Daniel Fincke: So, you often advise people, especially young people who are under their parents’ financial roof, to be very cautious about coming out as atheists if it would cause them hardship.  What would you say to those who say that both as a matter of ethical principle and as a matter of effectively breaking religion’s power, people should be honest and even willing to sacrifice for truth in these areas if necessary?  Or to put it more in a more adversarial way: are you encouraging people to lie? Is that consistent with the values of truthfulness that are so important to many principled atheists?

Richard Wade: This comes up for me every time I read one of these letters where someone is under the authority or control of very intolerant religious people. It’s in a post I published recently, about an atheist woman who just discovered she has been hired by a “Christian based” company.  I’m never completely comfortable advising people to deceive others either passively or actively.  But I see these quandaries in life as an ever-shifting balance between the principles and the pragmatics. We have to acknowledge both in every situation.

Generally I encourage people to remain honest and to even be courageously forthcoming with the truth. But I do not think that I have the right to tell them to put themselves in harm’s way, whether it’s a teenager risking actual abuse or abandonment by their family, (and that does happen) or a newly hired nurse who really will be in a pickle if she loses her job at a “Christian company” while she looks for a more tolerant place to work. All these ethical choices exist in a context, not in a vacuum. The context includes people’s very legitimate material needs as well as their ideals and their principles.

I usually tell someone in such a predicament to carefully and discreetly investigate the situation first, to “feel them out” about how their parents or employer might react to being told that their child or employee is an atheist. Then if it seems obvious that it would not be in their best material or safety interest to be honest about it, I advise them to be as minimally deceitful as they can be for as short a time as they can be.

Invariably, someone commenting will say “Oh you should never lie. You should be brave and face whatever they do, and that will help all atheists to be more open”. With almost no exception, those people talking so bravely have never, ever been in such a situation where they might not be getting regular meals for a long time if they were to “out” themselves. In other words, it’s easy to talk bravely about principles and honesty and integrity when you’re not the one standing in harm’s way.  If a big man with a knife and a gun approaches me angrily demanding where is Richard Wade, I’ll say that Richard went off in that direction. Then I’ll call the police.  I have a very strong conscience, but I won’t feel guilty for lying to him.

So I reluctantly will even coach atheists in these predicaments how to lie the least that they must, and bide their time until they’re no longer under the thumb of these intolerant people. I think that the person to whom you tell the truth has some responsibility to make that truthfulness safe to tell. Some people will not honor a truthful atheist. The atheist’s lack of beliefs have nothing to do with their work or their duties, but the person in power will severely penalize them for demonstrating that courage and integrity.

In short, on rare occasions, some people do not deserve being told the truth, because they do not respond to that truthfulness and candor honorably. There’s also the idea of it not being anyone’s damn business. Keeping private the details of our sex lives, bowel habits, and religious views is not being “dishonest,” it’s being prudent, and I think that prudence is a very legitimate principle that must be considered along with the principle of honesty.

Read the other 7 parts of the interview, in which I ask Richard about:

The Origins of the “Ask Richard” Column

Anger In Families Divided Over Religion

Atheism and Religions As Bases For Identities

How Atheists Should Respond to Alcoholics Anonymous, and How Personal Values Influence Professional Therapy

How Atheists Should Confront And Replace Religions

Whether Believers and Non-Believers Should Avoid Marrying Each Other

Whether Believers Are Literally Deluded

Your Thoughts?

Despite a burgeoning literature that documents numerous positive implications of forgiveness, scholars know very little about the potential negative implications of forgiveness. In particular, the tendency to express forgiveness may lead offenders to feel free to offend again by removing unwanted consequences for their behavior (e.g., anger, criticism, rejection, loneliness) that would otherwise discourage reoffending. Consistent with this possibility, the current longitudinal study of newlywed couples revealed a positive association between spouses’ reports of their tendencies to express forgiveness to their partners and those partners’ reports of psychological and physical aggression. Specifically, although spouses who reported being relatively more forgiving experienced psychological and physical aggression that remained stable over the first 4 years of marriage, spouses who reported being relatively less forgiving experienced declines in both forms of aggression over time. These findings join just a few others in demonstrating that forgiveness is not a panacea.

profbigk responds to the paper:

The longitudinal study is fascinating on several levels, although the title somewhat overstates the conclusions. Hearing about this was a valuable reminder of the extent to which philosophers tend to appeal to hypothetical examples of heterosexual married couples when spinning conceptual analyses of forgiveness. Imagine how philosophical habits might change if we attended to the experiences of actual married couples instead of relying on the handy cultural narratives we tend to assume we share! And I haven’t even gotten to the wacky, wild, gutsy possibility that we appeal to concrete examples of intimate relationships other than the heterosexually arranged marriage.

More on the “Dark Side of Forgiveness” after I’ve really absorbed the data, but in the short run, I can already attest that the findings do not significantly vary between the husbands and wives in the study; sex is not a predictor of re-offense, according to the authors. Unfortunately, when it comes to serious harm, forgiving might be a predictor of re-offense.

Your Thoughts?

The whole video is fascinating but if you only have time for the portion on Syse, it is 2:40-4:11. If you want to see the most humane and genuinely reform minded prison ideal ever, watch everything after that.

Your Thoughts?

The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns.

The Catholic Church in Rome made the extraordinary admission yesterday that it is aware priests from at least 23 countries have been sexually abusing nuns.

Most of the abuse has occurred in Africa, where priests vowed to celibacy, who previously sought out prostitutes, have preyed on nuns to avoid contracting the Aids virus.

Confidential Vatican reports obtained by the National Catholic Reporter, a weekly magazine in the US, have revealed that members of the Catholic clergy have been exploiting their financial and spiritual authority to gain sexual favours from nuns, particularly those from the Third World who are more likely to be culturally conditioned to be subservient to men.

