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Ron Reagan is “Not afraid of burning in Hell,” nor does he think anyone else should be. Simply put, he does not believe in religious teachings that hold that thought over you. With religion so much in the news these days we thought we would speak to someone with a completely different view. Reagan is an atheist.
It all goes back to childhood. “Two things leap to mind,” he told Hollywood on the Potomac. “The first things really that set the wheels in motion was that I had become at a very early age fascinated by the idea of prehistoric humans. This is a fascination that endures. Of course, I was familiar from Sunday school with the story of Adam and Eve. These two separate narratives began to clash in my little 4 or 5 year old head,” he explained. “I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom playing with things one day and my mother walked into the room and I said, ‘Mommy, were Adam and Eve the first cave men or the first people as we know them today?’ I was very proud of the deploying the phrase ‘as we know them today’ which I had obviously heard somebody say and now I was going to use it, so I was happy about that. I was curious about this apparent problem, conflict.”
Ron Reagan
“Adam and Eve are supposed to be the first human beings,” he further explained, “but clearly there were these other people before them, so what’s up with that? It got me thinking that there’s an issue here. This Adam and Eve story doesn’t really make any sense. Then I got to the Abraham and Isaac story and was pretty immediately horrified at the idea that some father was going to haul his kid up a mountainside and plunge a dagger into him. It didn’t make too much difference to me that the angel came down at the last minute to say, ‘whoa, whoa, okay just kidding here.’ That seemed pretty horrific too. I couldn’t see why anybody held this story up as anything other than just a horrible capitulation to a celestial dictator of some sort. Who would ask you to do the most horrible things to prove your undying and eternal devotion to the deity itself? That story didn’t please me much. By that time I think I was probably already atheist.”
Ron with his parents: then Governor of California Ronald Reagan and future President, future First Lady Nancy Reagan and sister Patti Davis
We were of course interested in knowing what his parents thought. Turns out that when he was 12 he told them that he was an atheist and they were a little upset.”My father in particular was quite distraught about this. He was wise enough though not to try and force me to go to church or anything like that. It worried him though. He had a very just simple kind of faith, but very deeply held. He just worried that I was somehow going to suffer in the end because I didn’t share that faith. We didn’t fight about it or anything.”
Ironically enough, Ron and his wife Doria were in Rome around Easter so we asked him if he had ever met the Pope. “I actually have had an audience with the pope, not this pope, when I was about 10, 12 years old maybe. I traveled with my parents to Europe once. My father was making a trip when he was Governor of California at the time and then President Nixon had asked him to take some sort of trip over to Europe and on that trip we would meet with the Pope. My parents took me along. I think it was Pope Paul. We were told before hand that you are to address the Pope as your holiness. I’m not sure about the bowing part. We were not Catholic, so I don’t think we had to kiss his ring or anything like that. I had a sort of all purpose greeting for everybody at that age which was, ‘Hi. How are you?’ When it came time to introduce my parents they greeted the Pope and then they of course ushered me forward to meet him and I of course stuck out my hand and said, ‘Hi. How are you?’ He didn’t seem to mind. It was okay.”
Nancy Reagan, Ronald Reagan and the Pope
On religion: “It trains people not to think. It trains people to believe things for which there is no evidence. It trains people not to reason, but to simply accept on faith what an authority is telling you. It allows you to believe that evolution doesn’t happen. It allows you to believe gay people are an abomination and shouldn’t be allowed equality under that law. It allows you to believe an awful lot of things that reason would not allow you to believe. That’s a worrisome thing. That’s not really the way a democracy is supposed to work; certainly not a modern democracy that should be based in facts and evidence and reason, tolerance, and compassion and things like that. You’re not supposed to question somebody’s religious belief in the same way that you would question their political beliefs, their scientific beliefs, anything else, their taste in movies, anything. All the rest is pretty much fair game and open for question, but you cannot, you’re not allowed in our society to question somebody’s religious beliefs using reason and logic and to simply ask them to defend what they say they believe. Nobody believes in Zeus anymore. Nobody believes in some mountain god, the wisdom of Vulcana, or Thor or anything like that.”
Ron Reagan
On separation of Church and State: “We know what the constitution says. We know we’re supposed to have a secular government and a de-secular public sphere. Privately you can do what ever you want. It doesn’t mean you can’t be religious when you’re in public. You can think what ever you want. Nobody can stop you from praying any time you want to pray. How could that even be possible? I think there should be more places, more room in this world for spiritual retreat. I’m not crazy about that word, but it serves. That does not have to be tied to a religion. That’s a different thing. Buddhism for instance, while it’s treated as a religion by some groups of people, Tibetan Buddhists in particular I would guess, in it’s essence is not a religion. There’s no deity in Buddhism. The Buddha is not a god. He was a person like Jesus let’s say was a person. Elements of that for instance could be incorporated into a healthy spiritual practice and we certainly could all use time to get away and reflect quietly.”
“I’ve been a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation for a while and they asked me sometime ago if I’d be willing to do an ad for them. And I said yes. I wasn’t really the one spear heading all of that but from what I understand it’s been very difficult to get some networks to take it. CNN did, Comedy Central did. Somebody agreed, I can’t remember which network it was, to run the ad if they removed the last line about “not afraid of burning in hell.”
The Ad:
