How useful is dialogue?
One of the things that’s made me too exhausted to blog lately is a real-world manifestation of some of my blogly endeavors. I’ve been having these long, philosophical conversations with some of my Christian friends about exactly what their religion means to them (I was happy to find that these friends were open to such discussions!) and I read an extremely large portion of the Bible over the course of about a week in order to be more informed. My original goal in this was to broaden my own horizons and understand how intelligent people justify unproven and unfounded beliefs to themselves, and if I was lucky, to communicate some appreciation of how atheists are capable of being thoughtful, moral people even while not believing in God and/or Jesus. I’m not sure I got anywhere.
What I’m sure I succeeded at is making myself much more angry about problems with Christianity and religion in general that I used to just chuckle at and toss aside, and much more frustrated with people who I know are smart enough to analyze complex ideas but who seem unable to escape the mental compartment they’ve built around their religious beliefs. There’s no way that people’s moral beliefs are actually formed by Christianity’s teachings, because they’re able to cast out any unsavory (to them) messages and follow only the ones they like, but they can’t see this in themselves. They construct elaborate webs of language that prevent them from noticing any contradictions in their ideas or behavior. This same web deflects any questions I might ask, turning the conversation into a meandering stream of non-answers and platitudes. Aside from this, I had just read all the nasty things that the Bible says about nonbelievers and was trying to start some dialogue about that, but they all seemed indifferent to its offensiveness.
At the same time, I’m sure they mean well. They genuinely do believe what it is they’re claiming to, and it’s difficult to question what you really do perceive to be undeniably true. Sam Harris recently published a paper on this, which I read about over at Friendly Atheist. The basic outcome of the study, which used fMRI while asking participants to respond to statements as either true or false, was that the brain responds the same way to “regular” facts as it does to religious beliefs. That is to say, a believer knows the fact of God’s existence and a nonbeliever knows the fact of God’s nonexistence in the same way, neurologically, that they both know that the sun rises in the morning and that water is wet.
So what are we supposed to do? Keep on ignoring it? I don’t feel like I can ignore it when politicians justify their laws based on their supposedly religious morality, when people proclaim their religious judgments in everyday conversation, when people come up to me as I walk around campus and shove papers about Bible study groups in my face, heck, when I have to look at people’s happy T-shirt slogans and Facebook status updates about how Jesus loves everybody and prayer will fix everything. If everybody else gets to express their side, I want to express mine. At the same time, the dialogue seems futile. Nobody’s going to change their mind, and it doesn’t even feel like we’re speaking the same language. It just makes me exhausted and depressed, and obviously that’s no good either.
What do you think?
Questionable Ethics #2
This is the slightly belated second installment of our series covering the ethical ambiguities unmentioned in Randy Cohen’s New York Times Magazine column, “The Ethicist.” (See here for a bit more background.) This week, Cohen covers two dilemmas about disclosure.
The first letter is from an intern in a district attorney’s office who is often taken for the DA or an ADA when making phone calls. Cohen explains that getting mistaken for the prosecutor is apparently a common problem, even for public defenders, and suggests that we don’t have an infinite obligation to disabuse people of their silliest misconceptions. One ought to make an honest, concerted effort to explain one’s actual identity—merely saying the words one time is not necessarily enough, but something like a preface to every sentence is unnecessary. This seems like reasonable advice that most would agree with.
However, Cohen adds an odd caveat that I think is not so universally acceptable. He writes, “If this were a situation in which the person being interviewed might respond differently, then you would have to continue to clarify your job title, even repeatedly, even at the risk of becoming an old bore.” But… when is that? How does one recognize one of those situations, without having psychic powers? A statement like this can hardly be considered an ethical rule if it is next to impossible for a human being to follow.
Additionally, though, particularly in the legal context, I can see a good argument for doing precisely the opposite. If you are gathering information about a trial, and suspect that witnesses are cooperating with you because they believe you to be from the prosecution side when you are actually from the defense, so much the better for you! The defense should have equal access to that information, and shouldn’t have to bend over backwards so that even the most stupid of witnesses can have the opportunity to obstruct justice. Similarly, if witnesses are telling you things only because they believe you to be in a position of power instead of just a lowly intern, probably they are trying to curry favor, politically or otherwise. Better that their information gets received while no corrupt back-scratching is promised. If someone imagines they’ve been promised favors when they haven’t, that’s their own fault. I’m not sure I am convinced by this, but a reasonable person certainly could conclude that if “the person being interviewed might respond differently,” one has no more moral obligation to clarify one’s identity than in any other case.
