Moralistic Atheism
”She thought there were no Gods; no one was to blame; and so she evolved this atheist’s religion of doing good for the sake of goodness”
–Woolf
Often during theological discussion the notion is aroused by the theist that an atheist or an atheistic society can have no morals. This is often a point that disturbs me because essentially, to tease this out slightly, they are demonstrating that their belief is that a person cannot be moral or good without praising some deity (for the sake of civility I shall not ad-lib on that). Being an atheist does not make someone immoral, it brings society back to the people, the results of actions in that view do not then stem from sin and God’s unyielding wrath, but from the evils of mankind itself. People in society are evil, because they lust for power just as others are good because they seek the betterment of society. Morals evolve from societal agreements, social contracts formed for the betterment of a civilization. If religion was the dictating factor in this progression, the human race would have, in all probability, died out already because of ever warring factions fighting to spread the message of their lord and savior (see also: The Crusades.) (see also: The Spanish Inquisition).
This lifestyle allows for a greater enjoyment of one’s own life and allows for a person to find deeper fulfillment during life, because without spending life hoping there is an afterlife, having the knowledge that there is no afterlife makes time exponentially more valuable. Some see it as much better to live life one one’s feet rather than their knees. Even if there is no fear instilled in a person that they shall be denied entrance to some “Heavenly Kingdom” people still abide by the laws and societal acceptances for which they are subjected…Though being God fearing or religious does not make one fully moral themselves (see also: KKK). People decide their own fate, each person makes their own destiny…whether that conforms with societal values is contingent on the person, not in their belief system.
Mr. Cynic
Nietzsche said that Christianity was Nihilistic in that it required God to have morality. Their religion supports that fact, so that is how it is for a Christian. Once we lose Christianity as a tradition, what is the ethical framework that allows us to avoid nihilism? This is why “God is dead” for him. There is “no longer” a God, but we relied on God to be moral.
Many atheists lack an ethical framework that was never handed down to them, so being moral becomes a matter of faith, and can be easily doubted. Many atheists, such as Richard Dawkins seem to say, “We evolved morality,” but that misses the point. Why even worry about morality in the first place?
Morality is the essence of an organized society and without it social contracts cannot function because the abandonment of morality is the loss of civility required to participate in modern life. That being said religion does not have to be the supplier of these moralistic values. While many philosophers muse that self-servant tendencies of humans, which I shall not contradict here, but that does not mean humans are void of the ability to coexist, if that were the situation humans would never have been able to evolve to their current state of being. Before the genesis of religion even the primitive neanderthals and cro magnons were able to band together into tribes and coexist. These beings were able to band together into communities and thus allowed for the eventual evolution of the species as a whole.
Have you yourself ever read Mrs. Dalloway? The novel itself is demonstrative of how a person without a god can be moralistic in modern society. To say atheists lack an ethical framework is highly presumptuous because while not all atheists may have been exposed to religious values, that is not to say they are not exposed to any moralistic values or a different set of moral values from others though in modern society religion is not needed to bestow morals onto people, for in modern society the bible and Christianity has become nothing more than a book of magic and myth surrounded by the justifications for hate and death. To say atheists have no morals is absurd when religion is responsible for more deaths and wars than any other cause in human history. When some of the morals taught by religion are “Thou shall not kill” and “Thou shall love thy enemy” and yet any form of deviation from other values of Christianity lead to persecution of individuals and death for those of different opinions. I hope I need not remind you of the time when the Church did control citizens and bestowed their own teachings, it was a time of witch hunts and crusades to either convert or kill. Morals lie within society and its people, not within an outdated tool of control.
I am not really talking about morality in the sense of behaving ourselves. I am talking about the idea that “goodness” is a real part of the world. Are there objective values? If not, morality could be a form of social control. Of course we want a “social contract,” but if nothing “really matters,” then people might decide to cheat whenever they can get away with it.
Richard Dawkins and Hitchens are currently the most popular atheists debating religious people about morality and want to say that we know about morality because we evolved it. The reason that this misses the point is that morality could just be instinctual behavior. We might instinctual have empathy or compassion for others, but that doesn’t mean it “really matters.”
Many atheists could have faith in “goodness,” but this might be against the spirit of atheism in the first place. Dawkins particularly abhors faith and wants us to believe whatever a rational person would believe.
In other words, if we know about morality from instinctual behavior or social control, then we don’t know about it from “goodness” itself. Considering that occam’s razor asks us to reject “suspicious entities” when necessary, we have no reason then to postulate that goodness actually exists.
I am not familiar with that book, but I have studied ethics and I know that many philosophers don’t believe in objective value.
thank you for this entry…