What Do You Worship?

So Representative Rick Saccone is trying to pass a bill in Pennsylvania requiring “In God We Trust,” to be posted in every school in the state. He claims it’s “inclusive,” because everyone who reads it can interpret “God” to mean whatever the god of their own religion is. Even if you ignore the existence of non-monotheistic beliefs, there is the obvious exception of us atheists.

In a recent interview, he was asked about this issue. His response was “Atheists, you know, they look at things their own way also. They can either interpret that as whatever god that they worship, in the form of, maybe it’s materialism, or something else in life that they look at.”

He also lied about receiving encouragement for the bill from the head of an atheist organization that doesn’t actually exist, but that’s not the point I’m angling at today.

There’s a very simple concept in play here that seems to have escaped him. It’s a concept, actually, that seems to escape many theists, since he’s not the first one I’ve heard say something similar. And that concept is that atheists by definition do not worship any gods. None. Zero. We do not believe they exist. By the way, that also means that we do not believe that we are gods either, just in case you were wondering.

Also, more than that, we haven’t gone and just replaced gods with something else to worship. I can’t even imagine what we would. The idea just seems ridiculous to me. It’s not as if I just have this weird urge to worship, such that in the absence of a god I’d have no choice but to direct that urge at something else. We don’t worship “materialism,” as the Representative Saccone seems to suggest, or ourselves, or science or anything at all. What would even be the point?

Bringing us back to the “In God We Trust,” thing, surely you can see that there’s no way to rationally argue that the phrase is inclusive of atheists. But the argument the Representative is making is nonsensical on another level as well. See, he’s basically arguing that the word “God” means whatever the reader wishes it to mean. Which means that he wants to spend legislative effort and public funds to plaster a nonsense phrase that essentially means “In whatever we trust.” Under that interpretation, the phrase is meaningless. It conveys no information and states no principal at all.

But of course, he doesn’t really mean it. He means the Christian god, and he wants to spend our tax money stamping our schools with it like a dog marking his territory. I hope his fellow representatives won’t fall for it, or worse, collude in it.

Why Don’t Atheists Want a Moral Basis?

In many debates I’ve seen between atheists and theists about the existence of a god, theists will frequently accuse atheists of having no moral basis. Some will even try to focus on this argument to the exclusion of all others, in spite of the fact that it actually has nothing to do with whether a god exists or not. And this is one of those arguments that just seems bizarre to me, because it’s one that no theist should want to win.

Why? Because the argument that “Without God, there is no basis for morality,” does nothing at all to prove that a god exists. At best, it’s an argument to want a god to exist. But just wanting something, no matter how much you might want it, does not make it true. The universe does not owe us an objective moral basis, and therefore the proposition that objective morality cannot exist without a god doesn’t demonstrate that a god exists.

So what happens if you convince somebody that there’s no moral basis without God, if you haven’t separately convinced him that there is a god? You take someone who had previously been moral, and turn them into someone amoral? Who actually wins in that situation? Anyone?

See, here’s the thing. By and large, atheists don’t look for ways to construct moral systems independent of God because we think they will banish him. We already don’t believe he exists. We try to construct moral systems because they are necessary to live in a society, humans by and large thrive best in societies, and nobody but humans is going to construct those societies (or the morals that guide them) for us. We don’t construct secular moral systems to deny God, we construct secular moral systems because we have no other choice.

And having to deal with the realities of living with other people seems like a pretty decent basis for a morality to me.

But ultimately I don’t think that the debate is necessarily about whether any given atheist can be a moral person. Inevitably, the debates seem to come down to this: how does an atheist justify imposing his morality on those who do not share it, since (as the theists claim) any moral system not based on a supreme authority is just as valid as any other?

From here on out, I’m speaking only for myself. Though my thoughts have been influenced by others, I cannot say that they are necessarily those of any significant number of atheists (who tend to be a diverse lot with a number of strongly conflicting opinions). But to me, it seems like the question posed in the preceding paragraph has some assumptions built into it that I do not believe are justified.

Firstly, the question seems to assume that morality is a fixed thing, and therefore when two moralities come into conflict one must be imposed unchanged on the other.

Secondly, it seems to assume that without a supreme authority, there is no basis for evaluating whether one moral choice is better than another.

I simply do not agree with either assumption.