The second letter is the following:
I volunteer as a Sunday-school teacher at my Catholic church. While I consider myself Catholic and understand Catholic beliefs, I do not agree with all that the church teaches. When a student asks me about a topic on which the church and I differ, may I reply with my own beliefs in addition to the official doctrine? B.J.,WASHINGTON
Cohen answers that B.J. may, as long as the differing beliefs are presented impersonally as things which some modern Catholics believe. He says it is morally acceptable, and suggests it is morally obligatory, to include this because it is “objectively true, pertinent to the discussion and informative for the students.” While I do personally like the idea of a Catholic Sunday school class including an explanation of the ways many Catholics disobey the Pope, the principle Cohen’s defending here seems so counter-intuitive that I am sure it is not the only possible ethical ruling on the issue.
Cohen says that in a class meant to teach a certain set of material, it is ethical to stop and explain why and how some people disagree with the material being taught, provided that people truly do disagree, and that their disagreement is “pertinent” and “informative.” This sounds like a lovely abstraction, but we would not accept a biology teacher who set aside curriculum time for creationism, or a history teacher who made sure students knew that many people out there don’t believe the Holocaust ever happened, because they would not be doing their jobs (even though these statements are surely true, pertinent, and informative). Perhaps we can imagine a limited context in which these lessons would be acceptable: debunking the claims against evolution made by ID proponents, or discussing the complex sociology of racial hatred—that is to say, pointing out that some disagree with the curriculum, and then explaining why they are wrong.
But this is certainly not what is being proposed in the case of B.J., who is also in a unique situation teaching Sunday school. In that context, even if it is not delivered explicitly, the message is still, “You should believe this.” Presumably, the “this” that B.J.’s church wants the students to hear about is Catholic doctrine, not the ways in which some of the congregants disregard it. B.J. is teaching under the auspices of the church, and so might reasonably be expected to check with the religious education coordinator about what was expected and allowed. This would give the church ample opportunity either to give the go-ahead and assuage B.J.’s concerns, or to inform B.J. that they’d rather find a different volunteer.
One might also take a stand on more basic principles and argue that one has a moral obligation not to propagate beliefs and ideas one disagrees with—that is to say, it would be unethical for a Muslim or a Jew or an atheist, or even for a Presbyterian or a Lutheran, to agree to teach a Catholic Sunday school class, since doing so would misrepresent their own identity and act against their own interests. (This would not be true if a non-Catholic was teaching an academic course, perhaps in comparative religions, which discussed Catholic doctrine. In the Sunday school setting, the teacher is a religious authority figure, at least attempting to instill beliefs in students.) From this ethical perspective, B.J.’s struggles and doubts about proper behavior may be seen as evidence that teaching the class is already too much of a moral compromise.
Not so grand a bargain
I haven’t written in a while, but I promised Z that I’d start up again. I think a good way to start is to talk about Robert Wright’s New York Times op-ed from Saturday, which bothered me in a lot of ways. The title is “A Grand Bargain Over Evolution,” and the goal is to propose a “common ground” between science/atheism and religion over evolution. Very little that he says is actually wrong, but all of it is missing the point. He proposes that the religious concede that evolution is fact. He then points out that many believe evolution is a process that is bound to yield intelligent beings with an idea of morality. He says that atheists should concede that this realization of moral sense being built into a natural process can reasonably be seen as evidence that the universe was created by a supernatural being who wanted those laws of morality to be known.
My biggest problem is with the idea of a “bargain” in the first place. I have no problem with a bargain in the sense of agreeing to disagree. I can easily reach that kind of understanding (and do) all the time with individual people. I also have no problem with (and very much support) the idea of a political compromise, where government stays out of the religion-atheism debate and guarantees the right of everyone to make the decision for themselves. I am not, however, okay with the idea of a bargain over the facts. If I claim the sky is blue, and you claim it is red, we don’t decide to just split the difference and agree that it’s purple. You don’t bargain over what is true. You debate and give logical reasons and do research and try to figure out what the real answer is. This article asks us to believe something because it’s a nice middle position. I have trouble any time I’m asked to believe something for any reason other than that it’s probably true.