The reports, some of which are recent and some of which have been in circulation for at least seven years, said that such priests had demanded sex in exchange for favours, such as certification to work in a given diocese.

In extreme instances, the priests had made nuns pregnant and then encouraged them to have abortions.

The US article was based on five documents, which senior women from religious orders and priests have presented to the Vatican over the past decade. They describe a particularly bad situation in Africa. In a continent devastated by Aids, nuns, along with early adolescent girls, are perceived by some as safe sexual targets. The reports said that the church authorities had done little to tackle the problem.

Much more here.

No one should be called a “holy man” and credited with being a special intermediary between God and man. No religion should be supported when it exploits and reinforces patriarchal social structures rather than dismantles them. And no authoritarian institution of belief, practice, values, and spirituality should be taken for a moral guide.

Because all these deeply immoral things, which are distinct features of the Roman Catholic Church, are already corruptions of conscience and culture to begin with in principle, long before in practice they ever get to the universally recognized level of abusiveness we are learning about over and over again in our times.

Your Thoughts?

By explicitly adopting atheism as a key part of our identities, do we forfeit (on pain of hypocrisy) the right to demand the religious to do what I demand of my students—hold their ideas separate from their senses of self—since we are no longer doing the same ourselves? Or are we actually still able to manage dispassionate distance from our atheism, even as we rally around it, raise consciousness about it, and form community with reference to it? What about religious people, can they dispassionately analyze their own views while forming their own identities based on their beliefs?

These questions arose in me based after I read a striking e-mail I got from an openly gay and atheist friend, whose atheism is matter-of-fact to him but far from central to his life.  Last fall he reacted with a combination of surprise and revulsion to a controversial New York Times article about PZ Myers’s unabashed atheistic confrontationalism, which towards the end referred to a woman’s concern not to be “outed” as an atheist to her employers. He wrote me:

What fascinated me were the comments at the close comparing acknowledgement of atheism to being “out” vs. “in the closet.” I would never have thought to compare non-belief with being gay, and I find it rather irritating, but it does help me to define my own view with regard to speaking up. As you know, I am very open about being gay because to hide it suggests that the condition is shameful and that I should not exist. At the same time I try not to blurt out, “I’m gay!” as a gesture of defiance or crude assertion. That is merely rude and understandably alienates people whom I like and respect. I try to put the word out in humorous ways, so that the point lies unmistakably before us, but the conversation doesn’t momentarily jar to a halt. Of course, when someone makes a homophobic remark, as people often do (often unwittingly), I try quickly to bring it to their attention and let them know (gently but firmly) that it’s not okay. But once they get the point, the sunlight returns and I try to forget it ever happened. People will remain homophobic – they can’t be otherwise in this culture – but at least I am then spared the insult of homophobic remarks made in my presence. Let them keep it to themselves.

That also covers how I respond to assertions of religious belief. When people gush on about God, as they often do in the South, I try tactfully but clearly to indicate that I do not share their views. But I don’t try to argue them down, unless they get on a high horse and tell me I’m wrong. And this is a policy I’m quite comfortable with. But I have no truck with the sort of actions and remarks made by PZ Myers (assuming they were accurately reported) which seem to me childishly crude and stupidly provocative. I will never give my support to people like that, no matter whose side they profess to be on. They sound like Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck, just on the other side.

Without getting into the specifics of the case of PZ Myers (which I did most extensively in a stimulating debate in the comments section of this Butterflies and Wheels post), my friend raises a difficult problem, which is the conflict between simultaneously asking for respect for a belief-based identity (or a lack-of-belief-based identity, if you prefer) while also aggressively attacking the beliefs on which other people have formed their own belief-based identities.

What my friend’s remarks indicate is that even though we activist atheists are adopting “coming out” language from the LGBT pride movement and self-consciously owning atheism as an identity marker, we are not at the same time making peace with other people’s identities. From my friend’s remarks I take him to have a truce-making approach to identity. He wants to be accepted for who he is without judgment and in return he accepts others for who they are without judgment. If atheists are going to ask for acceptance as atheists then they owe it to accept religious people in return as religious people.

And this is the problem, when it comes to religious people, atheists want them to hold their beliefs distinct from their identities and subject them to objective scrutiny so that they can abandon them. Yet, these same, confrontational atheists who want to challenge theism are the same kinds of atheists who want to “come out” and have their atheist identities respected without theists trying to change it. Of course, it is not only atheists who are tempted to hold this double standard. Many of the Christians and Muslims who most form their identity with reference to their faith are similarly the most aggressive proselytizers within their respective religions. In both the cases of the theists and the anti-theists, intensity of personal identification of the self with the belief correlates with intensity of desire that others acknowledge the truth of their belief.

This is a potentially toxic combination. If “identity-atheists” (atheists who form their identity in a significant way with reference to their godlessness) and “identity-theists” (religious people who form their identity in a significant way by reference to their theistic beliefs) were primarily the non-confrontational atheists and religious people then a truce which prohibited all attempts to dissuade or persuade each other would support coexistence between people who had different identities. On the other hand if the “evangelical-atheists” and “evangelical-theists” who want to start public and private debates to dissuade and persuade each other of their positions gave up on being “identity-atheists” and “identity-theists” then they could debate without anyone getting offended that their very identities were being attacked. Both sides could agree that their own beliefs or lack of beliefs were not parts of their very identities but open to vigorous challenge with no threat of personal offense.

But, ironically (but wholly understandably), evangelical-atheism and evangelical-theism are most often inspired by identity-atheism and identity-theism.