To address the second one first, I do not believe that morality has anything to do with pleasing or obeying an authority figure in the first place. Morality is about how your behavior affects other people (and, to a certain extent, other living things). Once you understand that morality isn’t about rules, but about people, then it’s easy to see how there is a basis for judging whether certain moral choices are better than others.

To address the first assumption, when conflicts arise it may seem in some situations where it is clearly obvious that one path creates better outcomes for the affected people, then it may be necessary to impose that path. But often it’s less clear, which is why the morally responsible thing to do is be open to the possibility that your moral preference may be the one that’s wrong. Or that there’s enough ambiguity that imposing one or the other is not justified.

That’s the part I think is the hard one to convey. The idea that you can be wrong, or even that there might not be a clearly obvious right thing to do in all situations. That imposing your moral preferences, no matter how strongly felt they are, may not always be justified. And also accepting that the mere fact that you can’t know the absolute most right answer in every situation does not mean you can’t make a good decision. And more than that, it’s OK for that to be the case.

If you insist that morality is based on following the rules of some ultimate authority, then you have surrendered the ability to change those rules even when they demonstrably create awful outcomes for actual people. Following rules that create misery simply because an authority tells you to is, in my opinion, a fairly immoral stance. Particularly when that authority is one that can’t even be demonstrated to exist, or to have the best interests of any people whatsoever in mind.

We’re human. We’re fallible, but we’re also learning. We do the best with what we know now, in the hopes that in the future we’ll be able to do better based on the knowledge we’ll have then.

Do You Celebrate Christmas?

Well… yes and no. I celebrate the secular version of Christmas, and not the birthday of Jesus.

Christmas means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and there’s a whole range between the extremes of “It’s all about Christ,” and “It’s all about sales and crass commercialism.” Actually, there’s a whole lot of meanings that don’t fall anywhere on the line between those two positions.

I could go on, I suppose, about the fact that it’s pretty much impossible that December 25^th is the actual birth date of Jesus, or how Christmas is just a Christian appropriation of pagan midwinter celebrations anyway with a modern incarnation defined more by Normal Rockwell and the Coca Cola Company than any religion, but I’m pretty sure we’ve all heard that before. My telling you about it again isn’t going to give anyone any new insight. And if you have somehow failed to hear about those things, there are people better qualified than I to spell out the details who are just a Google search away.

No, the purpose of this post is to talk about the Christmas I celebrate, and why I celebrate it.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I was raised in a Christian household. So, of course, I was raised celebrating Christmas. We used to do the whole Christmas Cantata thing, where my brother and I would participate in church productions of the little play telling the Christmas story. We sang all the religious carols. We set up an Advent wreath with the four candles, lighting one more each Sunday leading up to Christmas. We decorated the Christmas tree, and gave each other presents, and had a big Christmas dinner (which, as wonderful as it was, still placed second behind Mom’s Christmas cookies for holiday foodstuffs, as they are the best cookies in the known universe). Christmas from my childhood holds nothing but happy memories for me.

And really, that’s a big part of why I celebrate it: because it reminds me of happy memories. And I would like to share those happy memories with my children and help them form some of their own. Obviously, the religious symbolism (including the symbolism of the huge number of pagan elements contained in the celebration) is pretty much ignored, but the things they symbolize played little to no role in my enjoyment of the holiday to begin with.

Another reason I celebrate Christmas is that I happen to believe that the secular notions that it has come to embody are very good things. Setting aside time to be with your family and loved ones. Demonstrating love through the exchange of gifts (and no, I do not accept the notion that doing so is inherently shallow or commercial). Encouraging acts of generosity towards even total strangers. I think those are good things to do, and to be reminded of.

And finally, I happen to like tradition. That doesn’t mean I think tradition should always be adhered to without examination. But at their best, traditions are things that help to bind families and communities together through shared experience, and Christmas traditions are generally pretty fun and positive. Our family has a tradition of gathering at my parents’ house the first Sunday after Thanksgiving to decorate the Christmas tree. It’s a time we have set aside where everything else gets put away so we can get together in a loving environment and each contribute our efforts to creating something together. I love it.

So this season, we will once again put up our Christmas tree, and hang our lights around the house. And my wife and I will put in some late nights shopping and wrapping up presents in secret. We’ll even hold back a stash to lay under the tree Christmas night after the kids have gone to sleep, even though they know the truth about Santa, because it’s fun and it’s tradition, and it contributes to the whole magical feeling of the holiday. We’ll give to our charities, and we’ll visit our families (and score some of Mom’s Christmas cookies!).

