On Atheism and Virtue.

Ian Cooper

When Atheism becomes nothing more than an attack platform, an excuse to indulge in bigotry and prejudice against those who disagree, that is when I find it the least interesting.

All you have to do is read the comment section on any story regarding atheism, evolution, creationism, or something merely Biblical, or whatever the subject is. It’s easy to find plenty of examples. There are bigots on both sides of the issue, as well as the merely immature.

I don’t care if people are stupid to believe this or that. I don’t necessarily think they are inherently evil because they think different thoughts. And I think that works both ways—I can look at an atheist from the point of view of a religionist, and guess what?

They really are godless. One might think that is the point.

We are entirely Godless, and yet we wish to discuss certain moral issues.

We would like to discuss those issues with the rest of the world, and atheism is not evolution. It is not science in schools, it is not an attack on gun rights or the right to free speech. Atheism is not communism, nor is it an attack on the nuclear family, marriage or the children and their cute little kittens.

It is a method of making systematic inquiries into questions of a moral character, one which leaves supernatural causes out of the equation.

Atheism has broken the monopoly on morality formerly held by religion.

Look. It does me no good to read an anti-Semite’s views on the Jewish religion within the context of a discussion of atheism. Even Voltaire was a bigot, albeit one who claimed to be a philosopher.

To me that is not its purpose.

The purpose of atheism is, and should be, in my opinion, a method of both learning about, and teaching morality, which might be described as inculcating positive virtues in an individual, as well as within the greater social context.

There are many virtues. Virtually all human virtues are survival traits, but that is evolution, and others prefer to express that in terms of supernatural revelation. Fur surely that is what God is, if in fact there is a God. He exists outside of all of nature. This is the realm of speculation, which is by its very nature immeasurable.

Science is a system of investigation based on the collection of evidence through observation and experiment. Without something to measure and something to measure it with, it’s not much good.

We can still assign certain values to things.

Thrift is a virtue. Industriousness is a virtue. Respecting others is a virtue. These virtues are not the exclusive province of any one religion or world view.

They are in fact common to all human beings at some level. They’re often even expressed in terms of being handed down from above, when in fact they probably arose from mutual agreement over time within the social and cultural context.

Religion is myth, legend and fancy codified into a belief system.

People can and do teach themselves to believe anything they want—literally anything.

Tolerance is a virtue. Like any skill, it must be practiced, and over time the individual gets better at it.

It’s really hard to do, isn’t it? We know that even from within our own group, the people who actually agree with us most of the time.

Human beings are not perfect creatures, and of course we all fall down from time to time—when our tolerance fails us, when our patience fails us, when we ourselves are anxious and under threat.

If nothing else, this might be useful information, as it is helpful in seeing it from the other guy’s point of view once in a while.

Toning down that rhetoric might be the first step in toning down that perceived threat, no matter which side one might choose to be on.

That’s because anger stems from fear.

Anger leads to harsh words, and from there things quickly spiral out of control.

END

No Atheists in a Foxhole.

Ian Cooper

They say there are no atheists in a foxhole.

That may be true, but no one ever said there were no hypocrites in a foxhole.

Any port in a storm as they say, and when all bets are off, where’s the harm in it anyways?

***

One of the things about atheism, in my own personal life, is that I don’t want it to become an attack platform against someone else’s personal beliefs. It is more a matter of living comfortably within my own skin, with some semblance of dignity, if not outright gravitas. That can hardly happen without some moral constraints. 

Without divine revelation, where could these good things possibly come from?

Could they not come from our own hearts and minds...?

The notion that atheism is completely amoral is mistaken. Atheism is the examination of profound moral questions using the tools of reason. The funny thing is that all religions ultimately appeal to human reason. 

That’s why they have been so successful.

Without religion, where would we be?

We would live in a completely amoral world and evil and anarchy would triumph. Or at least that seems to be the reasoning, however unspoken it may be—and sometimes it is spoken.

Bearing in mind my own upbringing, and no doubt that of most readers, it is safe to say that my own personal morality, stems from some point on the Judaeo-Christian family tree. As far as I’m concerned, it is not an attempt to justify some departure, along superior lines of reasoning.

It’s merely the background that I came from, and ultimately rejected on some philosophical level..