And so we both want it both ways–we want to insist you change and want to be respected as we are without any demand we conform to your views. Of course, these positions are consistent in theory. We can both politically and morally respect each other’s identities while philosophically aggressively attacking each other’s views. But, as I noted last week, it is a fine line between saying that someone’s values and beliefs are utterly repulsive or stupid and saying that that person is repulsive and stupid. We only exist and live our lives through our actions and our thoughts. If we are told that the values and beliefs that orient them should not exist it is natural, especially for an identity-atheist or identity-religionist, to interpret this emotionally (and maybe cognitively) to mean that we ourselves should not exist.

And so identity-religionists get outraged when evangelical-atheists call for the end of their religion and their way of life with it and identity-atheists get outraged when evangelical-theists tell us we have no metaethical grounding for our morality or meaning in life and, sometimes irrationally, we identity-atheists take this as a direct assault on our personal morality. Sometimes it is an attack on atheists’ abilities to be moral, but sometimes it is a legitimate philosophical challenge to come up with a coherent account of moral philosophy to rival the long-established and widely-indoctrinated and influential ones theistic religions boast.

So, I open the question to identity/evangelical-atheists and identity/evangelical-theists alike, “How can we non-hypocritically demand of each other open-minded willingness to reconsider a central identity while also demanding for our own identities and respectfully treating each other’s identities?” In short, today’s open philosophical question is, “How is it fair to question other people’s identity-forming beliefs while demanding respect for one’s own belief-formed identities?”

Your Thoughts?

It would also be nice if people would carry out actions in good conscience of just being decent human beings rather than in fear of reprisal in the afterlife, but as there are “decent and undecent men in every crowd” (Frankl), it is not likely that humanity and some sort of functional moralistic system would hold up under strained conditions. And even under a fairly prosperous society such as ours, how much can the law really control without a Big Brother system? It is imaginable that these spiritual notions that keep people hopeful and happy about their lives also serve to maintain functional morality at least. Isn’t it possibly that being quick to remove religions altogether could be a cure worse than the illness?

This view seems to echo the logic of much conservative thinking about religion and a free society.  It seems that they implicitly think that people must inherently be controlled through formal channels or the social order will dissolve.  Not preferring a statist solution in which this control has the force of law, they opt to promote the “voluntary” subordination of religion.

The idea is to let people be free but to politically, socially, culturally, and legally encourage them as much as possible to live lives of voluntary subjugation to religious authorities who will hold the reins of morality, rather than involuntary subjugation to the political institutions which would obliterate nearly all traces of genuine freedom if given the power to enforce private morality.  The choice becomes either the formal structures of an actual, governmental, “Big Brother” monitoring and policing our every thought and deed or the informal structure of an internalized fear of an invisible, supernatural “Big Brother” (the “Heavenly Father”) who is monitoring your every thought and deed but who is not actually reporting you to the authorities who would actually take you to an actual prison.  Just “when you die” you might suffer in hell.  (And the enlightened conservative who promotes religion for these reasons knows there is no hell and so thinks no one actually is in any danger this way at all.)

This is, presumably, a strategy for giving less scrupulous and less conscientious people the functional equivalent of the sort of actual conscience that people need in order to be trusted to live peaceably and fairly in a genuinely free society.  Free societies clearly need good people who will not use their freedom to be so disorderly that the state becomes ungovernable and misery spreads throughout the society as a result.  If freedom leads to such chaos, it is only going to have to be stripped so that order can be restored.  If we want liberty, we must handle autonomy responsibly.

And If there will inevitably be at least some people with faulty consciences of their own, creating in them a fear of an invisible God which produces the same effects on behavior that an internally motivating, conscience that respected order, society, law, and humanity would provides the necessary supplemental control over bad people so that we can have laws that let everyone be formally and legally free.

Also, because of this, the good people who are motivated by the good alone get the freedom they deserve and do not have to deal with excessive governmental restrictions which would otherwise have to be put in place to control the bad apples (with the consequence that liberty would be ruined for everyone). And even the naturally bad person who is religiously tamed only through exploitation of his superstitious fears and hopes himself gains from the arrangement too.  Presumably, this is because even though he has to deal with perpetual ignorance and fear of hell, he keeps all sorts of freedom he would have lost for himself (and everyone else) with his unruliness if he believed there was no God and tried to test the limits of human power to control him.

And presumably this is also for his own good since being moral in most cases has actual tangible good consequences, regardless of one’s motivations.  If cooperating with others out of religious fears leads the otherwise bad person to the practical benefits of gaining others’ beneficial cooperation, good will, and (even) love in return, then he has gained the benefits of morality through behaving as morality requires without ever having to grow the internal moral motivation that both does not come natural to him and to which he would presumably have been incapable of persuasion were he not susceptible to religious superstitions.

Even if they do not explicitly formulate their view in these terms, I think this account fleshes out many political conservatives’ assumptions about the necessity for people to be controlled and how they reconcile their rhetoric of political freedom with their equally adamant hostility to people who use their freedom to disbelieve in religious institutions.  They do not really want people to be free since they do not trust human nature and think morality comes only unnaturally to us and requires instead “supernatural” sources, rewards, and punishments.  So rather than wanting genuine autonomy and freedom, they want people to just be controlled by the churches (and the corporations) instead of the government.

Finally, there is one other challenge nestled in the end of Caroline’s question and it is whether religion can be pulled out of society in one fell swoop without recklessly risking destabilizing the society in unpredictable ways and risking ruining the joy of many presently hopeful and happy religious people.

So, what is there to say in reply to this conception of, and prescription for humanity’s psycho-socio-ethical-political situation?

Just as there are “decent and undecent men in every crowd” there are decent and undecent men ahead religious institutions and encouraging people to think that they authoritatively speak for God means giving them an unconscionable amount of unwarranted power over the consciences of people.  The power itself is undeserved and abusive uses of it are damaging to both individuals and entire groups of people they demonize.  Given human nature’s demonstrably ineradicable  ”undecent” side, we should not encourage anyone to be unquestioningly deferred to as religious ministers so regularly are.