So for those who celebrate it: Merry Christmas! And for those who celebrate other traditions: Happy Holidays! And for those who don’t celebrate anything at all: we love you too and wish you only the best!

Aren't You Thankful?

Well, I was hoping to get something up on the subject of Thanksgiving before the actual holiday happened, but life sometimes has a way of foiling these little plans. Still, I want to say a little something on the subject of thankfulness. Because personally, I think it’s a good thing to set aside time now and then to think about it.

There is no doubt that I have plenty to be thankful for. I have a wife and kids whom I love and who love me, I have supportive and loving parents and in-laws, a roof over my head, and a full-time job that keeps us fed and housed. I have some friends I can count on, and others that I can simply have a good time with once in a while. I live in a country where I can have all of those things while being able to choose (more or less) what I do for a living, and where I can say the things I say on this blog in spite of them being an extreme minority opinion.

So that’s just a few of the things I have to be thankful for. I’m sure that if I really set my mind to it, I could come up with more and more until I completely bogged down this post with a huge list of everything positive in my life. But listing what you’re thankful for does raise a related question: who am I thankful to? I think that bears some thought as well, and may even be the more important question.

Almost every year, we spend Thanksgiving with my parents. And my parents, like probably millions of families worldwide, commemorate meals on significant occasions by offering a prayer of thanks to God (the Christian God – they’re Baptists) and asking for his continued blessings. I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that I’m not a big fan of the practice. Usually, I just sit through it in silence out of respect for my parents, and this year was no exception.

But what’s becoming increasingly uncomfortable to me is the fact that God is the only one to get thanked. He gets the thanks for the food, for the home, for the family, for all of the things that my father calls out to name in his list of blessings, he gives the thanks to God even though there is no visible participation in any of that by any immaterial being.

Meanwhile, it’s demonstrably true that a farmer grew the food, and a store sold it to us, and that my father’s earnings paid for it, and that my mother’s efforts transformed it into a feast. We have a family because each and every one of us makes the effort to plan these times together, and to let one another know that we love them, and because each of us there lends their own personality to the mixture that is our family.

And, of course, when you think about it a little more deeply, it’s not hard to expand the circle of people and events to be thankful for. Even just the ones that were necessary in order for me to be alive to be writing this, much less to be having any joy in life. For example: I was born in breach position, a situation which could easily have resulted in the deaths of both myself and my mother. So I have a doctor to be thankful to that I ever got to draw breath in the first place. And he couldn’t have had the knowledge to save us if it weren’t for the generations of people who not only investigated that knowledge but also set out the means to record it and train others in how to apply it. And each of those people, in turn, had to have all the things go right in their own lives to allow them to survive to achieve what they did. Plus each and every one of their ancestors all the way back through hominids, apes, primates, and on and on to the first organic molecules. It rapidly becomes absolutely mind-boggling the sheer number of events that came together so that I could be here writing about the fact that I’m kinda glad it came together in such a way as to make me.

That’s an awful lot to be grateful for. And a huge amount of those things are so impersonal, or so distant in time and space, that it would be impossible to express thanks to them in any meaningful way. It’s a vast and incomprehensible web, and merely getting a glimmer of the incredible number of things that had to come together so that I could even exist is both humbling and awe-inspiring. When I look around and realize that every person I meet is the result of an equally vast number of events coming together, that’s even more humbling and amazing still.

But that, I think, is the connection to the enormity of it all. I cannot express my gratitude to the impersonal and distant forces that led to my existence. But I can express it to all the people around me who are the equally improbable products of those same forces. By thanking them… by thanking you… I am thanking the universe as well.

So I say in all sincerity to all who are reading this, and even to all who aren’t… THANK YOU!

Are Atheists Soulless?

Of course they are. I’m not going to beat around the bush: atheists have no souls. I don’t see this as a problem, though, since nobody else does either.

Actually, that’s too strong a statement. It would be more true to say that I, and many other atheists, do not believe that there is such a thing as a soul. We can’t say conclusively that there isn’t; it’s just that we haven’t seen convincing evidence for it yet, so we don’t believe it.

