When asked about my religious views, I usually call myself an agnostic but if I had to describe my views more accurately, it would be fair to say I’m a lapsed atheist. Born in the Mecca of non-belief that was Soviet Russia, my view of religious people as ignorant, obscurantist and doctrinaire was only reinforced by watching my comedy heroes like Bill Hicks and George Carlin take big and legitimate swings at the disconnect between the teachings of religion and the behaviour of the religious.
I've been an atheist since I was a young teen. I was gifted with a curious mind and when rational answers to my questions weren't forthcoming, neither was my blind acceptance of any belief. This has been my creed and has continued to this day with the new religion of trans ideology. I understand the comforting thoughts of a god and the promise of an afterlife and as long as your beliefs aren't harmful to others or infringe on my liberties, go for it. But leave me alone to mine.
You’re describing the conundrum of modernity. We learned from Darwin that human value systems are based on no reality that is independent of the social interactions of humans as a species. The logical conclusion from this is that cultural values are relative. The entire educated secular class that is institutionally dominant worldwide is foundering on this nihilistic reality.
Meanwhile, the religious people point to their belief in God as the source of moral norms and social stability. From the evolutionary perspective, the coalitions formed around these shared beliefs have been the organizing principle of societies. But as the traditional God retreats in the face of the Darwinian worldview, social cohesion searches for some replacement foundation. It’s why wokeism feels like a sort of half-baked residual religious impulse of secular society.
When Nietzsche said God is dead, he wasn’t celebrating a liberating insight, he was just pointing out that humans are utterly alone.
The discussion about religion and the questions surrounding atheism should be kept apart. Atheism makes a truth claim that there is no God; religion is an answer to the affirmative claim. Nobody says that because of somebody's religious practice we would know whether there is a God or god, or gods. And it does not take any brilliance to sniff out a religious person that fails to live up to the demands of Christianity. Loving your enemies is hardly the most pragmatic part of the Bible. And just having sided with the religious does not free from doubt and adversity. The demands are high, and there are good reasons to abandon faith. (Another less popular saying has offenders who cause one simple-minded believer to stumble be better off with a mill stone around the neck, drowning. I can picture the struggle of the broken, the angry, the tempted, to hold or to give in, and to actually try "to have faith". And then comes along the smart and celebrated saying--you dumb fool!) Who would want to be counted among the stupid?
"My point is, it is extremely easy to prove that religion is evil but I am not convinced that proving that it causes more evil than its absence is quite as easy."
This sounds a bit off the mark. (I think David Berlinski gave the answer to Hitchens' religions is bad glib. I think he replied "this is like saying 'politics' is bad.") There are religious practices that are certainly evil (once one has a way to ground the notion of evil), but to say religion is evil is like saying the weather is evil. A better start for a debate would be to ask whether the Christian religion is a power for good or evil. Dawkins and his friends did not spend a second thought on the difference. For them it is clear that the Judeo-Christian heritage can all go to hell (or wherever atheist things go when one wishes for annihilation). I think it is very easy to produce evidence to the contrary, ie. we have no idea how different the Roman world was and that anything post 3/4th century has come under the judging eye of Christian ethics and produced what we "enjoy" today. I think this is nothing new and has been eloquently elaborated for years by Tom Holland, and the like.
The problem with the new atheists is that they think science is an answer for everything. It’s not. It’s a very useful tool with limitations, and they interpret those limitations as answers.
Too many people convert their disgust with the main religions and their offshoots into a ludicrous belief in a Universe which in all ways exists merely by accident. That is not reasoning: it is merely stating a belief in an opposite system. A reasoning process would be to search for an alternative system. In a way, atheism is a part of the modern way of of thinking, or anti-thinking, in which everything has one form or the exact opposite, and by not being in one form, existence must be in the other form. If you are not white, you must be black; if you are not left, you must be right; and so on. Many actually declare themselves to be atheists because 'God is so cruel to let terrible things happen'. So, the false reasoning goes, he can't exist. On the other hand, belief in the truth of the Old Testament is based almost entirely on the repeated assertions that God is cruel.
When he wrote The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine stated several times his belief in a loving God, in the midst of taking apart the Bible, Old and New Testaments, and showing with great clarity, what a mass of lies and perverted horrors The Bible is. But that study and reasoning merely took him away from the religious creeds and the religious books: it didn't take him away from his belief in a loving God. He castigated Christianity, Judaism, Islam; the whole lot. But he kept his belief, and faith, in an all-powerful, and thoroughly mysterious God.
