ACTIVITY: Atheist Ireland Inaugural Meeting

The members of the atheist.ie website are holding the Inaugural Meeting of the proposed Atheist Ireland organisation in the Central Hotel on Exchequer Street in Dublin today.

I'm very impressed by both the initiative and the ideas listed for this organisation, and hope to be in attendance today for what should be a landmark day in the continuing striving for improvements of society.

Red: I eventually went for what was a stimulating day with like-minded people and I'm impressed with the activities and the news coverage the new organisation has created in the last two years. My one regret is that my running and work commitments simply don't currently allow more active support of this great and important organisation.

ATHEISM: Not a Religion, Not a Replacement

A claim atheists are often faced with is that without religion the world would sink into depravity and the source of this depravity would be atheism which is, in their logic, just another religious belief (inferior to theirs) and that tyrannical and genocidal regimes such as Mao's China, Stalin's Soviet Union, and Hitler's German Reich are caused by the purported Atheism of these three political leaders (North Korea is less commonly used these days after many religious people realised that the president of the country is the dead father of the current ruler, basically making it a Death Cult to borrow the words of Christopher Hitchens).

The reason for this fallacious claim is simply a broad assumption among religious people that your religion defines your morality (science has widely disproved this, so I reject this assumption outright). Ergo, however, in the mind of many religious believers, atheism caused the morally deplorable behaviour of these "atheist leaders" in what they perceive as an absence of religiousity.

This ties in with the widespread notion among religious believers that Atheism forms a religion in its own right (Sam Harris puts this argument to rest in his book "End of Faith" which I won't repeat here, but I can sum it up with Sam's apt analogy that being an "atheist" carries just as much meaningfulness as a term as "non-astrologer" or "non-fascist").

Religion, by its original definition, is dogmatic in nature. A simple non-belief in the dogmatic claim of religion can therefore not be dogmatic in itself and cannot reasonable be called a religion (unless religions would like to term the insistence on rational inquiry and open debate "dogmatic" by which time the term would have diluted into meaninglessness).

THE SOURCE OF MORALITY

Going back to the original point, few atheists would claim that they gain their morality from atheism (indeed, they could not since atheism does not define any rules on ethics, a criticism often raised against it by religious people). Instead the general atheist will seek his morality somewhere else (in modern schools of thought such as humanism, or, as it regrettably happens, to religious and non-religious people alike, in other forms of dogmatism such as Nazism, Stalinism, capitalism and so on).

So when religious people claim that Atheism caused Mao, Stalin and Hitler, to behave in their morally reprehensible manner, they are making a faulty conjecture (that Hitler paid lipservice to his Roman Catholic faith would sidetrack the discussion, but is an interesting anecdote for gauging the claims of his "atheism").

When an atheist points out that witch burnings, anti-contraception laws, suicide bombings, and the blocking of stem cell research are caused by religions there is no flaw in their conjecture: the very religious books that are claimed to contain the word of the Creator (in which the religous professedly believe) either support or directly recommends all of the above practices. Is there any more logical or rational conclusion to reach than that religion causes people to carry out these acts?

If you examine the example of Stalin in a similar way, the flaws of the analogy become obvious. Take "ban on contraception is caused by religion" and compare it to "gulags and political inquisition was caused by Atheism". In the first case, you have a lot of evidence to support your claim (e.g. the Bible widely makes it clear that the creator of the Universe considers most of your sexual activities a Sin unless its with an eye on procreation, and then only if you've performed the ritual of marriage beforehand). In the second case, would most of us not accept the claim that "gulags and political inquisition was caused by Stalinism" as more valid? Certainly the dogmatic beliefs of the Soviet state and the blind obedience to Stalin (replace with "God" as you please) was the more likely cause?

Also, historically, is there any likelihood that atheism influenced Stalin in any way? I am yet to see evidence of this (in fact, it's quite clear he was not oppposed to dogmatism, unlike atheism. Stalinist Russia did not suffer because of an overabundance of rational inquiry and free discourse).

THE VACUUM LEFT BY RELIGION

So with this argument laid to rest, I would like to turn to a more interesting argument that some of the more formidable religious thinkers have turned to when they had the above pointed out to them: That the absence of religion caused a vacuum of morality that allowed Stalinism to flourish. Now, ignoring the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church continued to survive within the Soviet state, this is at least a point that merits examination.

"Would people, with their religion removed, inevitable turn to other pseudo-religious dogmas, such as Stalinism?" Possibly, and this is just exchanging one dogma for another and clearly undesirable (sometimes worse, but how do we start to quantify when we list the crimes of Stalinism against those of religion over the years? Does it even really matter?).

The first question religious people should ask themselves is, who would be most likely to replace one dogma with another. The people who have been insisting one open debate and rational discourse all along (e.g. most atheists) or people who have been used to a more dogmatic worldview (e.g. many religious people). Should the obvious answer to this question not discredit the argument that atheism causes morally deficient societies such as Stalinist Russia, Hitler's Germany, or the necrocracy that is North Korea?

BEYOND RELIGION

Atheism does not offer any new solutions, it simply demands the removal of certain problems that exist in the world (those caused by dogmatism). Once that is out of the way its up to all of us to figure out together where to move from there. In Humanism we already have one solution that would offer an improvement on the existing status quo. And if we can move beyond our religious beliefs, this process of improvement could become an ongoing process leading us closer to that undefined point of "ultimate morality" (which may or may not exist, but in any case it would be possible to scientifically approximate it instead of staying stagnant).

Compare a situation in the future when our society has moved beyond Consumerism (that means putting your wants before your needs). Would you expect an outcry to keep Consumerism simply because of the "vacuum" it would create now that people don't drive themselves to distress because they focus their lives on wanting ever more things they don't need while at the same time losing the time to meet the actual needs that they have (a thrilling account of this can be found in Oliver James' "Affluenza").

You could build a case for Consumerism much like you could for religion e.g.:

1. It makes people "happy", that is, "it's useful" (this builds on a rather dubious definition of happiness that I will leave for a later philosophical discussion so as not to stray too far off point).

2. It gives people hope (in this case hope of becoming "rich" or "getting that new car" instead of "for life after death" or "some deeper meaning to my life")

3. It helps build communities (undoubtedly true, but what communities? Healthy communities?)

4. It creates shared values (true again, but shall we examine these values?)

In the face of such arguments, how many people would be opposed to doing something about Consumerism if it was seen to cause widespread propagation of sexual diseases, delay critical scientific research, cause Consumerist wars in many places in the world, and prompt fundamentalist consumers to fly planes into the buildings of anyone opposed to their particular branch of Consumerist views? Would we hesitate and demand an alternative be presented or insist that the world would plunge into chaos without the pacifier of Consumerism? Consider it, just for a moment!

So let us move beyond the argument that Atheism is a religion and start discussing the options for a new improved society beyond religion.