And I believe that it is an abrogation of duty to the public for intellectuals to hide safely in the ivory tower and never challenge religions’ systematic efforts to inculcate bad habits of thought for the sake of social and political control. It is messy to get involved in the public domain and demand that the strict rigorous standards for pursuing knowledge and establishing just authority be consistently applied in social, ethical, spiritual, and political matters no less than in scientific and other academic matters, but it is our responsibility.  What else are philosophers here for if not this role of public education about vital philosophical issues?

But to illustrate her point that at least some issues should not be debated carelessly before an audience that cannot properly handle it, she explains the possible dangers of incautiously advocating that atheism leads to moral anti-realism. More specifically she explores what the consequences for atheism itself might be like if moral error theorists, such as Russell Blackford, with whom she is currently debating and who recently criticized Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape on error theorist grounds, were ever to become prominent cultural voices. (An introductory post to error theory by me can be read here.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s explanation is here.)

She gives a serious warning about an issue that has certainly weighed on me and influenced my own decisions often. Both personally and philosophically I care deeply about metaethics, atheism, and the causes of rationalism and liberalism. And I also spent years writing a dissertation on that self-confessedly polemical, rhetorically reckless, self-proclaimed “immoralist” and “antichristian” Friedrich Nietzsche, who says a lot of things that can be used against a lot of things I defend.

I think that in the end, when read carefully, Nietzsche is ultimately a naturalist and realist about value (in fact, in my case studying  him helped convince me of both positions).  He just calls for massive work psychologically analyzing, contextualizing, and reassessing the values of particular moral systems according to what he takes to be a truer naturalistic value standard than is often admitted.  But, nonetheless, his skeptical and iconoclastic rhetoric both tantalizes many readers into anti-realism and gives fodder to a great many religionists who see him as a confirmation of their fears (or hopes?) that atheism inevitably leads to moral nihilism.

But before I get into my views of how to respond to these problems, I want to give Kazez’s case against indiscriminately public debates on metaethics the full vent it deserves:

A  view Russell’s been promoting lately is not science/religion incompatibility but atheism/objective morality incompatibility. He argues that atheism leads to an “error theory” of morality like that defended by J. L. Mackie and Richard Joyce.  Take the sentence below–

Torturing babies just for fun is wrong.

Most people think it’s true.  The error theory disputes this.  Mackie says all moral statements are false, while Joyce just says they’re not true.  (There’s a difference–with different logical problems whichever way you go.)

Suppose Russell gets lots of fame and acclaim, and starts promoting the error theory all over the place.  So he starts influencing people to think that atheists must believe the sentence above is false, or at least not true.  I wouldn’t hesitate to say I thought that was a bad idea.  It wouldn’t be my place to address him in the second person and tell him what to talk about, but I’d be perfectly entitled to my opinion that spreading this view is unwise.

And it would be a perfectly cogent and respectable opinion.  This sort of meta-ethics would likely increase public distrust of atheism and discourage people from accepting atheism. I’d also make another sort of argument–that meta-ethics can’t be discussed coherently in the public square.  It’s a highly technical area of philosophy, where philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and logic intersect. There is simply no way that the ordinary person, with little or no education in philosophy, can get a grip on the pertinent issues.

Furthermore, there’s just no point in the public worrying about meta-ethics.  All sane people are committed to not torturing babies just for fun and will do the very same things to stop would-be baby torturers.  For all intents and purposes, we may as well say the sentence above is true.   Everyone in philosophy converges on the idea that roughly speaking, anyway, it’s at least kind of like true. Nothing whatever is gained by associating atheism with an anti-realist view of morality.

Now, that doesn’t mean the error theory should never be discussed. Of course it should.   In philosophy books and philosophy seminar rooms, and by anyone who’s willing to spend a couple of years gaining the expertise required to discuss these things proficiently.  If you get yourself into that milieu, you’ll find out there are big problems with the error theory, and there are many, many impressive competitors in logical space.  In fact, there’s a very close competitor that [on some versions...] makes the sentence above true (moral fictionalism, which compares it to “Harry Potter is a wizard”).  There is no reason at all to foist the error theory on the public (at the price of atheists seeming bizarre), and not one of these competitors, given the total lack of consensus even among meta-ethics experts.

In any event–the point is that there’s nothing remotely scandalous about saying that the public square is the wrong place to promote atheism/objective morality incompatibility*.

My response:

Even as a (somewhat unconventional) moral realist and (Aristotelian/Nietzschean/existentialist) moral naturalist, I do not fear the metaethics debate being brought into the public eye because I think that error theory (and fictionalism, which improves little on error theory as far as I am concerned) is false and can be shown to be false.  But I also admit that proving that point takes serious work.

And we live in a culture that tends to think simplistically and dualistically.  A good many people assume that our only options in ethics are the extremes of total absolutism on the one hand or total subjectivist relativism on the other.  The same problem occurs in popular epistemology too as people constantly talk as if anything short of absolutely incontrovertible certitude in knowledge is formally no different than the wildest, most religiously baseless, leap of faith.

So, in this context, there is a prejudice towards anti-realism as soon as one starts dismantling absolutism.  And even if there are better arguments in favor of both moral naturalism and an objective moral pluralism that can rationally and systematically account for the real relativities and subjectivities in ethics without descending into moral nihilism, a good many people would be seduced by the extreme of absolute moral anti-realism and a good many others would be scared back into the comforting arms of the opposite, equally familiar extreme, moral absolutism.