And centuries of superstitious God fears have not yet eradicated crime and a few more such centuries will not do so either.  America is the most religious nation in the Western world and the Western nation with by far the highest rate of incarceration.  In fact, many of the least religious countries in the world rank highest on the Global Peace Index as among the world’s most peaceful nations, while many of the world’s most religious nations rank among the least peaceful.  This makes sense to me because authoritarianism in cultural attitudes is bound to increase authoritarianism in political attitudes.  It is not a coincidence that our nation’s most outspokenly Evangelical “Born Again” conservative president in recent memory was also the one to turn America into a torture state.

Liberal politics liberalize a culture and vice versa.  And authoritarian politics make a culture more authoritarian and vice versa.  As possible evidence for this thesis compare two Muslim countries and their attitudes about whether apostates from Islam should be killed.  In the politically secular but liberal Turkey, support for such a penalty is just a few percentage points. In the politically secular but authoritarian Egypt, support for such a penalty is over 80%.

We cannot have freedom half way.  We must have a culture of freedom if we are to have a politics of freedom.  Encouraging people in the pews to distrust freedom as a fundamental spiritual matter is counterproductive to their permitting their fellow citizens freedom as a legal matter.  Inculcating people with the idea that the most just authority in all the universe is an absolute, unquestionable tyrant who tortures people who do not offer him proper fealty for all eternity is not a way to teach them that true authority stems from moral fairness and the ability to earn the consent of the governed by acting truly in their own interests, for their own growth in personal power.

All of these considerations make me distrustful of private authoritarianism as a mechanism for supplementing political liberalism before we even get to the question of intrinsic goods.

Religious institutions do not only offer an authoritarian means for inculcating and enforcing values in people’s consciences but the values they so impose are themselves more likely to be, at worst, regressive or, at least, resistant to progress. As institutions designed to perpetuate traditional ideas and police against heresies, religions are structured to serve as obstacles to moral reexamination, reimagination, and innovation.  They threaten to ossify values and encourage an authoritarian intellectual approach to thinking about values that constantly altogether sabotages particular people’s and entire nations’ abilities to rationally consider and improve their values.

It is intrinsically good that human beings develop their excellences, including their moral virtues, as well as they can.  And this requires both a freedom of thought with respect to values which is incompatible with a fear-based, infantalized deference to otherworldly moral authority.  To deliberately stunt moral growth, both in terms of motives and beliefs about morality, by indiscriminately teaching the potentially noble and the potentially ignoble alike to be captives to fear and tradition is to try to arrest their moral and psychological development at the level of a child—and to arrest the culture in the same exact place.

Even if people need some coaxing into morality through carrots and sticks, at least we can encourage them to understand how they mutually benefit when they participate fully in the social contract and would be harmed without it.  Even if they do not rise to the level of identifying their own highest good and their own highest power with their ability to contribute maximally to the greatest flourishing of their society in power (as I think they should), they can at least be taught to have a basic understanding of how their even their less ambitious desires for basic pleasures, comforts, and securities are aided through an ethos of cooperation.

And the idealist in me wonder whether even this, rather minimal, level of moral consciousness cannot make people good, whether they deserve an orderly and secure society at all.

I think the goods of an aspirant will to maximal power according to our excellences through perpetual self-overcoming (which is what I take Nietzsche to mean by the “will to power”), of autonomy, of dutiful motive, of excellent virtues that are guided by truth and an ennobling truthfulness, are all worth pursuing for their own sakes.  I think a humanity that must have its reason butchered and its basest instincts pandered to is a humanity that is already lost.  I think in an age of such unprecedented advances in knowledge, technology, health, political liberalism, and freedom of conscience, to advocate that the human spirit stay in the dungeon of fear because it cannot be trusted to roam free in society is to prioritize order over human excellence and, therein, to misguidedly sacrifice the only real end worth pursuing for the sake of what should be only one of the means to its attainment.

For a related analysis of religious conservatives’ preference that governments not take care of the poor but instead that they be at the mercy of private, and, in particular, church-based, charity see my thoughts on the ethics of private vs. publicly-mediated generosity.

Your Thoughts?

UPDATE:
Now there’s a follow up interview with Chloe from CBSNews.com

Your Thoughts?

But, nonetheless, insofar as atheists share Western liberal secularist values, I would hope that all of us share a moral, and not merely political, ideal that involves respecting and honoring the dignity of all people. I would hope that more than just politically tolerating people with whom we disagree, that we also seek to have generally benevolent dispositions towards all the people we encounter socially, as much as this is possible consistent with respect for truth in value judgments.

While some enemies in life are inevitable (and sometimes actually wind up providing as much or more benefit to each other as friends do), we should want as much goodwill and positive interaction with other people as possible, despite their manifold manifest flaws. And this means that even though we disagree with people’s immoral behaviors, we should try to be as sympathetically inclined to them as we can, consistent with justice, truthfulness, and their own well-being.

And as much as we disagree with and vociferously challenge people’s wrong and/or pernicious ideas, we should be able to bracket (or at least contextualize) these qualms as much as possible when considering people as whole people. For example, we should not let a philosophical disagreement, even a serious one, completely cloud our ability to appreciate someone’s overall excellent character where it exists. We should keep conflicts of the mind from precluding friendships of the heart. And a friendship of the mind where the minds disagree is in most cases something to cherish since it provides the benefits both of productive enmity and of harmonious concord.