Incidentally, there are atheists who do believe in souls. The concept, after all, is not inextricably tied to belief in or worship of a god. It’s just that I’m not one of those atheists, so please don't think that I'm speaking for them in this post.

Now, when I say a soul, I’m talking about a magical, immaterial and potentially immortal component of consciousness/personality that can survive independently of a living brain and body. That’s the thing that I don’t believe exists.

The problem is that the word “soul” has acquired a lot of cultural baggage, and a lot of other definitions. Many, for example, regard the soul as being the seat of all positive emotions (such as love, nobility, wonder, etc.), with the physical body driving only negative emotions. Or others regard the soul as being the seat of emotion altogether, with the physical being incapable of such things. To people with this kind of dualistic outlook, to not have a soul is to be capable only of evil and selfishness in the first case, or merely an automaton – a thing rather than a person – in the second.

So when an atheist says something like “I don’t believe in souls,” many people don’t hear “I don’t believe in an immaterial component of consciousness that survives outside a living body.” They hear “I don’t believe in positive emotions, only selfishness and evil.” Or they hear “I don’t believe in behaving like I or anyone else is a person.” A lot of these people, though, would probably say that atheists have souls, but are just mistaken about it.

Some even go a step further than that. Either out of desire to demonize atheists, or simply an inability to comprehend that it’s possible for people not to believe in souls, they will twist the simple statement “I don’t believe in souls,” into something like “I want to destroy the soul so that everyone can be purely selfish and/or automatons.” These people are a lot more likely to say atheists have no souls (or that the “atheist ideal” is a “human form without soul,” as I recently read in an incredibly ignorant article about how us atheists would all love to be vampires), because what they mean by that is that atheists are bad people. This is especially true for those looking to demonize us, since to them and their target constituencies, the accusation of soullessness brings to mind images of dead-eyed, leering monsters in human form setting out to debauch themselves and harm everyone else in the process.

But when an atheist like me says that he doesn’t believe in the existence of a soul, he’s not saying that he doesn’t believe in the impulses to love, or empathize, or create, or wonder, or any of the other positive emotions and impulses commonly ascribed to souls. There is, after all, nothing that logically requires those impulses to be bound to an immaterial immortal consciousness. Our lived experience is still a human experience just like everyone else’s and doesn’t become qualitatively different just because we don’t credit that experience to the same source.

We just happen to think that all of those impulses – the good and the bad (and justifying the use of “good” and “bad” is probably a whole series of posts on its own) – are all rooted in our material bodies. It’s all inseparably human.

It would be nice to think that we have a “true” self that is upright and good and will someday be free to live forever without being dragged down by all the bad parts of ourselves when we leave our bodies behind. But the reason I don’t believe in souls is not because I think it would be great cease existing, or because I really want to cling to the bad in me. It is, quite simply, because I’m not convinced that that souls exist.

So this is me, all of me, here in this world being soulless and human just like anybody else.

Isn’t Evolution Racist?

This will probably open a real can of worms, but…

I was listening to a program the other day on which atheist hosts were fielding questions from callers. One such caller was quite insistent that if you believe in evolution, then you must be a racist because you believe white people are more evolved than black people.

I wish I could say that this was the only time I had ever heard that statement, but it’s really only the most recent. And it betrays so much ignorance on so many levels that it’s hard to decide where to start.

I guess first I’ll start by saying, because I don’t think this can be repeated enough, that evolution is not a system of morals. It is a framework for explaining observed facts about how living things change over successive generations. That is all. It doesn’t tell you anything about what you should believe or how you should behave, it merely explains why organisms are the way they are.

That means, by the way, that accepting evolution is not a moral stance. It is an evaluation of evidence about how things are. In that sense, it’s no different than accepting gravitational theory of attraction, or the atomic theory of matter, or the germ theory of disease. So even if evolution somehow showed that one race was demonstrably inferior in every way to another, that would have absolutely nothing to do with whether it is true or not.

But happily, evolution says no such thing.

You see, the thing to realize is that there is no such thing as “more evolved.” In this sense, we don’t do ourselves any favors when we make jokes about people needing to evolve more, because it kind of gives the impression that that’s a real thing.

But the reality is that evolution is not a scale. There is no perfect end goal that evolution is striving for, and therefore no one organism can be said to be further along toward that goal than any other. There is only degree of successful adaptation to the environment – and since environments can change, what constitutes a successful adaptation is in constant flux. The whole idea of “more evolved” is actually kind of nonsense in that respect.

