My blogging hiatus in June was intentional. My apparent hiatus in August was entirely unplanned. Several factors have kept me away from Dead-Logic (and the blogosphere altogether), but one thing in particular has robbed me of my muse lately. Hopefully forcing myself to sit down and write will help me figure this out. If this blog entry seems a bit disjointed or rambly (no, it's not a word... don't care), just go with it.
Okay, more writing starting in 3... 2... 1...
I've never been comfortable with labels. I accepted the atheist label reluctantly. This reluctance was not out of shame or uncertainty, but due to the cultural denotations: mostly the implication that I'm "in the club" with guys like Dawkins and Hitchens. While I respect these thinkers, I just don't feel that way. I'm not in any club. I hate the idea of uniting under the banner of atheism because I don't think unity can be achieved merely by proclaiming what we are not. Here I can sympathize with P.Z. Myers' criticism of "dictionary atheists," even if I think he's just plain wrong on this and his approach was asinine and childish. If you're an atheist like P.Z. or me or my brothers-in-blog Mike and Tristan, then there's more to you than just a "lack of belief in god(s)." Doesn't change the meaning of the word "atheism," but understanding that fact is important nonetheless.
Atheism is simply the by-product of that which people like us hold most dear: skeptical inquiry, the scientific method, free thought, radical questioning, critical thinking and the quest for truth. Atheism would be cast aside if those virtues ever pointed to a reality we could rightly call theistic. Uniting under the atheist label places the emphasis on the least significant aspect of our worldview. If I have to use a label (and I understand the necessity of labels, even though I know they can't be trusted), I would much rather choose a label that expresses something positive - something I really believe in.
Some argue that the atheist label is necessary, since we live in a theistic society and, given the strong cultural influence theism still enjoys, the distinction is needed. Maybe that's true. I'm not saying we should abandon the label altogether. I just find it incredibly unsatisfying.
 Whoever made this is an idiot. |
I got into an interesting discussion about religion recently with a friend of mine who was curious about my current beliefs (and non-beliefs). He considers himself a Christian, although he admits "there's no proof." He isn't what one might call a devout believer. He has a casual belief in god. His reason for maintaining the faith that his parents handed down to him struck me as peculiar, although not necessarily uncommon: "I believe because I'd rather believe in something rather than nothing."
Ah, yes. Atheists believe in nothing. He might as well have said that atheists have meaningless lives. Certainly many theists would agree. This idea that "without god, one has no real beliefs" that my friend believes implicitly is without question the result of the influence religion has had on his life - and he's not even that religious. The mindset of religion - the Abrahamic religions in particular (after all, those are the faiths that have caused the most harm) - is an "all or nothing" mindset:
Our faith is the only true faith. All other faiths are wrong. Any other path is wrong. If you do not believe in our faith, you have nothing. No hope. No truth. No morality. Nothing. If you do not agree with the one true faith then you are condemned. All your base are belong to us.
Obi-Wan Kenobi sums it up well in Episode III: "Only a Sith deals in absolutes." Wars start, people die and lives are destroyed because of the absolute nature of religious faith. Compromise is a dirty word, used only by heretics and wacky liberals. Coexist is a bad idea somebody decided to put on a bumper sticker. It just doesn't jive with the absolute nature of religious faith: The Way. The Truth. The Life. No one can be saved without the One True Faith. Amen.
When atheists can't or won't answer the questions theists think they should answer, they laugh, scoff and mock. How many times has a theist asked (arrogantly), "Oh yeah? Well where did we come from then?" When the atheist doesn't come back with a definite answer or has the audacity to admit simply, "I don't know," the theist uses this as evidence that atheism is wrong. "Atheism can't even tell us how we got here." So... having an answer you can't prove is better than being honest by admitting we don't yet know all the answers? Sorry, but we don't know how it all happened. We can get you as close as the Big Bang, but beyond that we just don't know yet. Maybe one day we will. Until that day, honesty and integrity demand that I admit my lack of knowledge.
