Speaking as a theist, there's a lot that atheism has to teach the faithful: skepticism about accepted teaching, dealing with the conflict between dogma and human knowledge, contention against authority, and understanding where many of the threads of modern faith come from (hint to modern Christians: a lot of it ain't the Bible).
But a deeper lesson that it has to teach us — both theists and atheists — is that humans and human institutions sometimes suck, and aligning with the truth in one area doesn't mean total enlightenment and shedding of human foibles, flaws, and asshattery.
Too many people think that simply claiming Jesus as one's personal savior will sanctify and reform all of one's attitudes and beliefs. Too many other people think that simply shedding superstition and religion will clarify and reform all of one's attitudes and beliefs.
In reality, people … well, I hate to say we tend to be jerks, but we are conservative and complicated as all get-out, and flipping a switch in a single part of one's ideological framework is no guarantee of a sudden cascading change in every part of that framework. It's not a matter of a single profession of faith (or unfaith), but a continuous examination of all of one's behavior and beliefs, some of them far more painful in examination than the question of the existence (or non-existence) of God. It's damned hard work, work that takes a lifetime, and assuming you've dealt with it all is a great signal that you very much haven't.
Or, put another way, if sainthood (religious or secular) were easy, everyone would do it.
We are all pilgrims, claiming to seek truth, but reluctant to leave behind each bit of parochial, selfish, self-aggrandizing, status-quo-loving falsehood. It doesn't matter so much (in my opinion) what path we're taking in that seeking, so much as we are willing to follow that path wherever it may lead us, no matter how painful it may be, and to leave no internal corner of our thinking unturned.
Ultimately, the true challenge is not to best other people in their unenlightened state, but to best ourselves.
The Atheist Disillusionment
I’ve been writing about atheism for about 10 years now. What has driven me is a combination of awe at the amazing insights produced by science, so much deeper and more substantial than any collecti…
In other words:
This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Hamlet, Act I, Scene 3, Polonius speaking to Laertes
This is a more elaborate summary of everything I've come to dislike about social movements, and I realize the reason is that they are always composed of the enlightened few who lead the self-interested many.
A way of thinking and being that I have always taken for granted is, as you suggest, rare. I can't enforce this mentality on others, and even if I could, I really can't guarantee it would function well. It's simply not who they are.
Well said.
+Patrick Bick But without social movements, things will never particularly change. There were asshats among the abolitionists, and jerks who fought hard for civil rights. In my varied historical reading, I find that even the most admirable heroes have dark spots, things they believe that I sometimes vehemently disagree with. People are people, and they have feet of clay, and no social movement or hero thereof will solve everything, just some incremental bits. That's not something that can be ignored, but it's also not something we can let turn us off from making even that incremental progress.
+Dave Hill and that is fair to say.
I had a long discussion with my soulmate last night about what it was like, for me, growing up amongst (what I would now regard as) religious extremists.
The first time I encountered someone who actually believed but challenged the scripture – at least, as it had been taught to me – was when I was 12.
By that time, there was popular talk of the power of genetic engineering in our future, the ability to manipulate people's bodies into doing things they might not have done, to cure things like cancer. Everyone around me said "we have no right to play God", to which this man replied "we have always played God. That's what medicine is. Should we stop healing the sick, using CPR or the Heimlich for people who would die without our intervention?"
The quote is a paraphrase because, alas, my memory doesn't go back that far, all that well. It's him that ultimately set me on a path of atheism, because his way of thinking got me to thinking "being good can't be about heaven". It wasn't a large leap for me to conclude that being good was something deeply personal, but not residing within the church.
And that, to a great many people, makes me an enemy of the church.
But when I see something like the sexual abuse scandal, I can't just foo-foo the church and go back to participating. The question becomes how you enact your moral obligation not to support such activity.
It's this thinking that guides me, but you've certainly given me something to reconsider.
+Patrick Bick Well, you've shifted a bit from social movements to churches (which maybe should all be social movements, but are too often enforcers of the status quo), but …
I certainly have no problem with "playing God" with medicine and scientific advancements. It's a silly thing to say — using fire is playing God, in its own way. I'm nearsighted, and suffered a bout of scarlet fever as a child — without humanity "playing God" I would almost certainly not be here today.
I would agree that one can certainly be good outside of a church or organized religion or even any sort of faith in the supernatural. But I think a big part of "goodness" is not just individual growth but about relationships with others — which is where social movements small and large come into play.
