Chapter 10
The trouble with Atheism though…
…is that it seems like nothing. A simple negation of something that appears pretty nebulous in the first place. Matthew Arnold’s ‘naked shingles of the world’ from which the Sea of Faith seemed to be withdrawing in 1867 carries on in the same gothic vein:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.[i]
From within the vague garden, the area immediately outside its low and dilapidated walls can at the outset look like a threateningly barren waste ground. Just on the other side of the wall, that is on the outside of faith, Arnold’s doubtful vision of confused alarms and ignorant armies might seem to play out before us on that ‘darkling plain’. We should forgive Arnold his gloom. He was an evolving agnostic himself, and defined religion as only ‘morality touched with emotion’, but his was not quite an Atheist perspective. The agnostic view can be a little retrograde, seeing only decline and lack rather than hopeful freedom and great possibility ahead. In Arnold’s day in the late nineteenth century, Christianity had been more or less universal in the culture of the British Isles for around 1200 years and for very good reasons this dominance was coming to its end. The general loss of faith in society at that time must have felt something like you may now be feeling on a personal level as you teeter on the edge of momentous change. On all the important questions of life, the universe, and everything, real knowledge was replacing faith as the dominant mode of mental capital and moral and intellectual activity. This was not a painless transition. On the Origin of Species, the foundational text of evolutionary biology, had been published on 24th November 1859. Through this, Darwin wove his magic and changed the course of human history. His thesis was almost totally correct of course, but at the time sufficient physical evidence still lagged and thinkers like Arnold, and indeed Darwin himself, were left with ambiguities that niggled. Since then, any difficulties have been wiped out by a multitude of cross-referenced disciplines that have given us by far the clearest picture we've ever had of our own origins, and fresh insight into the deep connections not only between ourselves and other humans but between ourselves and all the animals, and indeed plant life, on this planet.
Thinkers like Arnold sometimes struggled, but huge steps have been taken since the Victorian artists and intellectuals levelled their critique at religion. For us, science and medicine are much less mystifying, and far more likely to save and enhance our lives, than was the case in the nineteenth century, where they were still in the process of developing and applying the germ theory of disease, antiseptic surgery and vaccination, while taking technical and technological baby steps with electromagnetism, chemistry and engines. Throughout the twentieth century, physics, astronomy and cosmology made astonishing leaps and unlocked the secrets of the universe, of time, and of our deeper origins. Einstein’s understanding of relativity, hidden for all of time up to that moment, and quantum physics especially, opened new mysteries to science and realms that require no watchmaker to wind their weird machineries. These mysteries have given us the computing revolution and stand us on the verge of a new world of understanding through AI systems. With the sheer weight of the benefits that have accrued from our pursuit of knowledge, the church’s usual objections to such things have become ever weaker, fading almost to zero. All they can do now is to pack ethics committees to try to halt beneficial stem-cell research and other healing sciences that seem to step on the toes of their superannuated ideology. Everyone in church at this time has a smartphone that uses technologies built upon discoveries many churches would rather we had never made. It will come as no surprise that, in the 1940s, American Protestants tried to restrict access to the radio broadcasting spectrum which is at the heart of cell phone technology. (Their main fear was of the broadcasts of unregulated Evangelicals, but it caused a small moral crisis nevertheless).
Despite the fact that secular science and rational thinking have given our world so many benefits, they still have a reputation for offering a bleak and hopeless moral vision, of the kind seen in Arnold’s poem. This results in the Atheism they are thought to entail being an actual taboo in some places, even in the relatively free countries of the West. The American Atheists organisation is working on this problem in the US, but what they call ‘out atheism’ is still a much-needed movement there. When asked their religious identity, although 28% of Americans avowedly choose the ‘no religion’, only 4% say they are Atheists (see Pew Research Center). This is actually double the number polled in 2011, but surely we can do better. In the UK, Atheism is much more acceptable but Atheists can still be subject to suspicions of dourness, lack of spiritual qualities and deficient morality. How can they even live in such a moral desert?
I completely understand this perspective. From inside the garden looking out, I remember very well the mist that obscured that outer landscape, along with the feeling that beyond the crumbling walls of the faith there could only be a vast and arid wasteland, one devoid of community, sympathy, purpose, guidance and morality. It is true too that those things may sometimes be less immediately at hand when one first steps outside the restrictive parameters of the faith. This is because for the believer, community, sympathy, purpose, guidance and morality exist within the small world of church in handy, bite-sized forms. But in fact, the restrictive parameters of its ideology put limits on what those things can possibly mean. In other words they all tend to be shallower in church than they are outside it. Once you have taken the courageous and determined step across the decaying boundary of the vague garden or even beyond the rigid walls of the fundamentalist exercise yard, it is a wonderful liberating experience to find that all of these things can be defined in new, interestingly bespoke and almost boundless ways. Be advised however that if your interest in them extends only to versions offered in a catalogue compiled in the period from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, then you are probably best to stay inside. You may not be fitted for the more adventuresome world that lies outside the walls and beyond the mist. Since you’ve got this far though, I’m guessing that’s not you. You’re up for the adventures it seems.
Once you finally divorce Jesus, jump over the wall and take the first step of wonderful unfaith, you will begin to realise that all of the rules, regulations and recommendations of the past, the warnings and the flattery, even the simple life advice, are what make up the walls of the ruined old edifice you have just escaped. Even the good ones have acted as restrictions on the progress and development of your better moral self and barriers to your increasing integrity. You may have yet to evaluate their real validity for yourself in the new extramural world you are now set to explore. So, as your eyes adjust to this much larger vision of the universe without religious parameters, the view from outside the ruinous complex starts to look very different.
As I hope you’ll find, what’s out here really is not a desert at all but a bountiful and multifarious jungle world of experience. A vastly expanded horizon of knowledge. A more generous morality and a far greater acceptance of human beings on their own terms. Out here, meaning expands with human endeavour and with creativity. The arts flourish unbounded by the crushingly didactic parameters of scripture. Here again life expands outside the cosy boundaries of church with all its creature comforts and its love of ease. Out here it’s possible to feel closer fellowship with those who are suffering simply because there’s no distinction between their feelings and your own. In all, it’s a much bigger world of potential experience and one that invites the truly adventurous to larger dreams. You don’t have to wait for God’s say-so to leave a boring or stultifying place for somewhere, or someone, hotter. It’s especially rewarding to those who want to pursue intellectual and moral development in a way that results in deeper knowledge of the self. If at first you feel disoriented, this is normal. Trust that you will find your way in a world that is after all the only reality. Once you have rejected the bigoted tendencies of the past, you can set your mind to being an open-hearted learner of all the world offers. This feels like an incredibly rich, fulfilling and intellectually satisfying way to engage with the universe. Because it connects fully with the best of the world’s knowledge, it offers a deep and critical engagement with the realities of life in all their simplicity, complexity, love and pain. In fact it is, as the believers are often fond of saying about their experience of religion, not until you experience this that you can fully taste what it means to be human. These things are only possible once you have shed the unnecessarily heavy armour of religious demands and allowed yourself to be sensitive and vulnerable to the world’s experiences.
Once I had stepped over the wall, I have to admit that the first thing that occurred to me was that I would never have to go to church again. More of this wonderful revelation later. The second thing that followed was the absence of something I was expecting. I mentioned earlier that some Atheists use the phrase ‘embrace the void’ to help us engage with perceptions of futility or purposelessness that might occur. In the days and months after my definitive step of unfaith, I was awaiting an encounter with this thing called ‘the void’. I had invited it to the party but it signally failed to turn up. I don’t know if I was even a little disappointed by this. Now I'm really not trying to be all postmodern here, but there seemed to be a void where the void was supposed to be. Or maybe the void is that there is no void: a meaninglessness gap, if you can get your head around that. For me, the anticipated abyss is actually filled with all kinds of meaning and potential satisfactions. How could it not be, since it potentially contains all of the things in the universe? Before we become Christians, we may be told that the reason we need salvation is that every human being exists with a God-shaped hole inside them. This is untrue. The need all humans have is for love, hope and a purpose outside themselves. Often called a goal which is just beyond their reach, the last of these was originally fulfilled by the bare need to hunt or farm for survival, and with related family and tribal loyalties. At some point in human history, first this and then the hope and the love became tangled up with religions. These in turn became explicitly tied to the identity of the tribe. Such identity religions are still the dominant modes of religious expression throughout the world. If you are born in a Muslim country you are extremely unlikely to be a Christian, purely as a matter of probabilities, and obviously the same is true in reverse. Once we transcend the need for such communal and personal religious identity, what we're left with is not at all a void but something that feels much more like a clearing in a forest, a breathing space, a blank page, or an open screen.
As you begin to rebuild your identity outside a religious framework, you start to find that everything that frame had assimilated within itself, your history, talents, interests, desires, relationships, each become reinterpretable in the terms of your new situation. Their contribution to your identity now becomes much more personal, since they no longer need to be referred upstairs for approval, humble thanks or guilty apologies. This new situation will manifest above all in the way you see yourself, and project yourself, in your relationships as you begin to take total responsibility for the person you have chosen to be. You can rediscover things that you had lost about yourself, perhaps sublimated under religious injunctions or devalued by skewed and twisted value systems of religious intolerance. You might rediscover music you once loved, games you once played, books you once adored, people and situations you once treasured, dreams you abandoned. All of the things that go to make up a human individual, the prompts of our genetics, the memories that form us, can be reinterpreted in the new light of the new situation and we can start to make ourselves whole again, this time consciously and with the experience of having endured, despite the religious element of our histories. This is not at all scary and in fact is incredibly exciting.
Essentially what we are doing here is redefining our place in the world in our own terms, for our own purposes, and with reference to our own desires. I'm quite aware of what this would sound like to the average Christian person. They would tend to assume this was simply a self-centred project. But, as they too know, in order to genuinely love your community you have to first love yourself, which is implicit in the biblical injunction to love your neighbours as you love yourself. Although that command is in essence impossible to perform, it at least gets part of the mechanism right. Without genuinely caring for yourself, looking after yourself and giving yourself the opportunity to grow in love and appreciation for your own mind, body and emotions, you will not have the energy, motivation or skills to be able to express that coherently even to one other person. In exactly the same way, unless you know yourself, which is the aim of all good philosophy and one outcome of all useful learning, you will not be able to coherently relate to your community, to offer it your abilities, or to contribute to human society in the meaningful way we hope for.
Atheists obviously do not claim that all is right with the world but they do have the facility to drop any soothing illusions about it. There are a huge number of things that we might find unsettling and disturbing. The seemingly unstoppable shift of the worldwide working class to the right when their interests lie to the left. The manipulation of truth by the over-rich to produce this effect. The dreadful oppression of women and girls in Muslim countries, and increasingly in the West. The horrific and constant murdering of schoolchildren by maniacs in the United States. The American judicial system. The British class system. The dangerous ignorance of the worldwide anti-vaxxer movement. The martyrisation of the young in pointless religious conflicts. The Nazification of the Jewish state. These are horrors of course. But with all of these historical moments and movements, Atheists deny themselves the childish consolation of saying that God will just sort it out at the end of time so we don’t really have to think about it. This response is typical of many Christians and it is a comfort to them. They can simply ‘trust God’ and bypass the real tragedy of the world. Atheists on the other hand might see this as a loss of mental and moral facility. It is much too easy to slot the filthiness of the world into a convenient space in a psychological system and so to minimise our engagement with it.
Rejecting such childish solutions means the world poses more of a problem to Atheists, but it’s at least a real problem. The extent to which we choose to engage with it may be determined by our moral outlook and the extent to which we feel we can do anything about it. What we deny ourselves is the luxury of pretending such things don’t really matter because something more important is supposedly going on in some invisible spiritual world beyond. In reality, there is nothing more important going on and these issues are very much the most urgent questions of the age. The idea that we may casually discount them by handing them off to some nonchalant deity is a dangerous fantasy and it would be much better for the well-being of humanity and the planet if this idea had never existed. The illusion that this world doesn’t matter as much as a more real one beyond may be the most destructive concept humankind ever invented.
We can also see this when we begin really thinking through the concept of an afterlife. In many ways, we would have to admit, it is a disadvantage to one’s comfort to believe that there is no life after death. If the religious are above all driven by the fear of death and the desire to find an exception to the general rule in their own case, for the Atheist the understanding that there is no such exception might be as close as we come to embracing the void: that of our own ultimate and irrevocable extinction. It is argued that once dead, you won’t know you’re dead and therefore it is not a disadvantage. It’s a bit like being stupid they say, or musically insensitive. The lack of consciousness of the deficiency is the deficiency itself. I have to say that I think this is a bit of a cop-out. I was looking forward to an eternity of bliss, a never-ending high better than all the drugs and a grand reunion with all my favourite people.
There are however two real advantages to knowing this is just a very tempting but ultimately silly and self-serving fantasy: the awareness that you are choosing to live your life without comforting illusions, committed to what is known to be true, and the sharp sense of urgency it brings to living one’s life to the full. It’s a modern truism to say that the present is all we have. Through Einstein’s relativity, we now perceive that both past and future, though useful mental constructs, are not in reality fixed in any linear progression. We are not on a time-line. All the life we have ever had, all the integrity we will ever enjoy, and all the pleasure we will ever feel is felt in the present. When our experience of the present is over, in all likelihood we are over. This is a hard lesson, I know. Many lives are lived in distress and there seems to be no escape. But the evidence suggests, through the increasingly effective interventions of science and technological progress, that life is improving slowly for humans. Whatever of life we possess, we must embrace it. Never postpone desired experiences to a desired second life. There is only one life and this is it. For the planet Earth meanwhile, the idea that the real world is coming next and that this world is a passing veil of tears, to be merely endured and if possible dominated and exploited, has been an unmitigated disaster. We can only hope that at some point a sense of political urgency will also emerge, perhaps revived by a fresh understanding of the brevity and singularity of our lives, and that this will be applied to the beneficial management of the planet’s ecosystems.
Another thing I was surprised to find I don't miss is the idea that God has plans for us, in the style of that most often quoted biblical verse, those ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you a hope and a future’ with their contradictory contexts that we discussed earlier. I admit that I once found this verse comforting too in an abstract way. I knew of course that this proposition only really works when life is going pretty well, and mainly in relatively affluent cultures, the places in the world where the phrase ‘God wants to give you nice things’ is remotely plausible. I certainly don’t miss its infantilising and totalitarian implications. But whatever the context, one thing was insistently emphasised by experience. People in the faith fail to plan adequately forwards on both large and small scales. Partly this is due to the terrible advice we’ve seen in the Sermon on the Mount to ‘take no thought for the morrow’ and trust God to clothe and feed you, unless you want him to think you are one of those ‘of little faith’. Partly also it is the soporific effect of these ‘plans’ that are supposedly in place to look after your future. A related effect of this is that the concept of constant self-improvement is something that most Christians simply ignore. This goes to the heart of the faith’s twisted ideology of salvation by substitutionary sacrifice. Being saved once and for all from your sins and being forgiven in advance for all time by the Lord of the universe tends to reduce the incentive to do any work on yourself. Pastors I know agree that this is a seriously damaging anomaly of the faith. Certainty of salvation makes people neglect personal enhancement. In a world where adaptation to change is the key to survival, faith makes people stagnate.
Since we are really living in a world where there are no divine plans at all, let alone ones specifically aimed to prosper us in person, it becomes absolutely imperative to make your own plans for the improvement of your self and your circumstances. So now you have your own destiny in your hands. No divine daddy is going to rescue you or make up for your indolence. Plan for the renaissance of the self. Look to make continuous improvements in all aspects of life. When I drive north out of Auckland, I pass a big mural which simply says ‘Better Never Stops’. I find I like this. So long as we do things that we can genuinely get better at as we go on in life, there's a good amount of research to suggest that this is one of the keys to longevity. Obviously, any time you find to work on improving yourself or your circumstances is valuable. There are any number of ways you can do this, but below is one way of thinking that I have found useful, since it takes into account the ups and downs of real life. This is loosely based on the work of Dr Phil Stutz and his Good Life Project, which comes out of his experience working at the notorious Rikers Island prison in New York – check him out.
There are three interrelated modes of life that we primarily use to engage with the world: firstly the self, secondly our relationships, and thirdly our activities (career / studies / finances / interests / hobbies). These can all be improved with determination and application. As they improve, so life improves. The first level is simply the engagement of the self in all its aspects, in the physical and mental spheres. To meet the world with joy and confidence you need to treat your body and your mind well. Survey what you need to do this and make some decisions. Firstly, take a cultural step back, figure out how your norms might negatively affect you and find ways to resist them. If you live in Britain you probably need to drink less. If you live in the USA you probably need to eat less. If you live in France you probably need to smoke less, for instance. Resist any unhelpful social norms and decide to carve your own path. Then, if you’re not already in a regime of exercise that you love, find one. If you’re over 30 years of age this is especially important because it will determine your future health for decades ahead. Embrace the new. Find an activity that feeds both your mind and body. I chose Yoshinkan Aikido. I’d recommend that if you can find it, but there are so many pursuits that will benefit you – yoga, jiujitsu, Pilates, tai chi, distance running, kung fu, five-a-side football, ultimate frisbee, table tennis, judo, there’s an endless list. At the same time, any of these can provide a swift and effective substitute for that small group fellowship you may miss in leaving church. If establishing a sense of physical wellbeing like this proves difficult, there’s an answer: start on your own, start very small, and think very long term. If you haven’t exercised in a while and have no ideas, here’s one. If you can do one press-up or sit-up (or both), then do it. Tomorrow do two. The next day do three, and so on without stopping. If you get stuck on a number, just repeat that amount daily until you feel like moving on. This exercise regime should take no more than two minutes per day. This is good if, like me, you find exercise boring. Do this without fail and in the long term, which is your commitment, you will break through into levels of fitness yet undreamed of.
Relatedly, look for a way of improving your mind. Do this with your level of education, your memory, your capacity to understand the cutting edges of knowledge. You might need to read more classic literature so you can get more of the references in other good books and so understand them more deeply. This can give you important keys to your culture. Your previous reading of the Bible will be useful to you here, especially when reading historical classics. Literature is our best guide to the real conditions of human life and our dilemmas and aspirations. Find your inspiration there. Or you might need, as I did, to improve your scientific literacy so you can appreciate the great leaps in cosmology or theoretical physics more readily and enjoy that incredible and massively expanding field of human potentiality. You might want to gain technical knowledge of computing, coding or other aspects of tech, including how generative AI works to give you access to that important sphere of influence. You might want to learn a new language, and so gain new insights into the world and open up new territories of discovery and adventure. This is proven highly effective in combating the onset of dementia and other mental decline in later years. All these fields come with their own flavours of satisfaction and the more understanding you achieve in them, the better you will feel about yourself in relation to the rest of humanity and the pursuit of human excellence in general. This is stage one, and whatever happens with the following categories, you can always return to this and continue to improve yourself.
The second stage is relationships: acquaintances, friends, partners. Personally I was playing catch-up on the last of those from my late 40s onwards and overall I had a great time doing so. Please do not think it’s ever too late to improve your experience of relationships or to get better at having them. It wasn’t all easy though. After 30 years in the faith I had been one of those I describe above who had neglected the pursuit of real self-improvement in favour of the very limited sub-set of ‘trying to be more like Jesus’. Establishing your personality on the unreliable reports of a single human life lived in ancient Palestine is no basis for a coherent programme of self improvement. True self-improvement comes from a mandate from the self alone, not from some farcical antiquated morality. New partners I had over that time of self-discovery sometimes pointed out real flaws in the way I tried to relate to them, and I floundered a bit to be honest. Without shame, I admit I read some of those ‘How to have a proper relationship’ books, and found that they contained some good advice from experts long in the field. So, another great revelation came: it is okay to listen to good advice wherever it comes from. Open your mind to the possibility that other people know certain things better than you. They often have far greater insight than scripture ever did. Take good relationship advice wherever it comes from and add it to your skills.
Friendships are also of deep and lasting significance to us as humans, and these don’t happen automatically but must be sought out and cultivated. Put time aside to catch up with old friends, even over video calls. Don’t leave it years. You or they might die, and where will we be then? Nowhere, that’s where. Then make new friends by joining groups of various kinds (suggestions above). These are where actual people congregate and if you want to catch one you’ll usually have to leave the house. If you find small talk difficult, learn a little just as intro material to give them time to see you before they get to know what a weirdo you may be. Even with casual acquaintances, neighbours, or work colleagues (if possible) remember to say hello and ask about their lives. A small amount of contact goes a long way. Lack of communication festers and turns ugly. Avoid this by airing the room with banal conversation from time to time. And really importantly, when relationships end, fail to emerge, or are frustrating and unprogressive, then simply go back to the first stage and spend time working on improving your self before bouncing back and going again.
The third way in which you engage with the world is to project yourself into your community through your career, studies, finances, hobbies, interests and wider plans. The ways you can relate to the world through these aspects of your life are far too numerous to comment upon. One thing I would say though is that because these are often the most obvious ways you are seen by your community they inevitably seem the most important. Actually, we’ve got this backwards. Your personal integrity is the most important thing and second to this are your relationships. These, and not your job, are what people will remember when you die. We can even say that in a real sense these things are what lives on after you die: the fond memories people carry and even in traits of yours that people emulate in their own lives and pass on through their relationships. This is our real eternal life. Careers have their place though, in generating funds to keep us going, as hobbies do in generating interest and social engagement. Studies and other plans should be celebrated and pursued for their own sake and because they are part of our self-improvement. There are always times though when all of these are arrested and no progress seems to be possible. In this case, simply go back a stage and work on your relationships. Improve those and see the effect. If those too are frustrated, retrench again to the first stage of the continuous improvement of the self. When you can’t be bothered with that, just chill until the desire comes back. ‘Better never stops’ is an ideal and a general truth, but rest and restoration need to be factored in too. You are ultimately responsible for your own life and health.
Part of the joy of writing this book has been that in some ways the benefit of it is supposed to be mutual: a completely win-win situation. I hope it'll do you some good, but it's definitely done me some. It has allowed me to think through the processes that have led to where I am and has made clearer some of the issues I’ve had and steps I’ve taken on the way. It hasn't all been comfortable though. I've come to realise that part of the impetus for writing this book is a real sense of shame I feel about not only the specific beliefs that I used to hold but also the allegiances that I used to value, both in my own life and with the figures and the movements of history. If I didn’t wish to think too clearly about it, I could tell myself that it’s okay, I was very young when I was espousing ridiculous and embarrassing beliefs, but it’s not really true. I was in my early twenties, and I wasn’t stupid. I really should have known better. In my defence, as I became educated, and educated myself, I like to think I shed the fundamentalism pretty quickly. A significant part of my journey was encountering some genuinely reflective thinking about the faith through the educational programme known as Workshop, run by the indefatigable Socratic figure of Noel Moules, one of the most open and honest people I have ever met. I know there are very many others who have benefited immeasurably from this good man’s commitment to open-minded and open-hearted enquiry. He should be honoured by all who value truth seeking. Noel calls himself a Christian Animist, an interesting term which seems to me to run very close to pantheism. We probably disagree on this. He now also runs a project called Shalom Quest, which aims to help people find their own path to meaning and identity, without pushing any religious or other line. Look this up if you’re in need of further motivation on this journey. Despite my enlightening time with Noel, however, I know also that I entertained ill-considered beliefs probably up into my 30s and only seriously started to shift these when I went to university at the age of 33. Even then, I was still trying, not without some success, to convert people to my understanding of a loose form of ecumenical, pseudo-intellectual Christianity – very much that of the vague garden. I thought I had some proofs and I was going to use them.
I'm very much aware also that this tendency of mine to overshare is going on right now in a different form. One day I hope to understand why I feel the need to convince people that my way of seeing things is the best way. I can't say that this is any clearer to me now than it was before. It doesn't directly do me any good if this book convinces you to divorce Jesus, take the step out of vague, comfortable Christianity and over the boundary into a beneficial Atheism. Once the book is paid for, I'm probably already at maximum benefit. But I would also like to live in a society where a common-sense secular understanding of the universe was able to affect public policy and political discourse, so the more of us the better. Atheists tend to oppose the twin leeches of church and monarchy, and to be in favour of the general good. Spreading this message is worthwhile, I think. To some extent the book is written to my earlier self, and as such it is a form of therapy. I do wish somebody had been able to explain to me that there was a viable way of being besides the one I was used to, and an honourable community of people who had beaten a path to the outside of Christianity not because they were bitter, disappointed, or hurt from the mistreatment of believers, pastoral injustice or abuse, but simply because the honest and logical road led there. I may have been a lot happier a lot sooner.
This chapter is not so much an argument for Atheism as it is one for thinking for yourself outside the bounds of religious doctrine and recreating your core self from scratch. As I said at the outset, in itself Atheism is not really a thing, it is a negation. At most it is a viewpoint on one very specific issue. Believers are right to ask how you can base your life on a negation, how great art can come from such a negation and so on. Of course one doesn’t base one’s life on Atheism. Atheism is a boundary of zero thickness. Because religions had to compete with each other in the past and so needed to offer ever more totalising systems, they have bound morality to erroneous and damaging visions of the world. These might have been appropriate to first century Levantine societies, or the seventh century deserts of tribal Arabia, but they are a very poor fit with 21st century modernity. Atheism frees you from all this but binds you to nothing as a consequence except a commitment to the logic that brought you to that negation in the first place. It simply announces that I insist on certain important freedoms. This logic then recommends its own scientific visions of the world, moral imperatives, valuable purposes and worthwhile pursuits.
