Alex’s Heresies – embracing a physical reality

At the conclusion of my atheism course I was challenged by one attendee to respond to the loss of the fundamentals of religious faith, those common aspirations that sit beneath all rituals and texts of religions. He and others saw comfort and hope being fundamental to religious offerings.

 

Our everyday experience can be frightening with its apparent pointlessness – contingent nature of our existence, daily routine work, familial deaths, regular disappointments, and relationship heartaches. Even Plato, some 2,500 years ago and prior to Christianity, sought to imagine something eternal and perfect, separate from the transitory existence of our world and our lives. He saw extant physical things as imperfect and transitory copies of eternal templates or forms: all trees are imperfect copies of the ideal perfect tree. Augustine of Hippo, many years later, christianised this thinking with us as imperfect and fallen copies of God. Most atheists would see these as implausible ploys for offering certainty in an uncertain, transient world; we call them religions. So, what are the common ‘losses’ for atheists?

Atheists who reject an afterlife, and some don’t, see the life ‘here and now’ being the main game in town: building families, cultivating friendships, pursuing meaningful activities, engaging in personal reflections, and seeking general well-being of others to name a few concerns. Seeing this life as a mere staging post for some sort of imaginary future eternal existence – constant blissful or torturous – seems an abdication of life. Life is winning the most improbable lottery of all and one to be seen as offering promise and hope; that’s an atheist response to our existential absurdity, not religious delusion.

‘Make your own purpose’ is a common response from an atheist. The idea that a God has ordained a purpose for individuals and for humans in general – a linear (or Eastern cyclical) pathway to enlightenment or salvation – seems contrary of all our experiences, as atheists see no necessary or automatic progression to an ‘ideal’. Our lives are bound up with family and friends, as we have evolved as strongly social creatures, seeking the company of others. These interactions provide genuine meaning and purpose, not ancient scriptural interpretations of a Christian god or an Islamic god or a Jewish god or tribal gods.

Without gods and religions we would not know good from bad; we could do bad things unknowingly; and without god’s carrot and stick we would want to do bad things. The faithful need religion to be good, to do the ‘right’ thing. Atheists must rely on their own moral sense without god’s help; they see moral sensibilities coming from some combination of biological evolution shaped by culture. And, guess what, religious faith makes little difference for doing good and bad things. Other factors seem far more important.

 

We evolved the biological structures to co-exist and cultures shaped the behaviours. Sharing, fairness, others reactions, and tit-for-tat all seem wired in as common denominators throughout all people. Cultures – different social groupings – then produce a bewildering array of acceptable and unacceptable moral behaviours, varying across cultures and over time. Today’s immoral racism replaces yesterday’s moral and often religiously-justified racism. Was that a change of God’s mind or better communication from God some 1500 to 2500 years after Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sacred texts were written? Atheists look to secular principles like ‘minimising harm’ when deciding moral disputes and, in reality, so would most religious people in a Western country like Australia. In practice even many religious people give lip-service to religious authorities when deciding most moral issues. Thank god!

 

Alex McCullie