I cannot say that my morality, which is near enough that of most other Canadians as makes no difference, was independently arrived-at. It all had to come from some starting point, and that particular starting point included the Roman Catholic Church, and separate schools. It includes bed-time stories and Christmas decorations, the child’s yearning for gifts and miracles, and even the typical children’s books in the doctor’s office waiting-room. You might still be able to find some of those religious texts in your own pediatrician’s office next time you take little Suzie in there for a tummy-ache. No sane person sees any real harm in that. There’s no doubt that culturally, religion has played a role in the building of our society, and religion has also played a role in the sort of job description of atheism.

It is difficult to imagine a world not built on some form of generally-agreed set of rules.

***

It is a bit of a contradiction that the more liberal must tolerate the intolerant. This is not always easy to do, as it is not always reciprocated. Non-reciprocity leads to feelings of injury and alienation. It also leads to real injuries.

If I have the right to be an atheist, certainly someone else has the right to believe whatever they like. If atheism expects toleration, then surely it must offer its own tolerance up front. It’s a fair exchange.

There are times when I need a loaf of bread or a quart of milk on a religious holiday and I prefer not to have to go to a gas station—notice the societal sense of priorities here, where a quart of milk will cost me a buck more.

It's a minor inconvenience in a generally-decent society.

I really don’t want to go out and picket in front of your church over the matter. Let’s leave it at that.

People don’t have to adopt our beliefs, they don’t have to like us or accept us—merely tolerate us. That’s not always easy to do either! That is one good reason to keep discussions as polite as possible, and another reason to avoid the whole attack-platform ethos.

If atheism somehow justifies anti-Semitism, or anti-Hinduism, then the practitioner has missed the point.

And yet atheism is surely an attack platform against religion—any religion, and all religion. Simply put, an atheist believes all religion, at foundation-level, to be a problem of one sort or another.

Otherwise, why bother to speak up at all?

Maybe atheism sees itself as a solution waiting for a chance to happen. For a problem, is nothing more than a solution waiting to happen, or so the motivational speakers would have us believe.

It is an attack on irrational beliefs in the sense that those beliefs have come to rule society, which has many inequities and the presently-constituted moral authorities seem unable to address these issues. It is an attack platform for any number of things, including bourgeois value systems…if a person cared to see it that way.

But simply put, and as most people see it, atheism is the antithesis of religion, and nothing more in the eyes of some.

Atheism is the great contradiction, for in order to defeat and supersede religiousity as the dominant set of belief systems on the planet, as it might very well do some day, it adopts similar methodology. It adopts similar lines of reasoning, and it parallels religion in significant ways.

This is of necessity, for both belief systems are responses to and ways of dealing with questions of morality.

If Jesus Christ were alive today, he might very well be an atheist. He might very well still preach exactly the same things, for example brotherly love, respect, tolerance and forgiveness. He might simply phrase the ideas in more modern terms.

On the purely personal level, this is what I would seek to do with my atheism.

Leaving the whole question of God out of the equation, the message would remain the same, and also remaining the same would be the goal, the intention, of the teacher. For surely that was what Jesus was, and what he set out to be.

One of the things he tried to do was to contradict prejudice.

One teaching must supplant another with superior knowledge, or superior application, or it dies.

One of the lessons taught by atheism is that all bigotry, all prejudice is the result of teaching.

It is a learned response. The lessons we learn in life begin at birth and are instilled by the people around us, and the circumstances we find ourselves in. We are very carefully taught those prejudices, in many instances.

For the record, our prejudice against eating poisonous mushrooms would appear to be a rational one.

Even in the 21^st century, it would be difficult to be born a native American and not feel some resentment towards other Americans or Canadians, or not to have some questions about the past, and the society that still surrounds you rather than fully accepting you.

It must be difficult to be born a Palestinian, and have anything other than anger towards Israel. It must be difficult to be born an Israeli, or a Jew in some other part of the world and not have some ingrained prejudices towards a people who, in some cases, live fifty yards away. It is the same whether we care to discuss black versus white—how ‘natural’ that phrase sounds—or any other racial or cultural question.

Atheism isn’t going to solve too many land questions, and not in a situation of long-standing dispute, where cultural, economic and political dominance are at stake. A place where there is too much blood and too much history. Only time and stability can heal those wounds. Only a long period of sustained peace can heal those wounds. It is fair comment to say that it is religious interests, allied to political interests, that fight so strongly to keep those wounds open. For surely the state, as theoretical entity, would like to see those wounds firmly closed.