But in order to walk the line between intellectual disagreement and personal friendship, the atheist must consider a difficult question. Can she both hate religion, as many atheists seem to, and yet simultaneously love the religious person any more realistically than the fundamentalist religious person can love gay people while hating homosexuality?

Of course, an atheist can say to the religious person something analogous to what the fundamentalist religious person says to gays, “I don’t care what you do in the privacy of your own church or home, but I just don’t want to hear about it.  Leave all your crazy ideas for when you’re with your other religious friends.  I don’t want you to talk about praying for me or about your spiritual experiences or about your ignorant opinions that come only from superstitions.  I hate all this stuff about you, even though I otherwise think you’re great and totally honor your overall character.”

The problem is that comparable to the way that most gay people do not think they can closet their sexual identity and be comfortably themselves and the way most gay people resent anyone who asks them to be closeted as callously rejecting them, it may not be entirely unreasonable for many religious people to say that their faith is too central a part of who they are to feel pressured to stifle it every time they go out in public.  I’m not talking about theocratic religious people who want to impose their faith or its more arbitrary moral ideas through legislation or who crave for special recognition of their religion or of prayer, etc. in government settings.  Of course we can ask that people not try to make the government an arm of their faith or a vehicle for its expression without being confused for being “hateful”.

But even politically secular and tolerant religious people have a lot of other ways in which being openly and fully themselves means expressing themselves religiously.  And similarly, for many atheists our atheism is not a small issue but an important part of our identity.  This might be because our atheism makes us feel alienated from friends, family, the larger and more religious body of humanity, etc.  And/or it might be because we were once religious ourselves and rejecting religion was a key moment in our self-formation that is important to us still.  It might also be because in questions of religion, and specifically in contradistinction to it, we most clearly see what our intellectual and moral values are and find the greatest conflict with others over these core character issues.

And of course, for many religious people, we are talking about a key way in which they form their own sense of identity, in which they fundamentally connect with their family and with the “spiritual”, hopeful, reverential, moral, loyal, ritualistic, traditional, communal, purpose-oriented, and/or intellectual sides of their nature.  Their embrace of their religiosity can be a major part of their self-formation and their way of life itself.  It can profoundly shape core values—or at least their personal conceptualization of them.

So, both serious atheists and religious people can have a lot of themselves bound up in their complicated relationships to religion.  The stories of their lives and the dynamics of their psychologies would likely be woefully distorted were there religiosity or irreligiosity, their belief or their unbelief, scrubbed out of them.

Now, of course, for the sake of each other’s sanity and their mutual friendship, both serious atheists and religious people may make truces as far as their personal friendships are concerned, by which they either do not discuss religion or by which they employ deliberate or implicit means of not letting it become a wedge between them.  But to the extent to which this is necessary, there is a fundamental alienation between people who are otherwise friends, which can still be lamentable.  Maybe adherence to intellectual principle is a great enough good that it is justifiable to prioritize it even at the expense of better friendships and more “truces”.  But if there is a way to separate intellectual criticisms of each other’s core beliefs and values from emotional, visceral dislike or hatred?

There is a potential trade off in making our dislike of existing religion less emotional—it might mean not accurately enough feeling negatively towards what is genuinely bad in the existing religions.  It is a good thing to feel dislike for what is bad.  The bad deserves that.  And negative emotional dispositions provide motivational aid to get us to work reducing the bad.

But this brings me to the real crux of the problem.  When we orient our minds to eliminate the bad of religion, we are also possibly orienting ourselves to eliminate constitutive parts of our religious friends’ ways of life.  Describing how we want people to never again do or think the things our friends do or think risks saying to them, “we don’t want people to be the way you are.   We don’t want stories like yours to exist.  We don’t want the practices, traditions, rituals, etc. in which you form yourself and live your life to exist.  We don’t want people to have psychologies like yours or values like yours.”

Looked at in this way, of course religious people feel threatened and sometimes hated by our more vituperative denunciations of the beliefs, practices, institutions, and values through which they live their lives and construct their identities, hopes, moral judgments, etc.  It can be as bad for them to be told their religions should not exist as it is for gays to be told that their basic psycho-sexual love drive and love relationships should not exist.

And, of course, this door also swings the other way.  Religious attitudes that wish atheists out of existence and vilify us are alienating and harmful to some of us in comparable major ways too.

Is there a solution?  I think so.

I don’t think the answer is at all to pretend we believe things we don’t.  Nor is it to feign respect for badly formed and obviously false ideas.  Nor is it to gloss over our real and vital disagreements about moral values.  We are going to have to have these conflicts because truth and goodness ride on them.  Not everything in life can be sunshine and rainbows.  And some people will be evil in distinctively religious ways and be worthy of a good deal of denunciation.  Some atheists too.

But I don’t think we need to hate people’s reverential, spiritual, hopeful, traditional, superstitious, loyal, purpose-oriented, zealous, morally concerned, grateful, idiosyncratic, wondering sides that they are expressing through what we take to be the wrong means or what we see as aimed at the wrong objects.  We can appreciate that, in essential character, we share most of these same traits, only directed to objects and causes and people we think more worthy.

But these sides of our common humanity are what they are channeling through their religiosity and maybe if we can see these commonalities and appreciate their value in some of religious people’s religious expressions we can respect and appreciate as much of who they are as possible.  We can do this even as we are not shy about appropriately voicing our principled disagreements with their wronger abstract ideas and important value judgments when they are of consequence.

If we can see in their religiosity their admirable aspirations and character traits and not only their errors, we can find a way to love not just them but their religiosity itself.  When debating philosophically, we should still make the case to them that there are better ways to think about reverence, spirituality, values, etc. than the specific content of their religions when such content is foolish or pernicious.  We should even be working to develop more coherent and integrated ideas, for ourselves and our fellow atheists, about what proper, ethically enhancing uses the most distinctively “religious” tendencies of human nature can be put towards–consistent with truth and justice.