In fact, a previous great public wave of ascendant atheistic philosophy, namely atheistic existentialism, already influenced a pervasive ethos of nihilism among many atheists and gave ample stories for theologians and pastors to tell their flocks at the bedtime of their reason to make sure they would never want to wake up to a secular reality.

The New Atheists though, as far as I have seen, have had little interest in repeating the existentialists’ sabotage of atheism in the public mind.  By contrast they have tended to give full-throated endorsements of Enlightenment values.  They are more likely to brush aside questions about an atheist metaethics either (a) as easily and quickly solved, (b) as irrelevant, (c) as just a chance to rightly point out secularism’s vindicating record in practice of creating values progress, or (d)  as a personal, prejudicial assumption about the depravity of actual atheists and, as such, a cause for offense rather than refutation.  Of the New Atheists only Sam Harris has made a serious book length attempt (yet a somewhat wrong-footed one if I understand his argument in his reply to critics properly, though I have not read the actual book) to treat metaethics head on.

My view on this is simply that the man on the street will not be scandalized by becoming acquainted with the views of moral anti-realists.  They already share them. Even those who cling to moral absolutism by faith cite epistemological relativism when it suits them as a justification for faith, saying some variation of “no one can be certain so we all hold an absolute by faith, so I am entitled to my dogmatic belief which at least makes coherent sense of ethics so I have something to teach my kids, gives me meaning, and promises me eternal life”.

When being philosophical and weighing options metaethically, they see an abyss of moral nihilism outside of their bald faith assertions.  They do not want to dive into that abyss and so instead they stick with beliefs that a good many of them will frankly admit are rationally unjustified.

When Sarah Palin insidiously assumes that the godless liberals would judge her Down’s Syndrome afflicted son or the “useless elderly” unworthy to live, she is logically inferring that unless God imputes value to such a life, it has little by the objective standards of full human power and excellence.  She and many other religious people are absolutely convinced that but for the fiat of God, Social Darwinism and brutal amoral selfishness would be the only options for humanity.

So this fear keeps many people penned up in false institutions out of sheer will to believe there can be meaning in the teeth of their cynical, hardheaded philosophical realism (which in metaethical terms is moral anti-realism).  And some (though definitely not all) of those who simply cannot believe the necessary religious fictions become truly metaethically disoriented, nihilistic atheists (as I did for a long time before I could painstakingly prove a realist position to myself through studying primarily Nietzsche and teaching numerous ethics classes while in graduate school).

Metaethics is not some irrelevant puzzle only of purely academic interest and of such interest only to philosophers.  Though the ordinary person has never heard the word, to many of them believing in the truth of moral statements is essential to believing in their authority at all.  They are not naive about what hangs in the balance on questions of moral foundations. To many people this is what keeps them within the irrationalism of faith.  And to many, like me 12 years ago, it is a personal and existential crisis to leave their faith and feel the need to build their own moral compasses for themselves since few prominent people or institutions, if any, seem to offer ones that seem to be truthful.

I think making the metaethics debate public can only make objective, context-sensitive moral realism get a voice in the discussion, to make arguments against the prevailing presumption to extremism—whether it be relativistic or absolutistic.  And from the activist atheists I see, I think many have a serious hunger to prove morality can have an objective footing without religion.  Many atheists want nothing to do with Sartrean nihilism.  They want to prove that their worldview has a place for moral truth so that religion can no longer hold morality hostage with the threat of meaninglessness and anarchy for all who become atheists.

I say, let’s have some confidence that the truth will win out.  I say let’s put our money where our mouths are as supposed believers in the educability of the average person and his or her fitness for self-rule in an open society and a participatory democracy.  I am a moral realist predominantly because our visceral opposition to torture is rooted in true things.  There are really good reasons that we are passionate about Western liberalism, about mutual cooperation, and about feats of moral heroism.

There are of course, some legitimate Nietzschean challenges to these things that honesty requires tackling head on.  But, in general, these values are pragmatically borne out in facts about human flourishing and where they may not be they deserve to be interrogated.  There are reasons we believe in these things and we should not shy away from a public fight for their respectability.

Publicly avoiding these most difficult questions for fear of what the masses would think if they heard question marks put behind moral statements is to signal to those very masses that we have nothing to say on behalf of moral truth that we think could stand up to public scrutiny.  This confirms their existing suspicions and prejudices.

If we believe in our values for good reasons (and I sure think we do), then we should be able to prove that our value judgments are rational beliefs and we should find ways to do it that require no special technical ability to sift out every detail of a complicated proof.  If we cannot do even this much then philosophers will continue to prove by our silence the irrelevance that the public assumes of us.

And meanwhile those looking for a positive, constructive account of how they can find meaning and values and moral truth in the world will continue to see those signs only in the windows of religious houses of worship.  And there they will be radicalized politically in favor of regressive, authoritarian, nativist politics and social values, while liberals will offer strong assertions of progressive political values that are unmoored from any philosophical grounding and never adequately stated in coherent moral terms as part of coherent moral worldviews that advocate anything more than tolerance as an ideal.

If the truly qualified authorities on philosophy do not frankly address the public, we leave them to the pretenders to authority.  And that, to me, is a dereliction of duty.

In the West (at least), the gods are dying.  This is an unstoppable process.  We cannot tell the people coming out of the houses of worship just go back in unless they are ready to become philosophy majors and we should not by our silence abandon to nihilism all those serious, thoughtful people who cannot bring themselves to go back to faith and yet have internalized recent Christianity’s false dichotomy that moral confidence can only be found within the faith and only moral arbitrariness or crude selfishness can be found outside of it.

