In Praise of Agnostics and Atheists
By pm317 on December 30, 2008 at 10:00 AM in Current Affairs, Religion
I have much to say against organized religion, especially when it breeds people like Rick Warren (of Saddleback Church) or other such mega-church religious people here in the US who teach homophobia, or Imams in madrasas or elsewhere inciting violence in young people in the name of religion, or some Hindu fundamentalists wearing orange robes who are in fact nothing more than politicians and crooks vying for their own power over communities. In view of such negative forces, my inclination is to just put aside religion for a moment in all our daily activities and see the world for what it is from a secular humanist point of view. It is easy for me to do that, because I am a self-declared atheist from my early high school days, the age where I started my independent thinking and one relative famously labeled me as a non-conformist and I wore it as a badge of honor.
I come from a land of spiritualism and superstitions, of belief in a supreme unnamed being to 100s of big and small, male and female deities worshiped in every street corner, the purported high and the low; while I can be dismissive of the low, I am also reluctant to acknowledge the high. The word spiritualism as defined by people like Deepak Chopras or Eckhart Tolles of the world annoys me. Anybody who really gets the meaning of that word, will perhaps lead a quiet life without trying to make a cottage industry out of it; they will at least not have the ego to delude themselves into thinking that only they can help others — they will certainly not go on Oprah’s show.
If you sensed my irreverence, you will see that I am not that removed from India’s heritage of religious dissension which has been alive and well from first millennium BC. The group of early dissenters from India’s past were called Lokayata or C[h]arvakas and unfortunately much of their writing has been lost and whatever evidence is there of their existence comes from other philosophers’ works trying to refute their way of life. These Indian atheists had a long presence in its rich history even until as recently as the late sixteenth century when Akbar’s chronicler, Abul Fazl recorded their active participation in Akbar’s multi-religious conferences. Some well known thoughts and ideas attributable to their writings are cited by the Nobel prize winning economist, Amartya Sen in his book The Argumentative Indian. Quoting Sen:
In addition to the denial of God, there is also a rejection of soul, and an assertion of the material basis of the mind: ‘ [from these material elements] alone, when transformed into the body, intelligence is produced, just as the inebriating power is developed from the mixing of certain ingredients; and when these are destroyed, intelligence at once perishes also.’ Along with these radical beliefs about the nature of life and mind, there is also a philosophy of value, which concentrates on identifiable pleasure, not any ‘happiness in a future world’. There is recurrent advice on how to live: `While life is yours, live joyously!’ There is also an acrid and cynical explanation of the cultivated survival of religious illusions among people: `There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world… it is only as a means of livelihood that Brahmins have established here all the ceremonies for the dead — there is no other fruit anywhere.’
That last line is quite a dig at the caste system and the Brahmins. Seems to me that these ancient atheists were a vocal non-conforming group motivated by truth and honesty criticizing the orthodoxies of the day. Their fearlessness in accepting the world as is without superficial religious constructs, is also commendable. Godlessness of such groups however, will actually scare some religious people for whom godliness and morality go together. But do they have to, God and morality?
The connection between religion and morality is at best tenuous. For a contemporary treatment on morality without religion, read Hauser and Singer in an Op-Ed written for Free Inquiry (Dec 2005/Jan 2006, Vol. 26, No 1), a publication from the Council for Secular Humanism:
How do we know that believers and atheists approach moral problems in similar ways? Consider the following three scenarios. For each, fill in the blank with morally “obligatory,” “permissible,” or “forbidden.” 1. A runaway trolley is about to run over five people walking on the tracks. A railroad worker is standing next to a switch that can turn the trolley onto a side track, killing one person, but allowing the five to survive. Flipping the switch is ______. 2. You pass by a small child drowning in a shallow pond, and you are the only one around. If you pick up the child, she will survive and your pants will be ruined. Picking up the child is _______. 3. Five people have just been rushed into a hospital in critical care, each requiring an organ to survive. There is not enough time to request organs from outside the hospital. There is, however, a healthy person in the hospital’s waiting room. If the surgeon takes this person’s organs, he will die, but the five in critical care will survive. Taking the healthy person’s organs is _______.
If you judged case 1 as permissible, case 2 as obligatory, and case 3 as forbidden, then you are like the 1,500 subjects around the world who responded to these dilemmas on our Web-based “moral-sense test” (http://moral.wjh. harvard.edu). On the view that morality is God’s word, atheists should judge these cases differently from people with religious background and beliefs, and when asked to justify their responses, should bring forward different explanations. For example, since atheists lack a moral compass, they should go with pure self-interest and walk by the drowning baby. Results show something completely different. There were no statistically significant differences between subjects with or without religious backgrounds, with approximately 90 percent of subjects saying that it is permissible to flip the switch on the boxcar, 97 percent saying that it is obligatory to rescue the baby, and 97 percent saying that it is forbidden to remove the healthy man’s organs. When asked to justify why some cases are permissible and others forbidden, subjects are either clueless or offer explanations that cannot account for the differences in play. Importantly, those with a religious background are as clueless or incoherent as atheists. These studies begin to provide empirical support for the idea that, like other psychological faculties of the mind, including language an mathematics, we are endowed with a moral faculty that guides our intuitive judgments of right and wrong, interacting in interesting ways with the local culture. These intuitions reflect the outcome of millions of years in which our ancestors have lived as social mammals and are part of our common inheritance, as much as our opposable thumbs are. These facts are incompatible with the story of divine creation.
Read the rest of that article for a fascinating discussion on religion and morality.
So many of today’s problems around the world seem to emanate from highly dogmatic religious fervor of all kinds. It is perhaps better to put aside one’s religiosity and enter the world with just the humanity that our long and enduring civilizations have taught us. Bertrand Russell in his essay Why I am not a Christian speaks for me when he says:
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
by Ronald Scott
* More novels by 
* 
(
)
- You'll have access to 18 million movies, TV shows, songs, magazines, and books, as well as ultra-fast Web browsing with Amazon Silk -- faster than iPad. Full e-mail and document access and a keyboard. Fire can transmit what is on your screen onto a connected TV or monitor without an accessory. It runs Flash (iPad doesn't). 
