Atheism and (lack of) morality

Are atheists more moral than those of us who do not classify ourselves that way? I often think they are. Perhaps this is why they aren't unnerved about the long-term effects of atheism; they are doing fine, and they assume everyone else will, too.

The 'new atheists' are basically moral and well-behaved, so they don't realize that some of us are moral and well-behaved simply to keep from burning in hell for all eternity.

If there was no God or no law or no karma, we would SETTLE SOME SCORES.

I started thinking about this after participating on an atheist blog some years ago, when I was still identifying as Christian. I was struck by the fact that one of my serious questions was thought to be a joke, or at the least, a sarcastic rejoinder. It wasn't. I was dead serious. But the atheists didn't think I was serious, and that is what I found alarming: this means they do not understand what a serious matter it is.

Once again, I felt we were trying to communicate across a huge abyss.

I asked, "What about the fact that believing there is a God, keeps lots of people from killing each other?"

HAHAHA, they all responded, virtually as one unit. Well, they sneered back, one can learn not to kill someone without God. They acted like it was a simple decision, not a seductive thought that one consciously wrestles with (as in Woody Allen's great movie Crimes and Misdemeanors); an act that you eventually logically decide is... not nice. And so, you don't do it.

But why not, in that case? I asked what would be the deterrent, if there is no hell-fire? No bad karma and/or no punishment? Again, they sneered and thought I was joking or being a wise-ass. (It is also notable that they apparently assumed I was talking about someone else, i.e. The Bad People, rather than myself and other regular people like me.)

I wasn't. I was being rational. Belief systems (various kinds) have kept a lot of us from going off on people and committing violence. If there is no divine retribution, no holy justice, no guarantee the evil will be punished... do you understand how dangerous such an idea is?

Let me be very clear: Do the privileged understand that if the poor stop believing in God, they will no longer be safe? Are they ready for that world? Because I don't mind telling you, I'm not.

"Are you saying God is the only reason people act morally? What does that say about you and your view of humanity?"

My view of humanity is utterly realistic: humans have enslaved each other, pillaged, raped, and committed mass genocide. There have been Final Solutions, prison camps and Gulags. People have killed each other for insurance policies, parking places, brand-name shoes and having the wrong tattoos. And this has been possible even though the perpetrators DID believe in divine retribution and everlasting hell-fire. What if they stopped? What if all that matters is only what we see right in front of us: what you can get away with?

Will that be a better world? Doesn't it frighten you?

I don't think it frightens the atheists, because they are intrinsically moral people. This is why they can do without Gods, while the rest of us have floundered, made serious moral errors, became addicted or went to jail ... we have messed up again and again. We have had to pray late into the night, to be delivered from soul-devouring anger, envy or desires for revenge. We have suddenly left crowded parties because if we didn't, we were going to grab someone by the hair and throw them into the wall, before they even knew what hit them. We can taste the blood; we want to HURT people. We want to make them PAY.

And then, we tell ourselves, wait, that isn't up to me: Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord. (This phrase has the effect of deflating my anger immediately.) Karma, we assure ourselves, will deal with that individual. It isn't up to me. "What goes around comes around"--we remind ourselves and everyone around us. The overriding concept, of course, is that there WILL be justice. Therefore, I do not have to be the one to administer it.

But you atheists are telling me--it IS something I should administer myself, or it won't get done? You tell me justice will not inevitably happen?

This is something I wrote about in an old post, first quoting bell hooks:

[Quote from bell hooks]: my grandfather [was a black] sharecropper, and definitely the white man was on his back, but what I remember about that, when this man would walk through his fields and see his vegetables that he grew, he’d say, “See these vegetables. White men cannot make the sun shine. They cannot control..”

I mean here’s a black man who did not go to school, who did not have an education. But he found a sense of self that transcended the idea of him as a victim. Because he could say “yes white men have power over my life. They exploit and terrorize me, but at the end of the day, there’s a power higher than white men that I can lend my imagination to.”

[my comment]: And I would add, this is one reason why belief in god(s) has such a hold on people. To some, it is a synonym for a higher justice, a higher truth, a higher law--above and beyond unjust earthly authorities that dominate us on a daily basis.