Wright also makes it clear that he does not fully understand the atheist argument, which is surprising considering that he just wrote a book on the history of religious belief. He states the grand compromise he proposes this way:
Believers could scale back their conception of God’s role in creation, and atheists could accept that some notions of “higher purpose” are compatible with scientific materialism. And the two might learn to get along.
Of course the idea of a “higher purpose” is compatible with scientific materialism. Atheists believe in morality, after all. I am not sure why he thinks this is a concession. He makes himself a little more clear later on:
[Atheists] could acknowledge, first of all, that any god whose creative role ends with the beginning of natural selection is, strictly speaking, logically compatible with Darwinism.
I have never seen even the most extreme and combative atheist fail to concede this. A creator-only god is logically compatible with any scientific evidence that could ever be produced, and this is fully conceded by atheists. In fact, even a much more active god is logically compatible with all scientific evidence that could ever be produced. You want to believe God created humans in their current form? Fine. You just also have to believe that God created fossils of various early humanoid species in such a way as to create an apparent link between them and other early apes. It seems to me like a really strange thing to believe, but it’s not logically inconsistent.
The point atheists make is that, while the religious view is logically consistent, there’s no reason to favor it over the non-religious view. We have every reason to believe that logical consequences of the laws of physics govern the events we see around us. Sure, those could be explained by any one of thousands of different possible religious beliefs, but why would we choose to believe any one of these supernatural explanations over any other, let alone over the simple straightforward explanation we can see in the world every day? Atheists don’t claim to disprove religion—they just claim that given the existence of these numerous logically consistent worldviews, the one that doesn’t posit the existence of a random supernatural being without any evidence of its existence is the one that is most reasonable to hold. Wright never even references this argument, and it’s hard to convince people to change their minds when you can’t even prove you understand what they already believe.
Left Behind
Remember that series of Left Behind books, the novelization of the book of Revelations? Did you know that they actually made it into a computer game? If you’re surprised by that, maybe you should sit down, because they have actually just released a sequel to the computer game. Apparently, the people are clamoring for more!
I’m not sure exactly who is clamoring or why, because the first game was not received well. And not just because of the premise. As this review on Gamestop said,”games are typically based on outlandish ideas, so it’s unfair to dismiss this one based on religious grounds.” The beginning paragraph of the review sums it up nicely, though:
Don’t mock Left Behind: Eternal Forces because it’s a Christian game. Mock it because it’s a very bad game. The real-time strategy/adventure game from Left Behind Games based on the best-selling series of novels from Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins will even let down born-again types who expect the Rapture to beam them up to heaven any day now. Nobody has enough faith to endure a game with such a hokey story, terrible mission design, serious problems with the interface and graphics, and loads of crippling bugs.
I don’t really have high hopes for Left Behind II, but something caught my eye in the press release. Left Behind Games, Inc. says, “Rather than the usual ‘winning’ by using weapons and killing the enemy, players are rewarded when their characters use the power of influence to bring about good rather than destruction.” That is the method of gameplay, as you may have already seen from the Gamestop review, and as described on the company’s website. (Warning: for some reason, a woman’s voice reads the first paragraph content aloud when you click.) It just seemed a little strange to me that the press release also described “skirmish battle multiplayer maps.” Skirmish? Battle?
The release also says that
[CEO Troy] Lyndon’s personal view is that the approach incorporated in all of Inspired Media games can help to counteract the violence affecting gamers, who have acted out aggressively in real-life.
I’m so tired of this. Yeah, yeah, maybe some kid who played Grand Theft Auto ran into a pedestrian in his parents’ car, and maybe some kid who loved to watch pay-per-view wrestling hit his brother in the head with a chair. But what if some kid who loved Superman jumped off his garage roof—so no more fictional flying? What if some kid who wanted to be just like the Little Mermaid and drowned in the backyard pool—no more fairy tales? We can hurl anecdotes at each other all day and never get anywhere. The fact is, the set of people who commit acts of violence does intersect with the set of people who play video games, because lots of people play video games. There are also many people who do violent things who do not play video games. One does not categorically cause the other.
I’m dismayed, but not surprised, by this idea that killing the enemy in a game set upon a fictional premise is very bad, but a brainwashing crusade is totally great. (From the Gamestop review: “your goal is not to wipe out the enemy as in a typical RTS game but to convert as many neutrals and baddies as possible by raising their spirit level. … [Units] steadily lose spirit unless they’re bolstered with regular prayer.”) I mean, sure, you’re not wielding a gun, but it’s still awfully aggressive! The fact that even they describe it as a “skirmish” and a “battle” betrays their knowledge of this. And if you start from Lyndon’s premise that people emulate what they do in video games… well, I’m glad hardly anyone will be playing this one.