What atheism might do is to weaken the props—for state and church are still inseparable in too many ways.

In Canada, as I write this, it’s Good Friday. It’s a statutory holiday. That means a majority government, freely-elected, passed a law. It is a state-religious holiday. And yet rule by the majority surely means tyranny for somebody—the few.

Hell, maybe even the atheists.

The Queen of England, the titular head of our constitutional monarchy, is also the titular head of the Anglican Church. In order to become a country, Canada had to ‘repatriate’ the British North America Act. It’s a piece of paper. Rather than burn it or shred it, they enshrined it. It is the symbolic source of all their legitimacy, and it stems from the divine right of kings. Even in the 21^st century, we cannot seem to dispense with all of that. They still seem to think merit is instilled by blood and heredity. The reason is simple. 

To initiate a new discussion about what it means to be a nation, what it means to be a Canadian, or even just a person, and how equal under the law any given person might be, would invoke too much noise. We would all be talking at once. We’d all have our wants and wishes, some of which ennoble or enrich ourselves, and some of which diminish or impoverish our neighbours. It’s a strange thing, but Canada, as it is presently constituted, would be, ah…’un-re-formable-again.’

Too many people would seek to prevent too many things, and too many people would seek to enable too many things. The talk would never end, would it?

Too many terms and conditions would apply for it to ever properly work again. Nation-building best happens in the undeveloped or pioneering state.

As things now stand, our government is assumed to be valid—and for all intents and purposes, it is. The thing works after all. Once you have achieved that, it is a question of balancing a lot of interests, not all of which will coincide, and some of which will contradict one another.

Atheism undermines the legitimacy of all this, all of these mechanisms, in some purely academic and philosophical challenge.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be this way—it merely is, mostly because it has been.”

It reveals legitimacy to be nothing more than a legal fiction—a necessary fiction, maybe.

The idea of monarchy, is one that could probably be dispensed with, given fertile ground and some nurturing.

But it is a fiction nevertheless. For surely they govern by the sword as much as by reason. Where men cannot be persuaded to obey, they must be compelled, after all.

Atheism contradicts the assumptions on which our culture was built, and therefore it is The Great Contradiction for more than one reason.

***

Atheism has a lot of lessons to teach us about ourselves as well as others.

To be objective, one must get outside of the system under observation, and ultimately, to go beyond one's self.

It is to become an outcast in every sense of the meaning. It means to become an outcast from existence itself, for without existence we can have no perceptions at all. That’s all atheism really is. It’s just a new way of looking at the same old problems.

It is a contradiction of past perceptions.

In its present stage of development, it is still more art than science.

This ‘getting beyond all prejudice’ is of course extremely difficult.

How would we get outside of our bodies and their subsequent needs, (and therefore interests), let alone the known universe without some new kind of technology? The universe is where we live and where all things happen, for they can happen no place else. This is where our interests lie.

That’s only rational.

The very fact that we went outside of it might make it an impossibility to observe.

In that case, I guess you could say we’re pooched, ladies and gentlemen.

The sky is falling.

We’ll leave it at that for the time being.

***

Evolution. I don’t have a problem still calling evolution a theory. The reason is that our life-spans are too short to ever make the long–term observations required for scientific proof to be established.

That’s not to say that I have any doubts about the outcome of such studies.

Here are some more interesting links.

Christian Radio fuels witch-burning mentality. (Patheos.com)

Lawsuit to remove the term ‘under God’ from U.S. Constitution. (American Humanist.)

Atheists should ‘come out of the closet.’ (The Freethinker.)

Calling for an end to Saudi Arabia’s anti-atheism statute law. (Atheism U.K.)

Atheists are Believers. (non-Religion and Secularity.)

Use Rational Thinking to Build a Civil Society. BenBaz Aziz. (Atheist Ireland.)

Religious People Invited to Turkey’s First Atheism Organization. (Daily News.)

Angry Atheist Sues Over Vanity Plates. (The Daily News.)

Atheism to be Taught to Irish Schoolchildren. (The Guardian.)

Where Will Atheists’ Souls Go? (True Believer.)

END

On Church and State

Epicurus: 'Why does evil exist?'

We don’t really have separation of Church and State in this country, even though the claim has been made that we do. 

There has never been a church that revolted against this state, and the state has never represssed a single religion. 