I had better not go on, but I am open to further discussion with anyone.
Great stuff, Konstantin. I'm sure I speak for many in saying that your understanding and appreciation of worldviews, whether your own or opposed to your own, is admirable, as is your willingness to be transparent about your own personal journey through these issues.
(The Alabama Christians' response to Hicks should have been "Do you want to be forgiven?" But of course even if it had been he wouldn't have quoted that in his act.)
There is no such thing as an atheist. Everyone believes in something, even Richard Dawkins. The simple fact is that the alleged atheists just don't like what the current selection of gods have to tell them, so they go off an invent new ones with what they view as more favorable terms. They might try to clothe their new gods in the robes of science or rationality, but in the end they have to appeal to the transcendent. Otherwise, they are just some guy popping off about how he thinks the moral World should be arranged. Science is great at describing events that have transpired, but it can never tell you at bottom "why" they transpired, let alone what their ultimate purpose is. In that view, what Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens have to say about morality carries no more weight than the guy who claims the Universe was created in six days.
The perennial mistake is to mistake atheism with a system of understanding. It is not.
It is also a mistake to conflate human's greatest evils (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot) with non-belief. Each of these evils had a system of belief, that was indeed atheistic, but a system of belief that can be characterized, distinct from others, just as much as Christianity is distinct from Buddhism.
By blurring the boundaries between "not believing in a god" and "not having a belief system", we fail to articulate the foundational problem: when a person "loses faith" they often also fail to come into a new system of belief, making them susceptible to mind viruses and evil acts. I posit that we need to define sets of moral belief systems that call out and name evil, have reasonably well defined structures, and ideally have the possibility to have a social aspect to them. It is not responsible to advocate atheism and throw a child out into the world and say "here is a pile of books you might read". For the majority of people this will be insufficient to ground them in goodness, to call out evil, and to stand upright productively in society. Within three generations of the first apostate, it is more then likely their children will fall to partaking in evil or give comfort or aid to those who are. I believe this is quintessential to what we see with the "woke". Many do not have even their parent's grounding to lean on, and what they find will not be good for our society.
I am personally a conservative. I believe that truth corresponds with a physical reality. I believe that humans are selfish and we are not God and should not strive to be god. I believe as individuals we should align with truth, admire beauty, take responsibility, and seek excellence. I believe socially we should be procedural symmetrical (rule of law follows this, as does selection by merit) and we should not be outcome symmetrical (I reject "equality of outcome"). I believe we have social obligation to pass down our teaching and society to our children.
Now note two things about the above: 1. It is compatible with Christianity and probably other religions as well. 2. These core principles can be derived apart from a belief in a god.
In other words, these moral articulations do not have to be hostile to religion. Nor is it a perversion of an existing religion (United Methodists come to mind). It seeks to be honest in what it is and what individual and social beliefs it has. It has atheistic derivation, but it is okay being largely compatible with Christianity social values, though it will differ in some points.
Yes, atheism as practiced for the last 150 years has not worked. It has failed again and again. We must seek truth and we must not deny what we believe. But we can still articulate formal systems of beliefs that aren't religious perversions or mystical spiritual centers. Right now the options for many atheists are: isolation and reading large books, become woke, spiritual or mystical centers, churches that have fallen apostate themselves, or attend churches that you can't fully be apart of. These aren't good options.
Thanks for this, many a similar journey has been tread. One comment - tho many could be made - the actual study of science and religion goes on out of the sight of most. When the ancient texts, academically translated (Sumer, Akkadian, etc.) are compared with the deepest science, which is not general interest public science; strange coherences emerge, which suggest that our science is only recently capable of even providing limited answers to basic questions about the reasonableness of the existence of divine persons. Take for example Bohm’s experiments with plasmas wherein he discovered that plasmas display a “livingness” and attempt to defend “themselves.” Or ancient texts and structures displaying knowledge of advanced science concepts (the pyramid of Cheops containing a vast repertoire of physics coefficients unknown to the Egyptians, including Planck’s Constant h, π/2, and the geometry of it perfectly designed as a coupled harmonic oscillator at the perfect angles to send and receive energy). The originalist Abrahamic belief is that one cannot know if God exists or not, and it is a fool’s errand to ask or decide, but only to have faith in the face of the conundrum. Further, the Abrahamic teaching is that only through the prophets or The Christ can some of the mind of God be comprehended. My prediction is that as non-corporatist science proceeds, the bridging of science and faith will be accomplished. I for one grow weary of the intellectual and emotional dissonance of those not blessed with faith who feel compelled to pontificate, for they are literally the blind leading the blind. After a long journey, I have concluded that the best way to know faith is to do the work, make the effort, engage with it. If it works, keep doing it, as you wish. It is always voluntary. If it is coerced, it is not faith. Notice I did not endorse establishment religion, but the personal work. That so many are in fear of the act of seeking it, whether Abrahamic or Indic, is a source of immense suffering.