We should not shun or fear these parts of ourselves in their own right—only their abusive use in the service of superstition, falsehood, irrationalism, authoritarianism, cultishness, regressiveness, brainwashing, and all other forms of immorality.  We can recognize that our religious friends do not need to change their whole ways of life or deny their religious nature’s value.  We do not need to wish they were not who or what they are, just to wish they would correct some erroneous beliefs and counter-productive moral judgments.

And even as we openly criticize false beliefs, values, and institutions, we need to see what particular people are really expressing of value through their religiosity itself, amidst all the errors it might be twisted up with.  We might even be able to learn a thing or two about a side of ourselves that need not be opposed to reason or rediscover a side of ourselves that was never necessary to abandon when we rightfully left an irrational faith behind.

But is it possible to love someone’s religiosity despite thinking their beliefs and values are to some considerable extent pernicious?  In my next post on this topic, I addressed the question, “What Can An Atheist Love In People’s Religiosity?”

Your Thoughts?

This cannot be because it is impossible in principle to love someone and yet hate what they do.  Probably all of us love someone who does some things that we think are immoral and which deserve to be hated (or, at least, disliked) as such.  In fact, many of us share the same ideal of “unconditional love” which encourages loving people despite some of their flaws (though, strictly speaking, I think this is better conceived of as “volitional”, rather than “unconditional”, love since the idea of “unconditional love”, taken literally, is logically and practically incoherent and in some important ways undesirable).  We think the best love includes a kind of loyalty and volitional commitment to people as they are.  Sometimes we are tenderhearted enough even to find their flaws endearing.  But often we will keep an honest perspective that they are flaws and not themselves good things, even as we keep this from reducing our affection for those we love.  In sum, we effectively hate their wrongdoing but still love them.

So what is wrong with religious people (or others even) saying that they can love their gay friends and family—and maybe even gay colleagues, gay acquaintances, and gay strangers—without loving their homosexual deeds? They are saying, essentially, that they have plenty of affection and commitment to give the gay people in their lives, independent of their judgments about the sinfulness of their behaviors.

But it is that word “behaviors” that is one of the main sticking points.  To gay people, who understand their homosexuality as a key part of their very psycho-sexual identity—which is as fundamental to their self-conception as heterosexuality is to straight people—their homosexuality is not just a “behavior” but a rather fundamental expression of themselves with far reaching consequences for their entire lives.

Of course, that is not to say that being gay is the only important, identity-forming thing in their lives—anymore than a heterosexual person’s straightness is the only thing in her life which contributes in an essential way to her identity.  Gay people want and deserve both to not be belittled by being reduced to being only their sexuality as though they were not also full people in the whole other range of ways that straight people are, and at the same time they want and deserve not to have their sexuality treated like just an unusual kinky fetish, a dirty secret, or an embarrassing “unnatural”, “disordered” urge which they “struggle to control”.  They do not warrant straight people’s “sympathy” for their “condition”.  And while they have no more interest than straights do in regaling strangers or the squeamish with the nitty gritty details of their sex lives, they nonetheless want to be able to be as forthright as straights about the simple fact of their love relationships without it being confused for the improper revelation of their sexual exploits.

In telling someone they are gay, they are not revealing a quirky bedroom desire that’s impolite to mention in casual conversation, and to treat them like that’s what they are doing demeans their entire love orientation, and disrespects some of the most important relationships and desires for love and companionship in their lives.  This is why the homophobic cop out that goes, “I don’t care what people do in their bedrooms, I just do not want to know about it” is so insulting to gays.  Gays are not telling you about their sex lives when they tell you about their sexual orientation.  They are telling you about a much deeper and much more central part of their identity—again, something as important to them as being straight is to a straight person.

Fellow straight people, I implore you to imagine what it would be like to tell the core tale of your own life story and of the major moments in your own psychological life in a way that scrubs out all your thoughts, worries, fears, excitements, triumphs, loves, failures, crushes, and other experiences related to your desire for love with members of the opposite sex.  Sure, there is much more to your life story and much more to your psychology than those experiences.  But they’re goddamned unavoidably important, nonetheless. Your heterosexual orientation is much more than any one of your odder “sexual preferences” which you might easily omit with no disservice to your life story or an understanding of your psychology.  It’s no different for gay people.  And that’s why it is intolerable to ask of them any more silence on these matters than you would expect of a straight person.

And so, with all this in mind, the puzzle is how in the world can someone hate a gay person’s sexual identity itself—which is what someone does when they hate the fact that the gay person loves a member of the same sex and has sex with at least one member of the same sex—and yet claim to love that person.  Maybe you can dislike someone’s sexual orientation and yet still generally like the person overall on other grounds.  But I do not see how you can hate a fundamental, non-malevolent, harmless, loving, and psychologically orienting, part of a person while claiming that you simultaneously love that person.  Do you even grasp what the word love means?   Do you really have a good grasp on what either accepting or, minimally, respecting someone even means?

For another example of what this would be like—take a central part of my own personality.  Were anyone to tell me they loved me but hated my philosophical side would be lying.  Same goes if they told me they loved me but hated my heterosexuality.  I would be truly baffled by this cruel and demeaning person and puzzle over whether they were a liar, stupid, or delusional.  Maybe a family member who had a biologically deep attachment to me would be believable when speaking such crazy contradictions.  But nobody else, and certainly no strangers could tell me they hate philosophy but love philosophers, or hate straight behavior but love straight people, and expect me to fall for such nonsense!