If courts of law used the same reasoning as theists, then the accused would have to show the court who really committed the crime in order to be judged innocent.
"I didn't do it."
"Well who did?"
"I don't know."
"You mean to say you can't even explain how this happened and who did it? You sound guilty to me."
To make matters worse - and to keep on point - theists make the mistake of confusing ignorance with nothingness. "I'd rather believe in something than nothing" means my friend can't live with an acceptance of ignorance when it comes to god, in spite of the fact that he admits there's no evidence for it. For him and many others, agnosticism is equivalent to nihilism. How did people get this so wrong?
"Only a Sith deals in absolutes."
Of course religion is to blame. Religion started this mindset that disagreement should be punished, ridiculed and eliminated - violently, if necessary. And even if this mindset began independent of religion, certainly faith has perfected the grotesque art of exclusivism throughout the centuries. The earth has soaked up more than enough spilled blood of martyrs and infidels.
When my friend admits "there's no proof," he's admitting agnosticism. But he can't bring himself to say so, because he needs "something" to believe in. So, instead of just saying "I don't know" about god(s), he clings to that which is most familiar: the faith handed down to him by his parents; the faith most familiar to him; the faith most widely accepted by his cultural context.
I don't blame him. It's easy to do. I did it for years before dragging myself kicking and screaming out of Plato's cave. When I saw the light that burned away the shadows of my pretensions, I finally saw the need to embrace my agnosticism. But in doing so, I was left with a void - what Christians tend to call a "god-shaped hole" in my heart. They would argue that only god can fill that hole. I think the only reason the hole is "god-shaped" is that all I filled it with is god. When I found god to be less than, well, real, I needed something else. But I was so comfortable with my beliefs - even in moments of great doubt about the veracity of the truth claims of Christianity, I found comfort in the familiar. When I finally became honest with myself and discarded my faith, I was left empty.
 Good, good! |
"Ah ha!" the Sith theist will say. "See? Atheism leads to emptiness and nothingness!"
Sigh. No, all that happened to me is what Nietzsche's madman predicted would happen when we discard the faith of our fathers. The madman ran through the streets declaring “god is dead!" pointing to the culture's general abandonment of genuine commitment to the Christian faith. The madman has become a prophet of our times: people who consider themselves Christian these days adhere to the tenets of their preferred religion only when it’s convenient, nostalgic or sentimental.
My friend's faith for example is quite convenient for him. He doesn't get bogged down with any of the commands or cultural expectations. He doesn't go to church, he drinks, swears and does all the things "regular folk" do. He clings to his faith because that's how he finds meaning. He could find a true and deep meaning to his life, but he's comfortable enough to not look, falling back on the ever-so-comfortable "there's no proof" line to justify staying where he is and not looking for answers beyond his current presuppositions.
And to be honest, if that works for him, then fine. I won't tell him how to live his life. All I can do is promote the virtues I hold most dear, search for answers to the questions I hold most pertinent, and correct the misconceptions I hold most egregious. This is the meaning of my life. This is what I believe in. I don't believe in towing party lines, drawing lines in the sand and declaring war. I don't believe in defending labels or joining elitist clubs. People have done this enough in the name of religion, and when I see atheists act the same way I can't help but think we're taking a step backwards.