In order to function people have to go around believing stuff and society works better if everyone is more or less on the same page. Lots of institutions work to serve that purpose in modern societies, including religions and science. They tell stories and we get to choose which bits of what stories to believe and look for friends that currently believe more or less the same story as we do. It's kind of a hard life but most of us are managing to cope.
Seems like we have all been encouraged to question everything but there is a limit to human experience and wisdom left to critique. I have the hunch we are moving towards a new age of Constantine.
I do think there is great value to religion if stripped of deity and dogma. Once you remove this, you have the basis of law, civility, and a highly refined method to teach morality to our children. i believe god creates creates better behaved humans than atheism. I also think that as we approach 10 billion, order outweighs the need to invalidate and ridicule the religious.
There is not much room, or reason, to revolutionize the ‘Golden Rule.’ This constant need to add names to the canon of morality is why we are where we are with Wokism. Religion, for all its faults, put a full stop to this. I think Atheists played a part in getting us here. If anything, we need modern adaptation of monotheism to place us all under a singular identity.
Forgive me if I’m not as articulate as Kisin or the rest of you.
Wow! Well said. The problem occurs when we accept a statement on faith and without question because it's 'science'. Faith in something created by fallable human beings should always be suspect.
On a separate note; the constitution guarantees us freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion.
Brilliant article Konstantin, excellent clips to enhance it!
We fail, KK, we fail in modernity for the same reason Old Religions devolved into murderous wars... Some are still lile that.
The answer is fairly simple, answer which neither Harris nor Dawkins had the honesty and brutality to say, Hitchens did... - Stupid people exist, and you either control them with supplied dogma or they'll find another...
I've been an atheist since I was a young teen. I was gifted with a curious mind and when rational answers to my questions weren't forthcoming, neither was my blind acceptance of any belief. This has been my creed and has continued to this day with the new religion of trans ideology. I understand the comforting thoughts of a god and the promise of an afterlife and as long as your beliefs aren't harmful to others or infringe on my liberties, go for it. But leave me alone to mine.
You’re describing the conundrum of modernity. We learned from Darwin that human value systems are based on no reality that is independent of the social interactions of humans as a species. The logical conclusion from this is that cultural values are relative. The entire educated secular class that is institutionally dominant worldwide is foundering on this nihilistic reality.
Meanwhile, the religious people point to their belief in God as the source of moral norms and social stability. From the evolutionary perspective, the coalitions formed around these shared beliefs have been the organizing principle of societies. But as the traditional God retreats in the face of the Darwinian worldview, social cohesion searches for some replacement foundation. It’s why wokeism feels like a sort of half-baked residual religious impulse of secular society.
When Nietzsche said God is dead, he wasn’t celebrating a liberating insight, he was just pointing out that humans are utterly alone.
Quillette just published a piece on Kisin's note here (https://quillette.com/2023/07/24/new-atheism-and-the-demand-for-dogma/).
The discussion about religion and the questions surrounding atheism should be kept apart. Atheism makes a truth claim that there is no God; religion is an answer to the affirmative claim. Nobody says that because of somebody's religious practice we would know whether there is a God or god, or gods. And it does not take any brilliance to sniff out a religious person that fails to live up to the demands of Christianity. Loving your enemies is hardly the most pragmatic part of the Bible. And just having sided with the religious does not free from doubt and adversity. The demands are high, and there are good reasons to abandon faith. (Another less popular saying has offenders who cause one simple-minded believer to stumble be better off with a mill stone around the neck, drowning. I can picture the struggle of the broken, the angry, the tempted, to hold or to give in, and to actually try "to have faith". And then comes along the smart and celebrated saying--you dumb fool!) Who would want to be counted among the stupid?
"My point is, it is extremely easy to prove that religion is evil but I am not convinced that proving that it causes more evil than its absence is quite as easy."
