This diary is about something that I think is often misunderstood during discussions of atheism versus theism.
I have been an atheist all my life. I was probably about seven when I realized that I simply couldn't accept what I was told in Sunday School about gods, angels, and demigods. For many years of my childhood I actually thought that adults who professed beliefs in God, Heaven, Jesus, and angels where pretending, just like they did with things like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It was a shock to me when, as a young adult, I finally understood that I was in a minority, that most people I knew actually believed in those things.
However, that's not what this is about.
The fact is, I kept going to Sunday School and church for many years. In our family, it wasn't a choice. My father was an officer in the Marines, and even though he was not a religious man, he insisted that our family attend and be actively involved in the services at the current base where we were stationed.
Continued below.
I didn't object to most of what we talked about in Sunday School, or most of the content of sermons and even hymns. Remember, I was basically viewing all of this, through my childish eyes, as a kind of performance or morality play: the goal was to impart ideas about how to live a good life and how to benefit our fellow beings, expressed through the metaphors of God and Jesus and earthly or heavenly rewards and punishments.
I saw nothing strange or upsetting about this because I saw the same thing happening in every book I read and every movie or TV show that I watched. I didn't believe that what I saw in cowboy movies was actually true, and they delivered the same kind of moral and ethical messages as in church about helping others, making sacrifices, and hewing to an ethical code that valued those things and rejected greed and selfishness and all kinds of self-centered conduct.
When I finally did realize that some people not only believed in gods and the supernatural, but that they believed that that belief was necessary in order to live an ethical life, I drifted. I engaged in arguments trying to “prove” that belief in gods wasn't necessary and that it was in fact untenable if one valued coherency and logical consistency, but never once “won” one of those arguments. I made snide remarks, I tried joining groups such as the Unitarian Universalist Church that claimed to be a kind of middle ground where belief wasn't important, and I tried isolating myself from all discussions of religion. None of those things were truly satisfactory until I stumbled over something rather interesting on line.
Now, I'd heard the term “secular humanism” many times, always as an insult of atheists or agnostics by people on the religious right. But I'd never really understood what that term meant. It comes from a movement in the early part of the 20th Century to create a secular replacement for religion based on humanism. The idea was that there were good things in religious practice, things that satisfied or explained basic human needs and experiences, and that the value of those things was not increased by belief in the supernatural. Things like spirituality and prayer can be expressed secularly by visualizing the positive and by meditation. Even ritualized prayers can have value when incorporated into one's daily schedule in that manner, because the familiarity of ritual has long been established as providing comfort to us humans.
Loving one's fellow man is something that is often expressed by Christians, and that is in fact the key thought of this diary, but how do we go about it, and why should we? In Christianity, it is a teaching of Jesus, but in a secular context, it is at the core of the humanist outlook. One can indeed love all of humanity, even those who hate you or hurt you, not because a demigod has commanded it, but because if one engages in rational analysis of what it means to be human and have human emotions, one sees that even hatred is part of the human condition, along not only with the capacity for good, but with the full responsibility for the past, present, and future of humanity. If we can truly visualize ourselves and those whom we love individually as part of one vast mosaic, from the earliest hominids with glimmerings of human consciousness, to our descendants into the uncharted future, then I believe that our love will just naturally spread through all those linkages until it touches everyone. If we think not just of the victims of Naziism, for example, but of all of the perturbations within the human lattice that created the victimizers, how they fit together and become inevitable, how they saw themselves and their works, and if we then see ourselves and our loved ones in the same light as fellow human beings, then we can and must love them just as we love ourselves.
And that brings us to the concept of faith. Faith is always abstract, but it does not always involve the supernatural. I believe that the only way to have a successful secular humanism that is based on rational thought with an empirical basis, is for us all to have faith in humanity. It is only this faith that can engender true, unconditional love of one's fellow human beings, warts and all, and it is only that unconditional love that can bring us peace on earth and allow us to maximize our collective and individual potential as a species and as human beings.
In other words, I am a secular humanist, an atheist with faith in and love of humanity, and that faith is just as abstract as a theist's faith in and love of a god, with the difference that it is not founded on the supernatural, but rather on something very natural: human beings and their works and their potential. And regardless of why one attempts it, it is very difficult to love, for example, a W Bush or even an Adolf Hitler as a human being who has done both good and bad things and that is an essential link in the web of humanity of which we all are a part. Yet, I think we would be much better off if we emphasized humanistic faith and love and all shared it as a goal. I really do.
I know that not all atheists share this faith that I have, but I think that in many cases it is because they've not considered it fully. I think that it follows logically once one considers what is know of human history, human psychology, and of one's own personal experiences of humanity. But of course, as a human being, I may very well be wrong.
Happy New Year
Greg Shenaut