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 21st 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 21st 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.
END
