Believe it or not, yesterday’s post started as an honest question. I phrased it provocatively because this is, after all, the Internet, but I wasn’t just poking atheists with sticks.
This actually started quite a while ago, during one of the previous rounds of squabbling over Dawkins and his ilk, when I started a sentence something like: “What I’d like to see is less ‘Religion is Stupid’ and more…” and couldn’t finish it. I couldn’t come up with a good example of something positive to put in place of the “…”
Which was really annoying. After all, I’ve got a pretty solid idea of what I’d like to see more of from religious people– the short version is “http://slacktivist.typepad.com/“– but I don’t really have a solid mental image of what I’d like to see from proseltyzing atheists. Or even what would really be possible along those lines.
I ended up abandoning the post, but kept the topic in mind. I was reminded of it this week by the Mormons.
Not any specific Mormon, but the Mormons generally. Specifically, those corny-as-hell commercials they do promoting general niceness. They’ve done a huge ad buy on the local ESPN radio affiliate, so I’ve been hearing a lot of those spots.
The current one is, basically, “Talk to your kids.” Not in an explicitly threatening way, like you get from the War on Some Drugs: “Talk to your kids, or they’ll end up sleeping on the street giving hand jobs for crack.” There’s a small element of that, but the message is basically just “Talk to your kids. Everybody will be happier.”
This is, as I said, corny as all hell. It’s also pretty effective. I’m not going to run out and join up, because I know a bit about LDS theology, and, really, if Mitt Romney wants to make the leap to Scientology (seriously, Battlefield Earth?), he’s not getting a whole lot weirder. But those ads do a great job of reinforcing the image of Mormons as Just Nice Folks. And that extends somewhat to religious people in general.
That made me wonder again about that “…” from a few months ago, and I still couldn’t think of anything to put there. Now, granted, it’s not like “Talk to your kids” is an exclusively Mormon idea, but they can at least make an argument that the idea grows out of their religious and ethical tradition, and you just don’t hear atheists doing a whole lot of that.
Which is why I asked the question, and why I really liked John Novak’s answer:
The ethics of atheism– my ethics of atheism, at least– lead me to try to make the world a better place. Most if not all religions will claim that their ethics do the same.
But my ethics of atheism force me to do so in terms of the world itself and in terms of the people within it, rather than the dictates of a being that probably doesn’t exist, focussing on rewards, punishments, or other results in an afterlife that probably doesn’t exist either.
Hope, for instance, is a powerful Christian virtue and arguably one of the best three philosophical traditions to come out of the Christian tradition. But as an atheist, when someone dies, I cannot allow myself to rationalize or hope that someone has gone to a better place; on the flip side, I cannot allow myself to think that horrible men committing horrible actions will be sufficiently punished after their deaths.
Atheism keeps me focussed on this world, and permits no excuses for bad behaviour, except legitimate error (and thus exhorts me to improve myself, again, in this world, to make fewer errors.)
(Jed Harris says something similar farther down.) Now, there’s still a faint element of “religion is stupid” in there, but I like this approach It casts atheism in a positive light, as an active source of ethical principles, rather than primarily putting down religion. If you were running for office as an atheist candidate, this is the message you would want to put out there.
I’d like to see more of that sort of thing. Not just because I think it would be more effective, but because it’s at least interesting, which “religion is irrational” is not.
I realize, of course, that to the militant atheist crowd, my comments are about as welcome as those chin-stroker pieces in which David Brooks explains what the Democrats really need to do to win elections. I thought that I ought to give at least some explanation of the reasoning behind yesterday’s poking-with-sticks, though. There’s another angle on it, too, that I may get to later, but the next few days are a schedule nightmare for me, so we’ll see…