Religions have also tangled morality up with ill-informed responses to non-normative lifestyles and choices. As a primary step towards any mutually compassionate or even mutually compatible set of human interrelations the principle of ‘live and let live’ is the most basic. Society cannot function healthily without this to build upon. It allows time for dialogue and for understanding to grow. This can then be externalised as rules of social interaction and finally worked up into useful legislation where this is desirable. Religions short-circuit this natural process by insisting on absolutes based on the prejudices of Bronze Age farmers or Iron Age nomads. Without wanting to bring James Bond into the picture, their motivating principle was always a resounding ‘live and let die’. Their way was the only way and it had to be so, as far as they could engineer it, since anything less would imply a flaw in their presentation of the totality. This is the simple reason for the ubiquitous religious murders of the past and present. Atheism frees us from this inhuman imperative, but again sets nothing up in its place but its negation: ‘live and let live.’
To use the term ‘Atheist’ as a sole denomination for a person is best avoided I think because it gives believers the opportunity to say that you now simply belong to a new faith. It’s a non sequitur, but they will say that this worldview has the same status as any other worldview and therefore your atheism is just another religion. The main difference between us and them is that Christians have to have faith because it’s necessary for them to justify the existence of an invisible being, or at least what they take to be the actions of that being, in their lives. Their worldview is a religion because it binds them to certain unchangeable principles and supposed eternal truths about the universe, and about the way that life should be lived. Our worldview meanwhile is flexible and changes when the evidence changes. It is limber enough to cope with evolving technological and moral developments. If it would take any principle from Christianity it would be to ‘test everything, and hold onto the good.’ This really comes down to us though from the Greeks and if there is a method for such testing it is still the Socratic method and its practical outworking in the physical sciences.
In absolute terms, Atheism commits you to no principle at all, except the assertion that there is not, and has never been, any convincing evidence for the existence of a God. But even this should be minimised in our mental economies. If I go a bit John Lennon on you and ask you to imagine that there never were any religions, that at most the idea of a god had been mooted by human societies only within the realm of scary stories for children, consider then what the meaning of Atheism would be. It would be exactly on a level with Agoblinism, Avampirism, Atrollism, Awerewolfism, Abarghestism, Afairyism and so on. This scenario is in fact what Atheists claim, and its significance to everyday life is exaggerated only because of similarly exaggerated claims on the part of the religious. I don’t have to go around advertising my Atrollism because it’s obvious that trolls are purely imaginary (except possibly in Iceland). Because I am aware of the fundamental underlying unreality of a god, I am slightly embarrassed to say I am an Atheist. It feels better to assert that I am a Humanist, which is really to suggest that our values are founded on human reason and experience alone. For many this is simply a more acceptable way of saying the word ‘Atheist’, I think. After 30 years of sporting a convenient label though, something in me wants to resist the application of suffixes of any kind, especially those ending in ‘-ist’ or ‘-ian’.
Now, despite all of this you may be one of those people who embraces Atheism as a principle but is still tempted to stay in the church to try to change it from within. In this instance you need to take into account that the authority structures of these religions are not redeemable. You can never hope to challenge the authority of people who, with a straight face, are prepared to claim they receive direct instruction from a messiah or prophet dignified by antiquity, tradition and culture, or even from God himself. It is not possible to reform these systems without at the same time throwing out the accumulated rubbish of centuries. Dig far enough into this and you will find it has been buttressing the walls for so long that it’s indistinguishable from the supporting structure. Taking it all out will draw the whole edifice down on the heads of its congregants. Neither is it possible to start your own church, as many do like to do, without replicating the whole history of religion in miniature. “What are the central tenets of the faith? What should leadership look like? What’s our authority structure? Does anybody know a musician?” If that interests you, go for it. I guarantee if you do this you’ll be going over some very old ground indeed and that you’ll find yourself back at the same place in five, ten- or twenty-years time wishing you’d thought this through properly when you were younger. Or ignore me and do it anyway. Yeah go on, do it. What could possibly go wrong?
Or you can avoid all of this distress right now by starting the process of personal reconstruction while you still have the time and go onwards from there. If you happen to find finding the time difficult, let me tell you a great secret I discovered that will add three, four or five extra hours to the free time of your every weekend and perhaps free some nights in the mid-week too. You’re going to love the reinvention and self-improvement you can get up to with all this new time.
[i] Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’ (1867).