When the atheists sneer at that, it can be experienced by non-privileged believers as endorsing the material world as it is (with oppressive powers intact) and negating the self-preservationist experiences of the oppressed.

What do the atheists intend for us losers who use religion and sky-fairies to feel better? (If religion is indeed the opiate of the masses, do atheists think believers will happily greet the people who propose to take away our opiates?) What do they have to put in its place? Will it serve the same purpose(s) and properly spur us to leave the party when we see the person we want to throw headlong into the wall? Or will we think, hey, fuck it, NO GOD, NO MASTERS, and follow them into the restroom where there are no surveillance cameras and dunk their head into the toilet repeatedly, as in LA Confidential?

Why not?

~*~

For some of us, morality has not been easy. We have had to work at it, think about it, study it and dedicate our lives to it. We study theology and religion, because we are obsessed with morals. If you rip the rug of theology/religion/rules/myth out from under us, it would leave us empty, since this is where we initially got our morality from (in a way that we could understand) and how we learned to integrate it into our being. Some of us really do need the rules... because if there aren't any, we will go hog-wild. We know this, since we already have. We have to engage in continuous remedial education about the rules, and the reasons for them, to keep us from breaking them again and again.

I think the 'new atheists' underestimate the importance of God/belief systems in keeping us moral. Is it possible that the atheists are more moral than the rest of us, and do not need rules to govern their behavior? How can we impress upon them, that for some of us, it is in the interests of society that we adhere to these beliefs, or there could be unbridled chaos, Lord of the Flies?

And why have so few believers made this argument? Probably because believers like to think they are moral. This is likely because we think about morality a good deal; I think this is because WE HAVE TO, TO STAY MORAL.

The reason so many religious adherents believe atheists could not be moral, is because WE cannot imagine ourselves moral in the same existential circumstances.

~*~

At the end of Flannery O'Connor's short story, Good Country People, the simple country man posing as an innocent Bible salesman is suddenly uncovered as a freaky, abusive sociopath. The educated, atheist PhD in the story, has accepted him at face value ... right up to the end of the story, when he unexpectedly and cruelly humiliates her. "You ain't so smart," he schools her, "I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!"

The end of this story, and those words, have always chilled me to the bone. Because whenever I read all the highly-educated atheist discussions on the net; whenever I read ultra-smart authors like Steven Pinker; whenever I admire the smart, self-sufficient, rational atheists who know where they are going and how to get there... I suddenly remember the sociopathic Bible salesman. And I worry that the 'new atheism' may be more successful than it should be. It might branch out from the moral, rational, educated people like Steven Pinker and Dan Fincke... to sociopaths-in-training, like O'Connor's Bible salesman... and to morally-struggling (and/or morally-confused) people like me. I think I am a fairly average person in many ways, and I know that the overall message we take away from the New Atheism, may not be the fresh-faced utopian vision of ideological and intellectual freedom, that the new atheists obviously wish for us. The atheists believe that their cleansing experience of rationality would also be ours, but our experience might not be anything remotely like that.

It may be the experience of finally doing those things that we have always held back... because... well, why not?

...


And I wish they would start taking that idea seriously.

The place where nobody can follow

In a sense sickness is a place, more instructive than a trip to Europe. It's always a place where there's no company, where nobody can follow.

--Flannery O'Connor

~*~

Julie of Modern Mitzvot wrote some great stuff about her back problems and attendant pain, and I identified so strongly. I started this post as a blog comment on the thread (at Alas, a blog), and was eventually embarrassed by the length and overall narcissism of it... so I am printing it here instead and tracking back. (Narcissism IS acceptable on my own blog, after all!)

~*~

Julie's original post, titled About My Body.

This is some great writing, Julie. I think the process you describe mirrors aging very well, too. (you've had something of a crash course)

When I broke my leg, the person who "rescued" me thought I'd also broken my wrist because of the way I'd tried to break my fall with my hand ... I was in so much pain from the "sprained ankle" (I didn't know my tibia was actually broken until the X-ray, about a week later) that I hardly noticed.

Now the leg is healed, but a small bone/ligament in my left thumb is inflamed, and apparently, I broke that too but just never knew it. (My doctor says this happens all the time in injuries--people often don't notice the "smaller" injury until much later.)