The madman in Nietzsche's story is not mad because he talks nonsense, for his speech is coherent and insightful. The speaker only appears crazy because he is excited about something the crowd has not yet become aware of--because he is too far ahead of his time. The fact that "God is dead" in itself is no news to the crowd; many of them have been faithless for some time. What is news to them is that it is they who have killed God, that it was their own doing (by developing a modern civilization of scientific thought and sophisticated technology) that has led to the demise of the Supreme Being in their world. And what the crowd also fails to realize is the enormity of the consequences that are bound to follow from their deed. For so far most people have continued living as if nothing had happened, as if the world in which God’s authority had once been supreme were still intact. But that well-ordered and comfortable world, as the madman insists, does not exist anymore. Unnoticed by the crowd, the world as a whole has become a dark, cold, and frighteningly disorienting place. [source]
When our center - that in which we find purpose, meaning and a foundation for our lives - is taken away, we are left in an intellectual and emotional void. Nietzsche exhorts us to carve out our own meaning in this absurd universe. To do this, we must confront the madman, who seemingly echoes the sentiments of Christian apologists who argue for god-centered morality when he speaks: "Whither is God?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him---you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?" [source]
Without god, the apologists argue, everything is meaningless. We have no purpose, no basis for meaning or morality. All we have is "the [cold] breath of empty space" which causes us to ask, "is there still any up or down?" Theism-based morality is nearly as popular as theism itself. The belief that objective moral values are impossible without god is the conventional wisdom of the day – at least of present-day American culture. A good friend of mine who is an atheist received a peculiar compliment: “I can’t believe you’re an atheist. You’re such a nice person.” My friend took no offense, because he knew the intentions behind the words were good, but this statement illustrates the dominant belief that god is the source of morals, or morality apart from a divine source is either impossible or pointless. Some call this view “Divine Command Theory.” Apologists for god-centered morality evoke with consistency the name of Fyodor Dostoevsky in the attempt to credit him with this quote: “without god, everything is permitted.”
But it is the not-so-humble opinion of the writer of this essay that a serious reading of The Brothers Karamazov raises more questions vis-à-vis both morality and the problem of evil than many apologists think it answers; indeed, a careful examination of the classic novel should force the critical mind to question whether the author views the world through the eyes of the faithful Alyosha or the skeptical Ivan (or both, thus making the conflict within the book enfleshed in the author). Dostoevsky adhered to a form of Christian theism, but struggled with the human condition, concerned with finding a way to take the measure of human life in the modern world. This forever earned Dostoevsky a link to the umbrella term existentialism.
Nietzsche, Dostoevsky’s contemporary (the more of whom I study, the more difficult it becomes for me to discuss without also mentioning Dostoevsky, and vice-versa), another thinker linked to existentialism, divorces morality from its divine sanction altogether. Nietzsche sees a complicity between morality and the Christian God that perpetuates a life-denying, and so ultimately nihilistic, stance. [source]
Nietzsche was not the first to notice the quandaries inherent to deity-based ethics. Plato recorded a dialogue between his mentor Socrates and a priest named Euthyphro.
The Euthyphro Dilemma is summed up in the following question: Does God command the good because it is good, or is it good because it is commanded by God? If it is the former, then god is not the source of morality. At best god could serve as an educator of ethics, provided that we have a way of knowing for certain that god’s teachings (or god him/herself) can be trusted. If the former is true, then there is at least one thing above god: the code of ethics. If the latter is true, then morality is determined arbitrarily. The second horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma is by far the scarier of the two, for if it is true, then morality is entirely subjective, dependent entirely on the will and whim of god. If god turns out to be less than noble (by conventional standards), then by divine decree such activities as murder, rape, child pornography and human sacrifices could become morally good – even “holy.” Proper moral conduct would then be to respond as Abraham did when he ascended the mountain to sacrifice his son Isaac.
Theists argue often for an objective morality, yet try to claim god is the source of morality. They essentially want both horns of the Euthyphro dilemma to be true. Thus we find theism-based morality and meaning deemed precarious long before Nietzsche's madman ran through the streets. What lends influential power to the arguments of Divine Command Theory advocates is the fear that comes from the uncertainty associated with the death of god: one's center is destroyed. With feet planted firmly in mid-air, one struggles to find a foundation for his life.
This is the fire through which each of us must pass on our way out of Plato's cave. Many never make it through, opting instead for the comfort of the familiar. Better to remain in the safety of the predictable, even if they are merely shadows, than to burn in the purifying fire of reality. Better to hold on to that which is emotionally satisfying, even if it is a superficial satisfaction, than to struggle in the attempt to grasp something deeper. This is the refining fire through which all truthseekers must pass.
This is what I believe in.
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