If I am Kantian in any way at all it is in my view that true, valuable morality must be autonomous.  People must be able to understand the true justifications for their duties and act only on these and reject all claims upon them that cannot prove themselves to reason. Kant takes the risk of allowing people to think for themselves in confidence that reason will lead them to the right answers.  Kant’s moral courage is to trust so radically in reason and to eschew all that relativism, paternalism, and authoritarianism that fears the average man would just botch things up if allowed to think for himself.

I am with Kant and against claiming there are esoteric philosophical truths about the real foundations of morality which are inaccessible to the ordinary person.

Finally, the ordinary person can understand hypothetical philosophical reasoning that considers outlandish or immoral scenarios for the sake of philosophical clarity without finding the exercise itself immediately threatening, corrupting, or bizarre, as proved by this NSFW South Park clip:

Your Thoughts?

For an idea of my approach to substantive, naturalistic, realistic metaethics and ethics, my rejection of Noble Lies in politics, or overviews of the interpretations of Nietzsche I developed in my dissertation, see any (or all!) of the following posts:

A Brief Overview Of My Dissertation

A Video Of Me Rambling About Nietzsche

Goodness Is A Factual Matter (Goodness=Effectiveness)

Grounding Objective Value Independent Of Human Interests And Moralities

Non-Reductionistic Analysis Of Values Into Facts

Effectiveness Is The Primary Goal In Itself, Not Merely A Means

What Is Happiness And Why Is It Good?

On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness

Deriving An Atheistic, Naturalistic, Realist Account Of Morality

How Our Morality Realizes Our Humanity

Subjective Valuing And Objective Values

My Perspectivist, Teleological Account Of The Relative Values Of Pleasure And Pain

Pleasure And Pain As Intrinsic Instrumental Goods

What Does It Mean For Pleasure And Pain To Be “Intrinsically Instrumental” Goods?

Against Moral Intuitionism

Moral vs. Non-Moral Values

Maximal Self-Realization In Self-Obliteration: The Existential Paradox of Heroic Self-Sacrifice

On Good And Evil For Non-Existent People

My Perfectionistic, Egoistic AND Universalistic, Indirect Consequentialism (And Contrasts With Other Kinds)

Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

Further Towards A “Non-Moral” Standard Of Ethical Evaluation

On The Incoherence Of Divine Command Theory And Why Even If God DID Make Things Good And Bad, Faith-Based Religions Would Still Be Irrelevant

Rightful Pride: Identification With One’s Own Admirable Powers And Effects

The Harmony Of Humility And Pride

Moral Mutability, Not Subjective Morality.  Moral Pluralism, Not Moral Relativism.

How Morality Can Change Through Objective Processes And In Objectively Defensible Ways

The Religious Conservative’s False Choice: “Big Brother” Or “Heavenly Father”

Your Thoughts?

The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen

Judged by contemporary Western standards, honour has a mixed moral record. On the one hand, a sense of gentlemanly honour underwrote the practice of duelling, long after it had been outlawed and denounced as an immoral and reckless affair. The desire to protect a woman’s honour was implicated in the millennium-long practice of foot binding in China, despite the fact that everyone involved knew that foot binding is excruciating. Even now, family honour motivates the murder of women who deviate from conventional norms about marriage and sex. As Kwame Anthony Appiah is well aware in his new book none of these are honour practices we could wish to preserve.

On the other hand, Appiah argues that because the sense of honour is connected to a deep desire for recognition and respect, honour can also play a significant role in positive moral and social change. Appiah works toward this thesis through a combination of historical narrative and philosophical analysis. Offering a vivid and detailed study of three “moral revolutions”, where practices we now would regard as unthinkable were abandoned in a short period of time, Appiah draws attention to the positive role honour has played. Foot binding came to an end because influential intellectuals within China recognized that the practice brought dishonour upon the nation. Similarly, the Atlantic slave trade came under pressure from social movements which insisted that slavery was a stain on Great Britain’s honour and on the honour of the working class who shared with slaves the “dishonourable” work of manual labour. Here, as in the other moral revolutions Appiah explores, moral arguments alone, which often abounded while the immoral practices continued, were not enough to bring about change. Honour, rather than moral argument, seemed to excite people to action.

More here.

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?

Do you think of yourself as religious or spiritual?

Well, I am neither religious in any institutional, theistic, or superstitious senses, nor spiritual in any superstitious, other-wordly, or particularly mystical sense. But I not only grew up religiously but was religious into my early adulthood and my rejection of faith-based thinking was out of adherence to principles that I got from my religion. And I have retained my spiritual intensity, my concern for truth, my adamant attitude that certain primary ethical values be universally respected, and my speculative, metaphysically interested side.

I’ve also retained the highly social and therapeutic, introspective, and self-critical psychologically focused attitudes that are nurtured in both church contexts in general and the modern evangelicalism I was raised in in particular. And there is most notably a zealous, “evangelizing” side to me that wants to work for the cause of people’s deconversions, that wants to help people reject authoritarian thinking and institutions and instead to reason for themselves. So, in some ways my views and goals have religious parallels. Instead of God, I want to promote Truth, and instead of faith, freethinking, and instead of seeing people as sinners in need of redemption, I see people as evolutionarily imprecisely evolved reasoners and ethical judgers who need to scrupulously train themselves in better habits of reason in order to make for greater knowledge, better ethics, and more just politics. And I am admittedly, in temperament, “religious” about advancing this paradigm shift. I do believe in reason’s power to “save” and am willing to sacrifice with religious intemperance to do it.

To whom do you turn when you need support? Or, is there a person or group of people who are really important to you?

