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featured essay: december 2002 Atheist Virtues by Dale McGowan Who can resist the impulse to feel all gushy and reflective at this time of year? Fall always gets the ball rolling for me and my family, since we live in Minnesota, a place where planetary realities find full expression. Tilt our part of the planet like so in the summer and we fry through long days in the 90s, then gradually tip us back away from the sun and we can watch the days shrink and the temperatures plummet. I wouldn't be too surprised if Jamaicans were still flat-earthers: you could conceivably disbelieve the spherical earth in the low latitudes. But up here in the north, it's a whirling ball we're on for sure, and in late December it gets to feeling like the atmosphere itself has been pared away, leaving nothing at all between our chapped, upturned faces and the brilliant stars. Awesome, that. Downright humbling. It makes sense that the Easter resurrection myth found its home in springtime, what with the rising and renewal of life that characterizes that time of year. Nor would I say it's a coincidence that holy days emphasizing family and charity and peace and goodwill are sprinkled through the shortest and latest and coldest days of the year, when all we have is each other and, by golly, we'd better have each other to turn to to make it through. Charity would naturally be born in such a season. These are also the times it's easiest to see that religion has no monopoly on virtue. Just about everyone succumbs gladly to the best of human impulses at this time of year. The thin veneer of religion is easily stripped away to reveal natural, honest, human virtues of which religion is just one articulation. That's why the "holy days" have so naturally and easily secularized to "holidays" -- and that's right where they belonged in the first place, these celebrations of human hope and goodness in the midst of sometimes painful realities, in the hands of humans, not in the grip of a single mythic vision. The Christ concept was a cultural afterthought, after all, a single framing of that hope and goodness, not the source. One of my personal discontents about our movement is its relative inattention to issues of the Good. Open up any atheist or humanist periodical and you'll see one article after another about the True: disputations of Bible claims, defense of scientific theories, logical dissections of theological arguments. We are naturally obsessed with the True, since that's the principle battleground between theology and atheology. And we fault theists for being so enamored of the alleged goodness of their conclusions that they fail to look closely enough to see whether they are in fact true. Ourselves, well, we typically reverse that: it simply must be better to acknowledge any given truth than to substitute any given fantasy, and we expect the good to follow from the true. But too often we fail to make it clear that the good is also a high value for us. We assume it's obvious. Turn the coin over and you'll see that most Christians also assume their love of truth is obvious. We know otherwise. So it wouldn't hurt, especially at this time of year, to make our own commitment to the good just as visible to our kids as our commitment to the true. And just like Christians, we must make evident the connection of that value with our beliefs. As atheist parents, we certainly attend to the good, but we often do a poor job of helping our children see that goodness as a direct expression of our atheist values. I'll take it a step further: not only CAN atheists do and be just as good as Christians, we really ought to do and be far BETTER than Christians. I'll illustrate just two of the traditional pillars of human virtue, charity and humility. A fairly mainstream reading of the Christian worldview could easily endorse an entirely hands-off approach to charity. God is all-just, after all. He will provide for the needy -- and if not in this world, in the next. Yet Christians -- not all, of course, but many -- are out there doing for others as a direct and visible expression of their values. So much so, in fact, that the word "Christian" has found life as a synonym for "good," as in "He's such a Christian young man," or "Are you being Christian in your dealings with others?" Now you must admit -- achieving that kind of lexical coup is a major success for the Christian worldview. They've got the whole Western world thinking they invented goodness! The problem, of course, is that a subtext exists, one that kids don't fail to learn: part of being a good Christian is renouncing an interest in mere truth. especially when it seems to run counter to the received mythology. Is the reverse true for atheists? Do we renounce an interest in the good? Not exactly -- we simply frame truth as a non-negotiable highest value. Again, I'll suggest atheists should be better at living out certain values than Christians. We should be up to our elbows in charitable work, for example, since no one knows better than we do that WE ARE ALL WE HAVE. There is no safety net, no universal justice, no Great Caretaker, no afterlife reward. We have the full responsibility to create a just world and care for the less fortunate because there's no one else to do so. The answer to the question of how on Earth an atheist parent might instill values in his or her children is plain: the human moral mandate is, if anything, clearer in the atheist worldview than in the Christian. So why are Christians doing most of the charity? They're not. Frankly I was shocked to learn that myself. When I first sat down to write this essay, it was going to be a stern exhortation to the atheist community to engage in sober self-examination leading to greater volunteerism and social service. An hour's research, however, showed that the idea of Christians doing most of the charitable work in our communities is a myth. They get credit for it, though, because they do a better job of tying it to their creed. But as it turns out, 82% of volunteerism by churchgoers falls under the rubric of "church maintenance" activities -- volunteerism entirely within, and for the benefit of, the church building and community. As a result of this "siphoning" of volunteer energy for the care and feeding of churches themselves, most of the volunteering that happens out in the community -- from AIDS hospices to food shelves to international aid workers to those feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and caring for the elderly -- most of that comes from the category of "nonreligious" volunteers -- not all strictly atheists, of course, but the church monopoly on community service is clearly debunked.* Our shortcoming, then, is not in doing good, but in making it clear that charity is not a stretch by any means -- it's a logical outgrowth of our atheist worldview. A similar argument can be made for humility. No one should be more humble than an atheist, and no one should be more arrogant than a Christian. They are, after all, the center of God's creation, made in His image, repositories of the divine spark, beneficiaries of the sacrifice of His Son, and recipients of His confident Scriptural certainties. (Anybody getting itchy from the Capitals??) Atheists, on the other hand, should know better than anyone that we are little more than "trousered apes." Oh sure, we've done some remarkable things with the three advantages we have (language, bipedalism, and an expanded neocortex that made the first two possible), but we should be kept continually humble by an awareness of our origins, of our incomprehensible punyness in space and time, and of the even greater vastness of our ignorance. Humility is the natural inheritance of atheism. Christians have also named humility as a virtue in their canon. Sure, many of them fail to achieve it, but given their arrogant theology, it's amazing they even try. And though I know many gentle and humble atheists, I also know several who are among the most spectacularly arrogant beasts I've ever encountered. I know that stems partially from enduring the ignorant, self-satisfied smiles of theism, but arrogance should really be near impossible for a truly reflective atheist. As atheist parents, then, most of us are already instilling these values in our children, teaching them to do good and to be good. But too many of us say we do this in spite of our atheism. Far better to tell the truth: the values flow directly from our atheism. It is our atheism that provides the deepest and most profound reasons for charity, humility, compassion, benevolence, and every other human virtue. Happy holidays. * From "Religion and Volunteering in America," paper presented at the Conference on Religion, Social Capital, and Democratic Life at Calvin College by Steven J. Yonish (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and David E. Campbell (Harvard University), October 1998 |
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