Read Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) Online
Authors: Dale McGowan
Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (79 page)
But it’s not as if atheists are taking over from God. If he isn’t there, he never was. All the effort, love, and support people have ever had has come from other people. A new nonbeliever is simply recognizing this for the first time.
Setting Aside Bronze-Age Ideas
Traditional religions are literally conservative by nature. A big part of their purpose is to
conserve
a set of beliefs, rituals, values, and traditions from the past. Scriptures and priesthoods and catechisms set these ideas in stone, making change difficult, and sometimes even impossible.
As a result, religions rooted in the cultures of the Bronze Age or Iron Age (3600 BCE–200 CE) tended to carry the beliefs, rituals, values, and traditions of those eras into the modern era with little change, even as the cultures around them adapted and changed over time. It’s like trapping those values in amber so they don’t spoil during the voyage to the 21st century and beyond. Some of these values are worth preserving — love your neighbor, that’s very nice — but others really needed to spoil and be gone.
A worldview that isn’t tied to the past by scriptures and catechisms, one with values grounded in the natural world and in human society, is better able to change and adapt over time. By constantly examining their values and beliefs, people holding a naturalistic worldview are well equipped to keep and renew good values and ideas while leaving the bad ones in the past.
The following sections explore ways in which a nonreligious worldview can more easily dispense with outdated and undesirable ideas.
Thinking about virtues and vices
Virtues
are qualities admired and rewarded by a given culture. Or to borrow from author Sam Harris (see
Chapter 9
), you may say a virtue is something that promotes the wellbeing of conscious creatures. Moral systems often define virtues and then encourage people in different ways to strive for them.
A
vice
is the flipside of virtue, something a given culture frowns upon and discourages. You may also define a vice as something that’s either unfair or harmful to another person or animal, or to the environment.
The naturalistic view tends to focus on fairness and harm in defining vices. If something isn’t unfair and no one is harmed, an atheist would say it probably shouldn’t be considered a vice. Traditional religious views include things like purity, loyalty, and respect for authority in their moral codes. (See
Chapter 15
for more on moral codes.) That’s how things like sex and patriotism get treated as moral questions more often than secular people think they should.
A lot of the behaviors defined as virtues in the Bronze Age could get you arrested today. The Bible presents Abraham’s unquestioning faith as a virtue, for example, when he dutifully follows God’s instruction to kill his innocent son Isaac. The knife was in motion by the time an angel’s hand stayed it. He passed the test. By the religious standards of the Bronze Age, he was a virtuous man because he was willing to do whatever he was commanded to do by his superior — in this case, God.
Suggesting a few humanistic virtues
Virtues don’t always come easy — in fact, a virtue that comes easy isn’t much of a virtue. Virtues should be qualities to strive for, a list built by the consensus of people in a given family, community, nation, or planet.
Here’s one list of naturalistic virtues — amendable, arguable, and always incomplete:
Humility:
Surprised? Don’t be. I’m descended not just from apes but from bacteria, and I share 98 percent of my DNA with chimpanzees. I live on a tiny speck in a universe so vast I can’t even really grasp it, and my life is a fleeting blip in cosmic time. Though atheists don’t always exhibit it, deep humility is a natural fit with a natural worldview.
Empathy:
Empathy is natural (see
Chapter 15
), but that doesn’t mean it’s always easy. I have to overcome my equally natural selfishness to feel what others feel, to be compassionate.
Courage:
Paul Kurtz (check out
Chapter 8
) called courage “the first humanistic virtue.” I’m a fragile mortal living in an indifferent universe. It takes real courage to honestly face this fact. I get that courage from within myself and from those around me who were born into the same daunting reality.
Honesty:
Honesty is what made me naturalistic in the first place. I need to extend that honesty into every aspect of my life.
Openness:
I’m as prone as anyone to cling stubbornly to my opinions. Openness means staying open to the possibility that I may still be wrong. It also means accepting and being open to differences among people. Openness is a much better word than “tolerance,” in my opinion.
Clear thinking:
There’s often a bright line drawn between thinking and ethics, and that line doesn’t belong there. As I describe in
Chapter 15
, people can and should think about the reasons to behave morally. And clear thinking — including the ability to get our own biases out of the way — has huge benefits in every aspect of human life.
Generosity:
In the absence of a God, we humans are all we’ve got. Generosity — of resources, of time, of spirit — is the best way to get the best possible world.
Gratitude:
In the naturalistic view, gratitude is directed to people, not to a god. Sometimes I don’t even need someone to thank. I can be grateful for my health and family, for all the advantages I enjoy, and for the opportunity to extend those advantages to others. I often think about the incredible odds against ever being born, and I’m speechless with gratitude for being one of the lucky few who made it into the world.
Three thousand years later, the Nazi defendants at Nuremberg (ironically) offered Abraham’s defense — that they were only following orders. The secular international tribunal at Nuremberg, working from a moral code that had come a long way since the Bronze Age, now had a different term for following orders to murder innocents. It wasn’t a virtue any more — it was a vice, a crime against humanity.
Few religious people today would follow Abraham’s example, which is good, although the story of Abraham and Isaac is still told and retold as an inspiring example of ultimate faith. I can’t imagine what it’s like to carry a bronze millstone like that when you’ve moved on morally yourself.