I turn to close friends and to my parents. The only group I turn to is EVERYONE ON FACEBOOK.

Pretty big group, apparently you are not shy!

Right, I am comfortable broadcasting to the world. I only feel comfortable in two sorts of settings—

They are?

one on one and talking to large groups of people. One on one I can find that intersection between my personality and someone else’s where we both feel comfortable and relate to one another.

One on one I can understand.

And talking to groups, either my classes of students or my readers on my blog or the readers of my status updates, I feel very comfortable because I feel like an equal half of the equation, just like in a one on one conversation. Whereas, in small groups, the dynamic is not “me and you” or “me and the group”, there’s the 5 people and each of the 5 is 1/5, so I’m 1/5, and if I do not click with the group personality I will feel outnumbered, four to one.

If I get lucky and the whole group, including me, is on the same page, or if it’s a situation where my personality dominates the group, then I feel okay in the small group. But if there is a stronger personality than my own and that personality sets the group personality, or if it organically has a personality that is very different from my own, then I feel like I completely can’t express myself and close down.  Once I was with two of my closest friends who I was used to interacting with primarily one on one or with other groups but never with just the two of them and me.  We were together just the three of us for this rare occasion and their dynamic between them made me feel so excluded.   They indulged a shared side of their personalities that felt so alien and antagonistic to me that I felt as incredibly lonely and rejected as I’ve ever felt.  That night is a terrible memory.

What are sources of comfort and peace for you?

It’s a tough question to answer in general since there are many different sources of discomfort and unrest. So, to specify different circumstances: I rely on music enormously to express my feelings or to sustain me with pleasure during a long, hard day. I love small, temporary habits…

Like?

Like always eating at the same deli on Thursday nights while watching the same thing on the TV, listening to my i-pod, and reading Andrew Sullivan’s blog—that was one semester at about 4pm while I prepared to teach at 7.  I love building in those little rituals.

My favorite was, for several semesters, coming home from the city, whether I had taught in Queens or New Jersey that day or just in Manhattan, I would travel back to the Bronx on the school van and every night I would listen to David Byrne and Brian Eno’s album Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. And they say they wrote it as “secular gospel music” and boy does it work for me on that score. It was this meditative stuff, I would always start with the title track and I love the thought—everything that happens will happen today.   Somewhere someone is going through everything and experiencing everything that ever happens.

And every time I leave St. John’s I love playing this Decemberist song, “Yankee Bayonet”

and then the Neutral Milk Hotel’s album Aeroplane Over the Sea, and when I get stuck waiting for a subway that will be a long time I recharge with “Freebird”. So, these sorts of rituals—foods, music, patterns—they are remarkably psychologically pleasing.

But I hate rigidity and so I love that my schedule varies every semester in some ways and I can build new habits. As for comfort in a more existential sense—when dealing with the hardest times, I have a few people who I know will be entirely in my corner, like my mom or my dad or my friends Paul or Dan, people who will unflappably take my side and even think like my lawyer when I’m in trouble, who are just interested in me coming out okay above all else. We need people like that.

And beyond that, philosophically, I orient myself with the Stoics and with Nietzsche a lot. I focus on the reality of the limits of my control and prevent myself from wanting what it is irrational to want. I fight the urge to beat myself up and take frequent honest assessments of my life. What helps me most is to dwell on the power of small impacts. I really believe that when we do excellent things, we spread our power into the world through those things and they have effects which can be untraceable. I love just throwing myself out there and fighting for what I love and just wondering about, without ever possibly knowing, where it goes and what good it might do.

And I try to really understand that people are who they are and not change them and not vilify them or imagine their motives are as bad as their actions. I’m a pretty quick forgiver if someone sincerely apologizes. I have no years old grudges.  (Okay, maybe one.)  And I am pretty good about not letting ignorant, false opinions define my conception of myself. I am pretty vigorous about judging myself by the truth as much as I can. I can’t take a compliment I don’t deserve without squirming, I take constructive, legitimate criticism very gratefully and conscientiously, and I am pretty good at not letting the voices of the ignorant who don’t know what they’re talking about echo in my head. There are just a couple insecurities and weaknesses on these scores and those can slay me for weeks. But otherwise, I’m really good. I’m as comfortable as anyone could reasonably be expected, for example, with being constantly disagreed with as part of the life of a philosopher. That rolls off my back. I’m good at being wrong and (eventually) changing my mind when I have to.  I only get sensitive if I feel like I’ve somehow failed my students. That will eat at me and eat at me.

One of Nietzsche’s deepest resonances with me is his denunciation of regret. He describes the will as tortured and imprisoned by its inability to change past. He thinks that it is the “It was”—the past which cannot be undone—which drives us crazy as beings who find ourselves as powerful through our ability to will. The inability to will the past to be different is this massive, existential realization of the limits of our power and of ourselves.  And, of course, the past features many things we do not like which threaten to gnaw at us.

And so Nietzsche’s solution to this is to embrace what he calls “the eternal recurrence of the same”. This is the thought that the universe might recur precisely as it has (and presently does) an infinite number of times through all eternity. Whether or not this idea is plausible, Nietzsche argues that the highest affirmation of life, and of our own lives in particular, that we can have is the attitude in which we want nothing more fervently than the eternal recurrence of our lives exactly as they are and have been. To will the eternal recurrence of the same universe in all its totality is to affirm reality in the greatest possible way. To will the eternal recurrence of your own life is to affirm your life as the most valuable and desirable thing for you and, therein, to affirm yourself as much as possible. You are nothing but your life you have lived, and which you still live, and to resent your life is to alienate you from yourself.  To regret what you have done or what has happened to you is to wish that you, as you are, were not.

