THE HUMAN PARTY

Universe, City, Cell, String

articulating an affirmative atheism

I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.

...Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth.

-Friedrich Nietzsche

More than a century after Nietzsche wrote On the Genealogy of Morals, atheism and non-belief are still seen by most people as a No, a purely negative framework based only in denial instead of affirmation. Atheists are supposed to be immoral and licentious, and a life without God is still presumed to be cold, sad, and meaningless, lacking both mystery and purpose. Atheists are not trusted: in fact, study after study shows that atheists rank well below any other group in America in terms of who people would elect to public office or allow their children to marry - below homosexuals, immigrants, racial minorities, or any religious group.

Some of this perception is due to the non-comprehension of a society of people thoroughly and often irreversibly indoctrinated by organized religions. Some of it is due to the dogmatic scientific materialism of the last several centuries. But much of it is also due to atheists pettily sniping at organized religion’s more ridiculous tenets instead of focusing on the careful and sustained articulation of a reality-based alternative.

Such an alternative is urgently needed. For far too long, doctrine and dogma have trumped reason and reflection, obedience has overshadowed agency and participation in the visionary experience, and an obsession with an imaginary afterlife has eclipsed the beauty and mystery of life itself. Worse, organized religion continues to be a source of too much needless violence and destruction of life, a ceaseless spring of intolerance, bigotry, and hatred founded on fantastically outdated, primitive, millennia-old superstitions.

The issue is, of course, more complicated by far. Religions have introduced many important ideas into our cultures; for example, the prophetic tradition taught us to value the lives of strangers and the importance of helping poor and less fortunate. Liberation theology has played an important role in the global fight for justice. And belief in God has been a source of inspiration and solace for billions of people suffering incredible pain, hardship, and loss – without God, the world appears to these people an unintelligible, random, bleak, and often unbearably cruel (as, indeed, it often is).

No wonder then that so many are unwilling to embrace modern atheism, so long as it represents only a refutation. Yet to progress as a species, we must move beyond a literal interpretation of the myths of the past. We can, and we must, do better; we must create a spirituality informed and inspired by our ever-evolving scientific knowledge of the cosmos. Luckily, the world around us is an awe-inspiring place, brimming with a wonder and mystery that most organized religions have largely failed to acknowledge, much less comprehend or celebrate. And we can critically appropriate from religious texts and traditions without taking their teachings as the “word of God.”

The task of articulating a sustainable, secular spirituality is a daunting task, and far beyond the scope of this article. But as a small beginning, I’d like to briefly address a few of the misconceptions about atheism mentioned earlier. The first major fallacy is that atheists are amoral or immoral, and that belief in God (and afterlife) is the primary reason to act morally.

There are many glaring flaws in this argument that atheists often point out to counter it – for example, atheists are much less likely to be homophobes or misogynists than believers. A majority of modernity’s largest philanthropists are non-believers. And atheists have a much healthier, egalitarian, and pragmatic view of sex. This can have very important consequences; for example, the Pope recently decreed that condoms actually made the AIDS epidemic worse, something so plainly and patently false at face value that it’s a wonder more Catholics didn’t question his infallibility.

There are countless (admittedly valid) arguments like this, and perusing atheist web sites will quickly introduce you to more than you would probably care to read. But I think they miss the forest for the trees. The premise of our supposed immorality is a lack of divinely-ordained moral absolutes. But morality is not absolute, and blind obedience to simplistic rules invariably does it extreme violence – obedience is the morality of children. Real morality is situational, flexible, dynamic, and difficult, and it evolves as our collective consciousness does. Both the Greek philosophers and the writers of the Bible accepted slavery, as did most of America’s founding fathers, who inscribed it into our foundational documents. Yet today it is something that we categorically reject, and rightly so. Recognizing that our collective morality is an evolving human construction does not devalue it – it simply allows us to make it better, and to take pride in our ability to act morally of our own accord.

The second major misconception I’d like to dispel is that the world without God is a sad and empty place. When I explain to people that I don’t believe in God, this is probably the most common response I receive.  They assume that without some higher authority’s master plan, human life is utterly devoid of meaning or mystery. In fact, this could not be further from the truth.

To give an illustrative example: many religious people are disturbed by evolution, believing that having evolved from other life forms somehow dirties us. “I’m not descended from some ape” is a common refrain.  Yet think about this for a moment. The theist view is that we were put here by an omniscient and omnipotent deity, and our lives play out according to His master plan – all of the unfair suffering, wanton destruction, and undeserved death is written off as part of His unfathomable “greater purpose.” He created us all ex nihilo as imperfect beings, sinful from birth. I fail to see how an anthropomorphized deity, who is often by turns jealous, petty, and vengeful in the sacred texts, testing us though He already knows the outcome, playing out a sick cosmic game with our lives, is really “meaningful.”

Now contrast this with the reality of our situation. After billions of years of Earth’s existence, out of unfathomable spans of complete un-sentient darkness, grew the first sparks of life. These primordial beings, the most basic life-forms imaginable, somehow managed through selection, genetic drift, migration, and mutation, to birth humanity –after billions of years of evolution, against the most improbable of odds, we are here. Not just here, but able to understand how we got here.  We are the eyes and ears and minds of the universe, seeing and hearing and knowing itself. The most improbable confluence of forces and particles, we took untold eons to develop to this wondrous moment where we can stand on our own two feet and shout “I am here!” This is the greatest gift one could receive, and the most awesome responsibility.

Having been granted this brief moment of sentience, this imperfect rationality, it is our most fundamental duty to strive further – to know more, to act on that knowledge, and to create over and above ourselves. To fulfill our meaning as a species, we must at once embrace and overcome our origins, esteeming the world that brought us forth and its astonishing biodiversity as something truly holy, and understanding our role as its ordained caretakers.
 
When we realize that just to stand here as beings conscious of the world around us, able to perceive it through our five limited senses and our macroscopically-oriented¹  brains, is the most profound miracle one could imagine, it is a far more meaningful experience than being plopped here at the whimsy of a deity who no longer deigns to show His presence. Understanding the truth of our origins is the only way to understand our uniquely precarious situation as a species, the only way to comprehend the paradox of the human condition and to contextualize human society and culture. As Neitzsche wrote,

Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman – a rope over an abyss. A dangerous across, a dangerous on-the-way, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous shuddering and stopping.”

Realizing that God is a convenient fiction, many non-believers make the mistake of labeling the religious impulse as irrational and wrong-headed. Yet, as we begin to comprehend the nature of the universe and our place within it – as we look at all the layers of the cosmos, the universe(s) and galaxies and cities and cells and atoms and strings all at once, and find ourselves a product and a part of all – worship is a wholly appropriate reaction. We need to recognize and embrace our collective desire to be part of something greater than ourselves, and fight to explain that science does not have to destroy the mystery of life – rather, it can give it a more precise, and a more beautiful, articulation. I do not mean to suggest that atheists should create a new religion. But in order to present a palatable alternative to theism, we must recognize the limits of scientific materialism and learn from religion while presenting a subtler and truer vision of life and its meaning. As the mathematician and philosopher Alfred North Whitehead said,

Religion is a vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest. ...The fact of the religious vision, and its history of persistent expansion, is our one ground for optimism. Without it, human life is a flash of occasional enjoyments lighting up a mass of pain and misery, a bagatelle of transient experience.

¹ As opposed to relativistic, mesoscopic, microscopic, or quantum