In our “is evolution racist?’ milieu, the translation of that is that “whiteness” is nothing more than an adaptation to a climate with less sun exposure than the relatively sun-drenched African environment where humanity originated. In no sense can it be considered “more evolved,” it’s just adapted to a different set of conditions.

Furthermore, organisms and populations are constantly evolving. In fact, literally everything that has ever lived was part of a transitional species. Just as the various hominid species were transitions between the great apes and us, we are transitions between the hominids and whatever our descendants will become in the future. Humanity is not an end product, it is merely another step. We are evolving right now.

What does this mean in terms of the racism question? It means that black people didn’t stop evolving just because the descendants of a subset of the human species became white people (or Asian people, or Native American people, or whatever distinction you want to throw on the pile). Plenty of studies show that there is tremendous genetic variation in African populations, which suggests that the evolutionary mechanism of genetic variance is quite alive and well among them. It’s just that the forms it has taken have largely been in areas other than the highly visible (yet essentially trivial) realm of skin pigmentation. Evolution is still ongoing among black people, just like it is among white people, Asian people, or whatever other people you care to name.

But these differences only really start to become significant when one part of the population is evolving in isolation from the others. African and Caucasian populations acquired differences in genetic variation because they were living in relative isolation from each other. But it was such a short timeframe (in evolutionary terms) that neither group became fundamentally different from the other (or any of the other racial types). Which means that in an era of increasing global crossover between populations, those variations become potentially part of everyone’s shared genetic legacy. And that is arguably a very good thing, because it means our descendants will have a greater wealth of genetic information to draw on to fuel adaptation to changing conditions.

Have some people used ideas about evolution to fuel racist dogma? Yes, absolutely. But in almost all cases those ideas have been based on very flawed understandings of what evolution actually says. And all such cases have been the result of tacking some other ideology onto the findings of evolutionary science. Evolution itself is not ideological. It provides facts and explanations. It tells you something about how the world operates; it does not tell you what to do about it.

So I hope that my layman’s explanation has helped to show that in no sense can any race be considered to be “more evolved” than any other. In fact, to say so is to be pretty much speaking nonsense in terms of the actual theory of evolution.

But What If You’re Wrong?

I don’t know. You tell me.

I’m not being a smartass here. This is one of the most common questions we atheists get asked when discussing our lack of belief in gods, and it’s always asked as if it’s just assumed that there’s one answer and we’re supposed to know it. But even among Christians, there are many different conceptions about what the consequences of nonbelief are. Some seem to believe that as long as we’re good people we go to heaven when we die whether we’re Christian or not. On the other hand, we have those who believe we’re going to hell (although there are many different conceptions of what hell is) where we’ll suffer unimaginable torment for all eternity simply because we don’t believe.

Then you start looking outside Christianity, and you see many other conceptions of afterlives, and the consequences for those who do or don’t believe, or those who do or don’t act in certain ways with regards to the various pantheons.

So, in all seriousness, I don’t know. Tell me what you believe will happen to me, and we can go from there.

I will say, though, that most of the time (at least in America) this question comes from Christians who believe that we’re risking the eternal torment version of hell for the crime of not believing their god exists. The more aggressive ones phrase the question in terms of “What will you say to God when you die and have to face His judgment?” As if it were possible to threaten us into believing that for which we haven’t seen good evidence.

Of course, the first and easiest answer is that I have no more concern for that scenario than I imagine any Christian has for what they will say to Allah, or Thoth, or Hades, or the Valkyries (who, for the record, I also don’t believe exist). It’s hard to get worked up when a being you don’t believe exists threatens to send you to a place you don’t believe exists because you don’t believe it.

But then, I’ve been an atheist for a long time. I’m comfortable with it.

The thing that gets me about the question, though, is that it’s a dishonest tactic. It’s not about finding the truth; it’s intended to make you scared, so that the questioner can use that as leverage to open you up to the idea that they have the answers that will alleviate your fear. It’s creating a symptom so that you can claim to have the cure.

Though I’d have to believe that an all-powerful being would have more effective means than threats to get me to believe in it, and any being I’d respect enough to worship would be above making them.

So, what if I’m wrong? I don’t really know. Nobody actually does, and it’s not a question that can really be speculated on until someone can demonstrate that an actual consequence exists.