Kenneth Bronstein recalled the first meeting of NYC Atheists that he organized. “It was sad,” he told The Washington Post in 2004. “Ten guys in a room, all arguing with each other.”
Mobilizing atheists can be akin to organizing a meeting of anarchists or, he once said, like herding cats. They might fracture among freethinkers, secular humanists and anti-theists. Worse still, he added, the problem with being an atheist is that atheists, unlike a growing number of religious and ethnic groups, don’t even get a holiday.
Still, Mr. Bronstein never wavered. “We have faith,” he said. “Just not in God.”
Mr. Bronstein died in a Manhattan care facility on Oct. 18, absolutely certain that he would not go to heaven or hell. He was 85. His partner, Elinor Fine, said the cause was complications of leukemia.
A retired IBM engineer, Mr. Bronstein revived a ragtag fraternity of nonbelievers into a mini-movement called NYC Atheists, around 2000. As its president, his goal was to vigorously support the separation of church and state and to eliminate any special privileges for religion.
He recruited members, filed lawsuits, circulated petitions, convened book-club meetings. He once derided the meetings as “intellectual masturbation,” but he enjoyed the give and take.
In 2009, he received $10,000 from an anonymous donor to proselytize through 12-foot-long advertisements that appeared for a month on two dozen Manhattan buses.
“I’ve had people call me in tears and tell me they thought they’d never see a sign promoting atheism in New York,” Mr. Bronstein told The New York Times.
Because the signs had to pass muster with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, he said, he was careful “to find a statement that we thought was positive, it wasn’t bashing religion and it wasn’t huge.”
He settled on an angelic judgment — “You don’t have to believe in God to be a moral or ethical person” — that even a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York shrugged off.
“It’s a free country, and they’re allowed to say whatever they want on the side of buses,” said Joseph Zwilling, the director of communications for the archdiocese. “They’re not attacking or disparaging the church as far as I can see.”
Mr. Bronstein’s crusade claimed another benchmark in 2010 when representatives of his group were invited to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s annual interfaith breakfast. It was said to be the first time that people who lacked a belief in organized religion had been included.
However, his organization’s opposition to two memorials to victims of the 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center generated a backlash.
The group unsuccessfully sought to block the renaming of a street in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn Seven in Heaven Way, in memory of seven firefighters who died in the attack.
“We’ve concluded as atheists there is no heaven and there’s no hell,” he said.
His statement prompted the theologian Robin Schumacher to write, in an essay titled “Seven in Heaven and the Insecurity of Atheism” on the Christian website Blogos.org: “As Dr. Mortimer Adler points out in his book ‘Truth in Religion,’ ‘An affirmative existential proposition can be proved, but a negative existential proposition — one that denies the existence of some thing — cannot be proved.’”
The atheists also lost a federal suit to remove from the 9/11 Memorial a 17-foot-tall steel beam in the shape of a cross that had been found by rescue workers at the World Trade Center site. Mr. Bronstein called it “spiritual product placement” and “an act of religious symbolism.”
He argued against the motto “In God we trust” on money and the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and he proposed an alternative National Day of Reason and a blood drive on the federally designated National Day of Prayer.
Kenneth Stanley Bronstein was born into an observant Jewish family on Nov. 7, 1938, in Brookline, Mass. He was the grandson of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. His father, Max, delivered The Boston Globe and sold books and magazines. His mother, Ethel (Shulman) Bronstein, was active in Jewish community affairs.
Mr. Bronstein became an atheist, he said, when he was 13 years old, on the day after he celebrated his bar mitzvah.
Several family members said they didn’t know what prompted his change of heart. His brother, Barry, said in an interview that he had never pressed Kenneth to elaborate.
“He’s taken his own path, which he has a right to do,” Barry Bronstein said. “He was my brother, and sometimes you’re better off not getting involved in those conversations.”
Mr. Bronstein graduated from Northeastern University in 1961 with a Bachelor of Science degree in industrial engineering and was hired by IBM on the strength of his thesis. He moved to New York with his wife, Florynce (Schivek) Bronstein, a public school piano teacher, and worked for the company for 37 years (except for two years he served in the Army).
“When Bronstein slammed shut his IBM office door, some of the dust fell off church doors all over the New York City,” said Jane Everhart, a former communications director of New York City Atheists.
In addition to Ms. Fine and his brother, Mr. Bronstein is survived by a son, Dr. Michael Bronstein, and a sister, Caryn Kovacs. His marriage ended in divorce in 1980.
Mr. Bronstein was never shy about his beliefs.
“He loved to wear his NYC Atheists cap wherever he went,” his son recalled, including on a visit to Copper Canyon in Mexico. “I was concerned,” Dr. Bronstein said, “because many of our small group of 15 were very conservative — God-fearing Southern Baptists — and the week was going to be a nightmare. By the end of the trip, he had three of the group wearing some extra caps he brought along.”
Dr. Bronstein recalled another awkward moment, when the rabbi of the family’s synagogue asked his mother if they would be coming to Friday night services.
“She made some excuse why we could not make it,” he said. “I must have been about 4 years old and I chimed in: ‘That’s not true. We’re not going because my daddy says it’s a lot of crap.’”
Kenneth Bronstein was also a firefighting enthusiast. He collected helmets, fireboat replicas and other memorabilia, and he invariably carried a portable radio with him so he could respond to the scene of major blazes. He even owned a vintage 1931 Ahrens-Fox fire engine, which he kept at a country home in Connecticut and would drive in local parades.
One of Mr. Bronstein’s favorite sayings was “How you live today has the potential to impact all eternity.” But unlike many people who abandoned religion earlier in their lives, he did not ask God for forgiveness, or for anything else, as he faced death.
“Even when he sneezed and someone said ‘God bless you,’” Ms. Fine said, “he’d reply, ‘No thanks.’”
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