And for me this is precisely why I have never been able to regret anything. I really can never fantasize about some alternative scenario for very long at all. I can hope for an awesome turn-around in a situation in the future, but I cannot get very far in dreaming up particulars that would be different in my life because it would be wishing my own non-existence to me. It all feels wrong.

I wish I had your discipline. I regret very little, but there is a couple i can’t seem to let go.

I can’t even write fiction because I can’t change the facts of my life. Every idiosyncratic particular of the world fits in the way it really happened in my mind and has to go like that.

And the other side of the eternal recurrence is living every moment with the tremendous weight of thinking, “What if I were to live this life for eternity would I want this choice I’m about to make?”  And that existentialist sort of pressure on every moment, weighs on me all the time.

Some of this sounds like what my Buddhist friend believes.

When I look at the past and my limitations and other people’s, I am a Stoic, I feel it irrational to wish that I or it or they were different when they cannot be. And yet, even though, abstractly, I am a determinist, I embrace Sartre and Heidegger in feeling the openness of life and the radical possibility to create myself with my choices and the pressure to do so with death looming possibly quite faster than I can accomplish all I want to. I have great anxiety not about dying but about dying young. I am convinced that if I live to 83, I will make it, I will be proud of what I leave behind in the form of work and in the people affected and the causes advanced. But I would be bummed if I had to die younger.

So how do you counter the weight?

How do I counter which weight?

Existentialist sort of pressure on every moment, weighs on me all the time…

I teach and I write and I feel accomplished. I love the expression in sports that players just “leave it all out on the field” and don’t worry about the results. You just live and work as intensely as you can and, when absorbed in the meaningful work, there is no anxiety, no fear, no pressure in those moments, just complete immersion in what I’m “meant” to do and I regret nothing while doing that. When I’m not writing, I feel miserable, I feel anxiety, I feel behind, I feel like I’m accomplishing nothing, so the way to deal with the existential crisis for me is to act and act and act, create value every chance you can and feel good about that.  If I didn’t feel like my life was creating and spreading value well, I couldn’t imagine what the point would be.

What gives your life purpose & meaning?

Purpose comes from our characteristic tendencies. We are what we do, we excel in doing what we characteristically do excellently.

You make an impact by teaching.

So, yeah, by teaching I fulfill myself, I realize my inherent nature in teaching and it’s intrinsically satisfying. And in philosophizing. When I am doing philosophy, I am fulfilling me. But I could also be more than I am now and so there are parts of me I worry may be or may have been fulfilled and I’m too content with just this. But if I could really excel at these things and can have my greatest ultimate impact in creating value this way, then the sacrifice is justifiable. It’s all about the fulfillment of your excellences from an internal perspective and your spreading power and value beyond yourself from an external perspective. And that gives meaning and context to your life as it plays a role in the larger story of the increase or decrease of value, and greater, richer, more complex kinds of value, in the universe.

What brings hope into your life?

I think I have hope because I was so damned loved as a kid, honestly. I think it makes it hard for me not to be an optimist when my primary experiences as a child were all love. It makes you, however naively, assume the world’s going to love you or that the default of life is good. Hope just springs from within in this way.

Now, I’m a total realist and even a pessimist about some things. I don’t count on any doors just flying open for me and I don’t assume even that hard work will get me to the top. I’m aware I might not reach the top or even the tenure track job I had devoted so many years aiming for. But I still just have an innate, unquenchable confidence that I will find my way some place I belong, even if it will be like nothing I imagine right now. And in the cosmic sense—I get hope from the progress of history, I feel so excited to be a part of the story of history—to be part of a people, a discussion, a human narrative stretching for centuries. I think humanity is advancing—however much every two steps forward is followed by one step back. I am excited about contributing to the cause of progress in whatever little ways I can from where I am. It does reinforce my hope.

Your Thoughts?

Mary, who is a Roman Catholic theology student and a personal friend, is skeptical:

I like what you’re saying but I think that I’m having trouble believing that there really is a difference between “loving the sinner and hating the sin” and what you’re saying. If I have what you’re saying wrong, please correct me because I do genuinely want to understand what you’re saying.

Since I don’t actually think that there is anything wrong with how an atheist views or values the world (I can’t blame someone for not believing in an unseen or illogical God) I’ll use another example: I’m mostly anti-abortion. I’m not decidedly, always in every case against abortion. I can certainly see why people feel pushed to get them (a society that doesn’t value life and is sexist against women which puts them in a position of utter helplessness when they wind up pregnant). I don’t believe in throwing blood on women at abortion clinics and I’ve never protested one, but I do believe that the casual nature with which many women get abortions points to a really serious issue with personal responsibility and respect for human life. There is a certain type of abortion I really don’t respect and that actually makes me mad to think about – and that is adult women who come from stable economic situations with supportive families, a completed education, and a job getting an abortion because they don’t want to have a baby (this is, in fact, the largest growing demographic of women who get abortions). I have friends whom I know who are in precisely the position I just mentioned who would in fact get an abortion if they were to have an unwanted pregnancy. While I may have meaningful friendships with them, there is something fundamental about the way we view the world which would definitely push me ever from being as close to them as I am say, to my family, best friend, boyfriend etc. Whether rightly or wrongly, I believe they have extremely selfish ideas about when and where personal responsibility is important and when desire and comfort override love and sacrifice. And, on the converse, rightly or wrongly, they think that I have prosaic, religiously motivated, or even sexist views of women’s rights over their pregnancies. While we may not condemn or ostracize one another for this viewpoint, we certainly judge one another for it and that sort of judgment that points to the deepest way that someone views the world is hard ever to be truly overcome. As much as I might try to word it otherwise (and my friends on the other side) it really is a matter of loving the sinner and hating the sin. I don’t just dislike the opinion my friends hold concerning the issue, but the very part of them that motivates them to think that way – a part that I think is self-centered and lacking respect for life. And they don’t like the part of me which is anti-abortion – which they think is oppressive and narrow-minded. If I ever wanted to, say, seek advice from a friend that holds such an opinion on abortion, everything they said to me would be weighed against how they viewed life and responsibility and whether or not that world-view would negatively color their advice.