Religion on Facebook
I’m not the biggest fan of Facebook, but I have an account because it’s an effective way to get and keep in touch with people. Like most people I know, I don’t have every field of personal info filled out. Most of those omissions are things like “Favorite TV Shows,” stuff that doesn’t really pertain to me or which would make me feel silly to have taken the time to enter. There is one field which I have a real purpose in leaving blank, though, and that is “Religious Views.”
Facebook thinks that my religious views fall in the category of “Basic Information” about myself. I guess for most people, religion is a very prominent part of their identity. And, I’ll be honest, not being religious is an important part of mine, though I don’t think it’s important in the same way. I like to write about atheist issues on this blog because I don’t think they get enough press, and this feels like my own small contribution to the cause. But I don’t talk about atheism all the time. I don’t wear clothing or jewelry that proclaims my atheism, I’m not a member of atheist clubs or activist groups, I don’t go up to people on the street and ask them if they’ve heard the Good News about atheism.
There was a push a while back for people to list “atheist” as their religious views, as part of a sort of atheist coming-out day. I just feel like that’d be listing “teetotaler” in the “Favorite Alcoholic Beverage” field. That is to say, missing the point.
For me at least, being an atheist isn’t an active thing. It’s a lack of being anything else. Because of that, I don’t feel a need to proclaim it, any more than you feel the need to announce that you haven’t shaved your head. Having a shaved head isn’t a fundamental part of being human, and no one (assuming they couldn’t see you) would assume that your head was shaved. Similarly, I don’t think being religious is something “basic” about all people, and I don’t think religiosity should be presumed. By not filling out the “Religious Views” field, I cause the line not to show up on my profile. That’s a much more accurate description of my religious beliefs than a label could ever be.
Secular, not atheist
For the third post of Atheist Week, I want to talk about a common complaint I hear and read with regard to rules that restrict things like teaching creationism (or “the controversy”) in science classrooms, or singing Christmas carols at school assemblies in December, or including an invocation at government events. Some people argue that failing to mention or include religion is equivalent to teaching children to be atheist or enforcing atheism upon the nation. Steven Novella’s recent post rebutting Michael Egnor includes an example of this. (Responding to a blogger, Egnor writes, “Perhaps Mr. Sandefur desires to indoctrinate children in atheism, perhaps he doesn’t.”)
This complaint is incredibly misguided. I think it’s fairly obvious why, so this post will be relatively short. It’s not an explanation I usually see given, though, so I think it’s still worth putting out there.
A lack of prayer or a lack of Christmas carols is not equivalent to forcing everyone to chant together, “There is no God.” It’s merely an omission of something which applies to the beliefs of some but not all. Very few people actually incorporate religion into every moment of their lives. Even people who would describe themselves as devout don’t continually sing hymns or thank God aloud in a speech before every action. Ten more minutes of the day spent not praying or not singing hymns or not talking about how awesome God is doesn’t actually make much difference.
The fact is, “secular” does not mean “atheist.” From Merriam-Webster’s:
1 a: of or relating to the worldly or temporal <secular concerns> b: not overtly or specifically religious <secular music> c: not ecclesiastical or clerical <secular courts> <secular landowners>
While it may be true that atheists aren’t interested in an alternative or supplement to the secular aspect of life, it’s clearly also the case that religious people’s lives do involve the secular aspect too. The secular is what we all have in common. Because of that, common events we all share in such as public schools and government functions should be restricted to secular activities.
Surprising as it may seem, religious values and secular values do not have to contradict each other. In the vast majority of cases, religion teaches, “X is good because God says so,” and secular reasoning says “X is good because it promotes general welfare and is socially expedient.” Secular values aren’t the negation or antithesis of religious values. Unless proponents of religion really want to argue that they absolutely don’t care at all about their (or anyone else’s) well-being in the here-and-now, they have secular concerns. Secular events allow the religious and nonreligious to be represented, but once you include religion, you make your event exclusive.
Do you have to believe?
The topic for the second installment in Atheist Week also comes via Friendly Atheist. Hemant Mehta posts a reader’s query about answering the question, “If you don’t believe in God, what do you believe in?” and explains the issue like this:
There are also a lot of similar [answers] most of us tend to give: I believe in the goodness of people, I believe in nature, I believe we all find different ways to answer that question, I believe in the Golden Rule, etc.
