Happy Atheist?
Yes why not? One of the strangest stereotypes is that of a melancholy atheist. If someone doesn't believe in God, ipso fact he believes that life has no purpose. He sees darkness and emptiness everywhere, inside and outside. Love, family, friendship have no value whatsoever for him. He spends all of his time through the dark nights of his soul, totally immersed in himself, doing endless solitary introspection and painful self-analysis. He breaks his head (and occasionally even gives soul-stirring speeches and monologues like they do in Bergman's films and Dostoevsky's novels) over the mysteries of human suffering, spiritual emptiness and futility of salvation!
I guess this might be true for those fictional characters but not all of us atheists who live in the real world and go through the grind of daily life worry about "larger" implications of the absence of God. Perhaps we just don't have enough time to do it even if we want to! Anyway, a practical atheist (let's coin this new phrase) knows that it is not necessary to invoke God and religious scriptures, everytime we question the morality of decisions that we make. He knows that Ivan Karamazov's dictum that "if God is not there everything is permitted" is only of theoretical interest. He knows that concept of morality is a priori and doesn't need a set of commandments or some black magic to rest on.
A practical atheist also knows that nothing awaits us after death (just forget about Aftermath for a while!) and that's the precise reason why we should make most of what we have in this life, which is the only one we have got and use every opportunity to explore and know things and die more enlightened than we were born. Also, be as close to people, who you really love or who really care about you, as possible and cherish all the moments and memories when they are gone or else leave some memories of your own in case you depart first! Isn't the knowledge of the unpredictability of the life of your loved ones even a greater motivation to love them more when they are alive. And isn't the knowledge of one's own mortality the greatest motivation to live a more observant and meaningful life, open to all sensations, feelings and thoughts as they occur? You don't need to have read Proust to understand this but this is one of the most important themes of his great Book. It's the knowledge of an unpredictable and certain death that motivates some of our most noble instincts, specially our artistic ones. It certainly motivated Proust to write his novel and the last volume where the narrator realizes his true vocation in life after all the disappointments that life has thrown in his way, is one of most soul stirring episodes in the novel. Okay, Proustian digression. Back to atheism!
So, a practical atheist also knows that a belief in love and friendship does not require a belief in extra-temporal, extra-material things. I think it is here that the stereotype is the strongest. An atheist is generally considered a loser, a smug one at that, who is a loner because he can't find a girl friend or worse he lost faith because his girl dumped him, or some such stupid thing. People forget that love, friendship and the general feelings of human connection have nothing whatsoever to do with a belief in benevolent God. In fact, love and friendship for an atheist have deeper and more lasting value because he doesn't harbour any illusions about it. It is not an all-powerful God or some such cosmic force which brings us together but we ourselves, driven by our need to be with someone who understands us and who we understand that brings and keeps us together. Relationships based on this realistic understanding of mutual benefit invariably last longer and are always much more meaningful and productive.
Okay, did I leave anything, which an atheist should feel sad about? Of course, there are many things in this world to be sad about but the absence of God is certainly not one of them. And next time Mr. Karamazov makes his famous pronouncement ask him to drive in the wrong lane and park in the no-parking zone or just take him to the screening of Woody Allen's Love and Death!
4 comments:
interesting thesis, but a little trite, if not flawed. first of all, why must atheists always apologize for themselves? and while doing so, why must they always invoke a concept of god (extra-material, cosmic force, etc.) that many theists would also have trouble accepting? is it not possible to identify the divine as something within us, a state of existence, of total receptivity and composure, of unhindered love and kindness, and cannot spirituality be understood as a pursuit of this ideal? as a pursuit ultimately of self-mastery, and self-control, to which standard an imaginary god must be upheld if only as a marker of what is to be achieved through spiritual practice? moreover, just because human beings are mortal, it does not automatically follow that the purpose of life is to "make the most of what we have" and "die more enlightened than we were born". this sounds like a convenience (if not a desperate effort to buy some immortality after all). why should we be kind and gentle? why not drown ourselves in passion, in hedonism, in debauchery? what is that implicit judgement that requires us to rein in our destructive tendencies, and cultivate our creative ones? i submit that the very prescription you have laid out for a meaningful existence ultimately stems from the desirability of an abstraction (a moral standard if you will) not very dissimilar from a god concept. finally, why straightjacket yourself into this or that category? isnt atheism just a label? do you want to identify yourself with a label? yes, there are many interpretations of the god-concept. my contention is that one can put faith in some of them, and not in others. in other words, one can be an atheist and yet be profoundly moved to action by an understanding of the divine.
nice blog, by the way. i come here often, but was moved to comment for the first time by this post.
k.
Well, what about faith? Should an athiest place faith i the thought that he will be happy with his girlfriend or to any such thing which usually motivate us so that life will be better after 10 years.
Shouldn't an athiest be also hopeless.
Beyond our cognition, there is a void which we can only recognize, some its God, some agnostics don't care about it. Athiest say that this void is not God, but when he is rejecting one hypothesis, he has to put another. The inability to put forth another rides on his thought.
Woody Allen's practical Athiest is an oppurtunist agnostic.
The happiness lies in forgetting this void (agnostics don't find it worth enough and thiests undermine it by giving void a form, a doctorine)
K: I think I was making the same point although in a far more literal manner (here goes another stereotype -- atheists as philistine literalists!).
The source of love, kindness and other supposedly "divine" things is within us, within our human nature. And the way to live a purposeful, meaningful life is to nurture and use these resources inside us to counter the destructive instincts and urges. And the impulse to live a meaningful life is one of the primal urges that drives us and keeps us moving. If you want to give it a label of "divine", a quest for "immortality", I don't have any problem, but I would prefer something more concrete and unambiguous. I can even do without any such abstractions.
What I find disagreeable with this view of enlightened spirituality is the way people obfuscate these things and the way it leaves a lot of room for confusion. Why not be clear and direct? Why use metaphors and abstractions when we can do well with more literal concepts!
In any case if spiritualists can do without invoking a non-material, non-temporal and a benign cosmic force behind everything that is noble, I have absolutely no problem with them.
Qais: I would say, it is not a very wise thing to see hope for some happiness in future time as the sole motivator to live you life with.
Why not the feeling that "we will die more enlightened than we were born" be enough of a motivation and why can't this quest for knowledge be an end in itself?
And as for matters related to love (!), as I pointed out in the post, an atheist is more likely to be contented in a relationship than someone who just prays and hopes that he/she will be happy, precisely because he/she has chosen to live without any illusions.
There is indeed a void awaiting all of us but as I said in the post, it should paradoxically motivate us to live a more meaningful life.
And I invoked woody allen because he satirizes the atheist stereotypes very well. An atheist who has a girlfriend (like those woody allen chracters) is not a hypocrite or an opportunist. that was the whole point of the post ;)
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