The same sort of issue stares in the face of the atheist vs. theist debate. For atheists whose atheism is a fundamental part of their self-identity and who don’t think that the God hypothesis is simply false but actually harmful, they don’t just dislike the religious opinions of their friends that help them to justify hateful, oppressive and evil viewpoints – they dislike the part of that person that would allow them to submit to the God hypothesis, and organized religion, in spite of the logical fact that no God hypothesis of any religious type can be proved and, even further, actually seems highly unlikely. I read in your blog time and time again how important statistical and fact-based truths are to the way you understand the world, process issues, and decide what is right and wrong. I know that by virtue of being a religious person and, even further, participating in organized religion, I am suspending my disbelief and believing things that are beyond logic and argumentation – which means that I dismiss as not that important the thing which you find most important in forming your world view and value judgments. I trust in things I can’t see or explain which is completely antithetical to everything you hold dear. Even if on the surface we hold similar opinions about tolerance, love, freedom, etc., can you really say that you “like” the part of me which chooses to ignore logic and believe in God? I find that hard to believe. Furthermore, while I may answer “faith is a gift” which is what motivates me not to condemn or judge atheists (while still thinking that they’re wrong), not every theist holds my position and would actually dislike the fundamental part of an atheist which motivates atheism.

On a personal level, I think that in every important relationship, there is a part of us that loves the sinner and hates the sin. But for issues that are part of the core of someone’s identity and how they interact with the world, could that ever truly be overcome? Would you, for example, marry a religious woman or seek out a Catholic priest for advice in a moral dilemma?

There is one religious woman who I do want to marry but have opted not even to ask out because our difference in beliefs is too decisive an issue for me (and, I expect, for her).

But, I still love her in many, many ways even though a whole lot of her identity is inextricably bound up with her faith. I identify with a lot of who and what she is and I even find that philosophically we agree on an immense amount. Her views and fundamental values on an abstract level, stripped of religious forms, are actually quite a bit like mine at their core. When I tell her about many infuriating forms of religion I encounter she’s as bewildered by them as I am.

We have some serious disagreements but we genuinely understand and respect each other’s positions and on some issues relate in terms of assumptions that I do not share with almost anyone else. And she actively empathizes with some of my frustration with superficial religious challenges. In many ways, we are closer to each other in beliefs and values than I am to any number of other people. We disagree about a few fundamental beliefs and values but they don’t lead to either of us engaging in activities the other would find terribly immoral. Our abstract values differences really do not divide us.

And another religious friend knows more about things I do that he would theoretically find immoral and it has never caused the slightest dent in our friendship. (I also know the worst things he has done, by either of our ethical standards. And in fact, I feel more comfortable disclosing embarrassing mistakes I’ve made to him than to anyone else.) Sometimes you can understand that someone’s actions are not motivated by any intrinsic wickedness but only by their difference in beliefs and so even though you yourself would not do what they do, you know they don’t do it from malice and that it leads to little or no harm, and so you don’t think less of them. You can accept that they are just doing what looks best to them and that they are a well-intentioned and overall virtuous person who just makes a different judgment call on some value decisions.

I also know one of my great religious friends had a remarkable, admirable humility that was part and parcel with being a Christian. He was among the least judgmental people I have ever met and simultaneously one of the most devout. When you said something he found offensive he would meekly register his disappointment with an “oh no” and then let you keep going. He could get passionate but never made it personal and never imposed anything on anyone.

A couple months ago another religious friend treated me unfairly in a heated debate and as soon as I called him on it, he examined himself and apologized. I saw his willingness to introspect and unhestitatingly admit his fault as an expression of his conscientious Christian nature that is regularly habituated in confessing his sins. Of course this introspective nature did not have to spring from his religion, but in his case it did. In both these cases, I simultaneously processed my friends’ behavior as religiously motivated, as distinctly an expression of their religiosity, and admired it no less for that.

When I see religious people give their lives to genuine, no-strings-attached charity or stand up for gay rights or for human rights in general, I can appreciate our common values. And insofar as these values, in their personal cases, are religiously constituted, I can admire that kind of religiosity for its fruits. I can see it as a kind of religiosity that I like and not have to scrub the religious part of it to appreciate the person. When my religious friend is astoundingly tolerant and genuinely loving to me despite the fact that I am his putative enemy, I don’t hold it against him that he thinks God wants him be like that, it is a beautiful attitude and virtue he expresses and I think, finally a real Christian! I can admire the excellence of his character for its own sake even if I think his ideas are screwy.

I even admire one friend’s utterly private religiosity. I love that I had no idea about her faith until after a decade knowing her someone mentioned it to me. I instantly imagined this whole intense side of her and wondered about the practices she secretly engaged in and thought that her ability to live a Matthew 6:5 sort of religiosity was a neat thing about her.

