Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (78 page)

“Some of the time” is a key point. Everyone responds to moral incentives at many levels. As a secular humanist, my goal is to aim for the highest levels of moral expression as much of the time as possible. But even if I act on universal moral principles every other Tuesday, I’ll spend a lot of the time in between just hoping for the approval of others, following rules, or trying not to get hurt. We all do that, no matter what our beliefs. It’s just good to aim higher when we can.

Keeping two moral ideas in view

Being able to put human morality into words is helpful. And as it happens, two simple ethical concepts underline just about all of human morality. They are as follows:

Reciprocity:
Reciprocity
is the idea that I should treat others as I wish to be treated. No matter where or when people live or what their religion is, if any, the ethic of reciprocity is part of their culture and moral system. By simply interacting with others, people learn that treating others as they would like to be treated is a good idea. Children internalize this early on, usually by age 7 or 8 at the latest. Harvard Humanist chaplain Greg Epstein notes that no religion or ethical philosophy ever completely misses this concept — and that it makes perfect sense without reference to a God. (See the nearby sidebar for different ways various religions and philosophies have phrased the ethic of reciprocity.)

Universalizability:
Universalizability
— also known (without saving a single syllable) as the
categorical imperative —
is another idea so simple that kids understand it. When I threw my ice cream stick on the ground and my mom said, “What if everyone did that?”, she was appealing to my ability to see that I’d done a thing that wasn’t universalizable. I pictured myself swimming in a ten-foot drift of ice cream sticks. Fun, but sticky, and even at five years old, I didn’t do sticky. Given a minute, I could probably have thought of ten other reasons it was not good for everyone to throw their ice cream sticks on the ground.
Reasons,
not doctrines.

Naming a moral idea isn’t the same as following it, of course. But for the many reasons already discussed in this chapter, religious believers and atheists alike tend to follow these moral principles more often than not. In fact, it’s harder to derail a person from basically moral tendencies than people often think.

Character development specialist Marvin Berkowitz puts it this way: if a kid grows up in a basically pro-social family and culture, the child tends to develop into a good person. Religion is just one way to frame a moral life. There are countless other ways to do so without any reference to God.

Chapter 16

Seeing the World Naturally

In This Chapter

Feeling relief after losing faith

Accepting a new level of responsibility

Setting outdated ideas and values aside

Accepting the limits of life

Finding meaning without illusions

Raising children without labels

G
od isn’t the only one who’s gone missing in the atheist worldview. When someone decides that humans actually created the Creator, not the other way around, the rest of the supernatural world tends to follow God out the door. Just as Santa Claus generally takes the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and the rest with him when he goes, most people who set aside the idea of gods quickly see faeries, goblins, demons, ghosts, and all other magical beings as products of the same fevered human imagination.

What’s left when the supernatural explanations disappear are
natural
explanations — those that don’t rely on a realm outside of the universe we know. Instead of making room for beings that play by a different set of rules, it’s safe to assume until proven otherwise that everything is part of the same natural universe, playing the same natural game — and humans can set themselves to the fascinating task of understanding that game without a religious filter in the way.

The absence of magic and miracles doesn’t remotely mean the absence of wonder and awe. All of those things that are awe-inspiring about existence remain so — they simply have different, natural explanations. In fact, many atheists who were once religious describe a much
deeper
sense of wonder after all this spectacular stuff turns out to be not a divine design, but the result of unguided physical processes. Seriously, how much more wonderful is that?

This chapter explores the way the world looks to a mind firmly anchored in the natural world.

Feeling Freedom and Relief

Some atheists never really had religious beliefs in the first place. Their view was naturalistic from the beginning. For those atheists who did have supernatural beliefs, the stories of losing those beliefs are amazing in their variety. Some people describe slipping out of belief quite easily and without drama. Others describe personal pain, especially if religious friends and family react badly. But after they finally set aside religious beliefs, an amazing similarity exists in the feelings they describe. The most common by far are
freedom
and
relief.

I should add
surprise
as another common feeling. Many religious people have been told for years that a loss of faith is followed by a loss of all hope and joy. When that turns out not to be the case, and the world is every bit as beautiful and life as precious and worthwhile as it was the day before — for a lot of new atheists, it’s a very pleasant surprise.

The freedom and relief often come from the realization — sometimes for the first time ever — that their thoughts are their own, that their fate is in their own hands, that they aren’t pawns in someone else’s chess game but autonomous human beings. Atheists who grew up in conservative religious homes often experience this feeling most strongly, but others often speak of this sudden change of perspective as well.

And contrary to another common assumption, no one has an urge to suddenly go on a violent rampage. Good people of faith become good people without faith. Instead of seeking to do harm, the feeling of freedom and relief is often followed by an overwhelming sense of personal responsibility.

Accepting Responsibility and Accountability

When the last remnant of religious faith is gone, people tend to realize that with nobody minding the store, it’s up to human beings to care for each other, to work for justice, to comfort those who suffer or grieve, and to make this life as good as it can be for as many people as possible. It’s up to humanity to accept the responsibility we had formerly given over to God.

In a religious context, people can just leave these concerns in God’s hands, or feel as if something’s been accomplished when a prayer is uttered. Many religious believers don’t take that easy way out, of course. They follow up their prayers with real human effort. (Good thing they do, because that’s how things actually get done.)

But for people without religious belief, handing off the responsibility isn’t even an option. The easy illusion of doing good by dropping a line to the divine is no longer available. Instead, nonbelievers know they have to pick up the shovels, send in the donations, give the blood, hold the hands, and feed the hungry mouths themselves.

The same is true of accountability. If you believe in God, you may feel a greater accountability because somebody’s watching you all the time. But Christian belief (among several other traditions) comes with a very useful Get Out of Sin Free card — divine forgiveness. No matter what you’ve done you’ll be forgiven (with one exception — see Mark 3:29). You only have to ask, and some traditions even dispense with that part.

When televangelist Jimmy Swaggart was caught committing adultery with a prostitute in 1988, he tearfully begged God for forgiveness as the cameras rolled. “I have sinned against you, my Lord,” he said, “and I would ask that your precious blood would wash and cleanse every stain until it is in the seas of God’s forgiveness.”

Atheists don’t have that mighty handy option. They have to be accountable to other human beings with no guarantee of forgiveness. That tends to make atheists more careful than we might be if we believed in a reset button.

(Swaggart’s bid for forgiveness worked, by the way — until he was caught doing the same thing again three years later. When his congregation proved less forgiving the second time, Swaggart said, “The Lord told me it’s flat none of your business.” Darn that human accountability!)

Atheists do have to be careful not to substitute secular prayers for religious ones. We can spend all day “Liking” charities on Facebook without feeding a single hungry child. So in place of accountability to the divine, we have to hold each other accountable for our actions and our inactions. The more someone relied on accountability to God in their religious life, the more they may need human accountability in his shiny new secular life.