Don't take my comment about heroes having feet of clay to suggest that we should all simply shrug and ignore the abuses and evils that heroes (or their movements, or their churches) engage in. What the tipping point may be is an individual decision, but at some level it's difficult or impossible (and arguably immoral) to ignore, condone, or wave off the evils committed by the leader(s) of a movement. That doesn't necessarily invalidate the goodness of the movement's goals, but either the leadership needs to be dealt with, or on needs to leave (or find another group, church, whatever, to pursue similar ends).
I guess what I'm saying there is to consider how the "feet of clay" taint the end product. Martin Luther King Jr was apparently quite the womanizer. Did that invalidate the cause that he fought (and died) for? There's been a lot of talk recently about Richard Feynman's less-than-laudable treatment of women in some circumstances. Does that mean his teachings or his service to the scientific community should be ignored? There are few leaders of movements (or churches) who are without sin (as considered at the time, or even more so in the view of history).
(If evidence came to light that MLK had been a pedophile — what would that mean about the cause of racial equality? If it came out contemporaneously, it would make sense to seek out others espousing the same cause, or otherwise push him out of the movement.)
(The case of the Catholic Church sex abuse scandal is its own interesting case in terms of how laity and clergy within the church who aren't pedophiles or their enablers deal with it.)
Anyway, that's all far too wide-ranging and rambling. Sorry about that. The bottom line is that humans are humans, and most have something unpleasant under the hood somewhere — at least unpleasant from some folks' perspective. It's all a matter, I suppose, of what one can (or should) tolerate as quite indirect means to otherwise laudable ends.
The shift was very much deliberate, because almost any audience I garner will sympathize with that argument. Then, I can use their sympathy against them to make my point.
I count all churches as social movements. To wit, when the local Freethinkers Club chat got to discussing the evils of religion, I pointed out how the development of schisms within atheism mirrored those of religions, and earned the reply that "religion doesn't have a monopoly on social phenomena" – an argument which can then be used to discredit the idea that a religion can be held responsible for anything, if it can, instead, be attributed to "social phenomena".
As one of those "caustic, militant" atheists, back in the days of Cobb County textbook stickers, I recognized that they would make two divergent arguments: that atheism isn't a religion (and therefore isn't subject to the evils of religion), and that atheism can't be held to account for things evil atheists have done.
And because we're all disciples of Science™ we are clearly beyond the petty self-delusion and mob mentality that would lead us to be hypocrites en masse. Y'know, like we were with Thunderf00t, taking a private e-mail exchange and then making it public, shaming him for it. Then when he does the same thing, in greater volume, we shamed him for that, too – with no hint that the irony-meter was still working. Now, the community has gone as far as to call him a sociopath… because…. I don't know. It's not something you rationally conclude in the absence of evidence… because Science™, right?
… Once you invoke the idea of "social phenomena" to explain away the culpability of a community for its members, you are immediately subject to the problem that Evil Movement Z isn't actually evil, just a social byproduct where identical behaviors can be observed aligned with different ideologies. Therefore, all the evil behaviors you rally against are, well… yours.
It drives me bonkers that I see this and I'm not allowed to point it out, lest I become the enemy who is hurting the movement and shame on me (see the initial backlash against Positive Atheism to see how frequently that argument got used).
That having been said, you can replace Christianity with just about anything and it will still apply. Again, I use Christianity as a model because that's an area where consensus on some things (abuse scandals, for example) are very strong.
I have to agree that I see "feet of clay" in most of every movement, but I have yet to come to terms with that, holding them all in the deepest contempt – including, as appropriate, me. I have to untie that Gordian knot, somehow.
This situation is not eased by my immersion in competitive gaming, where the inability to withstand criticism or the desire to demonize the critical people is in full swing at the lowest skill levels (and, sadly, continuing all the way up to about the top 5% of the population, in League of Legends). I'd be interested in figuring out if there are gaming communities that don't do this, because there are broad implications, for the phenomenology.
Ah. Circling back to the point, the best way to set your movement/group up for a tremendous fall is to decide that the inherent righteousness of the cause renders you immune to criticism or the possibility of falling …
The thing is, I don't see a conflict between saying "Human institutions will be subject to human foibles" and also nailing those guilty of such foibles to the wall. The cause and the group behind it can be the bee's knees, but where it needs reform itself, we have to be willing to make it so.
(And when all of a sudden it turns from a social movement toward a worthy cause to a tribe that's circling up the wagons against the blasphemers and critics, that's a good sign that, yeah, it's time to get out of Dodge. But not necessarily to wander alone amongst the cactus forever.)
As a theist, I agree wholeheartedly.