And I admire the intense struggles of faith that religious people suffer. I wish they would just let the nonsense that has overwhelmed them go, but I feel for them as they are tormented between conflicting values and ideas and identify much more with them than some apatheist who tells me he does not even want to be called an atheist because to him the question of God is something he utterly does not care about. My spirit is much more kindred to the soul in the dark night of faith than it is to someone who thinks the titanic questions of ethics and metaphysics and meaning and tradition are just a waste of time.

And I can appreciate if someone has a love of ritual and music and tradition and meditation. When I was religious and attending an evangelical Christian college I used to love to show up an hour before the Sunday night chapel every week and watch the choir warm up and enjoy the whole performance when the service started. Why need I resent my religious friends their love of the organ, the choir, or the pageantry? I remember how intense my religious community was. How could I begrudge people their hugs or their holding of hands with fellows while they fervently express their thoughts and hopes and fears aloud in common prayer?

How could I begrudge them the ways they listen to each other and support each other in times of crisis? I remember people who used prayer circles to talk for the first time about being abused and I remember being able to pray with them and contribute to their feeling safe and loved and supported. There’s nothing to hate about any of that and if I am fair to my religious friends I will appreciate that a lot of their religious life may very well involve edifying, nurturing, loving moments just like that.

Why not appreciate their spiritual intensity that is like my own? (And why not appreciate that my own characteristic intensity was religiously forged.) Why not appreciate others’ sublime calmness and religiously centered unflappability? Why dislike their religiously constructed optimism, their struggles to be good, their fear of disappointing their parents, their willingness to self-sacrifice, their sense of reverence, their ecstatic moments, their appreciation of the interconnectedness of all things, their wild imaginations, their mythologies, their sense of purpose, or their burning hope for more life than we are allotted on Earth?

There are so many very good, very human, very sincere parts of people’s natures that religious people channel and shape through religious forms. And I can appreciate these human beings, lovable as any other human beings, as expressed through these forms, even though my skin crawls when they preach at me, when they attack reason, when they manipulate people’s emotions, when they get self-righteous, when they suffocate creativity, when they villainize human nature, when they promulgate falsehoods, when they encourage bad habits of thought, when they acknowledge false authorities, when they prop up corrupt institutions which are based on lies, when they oppose scientific and moral progress, when they get hysterical about sex, when they become sticks in the mud, when they indoctrinate children, when they abuse vulnerable groups, and when they politically organize on the side of oppression and ignorance.

There are lots of virtues they express in religious forms which are nonetheless virtues. There are lots of harmless spiritual and ritualistic exercises that in themselves I can fully appreciate their attachment to. Prudishness, preachiness, self-righteousness, hypocrisy, moral regressiveness, authoritarianism, and anti-intellectualism are not all the fruits of people’s religiosity. Most actual religious people I know don’t have more than one or two of those traits in an overwhelming degree, if they have that many. Most of the things that express their religiosity are themselves either matters of indifference or worthy of affirmation. I wish atheists had in place forms through which people could express these sides of themselves so they could be just as “religious” and yet not be faith-based thinkers, not be morally regressive or irrationally uptight, not be absolutists, not be superstitious, etc. Because so much else about religious people and about being personally religious is not really all that bad.

Finally, to answer your final question—I did a few times ask a priest for advice while I was an atheist, but not because he was a priest. Rather I asked because he was then my philosophy department’s chairman and, so, my boss. And his advice in both cases was exceptional and I quote it often. I would ask any wise person for his or her rationally defensible advice, regardless of whether or not he or she is wearing a clerical collar. And I will assess such advice as I would anyone else’s—by reason and with no prejudice due to that person’s race, color, creed, or sexual or religious orientation.

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.

Hear his whole interview with Philosophy Bites, in which he explores the ramifications of his interviews for his understanding of moral responsibility and just punishment, is here.

Your Thoughts?

Generation Ex-Christian: Why Young Adults Are Leaving the Faith. . .and How to Bring Them Back.

the problem today isn’t those who are unchristian, but that so many are ex-Christian. Strictly speaking, they are not an “unreached people group.” They are our brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, and friends. They have dwelt among us.

So most of his article laments various bits of good news about the rising tide of unbelief among young people and factors which make him suspect that this generation’s defectors may be more permanent than previous eras’. For example,even though people typically return to church when they get married and (especially) when they have children, Dyck thinks that this generation’s tendency to delay marriage and family until their thirties makes them less likely to gravitate back to church.  He thinks spending a longer time being single may habituate this generation more to non-churchgoing than past generations which experienced shorter spans of time between leaving their parents’ nests and starting ones of their own.

He claims it is important to ask “hard questions” about why people leave, but instead of asking any really difficult questions about the lack of good reasons to believe, about the silliness of various Christian doctrines in the modern world, about the fundamentalist Christianity’s hysterical obsessions with preventing all non-marital heterosexual sex, about the fundamentalist Christianity’s politicization, judgmentalism, materialism, or any other of its deeply questionable ideas or practices.  All he recommends is more of the same message, just with more completely closed minded “listening” and less gimmicky techniques for outreach.

Rather than questioning his faith at all, he diagnoses the various reasons people leave in a way that shows little willingness to take us apostates terribly seriously.  This makes sense since he eventually concludes his entire piece by declaring that in most cases people’s skepticism is actually “the tortured language of spiritual longing” (because of course there is no possibility for spiritual fulfillment away from Christianity!) and that as long as Christians can build trust with these hurting people, that trust can be exploited to “light the way back home”.  His advice to believers relating to us apostates is a simple, manipulative strategy: listen long and hard our stories so that we will feel like you really care—just so you can reconvert us.