It’s really just a bad question. Just because we don’t believe in a God doesn’t mean we don’t believe in anything. And just because someone says they do believe in God doesn’t mean we know anything else about them.
Yes, those are reasons why it’s a bad question. But my revulsion toward it is a lot deeper. I reject the premise of the question entirely.
Imagine saying to a person on a diet: You don’t eat chocolate cake? Well then, what desserts do you eat? Or, imagine saying to a person born blind: You don’t know Picasso’s work? Well then, who is your favorite painter? It would be absurd to demand these answers. It’s completely possible not to eat desserts or not to have a favorite painter, particularly if you’re a person with any sort of inclination against doing those things. I think belief is similar. When someone says, “What do you believe in?” they are saying, surely everyone must have groundless faith in something. As an atheist, I’m not the sort of person who tends to do that stuff.
In the same way that “bananas” isn’t an answer to “What time is it?”, I don’t see how you can answer this question with things like the Golden Rule, humanity, or scientific inquiry. It’s just playing a semantics game — I don’t “believe” in those things the same way someone else believes in God. I value humanity and I value science. I believe in doing good things and refraining from and/or stopping others from doing bad things, but that follows from a sort of axiomatic definition of goodness as a quality of which there ought to be more. Good things are good. There’s no faith there. If I found out that one of the moral precepts I try to follow actually does more harm than good, I would shed it and figure out a new one.
No, I think that valid answers to “What do you believe in?” (instead of the Christian God) would be things like deities of other religions, unicorns, leprechauns, the Tooth Fairy, supernatural powers. Those are things you have to “believe” in… but I don’t think anyone really has to believe in at least one thing in that set. My answer, assuming I’m brave enough to say it out loud to the person who asked, would be: “I don’t believe in anything. I look for proof, and I make my best educated guess when no perfect proof exists. Why do you think I need to believe in something in order to be complete?”
And honestly, if you asked me what I believed in, and I told you that instead of God I believed in Santa Claus, or Ouija boards, or invisible flying grapefruits… would you find any of those answers satisfying or even acceptable?
Violent fundies
We never wanted this to be an “atheist blog” or a “skeptical blog” or a “political blog,” or anything in particular like that. But I tend to go through phases in what I read and get excited about, and holding out for an assortment of post ideas sometimes means that I don’t post anything. In an effort to get back into the swing of things, I’m declaring this week Atheist Week here at It’s the Thought that Counts, and I’ll have one post on atheism and associated issues every day until I get it out of my system.
Let’s begin with a discussion of this ad from Answers in Genesis. (Thanks, Hemant… I think.)
Complete transcript of the voiceover: “If you don’t matter to God, you don’t matter to anyone.” Yep, that’s the word on the street from Answers in Genesis. (Motto: “believing it. defending it. proclaiming it.”) It’s not a new ad, but I guess it’s cropped up again.
I want to believe that the point of the ad is something like, if you don’t realize how much God loves you, you’ll feel unloved by the world and lash out with violence. I mean, I object to that message, but it’s a lot less horrible than the alternative, the easier interpretation: God hates you, so we have no problem with telling this child to shoot you in the face. (Crusades, anyone?)
I don’t take comfort in the idea that a man was gruesomely killed, in some sense by his own father, thousands of years ago in order to save me from eternal punishment and torment which his father set up for us in the first place. There’s no part of that that makes me feel particularly loved. I also resent the implication that I should be grateful and worship the people or entities responsible for such a monstrous plan, executed well before my birth and without my consent or even interest. But I thought that, at the very least, the explanation we’d associated with it was that God loves everyone, and that all you have to do to be saved is to acknowledge the love God already has for you. A weird explanation, to be sure; an emotionally scarring explanation, I think. But it was at least, at the end of the day, a desperate and sad attempt to reach out and be kind to others.
Answers in Genesis betrays the real message when they make this ad. That gun isn’t aimed at a vague someone; the child isn’t committing random acts of violence. Your impulse when viewing the ad isn’t to reach out to that boy and maybe tell him about Christ’s love so he doesn’t hurt a stranger. That gun is pointed at you. Your impulse is to be frightened for your life. AiG is saying that their God only cares about people who already worship him in the right ways, and that if God doesn’t care about you, you don’t deserve even the most basic of human courtesies from anyone else.