I can love you even if I hate that you shop lifted or lost your temper or constantly and negligently forget to do important tasks.  Love does indeed “cover a multitude of sins”.  But the more that being a thief or irascible or irresponsible becomes your defining character trait, the less I am going to be able to have sincere affection for you (let alone acceptance or respect) unless I do not care that much about goodness itself.  And were I to view someone’s homosexuality or their heterosexuality or their philosophical character or any other morally indifferent trait as a matter of sinfulness, I do not think I could love or respect or accept them the way I would love or respect or accept someone I saw as fundamentally good and honorable, amidst their flaws.

So, make up your mind, do you love gay people or not?  Or, if love is too strong a word, do you accept and honor their full equal dignity to your own or not?  Loving, or, at least, accepting and honoring gays as equal, means not hating a central part of their identities.  You have to choose.  There is no loving sinners and hating sins in this case.  You can love them as non-sinners (and I would think if there is a personal God, he actually must want this for reasons I have laid out here, here, and here).  Your other option is to hate or dislike what you insist on calling a sinful “behavior” against people’s own descriptions of their own deep psycho-sexual identities.  Those are your only real options here.

And do not even begin to hide behind your Bible’s passages dissing gays.  Your hermeneutic is up to you.  Take responsibility for whether you read the Bible guided by an ethics of love, reason, and  moral progressiveness, or not.

If for some reason, you just don’t see on rational grounds how homosexual love could be good and praiseworthy, then you must not yet have read my 6,000+ word moral defense of gay marriage. (Here are also some reasons to see the homosexual community as a moral inspiration and role model for people of all kinds.)

Scheduled for tomorrow, I have another post on this topic, in which I turn the tables on my fellow activist atheists and ask of us a challenging question—can we love religious people while hating their religions anymore successfully than they can love gay people while hating homosexuality?  In the meantime, though, Your Thoughts?

In the first part of this series, I explored the reasons for rejecting “unconditional” love as a candidate for the ideal essence of love since as a concept it is riddled with numerous problems as a recommendation for human psychology it is hopelessly unrealistic. In this part of the series, I sketch out a theory of love as any combination of 10 essential features, with the maximum ideal involving all 10 components in maximum strengths, and with various other combinations of only some of the possible components representing other genuine instances of love, but still only approximations of the maximum ideal of love.

We use the word love to refer to a number of different relationships, volitional commitments, attitudes, dispositions, behaviors, and feelings and to various combinations of them.  We also distinguish different love relationships as being of different characteristic types.  Below I have sketched out a list, which I concede may not be exhaustive or in every respect draw lines in the best places between related concepts.  Nonetheless it seems to me like a workable list of distinguishable features which can account for other related psychological states and actions associated with love (both when we describe our experiences of it and when we formulate our ethical ideals for it).

The various major things love refers to:

1. Intensity of affection for someone or something.

2. Intense platonic desire for someone or something.

3. Intense erotic/sexual/romantic desire for someone or something.

4. Intense admiration for someone or something.

5. Intense concern for someone or something’s well-being and flourishing, which is willing to prioritize bringing this about over attaining other goods.

6. A mutually shared, private intimacy, which excludes most all others.

7. Strong psychological attachment to someone or something.

8. Strong psychological identification between one’s own well-being and flourishing with the well-being and flourishing of someone or something.

9. Strong volitional commitment to the well-being and flourishing of someone or something, which stems originally from intensity of affection, eros, platonic desire, admiration, attachment, identification, intimacy, and/or concern for that someone or something but which also sustains itself even as some or all of these diminish as psychological motivators.

10. Intense affection, platonic desire, eros, concern, admiration, attachment, identification, intimacy, and/or strong volitional commitment to the well-being and flourishing of someone or something in spite of manifest flaws of the beloved (and sometimes even through affectionately reinterpreting flaws as “endearing”—although that word is misleading since it is the preexisting love that usually endears us to the beloved’s flaws rather than the other way around).

Does characterizing an essence and ideal for love involve combining all these various features into a unified ideal of complete love?  In that case, we might say that minimally to be love one of the 10 features listed above must be present but to maximally be love all 10 are necessary.

One immediately recognizable drawback to this strategy for defining an ideal for love is that it would preclude all non-sexual loves from being complete loves or, worse, encourage us to turn all our loves sexual in order to maximize them as instances of love. 

Since in numerous kinds of relationships sexual interactions would manifestly harm people in otherwise valuable, and even broadly loving, relationships, if the fullness of love necessarily involved sexual interaction one of two caveats would have to be stressed that fullness of love is not ethically necessary in all (or even the vast majority) of relationships which involve love and in fact that certain aspects of love (e.g. the sexual) would damage such relationships.  We might say that the full ideal of love involves the complete desire for another, including sexual, and complete identification with the beloved (as aided uniquely by the sexual bond) and that it’s just too bad for the other instances of love which encompass the other 8 features of love but not the sexual as well.

Another strategy is to say that the most ideal love is not the combination of all 10 components, with all loves which attain to less than all 10 being incomplete approximations of the fullest possible ideal, but that rather love is essentially some feature which is shared by all 10 manifestations of love and that wherever that uniting characteristic is present, it does not matter whether one has 1 or 10 of the kinds of love, one has enough to sufficiently have reached the ideal of love.  In that case specifying which of the 10 manifestations of love one has is just a matter for classifying the type and intensity of love but it is present in its ideal as soon as any of the 10 are had since each of the 10 are instances of love for embodying this more fundamentally characteristic feature.

If this strategy proves intractable and for some reason we do not like to privilege loves which manage to have all 10 features from my list over other loves which have only, say, 7 but which seem to be full kinds of love rather than partial, we might make the Wittgensteinian turn and consider love to refer to a family resemblance between various attitudes, dispositions, feelings, etc. without any one characteristic being necessary for all of them and without requiring that all the characteristics be present for “full realization” of the ideal of love.

