We atheists and agnostics often have a lot in common with you religious moderates
I struggle to see through the rampant commercialism, the over-consumption and the glazed-eyed happiness of the holiday season. But maybe I’ve had a break-through. It keeps recurring to me this month that kind and thoughtful atheists/agnostics have an immense amount in common with millions of kind and thoughtful people who believe in God.
Too many of us have too much in common, in fact, for me to stand by silently while the “new atheists” (led by Richard Dawkins) repeatedly belittle Believers. Most of these new atheists claim that religious moderates, by their silence, are enabling the social destruction wrought by fundamentalists. I think that is often true. By the same token, moderate atheists/agnostics are adding unnecessary fuel to the belief/non-belief wars when they fail to speak up during the new atheist hyper-scoldings of believers.
I suspect that many of the new atheist criticisms of religion underestimate the function served by the type of religion practiced by most religious moderates (I think that David Sloan Wilson has it right on this point) and that they over-estimate the ability of science to provide substitutes for whatever it is that religious moderates get out of their practice of religion (on this point, see this Salon.com interview of theologian John Haught).
In fact, many of the new atheist scoldings smell of schadenfreude and vengeance. I agree that much of criticism is warranted on an intellectual level, but it seems like we really need to sit down and figure out how to get along with each other, for the common good. Is that possible? Absolutely. We’ve got a country to turn around and we need the help of the many smart and good-hearted believers who line up with us well on so many issues. It always has been possible for us to work with each other and it always will be, as long as we limit membership in our “club” to people who are kind and thoughtful.
Before I continue, I need to define who I’m not including by use of the phrase “kind and thoughtful.” I’m leaving out fundamentalists. Yes, the fundies often show common courtesies—they hold doors open for others and they say “please and thank you.” The social, political and intellectual damage that they have brought, however, means that they don’t qualify as either kind or thoughtful. Who are these people I’m scolding? I’ll refer to Jimmy Carter’s definition of “fundamentalist”:
A fundamentalist believes, say, in religious circles, that I am close to God. Everything that I believe is absolutely right. Anyone who disagrees with me, in any case, is inherently wrong and therefore, inferior. And it violates my basic principles if I negotiate with anyone else or listen to their point of view or modify my own positions at all. So that is what has permeated this administration.
One more explanatory note before moving on: There are religious organizations that are entirely fundamentalist and there are other organizations that are not, but that include sub-groups of fundamentalists. To really get it right, each person should be judged individually. My quick test is whether a person is strongly motivated to impose his or her own image and likeness upon the rest of us. If so, we’ve got ourselves a fundamentalist (of one flavor or another).
Setting aside those fundamentalists, then, what do the rest of us have in common? What do kind and thoughtful believers have in common with kind and thoughtful atheists and agnostics? The list is almost endless. Every day is a good day for all kind and thoughtful people to remember this.
We recognize a rampant dysfunctional sense of community.
We notice moral incontinence abounding—too many people who are all-too-willing to unquestioningly submit to their immediate materialist and biological urges.
We recognize conspicuous consumption that is so dramatic that it keeps many of us from participating in the community building we desperately need.
We recognize the critical importance of raising thoughtful and sensitive children in safe neighborhoods.
We all believe in redemption; We know that lending desperate people a helping hand is something we should
We believe strongly in the value of cultural institutions such as libraries, museums, and universities, especially when they challenge us.
We believe in elementary schools that teach our children to think critically and to continuously reevaluate who they are and who they should be as individuals and as a society.
We support strong science guided by a wide-open sense of wonder.
For every agnostic or atheist I know who ascribes to these sorts of principles, I can name a person who is “spiritual but not religious” who agrees and two additional supporters who regularly attend some sort of church.
If the above principles aren’t enough, consider the hundreds of important and basic things that all atheists/agnostics have in common with all Believers. Reading this list compiled by Donald Brown, should dampen the enthusiasm of anyone who claims that the odd religious assertions of moderates should always be front and center when we atheists/agnostics are trying to figure out who these folks are.
I’ve certainly heard objections to getting too cozy with believers. I am well aware of the strange things that kind and thoughtful Believers say, especially on Sunday. Yes, these things are unsubstantiated and often creepy. But guess what? Kindhearted and thoughtful religious moderates don’t usually say such things outside of their Sunday services and they really (really) do see eye to eye with many of us skeptics on many of the things that really count.