Well--maybe a few. Maybe just a little bit--but they came around in the end.

To the state, all religions are equally useful.

They keep the people placid, and that’s good if you want to exercise power over them. Once the truth has been revealed, it is unchangeable—an important element in any system of beliefs.

The truth is unchangeable. Truth comes from somewhere far above you.

Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, these are all state and religious holidays. People who haven’t seen the inside of a church in years for any reason other than the wedding of a friend or the funeral of a relative celebrate religious holidays with an inconsistency that to me seems schizophrenic.

Religion is an excuse to have festivities.

The state itself rests on some religious foundation. The Queen of England, the titular head of our constitutional monarchy, is also the titular head of the Anglican Church. We have Henry VIII to thank for that, when all he wanted was to appoint his own friends to benefices that were up for grabs, (and the income derived from them) which up until then were strictly Catholic. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen—Henry VIII was a Catholic. Some would argue that all he wanted was another divorce, and the pope at that time refused.

It was a power struggle, nothing more, and I don’t think Henry VIII had any great theological arguments to back him up. So in that sense, it really wasn’t about the Reformation or Protestantism per se.

No one wants to talk about this. We prefer to let sleeping dogs lie. I’m just supposed to accept things and keep my mouth shut—because you guys have given me freedom.

And you’re not going to give it up—or the power that goes with it, anytime soon.

What a ludicrous claim. You have given me my freedom.

No one can set you free, ladies and gentlemen.

You must free yourselves or be perpetual slaves in service to your corporate masters.

Personal freedom requires the individual to take full responsibilty for themselves—and responsibility is hard.

Before each session of the Legislative Assemby of Ontario, the proceedings are opened with a prayer.

It is true those dummies need all the help they can get, for surely one or two of them had some vision…before they got elected, and had hopes of making some sweeping social progress in the context of this century, a hope that will be quickly pounded out of them by ‘realities.’

I’ve never actually heard it, but it’s likely not the Roman Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer that they use. 

They had to pick one, and only one, of several creeds.

In fact, when I switched from a public school to a Catholic school back in the 1960s, the words of the prayer were slightly different. The hair-splitting of theology is legendary.

One syllable, one wrong word, one wrong inflection or accent and the transgressor is immediately condemned to everlasting hellfire. Since I’ve uttered that prayer both ways, it’s difficult to see me as anything other than but one of the damned.

The trouble with atheism is of course morality.

Without a God, one socially-acceptable to my neighbours, where can morality possibly spring from?

What if I agreed that murder, theft, arson, violence of any sort was wrong?

Would you doubt my word, even though these things are first of all illegal, and secondly, they are impractical methods of conflict resolution?

Ah, but Ian, where are you getting all of this? Surely a man, a normal man, is incapable of figuring these things out without some miracle of divine intervention, a lightning bolt, a splitting of the Earth, or even just a stork leaving town in a hurry—a flock of birds behaving strangely, or perhaps the meteors of the air, showering the world with sparks and pestilence…but I digress, ladies and gentlemen.

Where do atheists go on Halloween? Because we don’t believe in the supernatural, it would be hypocritical to dress up as a ghost or a goblin; or to indulge in superstition such as reading the horoscope, crossing our fingers for luck, or throwing a penny into a wishing well.

Atheism, in order to be valid, must be supremely rational, and that is also its greatest weakness.

That’s because none of us are completely rational beings.

We cannot escape our upbringing. From our upbringing stems all prejudice, for we were born a clean slate with no rational thoughts at all.

Atheism takes power away from Church and State. No longer is there a fountainhead of morality, one that all can recognize and agree to, even if it is only as a legal fiction.

Atheism empowers the individual. It empowers them to be free.

I say the power to govern stems from the people, but in the maternalistic political world, the people can‘t be trusted and so we need a Queen. And in order to justify one person being Queen over some other choice, a person equally or perhaps even better qalified to be Queen, we must accept their ‘Divine Right of Kings.’ 

We must accept the prerogatives of birth and blood, their pedigree. We must accept not only history as it was written—mostly by educated males of the ruling class, but we must also accept that it can be no other way. We must accept the tyranny of past precedents without question.

Otherwise there is no legitimacy, and that includes the legitimacy of elections based on historical precedent, which is the only argument that you have when God is taken out of the equation.

Our ancestors fought for those rights for sound personal reasons.

Personal reasons, and today we can only speculate as to what they may have been.