Fundamentalist Christians (as well as many not-so-fundamentalist ones) ask how it is possible to be moral without the rules given to you by a supernatural being and without the threat of eternal damnation as well as the promise of eternal reward. The typical atheist response is to point out that it’s the Christians who admit that without religion, they would be unable to stop themselves from stealing, raping, and murdering, yet somehow atheists manage without a problem. That’s troubling enough. But here, AiG is admitting that even their fabulous religion that teaches them to love their neighbors and turn the other cheek wouldn’t stop them from murdering us.
Do you see now why I have such a problem with the term apologetic?
Choosing between God and Satan
I was involved in a discussion recently in the comment thread of this post, and I found myself using an analogy that in retrospect was pretty accurate for clarifying my position. We were discussing whether atheists don’t believe in God because they want an excuse to live lives without any morals. (I’m sure there are some people who call themselves atheists for this reason. There are also some people who dress in all black and act really morbid just to spite their parents. Those people aren’t really part of the goth subculture, just as these people aren’t really atheists.)
The people arguing that atheists are just trying to skirt morality are working from the premise that morals can only come from God, and without Him and the threat of eternal damnation we’d all be terrible people. (Weren’t we just talking about that?) Someone pointed out, as evidence that atheists hate doing good, the fact that some atheists had previously stated that if God were to exist they wouldn’t worship Him. Clearly, he argued, they were just rebelling against God and his morals. I answered:
We disagree on what makes someone/something deserving of praise (or worship).
Christians: Assuming the God of the Bible exists, He ought to be obeyed and worshipped.
Atheists: [some, not all] Even if that God existed, based on what the Bible says about him I’m not sure he’s worthy of worship.The Bible says that God wants us to worship Him, and that He is omnipotent and omniscient. Omnipotence is a pretty intimidating concept, and I can see why someone would agree to submit to that unquestioningly. However, some of us find some Biblical teachings to be morally repugnant. I’m not inclined to worship anyone more powerful than I am just because of their power; instead I look at what they do with their power and how good I think it is.
The other person then asked me what I thought constituted worship-worthiness. I thought I had explained it right there, but I guess it wasn’t clear. What follows is the analogy that I used to make the the point to him. It’s written a bit better and more thoroughly than in the comment thread, of course. (Forgive me if this is a really well-known strategy already; I did a bit of searching and couldn’t find anything that was really expressing this idea, so I figured it could be potentially helpful to get out there for other people stuck in the same conversational impasse.)
I acknowledge that if there were to be some clear proof that God exists, with all the stipulations of typical Christian theology (e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence), I’d probably have no choice but to worship Him. If there were incontrovertible proof that He really does decree what’s objectively right and wrong, no matter how nonintuitive his judgments are, that’s just the way reality works… I think I’d follow those rules. Obviously, I have a hard time imagining such a scenario, because of various paradoxes required by such a being’s existence. (Can an omnipotent being make a boulder so heavy he cannot lift it? and so on.) I have less trouble imagining an extremely powerful God, one whose abilities far surpass anything a human is capable of. I can certainly understand a being like that not being worthy of worship.
I realize most theists would probably stop me right here and argue with me about the many properties of God which are infinite. Bear with me, though. All that’s necessary for the purposes of this argument is that we agree that at the very least, to humans, infinite power and extremely vast power are indistinguishable. If someone comes to you and says they’re God, and they can perform tons of apparent miracles, that’s pretty compelling, right? Even if they didn’t perform a literally infinite number of miraculous acts.
Now, consider Satan, the Devil. Satan, we’re told, is not omnipotent but is extremely powerful. In stories, he often tries to trick people into thinking that he’s looking out for their best interests. He appears in Revelations 13 pretending to be God and demanding worship. So let’s imagine that two beings manifest themselves to you, both claiming to be God, and both demonstrating extreme power, far beyond your comprehension. How do you tell them apart?
You have to look at what they do and say. How does each one use such power? Presumably they have some commandments for you. Perhaps one tells you to love your neighbors, to care for the less fortunate, to treat others how you would want to be treated. Maybe the other one tells you that if your child talks back to you, you ought to kill him, and that it’s honorable to offer your daughters up to be raped by an angry mob. So you take those commandments, and you evaluate how good they are, how morally upstanding they would make a person who followed them. You can imagine doing that, right? Even without knowing which set of commandments belonged to God, the supposed arbiter of all morality. My guess is that you’d pick the first one to worship as God, and the second one to shun as Satan. The second one sounds pretty awful.
