didn't contain so little an interruption as a comma between "one nation" and "indivisible", because author Francis Bellamy wanted to emphasize the lesson of national unity so hard-won during the awful Civil War and embodied in America's ORIGINAL motto "e pluribus unum" (from many [states], one [nation]). The McCarthy Era interpolation of the phrase "under God" not only lies about the history and subverts the principle of church-state separation, it also ruins the scansion of the pledge's meter. It's like bolting a toaster onto the hood of your Corvette.

Finally, a word about efficiency. There are 180 days in the school year, and you spend 12 years in school. That's 2160 total days. Suppose it takes half a minute EACH DAY to recite the pledge of allegiance. Do you think you get any more out of it on the 1800th repetition than you did on the 20th? Isn't there some BETTER use that could have been made of those 18 hours wasted out of your life? What we're teaching kids is that patriotism comprises mindless, rote repetition, and the inevitable reaction is that they're bored to death with it.

Hmm, I see that I apparently clicked the wrong button and posted my initial response to your question as an original post instead of as a reply. It's down below.

However, let me take advantage of this opportunity to deal with the 2nd, probably more important, question you asked. Without wishing to get picky or pedantic, what I have is not a belief, per se, it's the absence of a belief. If you'd like, I can explain this in more detail.

As to what teachers can do — and, by extension, what school systems in general can do — I favor the positive approach. Rather than say "Here's what NOT to do", followed by a laundry list of discriminatory, hurtful behaviors (which will mainly serve as a shopping list for bullies who don't have enuf imagination to come up with a sufficiency of bad ideas themselves), I'd rather have schools praise and glorify the great VARIETY of people they get to deal with. "Look, we have students who are good at English, math whizzes, dancers, football players, kids in wheelchairs who can outdribble you on the basketball court, people with all sorts of religions, folx who can cook authentic Chinese (or Italian, or Indonesian, or Ethiopian) food because they're FROM China (or etc.).

Celebrate diversity! Cherish it! Relish it! Appreciate it for the astonishing richness it brings to the lives of those of us fortunate enuf to be raised, not in a melting pot, where everything gets smooshed together into sameness, but as part of the glorious smorgasbord of DIFFERENT flavors, colors, textures, aromas, styles, and sizes that makes this such an amazing country to live in. What a great time to be alive! Look at all the cool people you get to share it with!

Oops, McCollum vs. Champaign BoE was in 1948, not 1848.

Be unrelentingly supportive of your dotter no matter what she does. Remind her periodically that nothing she does as a teenager will REALLY go in her "permanent record"; that youth is a time of curiosity, exploration, and investigation, trying to find out who you really are; and that almost all trials will end up in errors. Such is life. Intelligence is learning from your own mistakes; wisdom is learning from other people's. Guess which comes 1st?

The great joy of all this is that she gets to CREATE who she wants to be. What a glorious time to be alive.

For yourself, resign yourself to the fact that, no matter how often you say "You can talk to me about anything", and no matter how much you mean it, there will always be some things she'll NEVER talk to you about. That doesn't mean you should give up on it.

1st off, let me make an important, if subtle, distinction. Atheists are people who DO NOT HAVE A BELIEF in any gods. A subset of that group is people who DO HAVE A BELIEF that there are no gods. By many common definitions the latter are the ONLY people who actually count as atheists, but we organized atheists feel it's appropriate to cast a wider net. We include among our number, for example, most flavors of Buddhists, who are religious but whose religion doesn't include deities. We include upwards of a billion Chinese, who may have ancestor worship and practice traditional Chinese medicine and other superstitions, but who have not been exposed to the concept of gods in their officially atheistic society and thus don't believe in them. We include newborns and mentally handicapped people who don't have the mental capacity to comprehend the concept of gods. We include people who have renounced gods for emotional reasons, such as falling in love with an atheist or anger at being sexually abused by the clergy. So, in general, if you don't believe in any gods, for whatever reason, you're an atheist.

An entirely separate question is how confident you are in whatever attitude you hold. Those who are so sure of themselves that they can confidently state "I KNOW that god exists." or "I KNOW that god doesn't exist." are said to be gnostics, from the Greek word "gnosis" (knowledge). Those who are leaning in that direction but aren't positive they're right are called "agnostics". Here the "a-" means just what it does in front of "atheist", namely "without".

The 4 possible combinations are gnostic theist, agnostic theist, gnostic atheist*, and agnostic atheist. With respect to the question of certainty, you are an agnostic — you don't KNOW. That still leaves open the question of whether, when push comes to shove, you do or do not BELIEVE that any gods exist. The answer to THAT question determines whether you're a theist or atheist.

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*includes me