This sounds a bit off the mark. (I think David Berlinski gave the answer to Hitchens' religions is bad glib. I think he replied "this is like saying 'politics' is bad.") There are religious practices that are certainly evil (once one has a way to ground the notion of evil), but to say religion is evil is like saying the weather is evil. A better start for a debate would be to ask whether the Christian religion is a power for good or evil. Dawkins and his friends did not spend a second thought on the difference. For them it is clear that the Judeo-Christian heritage can all go to hell (or wherever atheist things go when one wishes for annihilation). I think it is very easy to produce evidence to the contrary, ie. we have no idea how different the Roman world was and that anything post 3/4th century has come under the judging eye of Christian ethics and produced what we "enjoy" today. I think this is nothing new and has been eloquently elaborated for years by Tom Holland, and the like.
The problem with the new atheists is that they think science is an answer for everything. It’s not. It’s a very useful tool with limitations, and they interpret those limitations as answers.
Too many people convert their disgust with the main religions and their offshoots into a ludicrous belief in a Universe which in all ways exists merely by accident. That is not reasoning: it is merely stating a belief in an opposite system. A reasoning process would be to search for an alternative system. In a way, atheism is a part of the modern way of of thinking, or anti-thinking, in which everything has one form or the exact opposite, and by not being in one form, existence must be in the other form. If you are not white, you must be black; if you are not left, you must be right; and so on. Many actually declare themselves to be atheists because 'God is so cruel to let terrible things happen'. So, the false reasoning goes, he can't exist. On the other hand, belief in the truth of the Old Testament is based almost entirely on the repeated assertions that God is cruel.
When he wrote The Age of Reason, Thomas Paine stated several times his belief in a loving God, in the midst of taking apart the Bible, Old and New Testaments, and showing with great clarity, what a mass of lies and perverted horrors The Bible is. But that study and reasoning merely took him away from the religious creeds and the religious books: it didn't take him away from his belief in a loving God. He castigated Christianity, Judaism, Islam; the whole lot. But he kept his belief, and faith, in an all-powerful, and thoroughly mysterious God.
I had better not go on, but I am open to further discussion with anyone.
Great read about follies of humans, what a curious bunch we are. A good follow up might be, "in the absence of God, what am I worshipping?".
Great stuff, Konstantin. I'm sure I speak for many in saying that your understanding and appreciation of worldviews, whether your own or opposed to your own, is admirable, as is your willingness to be transparent about your own personal journey through these issues.
(The Alabama Christians' response to Hicks should have been "Do you want to be forgiven?" But of course even if it had been he wouldn't have quoted that in his act.)
There is no such thing as an atheist. Everyone believes in something, even Richard Dawkins. The simple fact is that the alleged atheists just don't like what the current selection of gods have to tell them, so they go off an invent new ones with what they view as more favorable terms. They might try to clothe their new gods in the robes of science or rationality, but in the end they have to appeal to the transcendent. Otherwise, they are just some guy popping off about how he thinks the moral World should be arranged. Science is great at describing events that have transpired, but it can never tell you at bottom "why" they transpired, let alone what their ultimate purpose is. In that view, what Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens have to say about morality carries no more weight than the guy who claims the Universe was created in six days.
I think we give God a good chuckle. When we, with our tiny brains, (1% genetic difference between us & chimpanzees) think we have it all figured out 😁
The perennial mistake is to mistake atheism with a system of understanding. It is not.
It is also a mistake to conflate human's greatest evils (Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot) with non-belief. Each of these evils had a system of belief, that was indeed atheistic, but a system of belief that can be characterized, distinct from others, just as much as Christianity is distinct from Buddhism.
By blurring the boundaries between "not believing in a god" and "not having a belief system", we fail to articulate the foundational problem: when a person "loses faith" they often also fail to come into a new system of belief, making them susceptible to mind viruses and evil acts. I posit that we need to define sets of moral belief systems that call out and name evil, have reasonably well defined structures, and ideally have the possibility to have a social aspect to them. It is not responsible to advocate atheism and throw a child out into the world and say "here is a pile of books you might read". For the majority of people this will be insufficient to ground them in goodness, to call out evil, and to stand upright productively in society. Within three generations of the first apostate, it is more then likely their children will fall to partaking in evil or give comfort or aid to those who are. I believe this is quintessential to what we see with the "woke". Many do not have even their parent's grounding to lean on, and what they find will not be good for our society.
I am personally a conservative. I believe that truth corresponds with a physical reality. I believe that humans are selfish and we are not God and should not strive to be god. I believe as individuals we should align with truth, admire beauty, take responsibility, and seek excellence. I believe socially we should be procedural symmetrical (rule of law follows this, as does selection by merit) and we should not be outcome symmetrical (I reject "equality of outcome"). I believe we have social obligation to pass down our teaching and society to our children.