Here’s the thing, though. All of those things are in the Bible, said by God or people speaking with his endorsement. The first set sounds familiar, I’m sure, but killing unruly children is laid out in Exodus, the story of Lot is right there in Genesis, and the apostle Peter later calls Lot just and righteous (2:7-8)… so you can’t claim that you’re just using the commandments of the God you already know to pick the hypothetical God in this example. There’s more where that came from, too, as I said in the comment thread:
I wouldn’t call a deity “benevolent” if they would think it’s good to kill everyone and start fresh every time a few people started misbehaving. I don’t approve of stoning to death as a punishment for anything. I don’t see any moral problem with homosexuality. I doubt that a benevolent God would set up a society with women inferior to men rather than equals, or that He would proclaim everyone to be tainted with original sin.
Even if you disagree with some of the particular cases, the general point is clear. We are able to look at rules and principles and judge them on criteria that are not derived from God.
The easy but weak analogy to make here is to a brutal dictator. Insert your choice of cliché example. Obviously, people condemn his regime because they look at what he did with extreme power and realize its moral repugnance. Reductio ad Hitlerium is so overused that people will overlook a situation where the analogy really is apt, so I think this sort of God vs. Satan challenge is a better trope to use. I’m not arguing that Satan might really be the good one, and God the bad one. If the Bible is entirely true, the Christian God is the one we ought to worship. However, this example makes clear the fact that moral judgments are something we are capable of, outside the scope of any deity’s commandments.
Atheists and Lent
A few days ago, I saw this post referencing a year-old article about Anti-Lent. The point of the article is that when most Christians are celebrating Lent by giving up things, atheists ought to do the extreme opposite: try new things, especially things considered sinful. Honestly, I’m ashamed to have this sort of stuff on About.com where people looking for information on atheism could easily stumble across it. It plays right into the scariest and most misguided stereotypes about atheists. When I saw the article featured again, with the comment, “I love this idea!”, I decided it was time to say something.
Being an atheist is not about being anti-Christian. If you’re an atheist because you hate Christians and you want to piss them off… you should think harder about what you truly believe about the world, how it got here, and how it works. Atheism means a lack of a belief in any deities. Atheists don’t subscribe to Christian dogma wholesale, but it is possible for atheists to agree with ideas that Christians happen to have as well. It’s not as though every time a Christian says something, atheists all stand up and yell the opposite thing. (Seriously, guys, given the number of times the Bible contradicts itself, that’d be a pretty counterproductive strategy.)
If you look at a set of rules and always take the action that breaks them, your life is defined by those rules as much as someone who always chooses to follow them. If you’re so vehemently not a Christian, why give their rules so much power over your life?
Then there’s the issue of sin. Many Christians, particularly the outspoken evangelical ones, believe that atheists have turned away from God and Jesus because they want the freedom to do whatever they want, no matter how immoral. Now, we know that it’s always a Christian who ends up making the argument that without God’s rules, they’d cheat and steal and kill all willy-nilly (and therefore God is necessary for morality). Atheists are perfectly capable of being moral and upstanding citizens without the threat of eternal damnation. Nothing advocated in this list is actually that outrageous if you read it — “Test Your Clothing Comfort Zone” turns out to suggest wearing a hat or a Hawaiian shirt, not a miniskirt and thigh-highs — but a quick skim through the taglines makes it look like atheists are a bunch of promiscuous, gluttonous alcoholics. (And worse, that we are that way just to spite the Christians.) We can do better than that.
Finally, I’m irked by the false dichotomy between atheism and Christianity. It’s really between atheism and religion. In the US, it seems like Christianity is the only alternative because of demographics. It turns out that lots of religions have holidays where you fast or give up things. In fact, most religious teachings aren’t that specific to one religion… probably because religions are just a formalized version of social norms, borne out of our intuition about what good morals are.
Getting too obsessed with your material wealth can lead to emotional strain or weakened friendships. Not always, but it might happen before you notice. It’s not a bad idea to take a step back, look at your priorities, and see if you’re really getting what you want out of the life you’re living. You can think of Lent like a religious version of a New Year’s resolution. You might not make one of those every year (I know I don’t), but you also don’t start out each year intending to be worse than ever before.
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