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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781634310697 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pitchstone Publishing |
| Publication date: | 04/12/2016 |
| Pages: | 224 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.60(d) |
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Read an Excerpt
A Is for Atheist
An A to Z of the Godfree life
By Andrew Sneddon
Pitchstone Publishing
Copyright © 2016 Andrew SneddonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63431-072-7
CHAPTER 1
A Is for ...
* * *
A Very Ordinary Day: A man wakes up, dresses, and goes downstairs to his kitchen. He makes breakfast for himself and his wife, then walks his dog. Afterward his wife goes to her office and the man sits at the dining room table to read and write. He makes coffee midmorning. At lunchtime he has a small meal in the kitchen, then takes a walk into the nearby town. When he returns he does more reading and writing. He starts to cook, and before he finishes his wife comes home. They eat then go to the gym. They watch television and go to sleep.
Many of the man's days are like this. Variations include eating out; some involve trips to the movies; others involve yardwork, more shopping, and, if he's lucky, travel, and if he's unlucky, trips to his office away from home. Is this man a religious person?
From this admittedly dull sketch of daily affairs, we cannot tell. As it happens this is pretty much my life, and I am no believer. But it could easily be the life of someone who professes some not necessarily insignificant degree of belief in god or gods, along with related ideas such as souls, the supernatural, heaven and hell, sin, etc. This is a telling point: from our behavior, we generally cannot tell the godfree from the believers. Some atheists declare their nonbelief, but most do not. Much the same goes for religious believers.
Adding church attendance to this description changes the probabilities, given that it's reasonable to believe that relatively more believers than nonbelievers attend services. But it's certainly not definitive. Lots who do not go to church nonetheless believe in a god or gods. More interestingly, some atheists attend church; some attend church very regularly. Some will even profess belief, at least in certain contexts. There are various reasons for this. Some are closeted and want to remain hidden among all of the ordinary apparently (only apparently, of course) religious people. Some like the music. Some like the community, or participating in traditions. Some are sad in their unbelief: they know that the distinctly godly claims of religions are not true, but wish that they were, for they find them attractive (in their comfort, their beauty, their weirdness — there can be lots of reasons here too). See Belief and Doubt for more on this.
Piety cannot be directly seen in our behavior. This should make us wonder how much giving up religion would affect our lives. The degree of publicity with which one does this can make a difference. It's imprudent to court hatred from former friends, neighbors, family, and this, lamentably, can happen. But for lots of people atheism just won't make that much of a difference, at least to day-to-day affairs.
There are, of course, people for whom giving up religion would make a huge difference, for good, bad, or a mix. Fair enough, but this group does not include everyone. It might not even include close to everyone.
The fact that religious conviction, and lack of it, does not necessarily show up in people's behavior should also make us suspect the frequently made claim that religion and morality are closely linked. If we can't tell the ordinary good believers from the ordinary good unbelievers, why should we think that religion has a unique link to being good? The answer, of course, is that we shouldn't. See Morality (or, On Loving the Good with and without God) for discussion.
Absurdity (and Meaning in Life): If atheists are correct, is life absurd? Does a godfree perspective on the world doom one to an absurd existence?
It can seem so. A religious outlook grounds the meaning of our lives in god's perspective on us. Atheists think that there is no such perspective. We do not typically think that our lives are meaningless. Instead, the sources of true meaning for human life must be found within these lives themselves. Identifying these is hard work, but we are all familiar with the things that make our lives worthwhile. Happiness, pleasure, virtue, knowledge, love — these are all time-honored candidates for sources of meaning in life.
We also make unfortunate mistakes with regard to finding meaning in our lives (see Tragedy [or, Despair about the Meaning of Life]). The classic example is the person who devotes all of his time to a career, then wakes up one day to find his life empty. Work is a legitimate source of value in life, but it's not everything. Moreover, not all jobs are equal, and not all jobs suit all people. Sadly, other examples are just as easy to find. Looking for love in the wrong place, or the wrong kind of love, leaves lives worse than they could have been. So does immersion in trivial hobbies. And on, and on, and on.
The crucial thing to notice is that humans crave meaning. Whether we seek it in the right or wrong places, we can't help but seek it. We take it so seriously that it is common to search for ultimate foundations for the significance of our lives. The normal things around us don't seem to satisfy us; instead, we seek gods to give our lives meaning. The irony (see Irony [and Meaning in Life]) is that when we do this we look right past the real sources of meaning. This is, in a sense, absurd: it is a cosmic joke that our hunger for meaning causes us to misunderstand the nature and roots of what makes life meaningful. It is indeed absurd that our own nature is both the source of meaning in our lives and precisely what makes us blind to this source.
The answer, however, is not to embrace god as the source of life's meaning. That is a mistake in itself and a recipe for making other mistakes about what makes life worthwhile. Instead, to avoid the absurdity of life we should give up on god and learn to pay better attention to the human condition in all its difficult details. Atheism does not make life absurd. It saves life from the absurdity that the craving for gods creates.
Adults: Some religions explicitly portray humans as children of god. Atheists aren't, and neither is anyone else. A godfree life is one for adults, in this sense at least: we must, individually and collectively, face up to our challenges and opportunities. This means considering, choosing, and acting on everything: there are no topics that are off-limits because they belong to god alone. There is no god. We are the only ones around to take care of ourselves and each other. To think of oneself as a child of god is to put one's head in the sand, at least with regard to some challenges and opportunities. Eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
Agnostic: Literally, someone who thinks that we cannot know whether there is a god. It is often used to mean a less-than-fully-committed version of "atheist." See Godfree.
Animals (the Human Ones): It seems to me that one of the hardest things for humans to keep in mind is that we are animals — wonderful ones, of course, but animals nonetheless. The godfree life is one for animals, for the human animals that we are. To lead this life is in part to learn to keep this in mind, and forever to be learning what the implications of our animal nature are. See Apes, Meat Machines, and What's the Case for Atheism?
Anxieties: Many people are anxious about topics that religions address. Sometimes religions address these anxieties and provide a salve for them. Sometimes religions produce these anxieties and thereby make people's lives worse rather than better. Sometimes it's both. The crucial thing is not whether religions address anxieties: this cannot be a measure of their truth, as falsehoods can often assuage our worries. Rather, the important thing is to separate genuine from false anxieties.
For example, worries which rest on mythologies — about hell, for instance — are false. Their best solution lies in dispelling their spurious foundations. Other problems are real. Sickness is real, poverty is real ... to continue this list would be unnecessarily depressing. However, genuine concerns that receive false hope from religions are not adequately addressed. This goes even if the people with false hopes feel better about their concerns. Maybe we would all feel better about the world if we believed in Santa Claus. This hardly recommends endorsement of this belief. It certainly says nothing about whether it's true (hint: it's not, and so it goes with many of the other stories that give people comfort).
We must also be careful not to make too much of genuine anxieties. I don't really mean that we should keep things in perspective, although this is wise counsel. I mean instead that we should not assume that we share each other's concerns. Suppose that one person is deeply concerned with professional success. This is indeed one of the sources of value in life, and hence it can generate genuine anxieties. But other people need not share this concern, neither to the same degree or at all. While this person might genuinely be kept up at night worrying about professional failure, others might genuinely sleep soundly, unworried about this sort of thing. It's a mistake to assume that your deep fears are mine too — indeed, that they must be mine too.
Some people are worried about whether life is meaningful in an ultimate sense (but see Tragedy [or, Despair about the Meaning of Life], Irony [and Meaning in Life], Absurdity [and Meaning in Life] for discussion); others are unmoved. Some worry about life after death; I don't care. It's a mistake to assume that what bothers you must bother me. Think doubly, at least, about your fears: are they worth the attention that you give them, and are they generated by features of your life that others do not share?
Some religious groups reach out to people in the spirit of assuaging their fears. This can be laudable, when the people in question need real help. But it can be reprehensible, when these groups indulge and even encourage baseless fears. The mere interest in our anxieties is neither good nor bad, given the vagaries of our concerns, and hence we should not think too much of religious groups that want to offer us help.
See Fear, Hope, and Perplexity for more along these lines.
Apes: We are. Pretty great ones, but apes nonetheless. Keeping this in mind is helpful for cultivating humility (both intellectual and moral) and for warding off the felt need to explain things about our lives in terms of god and the supernatural. See Animals (the Human Ones), Humility, Meat Machines, What's the Case for Atheism?, and You.
Are Atheists Fully Human?: Must we be religious to be fully human? Some people seem to think so. Atheist Ireland chairperson Michael Nugent, in an October 2012 blog post titled "Catholic Church Must Stop Dehumanizing Atheists by Saying We Are Not Fully Human," documented cases of high-ranking Catholics who equate full humanity with being religious in general and, presumably, being Catholic in particular. Particularly worrisome are remarks to the effect that atheists are not fully human. Here is an example he reports from a BBC Radio 4 interview with Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor, who states:
I think what I said was true, of course whether a person is atheist or any other. ... there is in fact, in my view, something not totally human, if they leave out the transcendent. If they leave out an aspect of what I believe everyone was made for, which is, uh, a search for transcendent meaning, we call it God. Now if you say that has no place, then I feel that it is a diminishment of what it is to be a human, because to be human in the sense I believe humanity is directed because made by God, I think if you leave that out then you are not fully human.
This line of thought makes a simple mistake. There is a difference between being a member of a group and exercising all of the capacities that are exemplified by the members of that group. Consider a different human capacity: appreciating and enjoying music. This capacity is found across cultures and throughout human history, so we can safely say that it is a typical human capacity. However, there are particular people who don't care for music. These people don't sing, dance, listen, hum, whistle, etc. Music plays no role in their lives. Should we say that these people are not fully human because they don't care for music, and hence don't participate in the making or enjoyment of music? No. (See Wholeness for problems with the very idea of a full, complete, or whole life.)
In case you are inclined to doubt this, try it with a different capacity. Take the capacity for murder. As with music, this is found everywhere in human history, so it is a typical human capacity. Do we really want to say that murderers are more human than nonmurderers? I should think not.
To be a human does not require the exercise of all of the capacities which humans typically have. A more promising idea is that to be fully human, one must exercise the capacities that define us as human. Presumably this is more in line with what, for example, Cardinal O'Connor has in mind. The operative premise for those who deny full humanity to atheists is the idea that religiosity is at least partially definitive of what it is to be a human. (See Religious Spirit [or, Religiosity; Religion in General; Religion in the Abstract] for doubts about the very notion of "religiosity." O'Connor actually worries that atheists are less than human because of a neglect of the transcendent, so see Transcendence.) Is this true?
Here we find a deep problem. Religious thinkers and organizations who make this sort of claim are taking a stand on human nature. Do we have any reason to think that these people and groups are in a good position to illuminate the sort of thing we are? No. These people have not studied us in any principled way, so far as I can tell. They are typically experts in interpreting certain texts that make pronouncements about the nature of all sorts of things, but without any principled study of these things themselves. (See Space Travellers for thoughts about studying us and our place in the world.)
Just what is it to be a human? The word "human" is used in a variety of ways, so this question is deceptively simple in its appearance. However, if we are interested in our nature, then we ought to pay attention to "human" as the name of a species. Now the question is transformed: what is it for an organism to be a member of the human species? This isn't as easy to answer as one might think. There is an ongoing discussion involving biologists and philosophers about the notion of a species, with special concern about what it is for two organisms to be members of the same or of different species. There is no settled account of this, but here's a very rough look at the foremost idea. A species is a biological group that perpetuates itself through time via production of new individual organisms. This suggests that maintenance of the reproductive capacity that perpetuates the group is at the core of species membership. Two organisms are members of the same species when, under the appropriate conditions (such as health, maturity, appropriate sexuality) they are capable of producing living, reproductively viable offspring. That is, if two organisms can produce organisms who themselves can produce more offspring, then they are members of the same species. If they can't do this, then they belong to different species, regardless of how similar they are in other ways.
There are two lessons here, if this is at all correct. One is that very specific capacities, rather than generally typical ones, can be definitive of our nature, at least so far as our species is concerned. The second is that the exercise of these capacities might not matter at all to our nature. We are members of the human species if we possess these reproductive capacities, not if we exercise them. This is good news for the celibate, such as Catholic priests and nuns.
Generally speaking, when people make claims about the nature of the world, or about the nature of particular parts of the world, such as ourselves, we should ask about the grounds on which the claims are made. These grounds should include the right sort of study of the thing in question. Religious claims are almost never made on these grounds. These mistaken and, as we all know, dangerous remarks about religion and human nature are just one example.
Atheism: Lack of belief in a god, or doctrine that there is no god, in any literal and interesting sense. See Godfree.
Authority: (1) The say-so of the influential and why we believe much of what we believe. The foundation of religious belief for the vast majority of people is authority. They believe because others before them believed and have passed on their beliefs. This is tricky territory.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Is for Atheist by Andrew Sneddon. Copyright © 2016 Andrew Sneddon. Excerpted by permission of Pitchstone Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Introduction 11
1 A Is for… 19
A Very Ordinary Day 19
Absurdity (and Meaning in Life) 20
Adults 21
Agnostic 22
Animals (the Human Ones) 22
Anxieties 22
Apes 23
Are Atheists Fully Human? 23
Atheism 26
Authority 26
2 B Is for … 30
Basics 30
Beauty 31
Belief and Doubt 31
Believers (or, My Sisters and Brothers in Disbelief) 35
Bigness 35
Bless You (or, God Bless You) 38
Bodies 39
Bright 41
Bullshit 41
3 C Is for… 42
Certainty 42
Children's Education 42
Churches (or, Buildings for Worship of Gods) 43
Community 44
Control 44
Cult 45
4 D Is for… 47
Death 47
5 E Is for… 49
Enchantment 49
Eternal 50
Everyone Has Their Own Religion 51
Everything Happens for a Reason (or, It Wasn't Meant to Be) 52
Evidence 55
Evil as a Reason to Reject God 61
Exceptions 62
Experience 63
6 F Is for… 64
Faith vs. Reason 64
Family and Friends 70
Fear 72
Foxholes 73
Freethinker 74
7 G Is for… 75
Gift 75
God (or, Gods) 76
Godfree 78
Golf 78
Guff 79
8 H Is for… 81
Habit 81
Hamlet's Advice 81
Heaven 82
Hell 82
Holidays 83
Hope 84
Humanism (or, Secular Humanism) 85
Humility 85
9 I Is for … 90
Ignorance 90
Irony (and Meaning in Life) 91
10 J Is for… 95
Jerks 95
11 K Is for… 96
Knowledge 96
12 Lis for… 97
Language 97
Lies 98
Love 98
13 M Is for… 99
Marriage (as a Model for Godfree Living) 99
Meaning of Life 101
Meat Machines 101
Mercy 102
Merry Christmas! (or Happy Christmas!, for Those of a British Background) 103
Miracles 104
Moral Math (or, Good vs. Bad Effects of Religion and Atheism) 106
Morality (or, On Loving the Good with and without God) 108
Mystery 126
14 N Is for… 129
Nonbelievers 129
Nonhumans 129
15 O Is for… 130
Ockham's Razor 130
Ontological Argument 131
Oratory 134
Order 135
Origins 137
16 P Is for… 140
Paradise (Fools; or, Whatever Gets You through the Night) 140
Perplexity 141
Pick Up a Textbook 141
Practical Religion 142
Pray 144
17 Q Is for… 145
Questions 145
Quiz! 148
18 R Is for… 154
Reality (or, Realities) 154
Reason 155
Relics 156
Religion 156
Religion in the Public Sphere 158
Religious Spirit (or, Religiosity; Religion in General; Religion in the Abstract) 162
Responsibility 164
19 Sis for… 166
Sacred 166
Salvation 166
Sanctity 166
Satanism 167
Science 167
Secular 169
Self 169
Short List of Suggested Readings 170
Sign 171
Simplicity 174
Sin 175
Sincerity 175
Soul 176
Space Travellers 180
Spirit 182
"Spirit in the Sky" 182
Spooky 183
Standards 184
Stories 185
Straw Men 185
Studying Religion 186
Supernatural 189
Symbolism (or, Analogy, Metaphor) 192
20 T Is for… 194
Thank God! 194
Tradition (or Custom) 194
Tragedy (or, Despair about the Meaning of Life) 196
Transcendence 198
Truth (or, Truths) 199
21 U Is for… 202
Uncertainty 202
22 V Is for… 203
Values 203
23 W Is for… 205
What's the Case for Atheism? 205
What's the Difference between a God and an Extraterrestrial? 206
Who Bears the Burden of Argument? 207
Wholeness 212
Why Are You Doing This? 216
Wonder 217
World (The) 217
Worship 218
24 X Is for… 220
Xmas 220
25 Y Is for… 226
You 226
26 Z Is for… 227
Zounds! 227
Select Bibliography 229
About the Author 231