Now note two things about the above: 1. It is compatible with Christianity and probably other religions as well. 2. These core principles can be derived apart from a belief in a god.
In other words, these moral articulations do not have to be hostile to religion. Nor is it a perversion of an existing religion (United Methodists come to mind). It seeks to be honest in what it is and what individual and social beliefs it has. It has atheistic derivation, but it is okay being largely compatible with Christianity social values, though it will differ in some points.
Yes, atheism as practiced for the last 150 years has not worked. It has failed again and again. We must seek truth and we must not deny what we believe. But we can still articulate formal systems of beliefs that aren't religious perversions or mystical spiritual centers. Right now the options for many atheists are: isolation and reading large books, become woke, spiritual or mystical centers, churches that have fallen apostate themselves, or attend churches that you can't fully be apart of. These aren't good options.
Ah, that whole “Folly to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews” thing.
Thanks for this, many a similar journey has been tread. One comment - tho many could be made - the actual study of science and religion goes on out of the sight of most. When the ancient texts, academically translated (Sumer, Akkadian, etc.) are compared with the deepest science, which is not general interest public science; strange coherences emerge, which suggest that our science is only recently capable of even providing limited answers to basic questions about the reasonableness of the existence of divine persons. Take for example Bohm’s experiments with plasmas wherein he discovered that plasmas display a “livingness” and attempt to defend “themselves.” Or ancient texts and structures displaying knowledge of advanced science concepts (the pyramid of Cheops containing a vast repertoire of physics coefficients unknown to the Egyptians, including Planck’s Constant h, π/2, and the geometry of it perfectly designed as a coupled harmonic oscillator at the perfect angles to send and receive energy). The originalist Abrahamic belief is that one cannot know if God exists or not, and it is a fool’s errand to ask or decide, but only to have faith in the face of the conundrum. Further, the Abrahamic teaching is that only through the prophets or The Christ can some of the mind of God be comprehended. My prediction is that as non-corporatist science proceeds, the bridging of science and faith will be accomplished. I for one grow weary of the intellectual and emotional dissonance of those not blessed with faith who feel compelled to pontificate, for they are literally the blind leading the blind. After a long journey, I have concluded that the best way to know faith is to do the work, make the effort, engage with it. If it works, keep doing it, as you wish. It is always voluntary. If it is coerced, it is not faith. Notice I did not endorse establishment religion, but the personal work. That so many are in fear of the act of seeking it, whether Abrahamic or Indic, is a source of immense suffering.
In order to function people have to go around believing stuff and society works better if everyone is more or less on the same page. Lots of institutions work to serve that purpose in modern societies, including religions and science. They tell stories and we get to choose which bits of what stories to believe and look for friends that currently believe more or less the same story as we do. It's kind of a hard life but most of us are managing to cope.
I meant "lots of institutions serve the purpose of trying to get people on the same page belief-wise".
Seems like we have all been encouraged to question everything but there is a limit to human experience and wisdom left to critique. I have the hunch we are moving towards a new age of Constantine.
I do think there is great value to religion if stripped of deity and dogma. Once you remove this, you have the basis of law, civility, and a highly refined method to teach morality to our children. i believe god creates creates better behaved humans than atheism. I also think that as we approach 10 billion, order outweighs the need to invalidate and ridicule the religious.
There is not much room, or reason, to revolutionize the ‘Golden Rule.’ This constant need to add names to the canon of morality is why we are where we are with Wokism. Religion, for all its faults, put a full stop to this. I think Atheists played a part in getting us here. If anything, we need modern adaptation of monotheism to place us all under a singular identity.
Forgive me if I’m not as articulate as Kisin or the rest of you.
Wow! Well said. The problem occurs when we accept a statement on faith and without question because it's 'science'. Faith in something created by fallable human beings should always be suspect.
On a separate note; the constitution guarantees us freedom OF religion, not freedom FROM religion.
You mean the government may force us to choose a religion?
Brilliant article Konstantin, excellent clips to enhance it!
We fail, KK, we fail in modernity for the same reason Old Religions devolved into murderous wars... Some are still lile that.
The answer is fairly simple, answer which neither Harris nor Dawkins had the honesty and brutality to say, Hitchens did... - Stupid people exist, and you either control them with supplied dogma or they'll find another...