An Atheist's View
Here is a pitiful little piece written by one who advocates the resurrection of atheism as a way to oppose Muslim fundamentalism.
As atheists so often do, the writer states his case but doesn't support it: "Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow." Really? In what ways to they "ring increasingly hollow"?
He goes on to argue "the lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted — at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God." But that clearly isn't true. At least those who state a belief in God have principled moral grounds for opposing what the terrorists are doing in the name of the religion they've perverted -- the grounds that what the terrorists are doing is contrary to the "true" nature of God and to God's laws. What do the atheists have? Nothing but their own, human decisions about what is right and wrong, based on nothing more than their own subjective theory of morality. And what sway would (or should) their personal opinions have with the terrorists anyway?
The writer likewise misstates the nature of Christian faith, writing: "Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do." That's not true. Catholics believe in the centrality of "works" to salvation to some extent, but fundamentalist Christian Protestants believe through accepting Jesus, they are already saved; their salvation has been "earned" and assured through Jesus' death on the Cross. And again, at least the fundamentalists' idea of "good deeds" are grounded in a belief and a philosophy greater than the product of their own human will and/or puny minds; Heaven help us all if some atheists once again decide that the mass slaughter of Jewish people is "the right thing to do" -- as did the Nazis -- or that allowing 10 million of their fellow citizens to die is A-OK, as the Stalinists did.
In the end, perhaps the writer of this piece forgets that the bloodiest tyrants of the bloodiest century of all time were atheists: Stalin, Hitler, Mao. No doubt many fine people likewise are nonbelievers, but the fact is that, contrary to this writer's assertions, Dostoyevsky was right: In a world without God, everything is permitted, for without religion, there is no universal and principled vocabulary for meaningful moral discourse.
As atheists so often do, the writer states his case but doesn't support it: "Today, when religion is emerging as the wellspring of murderous violence around the world, assurances that Christian or Muslim or Hindu fundamentalists are only abusing and perverting the noble spiritual messages of their creeds ring increasingly hollow." Really? In what ways to they "ring increasingly hollow"?
He goes on to argue "the lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted — at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God." But that clearly isn't true. At least those who state a belief in God have principled moral grounds for opposing what the terrorists are doing in the name of the religion they've perverted -- the grounds that what the terrorists are doing is contrary to the "true" nature of God and to God's laws. What do the atheists have? Nothing but their own, human decisions about what is right and wrong, based on nothing more than their own subjective theory of morality. And what sway would (or should) their personal opinions have with the terrorists anyway?
The writer likewise misstates the nature of Christian faith, writing: "Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and to earn salvation; atheists do them simply because it is the right thing to do." That's not true. Catholics believe in the centrality of "works" to salvation to some extent, but fundamentalist Christian Protestants believe through accepting Jesus, they are already saved; their salvation has been "earned" and assured through Jesus' death on the Cross. And again, at least the fundamentalists' idea of "good deeds" are grounded in a belief and a philosophy greater than the product of their own human will and/or puny minds; Heaven help us all if some atheists once again decide that the mass slaughter of Jewish people is "the right thing to do" -- as did the Nazis -- or that allowing 10 million of their fellow citizens to die is A-OK, as the Stalinists did.
In the end, perhaps the writer of this piece forgets that the bloodiest tyrants of the bloodiest century of all time were atheists: Stalin, Hitler, Mao. No doubt many fine people likewise are nonbelievers, but the fact is that, contrary to this writer's assertions, Dostoyevsky was right: In a world without God, everything is permitted, for without religion, there is no universal and principled vocabulary for meaningful moral discourse.
posted by LadybugUSA at 9:55 PM
6 Comments:
There is one God, do not have false gods before you. No god is a false god. God commands "Thou shalt not kill." No god says kill.
The writer likewise misstates the nature of Christian faith, writing: "Fundamentalists do what they perceive as good deeds in order to fulfill God's will and to earn salvation;
Yes the writer is 180 degrees out of phase with the most fundamental portion of "Fundamentalist" Christian faith. Salvation is not earned in any way shape or form. It is freely given ("grace") and accepted (or not) by the people.
In that fashion the writer's atheists have that in common with "Fundamentalist" Christians: both do these good works because they are the right thing to do.
I'm not sure I've seen a lot of successful atheist appeals for charity, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
I agree with you Carol, but at the same time, I am ashamed by what this atheist sees in our Christianity.
He lumps us Christians in with Muslim terrorists because he only hears our talking and doesn't see very much of Jesus in our walking out our faith.
Gandhi was asked, "What do you think of Jesus?
He answered, "Jesus I love; it's you Christians that I have trouble with."
Maybe we need to listen to critics like this atheist and change.
Anyone who claims Hitler was a practicing (as opposed to badly lapsed) Christian doesn't know his history, or his proudly pagan Hitler. Moreover, the only papal encyclical ever published in German was a strong condemnation of that Nazi party and its ideology, distributed to German Catholic bishops and their flocks at considerable risk to life and limb. See also the New York Times editorial of October 28, 1938, which praises the pope for his stand against Hitler. More here and here, if you're interested.
As to where good works fit in Catholic -- indeed, all Christian -- theology: yes, they have a place. But as Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft is fond of saying, "we don't do good to get to heaven; we do good because heaven has already gotten to us."
Assuming for the sake of argument that Hitler believed in God, there's a world of difference between simple deism and Christianity. Please note also that the Nazis didn't kill just Jews-- they also killed many Christians. Any Hitlerian references to Christianity in early speeches were mere window dressing; he used anything handy to rationalize his own hatreds. By the time he was running the so-called Third Reich, he despised Christianity as a "religion of weakness."
Cecil "Straight Dope" Adams dealt with this question fairly and at some length in one of his columns.
I think it's fair to say that part of Carol's point is that modern atheism, in spite of its claims to the contrary, depends on Christian intellectual capital.
One should recognize first of all the vast insight of Slavoj Zizek. Anyone familiar with his (numerous) works will recognize the sheer daring of his thought to break open the paradigms and conceptual categories of unreflective reasoning. He redetermines and refigures every argument he partcipate in - that is in fact his modus operandi.
Any response to his comments that does not start from this realisation, from this revelation of the inner fractures and aporia that inhere in the conventional categories of language, is - ipso facto - a null and void argument.
What shames most Christians is that Zizek probably has a better grasp of the philosophical nuances of Augustine's Confessions than they do, just as Agamben and Badiou have plumbed the depths of Pauline messianicity in order to present their arguments.
Christians as a whole tend to define the terms of their argumentation by either bible-thumping, which will have had little to do with faith in Jesus and more to do with the modern cravenheartedness that relies everywhere on "documentary evidence" to do one's reasoning for one, or reference to a wholly modern and commodified system of morality entirely interchangeable and indistinct from "democracy" itself (and which remains itself ill-defined and in no way related to the political tradition whose name it bears).
The well respected theologian Paul Tillich already, some forty years ago, demonstrated that the terms "atheism" and "theism" are not opposable in the truly religious life - at the peak of faith the thought of a god, and any hubris that might assume to know what that means, must be released. In faith one must despair and endure the death of god in any theistic sense. There is no epistemological difference therefore, between theism and atheism in their proper arena, which is not politics, but the existential encounter with meaninglessness, death, and nullity.
Religion has no connection to ethics, politics, or the day-today concerns of human interaction. The psuedo-religious life, which assumes to "integrate" itself with the day-to-day, on the other hand, is a very worthwhile target of critical thought. Bring it on Zizek.
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