If saying strange things disqualifies us from respecting other people, also consider the many bone-headed things that other atheists/agnostics say and do. There are many atheist/agnostic Neocons out there, for example. Also consider the atheists/agnostics who believe in astrology, nihilism, the free market as an all-purpose Savior to human ineptitude, or that science somehow provides all the answers to those who ponder the human condition (I’m not suggesting that anyone has all the answers).
Let’s make sure that we atheists/agnostics are not making it too much of a priority to bond and work mainly with those who happen to be atheists/agnostics when we might have a whole lot more in common with those people who like to give a weekly nod to Jesus-the-hippie-philosopher.
Vicki,
If I believed that there was a pink blancmange at the bottom of my garden that listened to my prayers then I would have been locked up years ago, but for reasons that I do not understand, simply because millions of folks are similarly deluded we do nothing and pretend they are perfectly sane people whose opinions on pink blancmange are a subject worthy of a university degree. And we give them tax breaks and invites on to TV programmes to talk about pink blancmange and let them decide when our public holidays are and have artistic representations of pink blancmange in our living rooms and public spaces and even let them break the law. I can’t have a meeting at work without first asking the pink blancmange for a good meeting, or walk down the high street without being asked to invite the pink blancmange into my life.
So when I point out that a believer in pink blancmange has no room to talk to anyone about intellectual honesty you cry foul because his pink blancmange has got chocolate buttons in it!?!
Erich says he agrees with Haught in his comments about scientific Puritanism. Erich, it is hypocritical of Haught to claim that science cannot speak on “purpose” while he is simultaneously reserving for himself the right to talk on science. Either the two fields are distinctly different and members of either should not step over the line, or the line does not exist. Haught wants it both ways and that makes him a hypocrit.
Erich then goes on to quote Philip Kitcher, a secular humanist. Secular humanism is atheism with empathy. I have nothing against it but I don’t do empathy very well so I tend to ignore it. His comments can be summarised as: People have to be given a sense that their lives matter.
To which I can only repeat that this is based on the fundamentally arrogant assumption that the lives of people have a purpose. We do not consider that a prawn has a purpose, or a zebra has a purpose, so why should we necessarily have a purpose (this is me being empathetic). You only need a purpose if you have a deity. Then you can ask yourself, “Why did God make us?” or “What did God make us for?”. But without a deity the question doesn’t even make sense. You are here to participate in the process of evolution, to reproduce and pass on your genes. To assume that “creation” or the cosmic pink blancmange has assigned you any higher purpose is simply another fond delusion.
In a much earlier post in this thread grumpypilgrim repeated a popular myth I have an interest in. What he said was: The question facing potential believers in Christianity is not whether there is a god or not, the question is whether the specific god described in the Bible exists or not. The first question can never be answered;
It is my contention that this question can be answered; we can know that there is no such thing as god. Although we do first have to define god.
Some people will claim that there is a god in anything, god is power, god is light etc. so that for them they can see god in a lump of coal or in a tree or a waterfall, or even inside themself. This is not the kind of god I am talking about. What I am talking about is the disembodied sky god of the hebrew bible, a supernatural ultimate supreme being that looks down on us and crucially, created the universe and everything in it.
The universe did not exist until god made it, so he must have been outside (or at least “not in”) the universe when he made it. So where was he before he made the universe?
The obvious answer is that he was in some other universe first, then he made this universe.
You might decide that this “other” that he was in when he made our universe was not actually a universe, but he clearly had to be “in” something so let’s call it a universe for the sake of having a name.
So who made the other universe that god was in before he made this one? If god made it, then how did he get in that universe?
This argument continues ad infinitum until at some point you claim that he didn’t make some particular universe, it was made by some other god. In which case our god is not the ultimate supreme being after all.
If you never make that claim, then your argument simply goes on and on and on for ever and ever without end. There is no point in time at which the creation of anything began.
Therefore, the universe cannot have been created by a supernatural ultimate supreme being.
Martin:
I don’t believe in pink blancmanges, as they are a lexical absurdity. Were I to suddenly come face to face with a pink blancmange, I would not eat it. Though I might pick out the chocolate buttons, if present.
I think we’ve heard the loop about pink blancmanges, sky fairies, etc. Do you have another one that is more germane?
Hi Martin,
Thanks for joining the conversation. God may very well end up being a pink blancmange or anything else you might visualize. According to many religious thinkers God is an amorphous being beyond our concepts and and possibly even our comprehension. So pick your own form. It’s free.