***

You could try speaking to me in purely practical terms, but I think you incapable of actually doing it, without quickly running out of arguments and falling back on tradition.

Genetically, we are asked to accept that the blue-bloods are not just morally superior in that they have the right to govern, it seems we must also accept their genetic superiority! Something that has not been scientifically proven seems to be an unwritten law.

Otherwise, the only other possible argument is that they are rich—or that they have a monopoly on truth, one which stems from somewhere far, far up above the common man.

Objectively speaking, if we did away with Queen Elizabeth II, would the country collapse of its own internal moral inconsistencies?

(But of course you don’t see that we have any moral inconsistencies.)

Of course not. Someone would find the justification to continue with our present system, with absolutely no changes (or disruption,) at all. Anyhow, they always have another king or queen waiting in the wings to take over, don’t they? If you follow the genealogy of the Royal Family, it goes all the way back to Wotan—the god of war, whose effigy was placed on a wagon and drawn through the camp of the barbarians before battle in order to remind those savage warriors that the gods were on their side and that Valhalla awaited the heroes who gave their life for their king and country.

It would seem that either they were wrong or now, in the present day, we must be wrong. For now all religions are equally valid before the law.

We have changed religions many times over the last two thousand years, and in fact Christianity itself would be almost unrecognizable to Jesus in the unlikely event he should be ressurected and return to Earth for a quick look to see how things were going.

Our ‘belief system’ is irrational, and even more so, it is perpetuated by an unwritten code of bigotry and prejudice, a system of checks and balances to keep us from asking all the wrong questions.

It must be based on a system of unconscious assumptions.

It has to be unconcsious, it has to be unwritten, and it has to be accepted by all, just like the emperor’s new set of clothes, for to question it is to unravel the whole fabric of our society, very quickly, and in the interest of order, we prefer not to do that.

We simply must have order.

To an atheist, the whole basis of Canadian law and government is irrational—because it is based on assumptions of the divine, the revelation of religion, which oddly enough always seems to favour the predominance of the rich—and the well-born—and it is really nothing more than a way of squelching dissent from ordinary people, most of whom do not have time for great philosophical debates.

They’re too busy struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads.

I have no doubt most of them have an opinion, one which no matter how loudly shouted, bears little evidence of actual thought, any real practicality, or any real usefulness at all.

I don’t really have the right to say this. Freedom of expression is in the Constitution? Yes it is, but then the neighbours also have pitchforks and unlit torches in the back closet, just in case something goes terribly wrong and another belief system comes along to threaten their comfortable assumptions.

You see, since atheism is not a religion, my belief system is not protected by the Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion. It most definitely does not guarantee ‘freedom from religion,’ because Canadians ‘don’t want that.’

They want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be left alone and not to have to think too much. 

They want some nice Christmas gifts, they want to eat turkey and give thanks for not being Americans—how many times have we watched Canadian journalists on TV, who report on the U.S. with such smug and self-righteous glee.

“Thank God we aren’t Americans.” How many times have we heard it?

To an objective observer half a world away, Canadians and Americans are almost indistinguishable.

But it means so very, very, much, to a Canadian, not to be an American.

Because Americans are unwashed. They are loud, boisterous, obnoxious people with a little too much power around the globe and a little too much money to spend at home…unless they’re here as tourists, in which case, ‘Bienvenue.’

Welcome to Canada, eh. The home of peace, order and good, rational government, a government of the people and by the people—well, two out of three ain’t so bad, eh?

And it is the home of an irrational system of beliefs which justifies much.

I hate justification. I think justification would suck a basketball through a garden hose if you gave it half a chance. In that sense, justification is much like assumption.

I hate assumptions, for they are a form of limiting beliefs.

If this nation really has a moral system of beliefs, a moral system of government, one which takes into account more than just the ignorances and prejudices of the loudest mouths, would someone please tell me why the disabled must live thirty or forty percent below the poverty line; a situation which has persisted for decades, and which will go on for the forseeable future?

But you can’t do it, can you?

Religion, morality, tradition, none of that can help the true hypocrite explain a situation that is intolerable to any thinking person.

Maybe that’s why I became an atheist.

You simply couldn’t satisfy my inquiries. And now I have become like the state—I see all religions as equally valid, or perhaps vapid would be a better word.

The state sees them as useful, a fundamental difference of philosophy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism