"IMPUDENT AND MISGUIDED SCHOLARS" PART I

(See also my entry Atheism As Extreme Fear Of God posted on January 15, 2011, as part of the composite posting Religion And Culture.)

“The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God.” (Psalms 1:14). I am now on the subject of atheism. The entry’s title is, curiously, a rather unexpected quote from Voltaire, and here it is in its fuller context:

“The atheists are for the most part impudent and misguided scholars, who reason badly, and who, not being able to understand the Creation, the origin of evil, and other difficulties, have recourse to the hypothesis of the eternity of things and of inevitability.” (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1764).

I am not surprised at all by Voltaire’s devastating blow to his otherwise dedicated fan base. It Is one thing to scorn religion, with its inevitable hypocrisy and will to power (hence Voltaire’s famous "Ecrasez l’Infâme!"), but quite another, to deny the existence of a higher spiritual power, the mainstay of all philosophical thinking and the foundation of ethics. Such “impudence,” Voltaire, being an equal-opportunity critic, naturally, cannot tolerate.

For those of us who do not credit the great Voltaire with an adequate definition of the subject of our discussion, the first question to ask now is what exactly is atheism?

The following is an abbreviated summary of the Atheism entry in the BBC World Religions Project, which I have found interesting, accompanied by my immediate comments. The BBC material is in blue font, my comments are in regular font.

Atheism is defined as the absence of belief in Gods or spiritual beings. Atheists do not use God to explain the existence of the universe. They also insist that human beings can devise suitable moral codes to live by, without the aid of Gods or scriptures. In other words, they are forever reinventing the bicycle, yet declaring that the invention of the wheel had nothing to do with it!

The next paragraph is on the morality of atheists, and here I have a strong disagreement with its very first sentence. Atheists are as moral or immoral as religious people. Considering that personal morality is more of an inner attitude than an outward expression, the question of hypocrisy becomes the defining factor. An immoral religious person is always a hypocrite, who disguises his or her immorality under a façade of fake morality. An atheist is moral when his inner attitude is rooted in religious belief, even though his outward expression may be contrary to his inner attitude, and amoral (likelier than immoral) always as a matter of principle, which sharply distinguishes his immorality, or amorality from that of a religious person.

Returning to the second paragraph in full now, we come to the discussion of a moral attitude in an atheist.

Atheists are as moral or immoral as religious people. In practical terms, they often follow the same moral code as religious people, but they arrive at the decision of what is good or bad without help from the idea of God. (Which is already a self-deception, if they truly believe that the social moral codes, accepted by the societies they live in, have themselves come into existence without help from the idea of God, or an outright deception, if they just pretend that this is the case.)

The third paragraph already contains a basic flaw in addressing the issue of atheism. It is mixing up items of different quality and assumes facts not in evidence:

Many atheists are also secularists, hostile to special treatment given to organized religions. However, it is possible to be both atheist and religious. Most Buddhists are, as also adherents of other religions, such as Judaism and Christianity.

Atheists deny the existence of God, but secularists are people with a political agenda, which is to abolish the privileged status of religion in society. If this is not a classic case of apples and oranges, nothing is. To put atheists and secularists into the same category obfuscates the issue. Once you start accusing atheists of secularism, or secularists of atheism, the separate meanings of both are lost, and so is the challenge.

As for the possibility of being both atheist and religious, this is, again, an issue of hypocrisy, but this time, much more than that. Three religions are mentioned here. It is clear with Christianity, which implies faith in God and His Son Jesus Christ, that any person who is an atheist inside, yet wishes to perpetuate religious ties to his community and culture, and thus keeps his church attendance and religious identification, ought to be counted as religious, and not an atheist, for all statistical purposes, except for psychoanalysis. Within my own distinction between faith and religion, there is no discrepancy here, and no difficulty in resolving a little problem like this.

With regard to Judaism, most adherents to Reform, Constructionist, and even Conservative Judaism are in principle atheistic. Their rituals are not a tribute to God, but to Israel, that is, to their ethnic, cultural identity as Jews.

In so far as Buddhism is concerned, whether or not it is, like Hinduism, a “Godless” religion, is a matter of definition. If God is perceived personally, as in the three great monotheistic religions, the Hinduist idea of Brahma will not be accepted as an idea of God. If, in Buddhism, the Dharma can be perceived as the Law without the Lawgiver, and Satori as an Enlightenment without the Enlightener, while Nirvana is nothing more than a transcendence into the total void, which is both physical and metaphysical nonsense, then we can only understand it as a resignation to the mysterious unknowability of God, but not a denial of God, by any stretch of imagination…

(This is the end of Part I. Part II will be posted tomorrow.)