So, I never healed properly and it keeps getting re-injured with every new move. In short, it now hurts like the proverbial motherfucker. (I open boxes and put stuff on shelves every day and thumbs are necessary.) The joint is now HUGE and swollen; and I am reminded of Sissy Hankshaw in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues--which is not a pleasant thought at all.

Just letting you know, I am with you.

I have recently passed into another place, wherein I don't really consider myself able-bodied now. There is just too much, taken together...thyroid disease, arthritis, high cholesterol, and now my Sissy Hankshaw thumb. I am supposed to go get some immobilizing-brace for my wrist and thumb, but after wearing a leg-cast for so long, I am self-conscious about still another thing going wrong with me. It makes me appear vulnerable and calls attention to my age, in a job market in which older workers are getting left behind. I try to look energetic and "happy" on my job, since we are "selling a lifestyle" and all that shit: I feel pressure in the health supplement industry to always appear healthy. Since it's a job in which people are always talking about their health, I am duly questioned about mine, when there are many times (like now) that I'd rather not answer. The overall sentiment seems to be: well, if you know so much about supplements, why are you falling apart? Aging is inevitable and people are in denial about that, as well as in denial about disability-as-part-of-life in general... I recently had a seemingly-reasonable, middle-class, educated woman very seriously and sagely inform me that cerebral palsy could be cured by detoxification and raw foods.

Ohhh, good God.

Thus, I am also coming to terms with the concept that my business can be oppressively intolerant of illness and ableist... it's like when I came to terms with the fact that my religion could be and has been oppressive. Just because I have a positive approach, certainly does not mean everyone in the business does, and that is also depressing to finally confront and accept.

Julie writes:

And I keep wondering if the whole sprain/strain thing is just a smokescreen anyway - if the problem is something completely different and has gone untreated. What if the doctors aren’t taking me seriously because I’m a woman? What if they think I’m lying?

I think what you are describing is an intersectionality, in these days of Feminist Blogdonia discussing intersectionalities: Ableism and ageism meets sexism. The very idea that a young, lovely, middle-class graduate student like yourself could have anything going awry physically? I mean, how could that be? It just doesn't fit the whole prescribed template for your life. You are going outside the boundaries, and whoever does that in our society is summarily punished for it.

This is part and parcel of the same wholesale cultural denial at the heart of eating disorders: But wait, she can't be sick, she is beautiful!!!! Confronting this fact leads to an unwelcome confrontation with WHAT we consider beautiful in our culture; beauty can co-exist with SICKNESS and DETERIORATION. (And what does that tell us about beauty standards?)

Julie writes:

But the core of the issue is that I’m afraid I’m making this up. I’m afraid it’s all in my head. Why didn’t I think to go to the ER that night in my boyfriend’s apartment? I’d known other people who’d gotten quick injections for back spasms; in fact, one of them was standing over me, offering to carry me to the bathroom. Obviously it was because deep down, I was just pretending. Why can I still not wrap my head around the idea that this pain is real?

Because of all of the above. How can this be happening to you, when you are a mainstream person? Our ableist culture teaches us that this is an exceptional, weird thing... when in fact it is normal and average. Pain is part of life--as Buddha said, life is suffering. Somewhere along the line, Western Civ decided pain was an anomaly, or evil, or punishment, probably because it was USED to inflict punishment. Pain is stigmatized, it often renders people poor. Bad luck.

And you have always had pretty good luck, so how can this happen to you? WE ARE AMERICANS, goddammit, everything is supposed to be easy. When it isn't, we feel cheated and angry. We are socialized that way. (And that is another intersectionality, Western culture: the Wild-West stoicism that leaves the sick dog by the side of the road to be eaten by coyotes while the wagon-train continues westward.)

I just want to know why I lack the courage to admit that it hurts, to ask someone to listen and help.

On some intuitive level, I think you know that this admission brings about contempt and judgment in people, and you want to avoid this. Like the raw foods lady, the endless yammerings about "what you should do" never let up. People judge. They are afraid, so they create distance instead of connection.

I want to create connection, so I am sending my virtual ((hugs)) to Julie, and anyone else out there who is experiencing physical pain.

Yes, it does hurt, but it also proves that we are alive, awake and aware of our bodies.

By necessity, and in spite of ourselves.