I can’t understand why some of the very intelligent folks on this blog feel so compelled to deride all people of faith as “deluded” and other such slights. I find it little different than the position that many fundamentalists take with atheists. They might call you deluded too. Sticks and stones will …Oh you get it. I think that the whole point of Eric’s blog is that both sides of the debate should (or at least can) dial back the negative rhetoric in favor of concentrating on those ideals we share regardless of motivation. You want social justice as much as I do. Whether that desire springs from religious conviction, self interest or pure logic is of little consequence in the big picture. Is it right of you to withold a life preserver from a drowning man until he professes atheism? Is it right of me to refrain from turning the firehose on your burning house until you beg Jehovah for forgiveness? I think that we would both agree that the answer is no in both cases. There is no real gain in false professions of faith or of atheism for either side. However, I would argue that everyone loses when a man drowns or someone’s house burns down. You can call it a pathological need to believe in pink blancmanges, or a pathological need to eradicate pink blancmanges for all I care. Just so that the man lives and the house is saved.
Believe me Martin, if I (and millions of other people of faith over the centuries) can’t prove that God exists to an objective certainty, then you have an even more formidable task in trying to “prove” the negative. Semantics aside, it is a nonstarter. I could pose you many a pretty riddle (to which the answer is always God) and it would not move you I think. Nor will the riddle of who created the very first universe move me. Because a question cannot be answered positively neither indicates nor excludes anything. It simply remains a good question until the data comes in. Wouldn’t it be funny if all of the praying, singing and thinking about God simply leads us to a better understanding of ourselves? Wouldn’t it be just as funny if all of the mathmatics, physics, chemistry etc. leads us to an understanding of God? Life can be hilarious that way. Stay tuned my friend.
I know that some religious folks now read Jesus as saying, “Do unto others, before they do unto you”. However, I still like the original better and I don’t think that you have to be a believer in religion to recognize the truth and justice of it. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” still works as both good humanism and faith. Whichever approach works to get us all to that wonderful place is less important than getting there. Nespa?
Vicky,
If you are not able to figure out for yourself that a man’s beliefs are germane to his right to talk about intellectual honesty, then there is no point us even having a discussion.
Haught’s beliefs are not of a trivial nature and are not to be compared to an average man in the street saying, “I believe the Rams will win the play-offs.” This man has by contrast spent his entire working life writing about a supernatural deity for which there not only is no evidence whatsoever, but which flies in the face of all the evidence there is. This puts it right up there on the shelf with the tooth fairy, Superman, Santa Claus and dare I say it, pink blancmange, from which it is obvious that he is not even being intellectually honest with himself, never mind with us. He therefore loses the right to speak for others on the topic of intellectual honesty. Period.
Vesperiant,
Personally, I’m with Christopher Hitchens on this one. I only offered the proof, which requires no quotation marks since it is a valid proof, because grumpypilgrim appeared to be unaware of its existence.
Should you not be familiar with the work of Hitchens, the quote to which I refer goes something like this: what can be asserted without evidence, can be ignored without evidence.
I also deeply regret that Bertrand Russel beat me to this one: Apart from logical cogency, there is to me something a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent deity, after preparing the ground by many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider himself satisfied by the final emergence of Hitler, Stalin and the H Bomb.
You ask why (some) intelligent folks feel compelled to “slight” believers. It is quite simply because it is only an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the creator of the universe can hear your thoughts, whilst it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he taps messages with raindrops in Morse code on my bedroom window.
Or what about one of the central tenets of the catholic church. If you say a few words in Latin over a cracker it turns into the body of a man who died two thousand years ago. Not just representative of his body, but his actual body is physically in that cracker.
Can there be any doubt that if you were the only one who believed this you would be completely mad. That tens of millions of people believe this is just totally beyond bizarre.
Martin, you attribute to Haught beliefs about creationism which are polar opposite to what he actually believes. Yet you apparently believe you still have the right to lecture others about intellectual honesty.
“If you talk to God, you are praying; If God talks to you, you have schizophrenia. If the dead talk to you, you are a spiritualist; If you talk to the dead, you are a schizophrenic.”
–Thomas Szasz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
Vicky,
I am not “lecturing others”. All I’m doing is what everyone else is doing, offering my opinion. And my opinion on this matter is that Haught is not being intellectually honest with himself.
If, out the maelstrom of contradictory irrational beliefs this man has about the creator of the universe I chose the wrong one to use as an example then that is to be regretted, but it does not in any way devalue my argument.
There is, I trust you are able to appreciate, a world of difference between on the one hand a netizen making an innocent error of attribution and on the other a christian theologian setting out to deliberately deceive people who have paid money to read his words?