I think my preference is to go for the first option in which the fullest love entails all the 10 features.  It does not bother me that this precludes the vast majority of our relationships, including our familial ones, from falling under the umbrella of fullest realization of love because of our good reasons to exclude sex from them.  Everyone that we should not have sex with we should not have the fullest possible love with.  If sex would harm our ability to love another person in terms of looking out for their well-being and flourishing, then we do better by them to love them incompletely in the way that advances their well-being and flourishing rather than by loving them incompletely in the way that sexually desires them but harms them overall.

Yet, where all things are equal, where one can affectionately admire, non-sexually desire, attach to, identify with, care for, and volitionally commit to someone without the addition of sexual desire and consummation, this otherwise magnificent love is still less complete than another love that has all those other components and also features sexual love.

Again, I do not mean this to say that sex is the essence of love by any means.  Where one love is made up of a greater combination of components (or stronger instances of some of the components) but does not include the sexual component while another has a lesser number of components (or weaker instances of some of them) but contains the sexual component, then the love combination which includes sexual love is the inferior one.  And I’ll stress again that where sexual love interferes with other components of love, in many (or even most) cases, sexual love is worth sacrificing for the other goods.

Nonetheless, I think that when we are talking about ideals, we are talking about a maximum situation.  And conceptually love seems to me to entail maximally desiring, attaching to, and identifying with another and the sexual kind of desire and attachment while far from sufficient on its own is necessary for completeness of desire, attachment, and identification.

My conception of love, as being manifest in degrees and through various combinations of components of love, I think has the advantage of accounting for Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblances.  I think the 10 features listed above (or another similar list if I missed any key features there) serve as the features that all the “family members”, all the types of love must share in order to be “part of the family”, i.e. in order to be types of love.  It is quite possible that two specific kinds or instances of love do not overlap in any of the 10 basic features necessary for minimal love.  I can imagine, for example I can imagine someone experiencing love for another by feeling a strong psychological attachment and identification with that other while not feeling affection or admiration for them, while another lover may primarily have a love which consists of an admiration which drips with affection for the beloved.  And, of course, we can imagine a love which is more robust than either of these for encompassing affection, admiration, attachment, and identification.  And still further we can imagine other loves which add more components.

When it comes to judging closer and farther approximations to the ideal of love, counting numbers of components will not always be sufficient.  There may be cases where less components more intensely present or less components of more integral quality may override instances of more components with less intensity or less integral quality.  Answering the question of which of the components contribute so much to a love experience as to be more important than numerous other components in equal degree is a hard one which I will not even attempt at this time.  All I will say here is that I suspect such weightings are possible and so if we were to compare loves, it would require more thought than goes into simply counting components present and comparing quantities.  And of course, varying degrees of intensities among the feelings or strengths of volitional components also make a difference.

We can finally return now to “unconditional” love and try to understand what exactly it is in terms of these possible components out of which all possible loves are created as combinations.  In the part 1 of this series I argued that the concept of “unconditional” love demanded too much psychologically of any human.  The concept was found to demanded that we love people with no reference to any of their desirable qualities and that we love everyone and everything “unconditional”ly.  If we were to exclude anyone or anything, even on the simple grounds that they were not the ones we chose without conditions to love, then we are conditionally loving those we chose to love because we are loving them for being those we committed to and not others.  So, “unconditional” love as a concept taken to its logical implications and made the essence of love itself did not do justice to notions (1) that it is good to love, and be loved for, desirable qualities, (2) that we can love some people purely without thereby being committed to loving everyone equally well, and (3) that we can have an admirable and special devoted love for family members and other intimates.

So, what is it “unconditional” love really about?  First, it is important to note that love as we psychologically experience it, and as it stands as an ideal for us, is a conditioned phenomenon.  The love we mislabel as “unconditional” love is usually conditioned by relationships (such as the paradigmatic case of parental “unconditional” love for children) or moral desires (such as deliberately altruistic love which selects (read: conditions) objects of love by assessing needs).

But just because these loves are conditioned, they are no less admirable.  So, what do they actually consist of and what makes them praiseworthy?  So called “unconditional” love in a personal relationship (like the parent-child one and any others based on personal ties) refuses two kinds of conditions for itself.  It rejects the conditions of sustained desire, affection, and admiration for the beloved as necessary for sustained commitment to the beloved.  It also persists beyond the weakening of visceral attachment and waives any conditions of adequate reciprocation of love by the beloved.

The so-called “unconditional” lover loves continues to volitionally commit to the beloved’s well-being and flourishing even when all the passively gained enticements to commit to the beloved are absent.  Despite diminished, waning, or non-existent affection, desire, admiration, and/or attachment, the “unconditional” lover still identifies with the beloved, looks past the beloved’s flaws and maintains a strong will committed to the beloved’s well being.  The “unconditional lover” still desires, admires, attaches, and feels affection for whatever is desirable, admirable, comfortable, and otherwise attractive about the beloved.  In this way, the “unconditional” lover loves us for what we want to be loved for, properly assesses and esteems what is valuable about our valuable traits, and yet gives us the remarkable benefit of constant devotion to us even when it is hard for her due either to the fluctuations of her own feelings, the weakness of our own character, or both.

So “unconditional” love is not only unrealistic but unnecessary since different species of conditional love can do a fine enough job of committing to us through the waning of the lover’s passive emotions and against the repulsiveness of our flaws and failings.  And not only that, but those species of love can be combined with positive affirmations of our desirable qualities for their own sakes such that we can be loved not irrespective of what we are but in significant portion for what we are.  And finally, such species of love can be partial to intimates such as family without concern that that would mean we failed implausible and useless demands for the “unconditioned.”

Your Thoughts?

For the next installment in my series on love, see Call It Volitional Love, Not Unconditional Love.