Misanthropic Californian

This blog post, which includes a clip from 20/20 about a girl who was ostracized, harassed, and falsely accused of all sorts of things just for publicly being an atheist, helped me articulate something I’ve been trying to put into words for a while now.

A comment by shalimar says “I, for one, do not know how atheists are not sad, depressed horrible people.” This comes back to what I mentioned before about how the idea that some Christians can’t conceive of morality without religion scares the hell out of me.

The second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative says: “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.” Human morality is based on the idea that human beings have an inherent value, and as a human being I have no problem agreeing with that statement. If enough people act this way, everyone benefits. This principle exists independent of god, and works from one god to the next. (Except for the ones with which it doesn’t work at all, but those are best avoided).

In Buddhism, the Eightfold Path includes “Right Action” and “Right Intention.” In the Buddhist view, virtuous behavior is a means to becoming a better person — part of the path of self-refinement that leads to enlightenment and cessation of suffering. (Buddhism has a specific meaning for “suffering,” which is a very rough translation of a term from Pali). However, the Buddha was clear that it wasn’t enough to merely act in a moral fashion. Being good just because it would provide you with some reward in your next reincarnation (he was also critical of the Hindu notion of reincarnation, but didn’t discard reincarnation outright) is not enough.

So, my views on morality in the absence of divinity:

1. Moral behavior is inherently beneficial to mankind.
2. Virtuous behavior is an end in itself, both for oneself and others.

What constitutes moral behavior is probably going to be the hard part.

Lately I’ve been seeing lots of articles on atheism on the news aggregator sites I frequent. I’m not an atheist myself, but I’ve been leaning closer to it lately, and I have atheist friends as well. They are among the most decent human beings I know. The army officially considers prejudice against atheists to be okay, and the President thinks that atheists can’t be patriots. These arguments always annoy the hell out of me, and they tend to be obfuscated by the existence of examples of profoundly bad behavior by supposed representatives of either side. Not a few anti-atheists like to cite the regimes of Stalin and Hitler as examples of atheism being the basis of tyrrany and slaughter. This to me is intellectually dishonest, on par with equating Christianity with Fred Phelps. The influential atheists today are at least as compassionate as any Christian you’d care to name, and I think it’s safe to say a distate for religion is the only thing they have in common with those historical villains. I wouldn’t hold a Dawkins-style atheist accountable for the actions of oppressive communist governnents any more than I’d hold a modern-day Lutheran responsible for the crusades (or abortion clinic bombings). This analysis of statistics of nonbelief in various countries draws a very sharp distinction between “coercive atheism” of a totalitarian regime and atheism that has emerged naturally in a democratic post-industrial nation.

Atheists are distrusted by most Americans, and at times are even targets of bigotry. My personal experience has been that how far you can trust a given person has absolutely nothing to do with their states faith or lack thereof. Whether we’re talking about theists or atheists, there are people who are jerks about the contrast between their beliefs and those of others, as though the world that already holds more than 6 billion people is somehow too small to hold multiple philosophical views. I for one base how much I trust someone on their actual conduct.

I’ve been wondering why it is that theism of one sort or another is basically the default. People have reasons for their faith and even incentives (the role of a church is far more social than people seem to realize, for one thing), but there is no proof per se. When Christians argue against atheism they seem to either beg the question or try to pick apart the opposition (which for them usually means evolution) rather than doing anything to substantially prop up their own views.

While I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being agnostic, so far the religion that makes the most sense to me is Buddhism. While there may well be some part of the world where you can find a Buddhist yelling at people that they need to accept the Four Noble Truths, it has a (percieved) lack of shouty jerks in its favor. It also plays nice with science better than any other religion I know of. Buddhist views of the nature of existence (“emptiness“) and self (as an aggregate of processes) are very compatible with our modern understanding of how the cosmos works, and the Buddha himself largely regarded “supernatural” matters to be secondary to the pursuit of enlightenment/happiness in the here and now. And, incidentally, morality (“right action,” “right intention,” “compassion for all beings”) are of paramount importance in Buddhism.

Why can’t we all just get along? Seriously, why the fuck not?