Having gone to high school as a devout Evangelical Christian in a public high school on Long Island, this video is somewhat surreal to me.  A world where everybody prays and atheists are shunned and harrassed?  I would never have believed it in high school.  But the truth is that both committed religious people and convinced atheists share something in common—the majority in the middle has little use or sympathy for (and not to mention a lot of suspicion of) such adamant thinking and has a tendency to alienate those of us on both extremes of the spectrum as much as we alienate each other.

So—I am eager to see more people accept their atheism as a good thing.  I want vigorously to challenge the stranglehold that deference to the supposedly unquestionable goodness of “faith” has on public discourse.  I am appalled by so many theocrats in our country trying to institutionalize Christianity wherever they can worm it in.  I am extremely worried about the growth of theocratic influence in Europe with the growth of non-secular Islam within its borders.   I completely support and hope for increased public (and private) secularization.  I am bitter about some of the deleterious effects on my life that came from irrational and manipulative religious influence during my first 21 years of life.  I am upset about the closing of kids’ minds through religious training.  And sometimes it gets lonely not knowing too many outright atheists.

But despite all of this, I simply cannot bemoan my “minority” status as a terrible burden.

In the final analysis, I’m passionate about advancing secularism in public (through public policy) and secularism in private (through private persuasion) but I don’t think that these goals require overblowing the real but relatively minor affronts to atheist freedoms in the country.

We may be marginalized and they may try to vilify us when we dissent to the general consensus that faith must be ever genuflected to as an inherently good thing (even as dogmatic religion is widely denounced)—but these are not the sorts of slights to try and claim oppressed minority status for. Not in a place as free as North America anyway, or at least in not in my own experience. But I live in the Northeast, so maybe I underestimate what harsher pressures may exist elsewhere.

Aside from the occasional jackass remark like George Bush claiming atheists can’t be real American citizens, I don’t feel terribly persecuted. I study and teach at a remarkable Jesuit university which not once in 9 years has made a single gesture, either through its administration or its faculty or student body to make me feel unwelcome to speak my mind freely.  Really, nowhere in my life have I been treated unnecessarily rudely for holding unpopular atheistic opinions.

I was teased pretty unsympathetically as an Evangelical in a secular high school on Long Island, but since then I have enjoyed the benefits of living in a free, Western secularized country and would feel like a thin-skinned ingrate to complain of mistreatment based on my particular experience.  That’s of course not to judge other people’s interpretations of their experiences, about which I know next to nothing.  I feel quite bad for the girl in this video because her sense of ostracization and rejection is palpably painful.  And maybe the midwest is as hard on atheists as Long Island was on an Evangelical.

What I think, in the final analysis, is that as Americans we are eclectic enough in ethnicity and philosophy that probably every one of us is only a 10-25% minority of the population in some way.  Maybe you’re a vegetarian or chronically ill or Jewish or black or gay or Mormon or old or autistic or atheistic or celibate or Islamic or a feminist activist or a socially maladroit genius or a pro-life activist or physically challenged or painfully shy or foreign born or a victim of sexual abuse or a convict or a devoted fundamentalist Evangelical Christian or a Vanilla Ice fan or maybe you’re the son of a Kenyon goat herder-cum-economist and a woman from Kansas and you are the first African American president in the history of the United States of America.

No matter who you are, my guess it that it’s more likely than not that there’s something about your life history, your identity, your life choices, your ethnicity,  or your beliefs that makes you feel acutely conscious that you’re not that Average American we hear so much about in the media and from politicians.  And that there are social assumptions and expectations that chafe at you and make you feel alienated, torn between who you are and what the society you belong to is.  This is the rub of multiculturalism.  It would theoretically be a whole lot easier, but far less rich, if we were all religiously, racially, morally and philosophically homogeneous.  Being fundamentally different in identity or life experience in any way can tear at your sense of belonging and make the 90% you share with your neighbor seem not as important as the 10% that separates you from her.

But as for me, despite being committed to the cause of secularism and of raising consciousness among atheists—when it comes to the larger society, I try to focus on the 90% I have in common and to remember how alienating it is to feel like  a 10% when it comes to relating to other people’s 10% experience rather than worry about complaining about my own.

Okay, having had my Kumbaya moment, here’s my favorite anti-religious screed propaganda from my favorite youtube vlogger

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1ImMtHrrKo&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&color1=0xe1600f&color2=0xfebd01]

Your Thoughts?

Questions of the most legitimate sources of value and normativity are not simple ones to answer.  No truth worth knowing is easy to find but takes a lot of research and vigorous independent thought.

But, what I can say fairly easily is the following:
(1) to behave according to moral codes out of fear of punishment is simply not to be motivated by a sense of duty or from a sense of commitment to something taken to be of intrinsic value, so anyone who associates being good with “obeying God for fear of the consequences of disobedience” is either morally corrupt or ethically infantalized in my view.

(2) if morality did come from God’s arbitrary commands (which is the tacit position I think assumed in your question) then I don’t see why it would be “normative” upon us unless you also hold the view that “might makes right.”  If God’s commands must be followed simply because he is more powerful over us and has control over our fate, then his supposed moral authority is only an extension of his greater power over us. If his power gives him such moral authority then it must be that might makes right.  The notion that the universe is one great tyranny in which we must all submit to the arbitrary decrees of a powerful being on pain of eternal punishment is a monstrous notion that I’m glad is quite likely utterly false.

(3) While I think that metaethics and abstract normative theory are inherently vital, urgent, and fascinating topics (engrossing enough to commit the bulk of my research and teaching to investigating them), I do not think that everyone without a full-blooded ethical theory is just at a loss for ethical insight or direction.  While I would argue for a particular conception of ethics and think that abstract investigation of ethics should in many ways help us revise and improve our everyday conception of the moral life—-I also think that people are sufficiently morally equipped to get by just fine without a grand theory worked out about what they are doing.

When I was still a devout Christian, a year before I left the faith, a close Christian friend, wracked with doubts, told me that he figured if there was no God then he could imagine just waking up one day and not moving.  His mother would come in and ask him to get up but he just wouldn’t.  There would be no purpose to anything.

And my reply to him even then, as a believer trying to persuade him to stay in the faith, was that even were I to be convinced there was no God I would still love what I love, love whom I love, and be passionate about the causes in which I believe.  Good food would taste no less sumptuous, laughter would feel no less joyous and/or cathartic, friendship could be no less deep.

Unlike those who think there is no value apart from God, I am not a nihilist.  I never was—neither as a Christian nor as an atheist.  I do not need an external authority to tell me to value or not to value that in which I already find intrinsic and indisputable goodness.

I passionately pursue the questions of what makes the good good and I am eager to figure out the mistakes in our value judgments and to figure out how best to conceptualize and implement the best lives possible for us.  But never, ever do I feel love and affection for another human being and think, “Oh no, this must be empty since there’s no God.”  Never do I feel the rush of satisfaction when I’ve succeeded at a difficult task and yet lament that it is all in vain since there is no God.  And never have I felt the pull of my conscience when I have done something that violated a principle I seriously hold, only to shrug it off because I’m not going to go to hell over it.

And I really don’t understand the psychology of anyone who could feel those things in the throes of those emotions.

Your Thoughts?

For my reply to a comment on this post which came to me from an old friend, see Is God Necessary For Us To Care About Starving Kids A World Away?