(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.)
No comments:
Post a Comment