So, with his eventual intentions in mind, here in his own words are his bad faith attempts to understand the morality-related reasons that we apostates leave (whether temporarily or permanently):

So 20- and 30-somethings are leaving—but why? When I ask church people, I receive some variation of this answer: moral compromise. A teenage girl goes off to college and starts to party. A young man moves in with his girlfriend. Soon the conflict between belief and behavior becomes unbearable. Tired of dealing with a guilty conscience and unwilling to abandon their sinful lifestyles, they drop their Christian commitment. They may cite intellectual skepticism or disappointments with the church, but these are smokescreens designed to hide the reason. “They change their creed to match their deeds,” as my parents would say.

I think there’s some truth to this—more than most young leavers would care to admit. The Christian life is hard to sustain in the face of so many temptations. Over the past year, I’ve conducted in-depth interviews with scores of ex-Christians. Only two were honest enough to cite moral compromise as the primary reason for their departures.

I find it, first of all, amusing that he assumes honest apostates would admit that Christianity has a truer morality that they feel bad about failing to live up to.  While it is possible that more than just two of the unbelievers he questioned may experience their disobedience to puritanical Evangelicalism’s excessive strictures as “moral compromise”, it is dubious of him to assume that it is immoral to “change one’s creed to match one’s deeds”.  It seems more morally mature to me that young people who do find positive values in premarital sexual activity as part of dating and growing up in general come to explicitly reject the value judgment that this is inherently sinful.

Of course if someone engages in actually immoral behavior that person should not rationalize it as okay.  But for human beings who have been sexually mature in physical terms since they were 13 but who very well may not be socially, emotionally, or financially ready for marriage until their late 20s or 30s (if ever), it is quite healthy to reject an over burdensome and sexually repressive rule against all non-marital sexual experimentation, sexual love, sexual friendship, and sexual pleasure that would actually threaten to cause them arrested development.

Unfortunately so many people internalize religious moral standards so unquestioningly that even when they engage in sex as a good and positive thing in practice, they nonetheless conceive of themselves as sinning.  Rather than encouraging young people to take a healthy, morally conscientious, but nonetheless experimental, approach to discovering and developing their sexual expression in later adolescence and early adulthood, and to think through what they learn from such experiences about how to have the healthiest and most ethical sex they can, the religious prefer them to either abstain altogether or at least view themselves as guilty “moral compromisers”.

Would that more people felt completely comfortable and guilt-free in their entirely consensual, other-respecting, physically safe sexual encounters.  Would that more people were morally intelligent enough to learn from their experiences of positive value in unnecessarily banned things to reject the prohibitions against those things rather than themselves for engaging with them.

Many experienced intellectual crises that seemed to conveniently coincide with the adoption of a lifestyle that fell outside the bounds of Christian morality.

This is honestly infuriating.  If you find that a value system is at odds with your own legitimate happiness and you are being an honest, rational person, you have every reason to doubt the legitimacy of the intellectual foundations of that flawed value system.  That’s what critically thinking, morally sensitive people do.  And even in cases where people are not changing their philosophical views to (justifiably) match their actual experiences of value, does Dyck ever consider that maybe genuine, intellectually abstract realizations can precede and motivate mature, intelligent, experimental changes in behaviors?

Dyck sees someone who claims an intellectual change of mind and assumes that he must have followed his loins to it rather than that an actual thought process may have come first, before his sexual behavior ever changed.  And Dyck also does not note the “convenient” coincidence that the freedom from their parents which young Americans experience in their early ’20s can coincidentally involve both freer thinking and freer behavioral experimentation without either causing the other to happen.  It is a period of general expansion of autonomy.  Young people are not staying mental children and only changing their views about the world because they are being mindlessly led around by their genitals.

And, finally, I want to turn the table on Dyck’s assumptions.  He never questions the legitimacy of the traditional behavior in which people return to church only when they get married and have children. He only laments that this previously reliable gravitational force may have less power over the present generation.  He never questions whether people’s return to faith after their period of youthful experimentation is as much a function of a convenient phase in which people (rationally unjustifiably) change their values to match their new behavior.

When it is actually beneficial in practice for people to reject fundamentalist Christian restrictiveness about sex, they leave the church.  When they are married and raising children, suddenly they endorse a system of values that conveniently allows that only married people can have sex and that their teenage and young adult children cannot.

Religious people of this sort are some of the worst and most blithe and uncondemned species of hypocrites out there.  They condemn the same healthy process of normal sexual development they personally benefited from while considering themselves especially devout and moral people for “repenting” of their ways when all they did was get married and find the church suddenly extremely convenient to their sexual goals of monogamy and their desire that their teenage and young adult children remain chaste.

As a young person, I suffered in my own psycho-sexual development under the repressive advice of such hypocrites (and of regular hypocrites too, like the youth leaders in my church who were sleeping together while teaching us about the importance of abstinence!).  And I admit I resent seeing people who were sexually active as teens now grown up, married, and hypocritically preaching unhealthy fundamentalist Christian values to impressionable, devoutly religious kids who are more conscientious than they ever were but who very well may not come out as emotionally well adjusted as they did, thanks to their warping influence.

To be fair to Dyck though, he does concede that it is not only sexual “compromise” that leads young Christians away from their beliefs.  He tries to address their intellectual journeys and the various cases of abuse at the hands of Christians that lead others away, next in his article.  In my next post on this topic, I will address his equally dismissive and shallow analysis of the young apostates’ explicitly intellectual journeys away from the faith.

In the meantime, Your Thoughts?