{"id":3475,"date":"2017-11-08T00:24:32","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T21:24:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/?p=3475"},"modified":"2017-11-08T00:24:32","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T21:24:32","slug":"opiate-of-the-morally-corrupt-why-unbelief-is-so-appealing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/3475\/opiate-of-the-morally-corrupt-why-unbelief-is-so-appealing\/","title":{"rendered":"Opiate Of The Morally Corrupt: Why Unbelief Is So Appealing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents<\/a><\/p>\n

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity<\/a>, at Amazon<\/p>\n

“It is wonderful not to have to cower before a vengeful deity, who threatens us with eternal damnation if we do not abide by his rules.” <\/em>\u2014Karen Armstrong, A History of God<\/em><\/p>\n

I<\/strong>N THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER <\/strong>we have seen how secular morality, while marching behind the banner of autonomy and self-fulfillment, can provide a cover for selfish and irresponsible behavior. Now it’s time to ask a deeper question: is unbelief itself driven by similar motives? To listen to prominent atheists, you get the idea that their sole cause for rejecting God is that He does not meet the requirements of reason. Philosopher Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if he discovered, after death, that there is an afterlife. Russell pompously said he would tell God, “Sir, you did not give me enough evidence.” I have throughout this book taken the rational objections of Russell and others seriously, but it should be obvious by now that atheism is far fr o m t he only reasonable alt ern ative. Unbelief, especially when it comes in the belligerent tone of a Russell, Dawkins, or Hitchens, is not merely a function of following the evidence where it leads. Rather, unbelief of this sort requires a fuller psychological explanation.<\/p>\n

Let’s remember that atheists frequently attempt to give psychological reasons for the religious commitment of believers. In his commentary on the works of Hegel, Karl Marx famously said that religion is the “opium of the people,” meaning that religion is a kind of escapism or mode of wish fulfillment. In Marx’s view, people imbibe religion as a drug, to numb themselves to the pain and grief around them and to give themselves the illusion that the injustices of this world will be corrected in the next one. Sigmund Freud saw religion as providing a cowardly refuge from the harsh realities of life and theinevitability of death. We console ourselves by thinking that there is another world insulated from the hardship, injustice, and confusion of this one. As French atheist Michel Onfray recently put it, “God is a fiction invented by men so as not to confront the reality of their condition.” Another explanation for the popularity of religion, recently expressed by James Haught in Free Inquiry, <\/em>is in terms of the wish fulfillment of its self-serving leaders. In this view, which seems quite popular today, religion persists because “churches and holy men reap earnings and exalted status from the supernaturalism they administer to their followers.”<\/p>\n

I’m not convinced by any of these explanations. I agree that there are priests and mullahs who are self-aggrandizing salesmen, but why do people go along with their schemes? Yes, there is an element of wish fulfillment in religion, but not of the kind that the atheists presume. Theologian R. C. Sproul makes a telling point: why would the disciples invent a God “whose holiness was more terrifying than the forces of nature that provoked them to invent a God in the first place?” The God of the three Abrahamic religions\u2014Judaism, Christianity, and Islam\u2014is a pretty exacting fellow, demanding of us purity rather than indulgence, virtue rather than convenience, charity rather than self- gratification. There are serious penalties attached to ultimate failure: for the religious believer, death is a scary thing, but eternal damnation is scarier. So wish fulfillment would most likely give rise to a very different God than the one described in the Bible. Wish fulfillment can explain heaven, but it cannot explain hell. Even so, my purpose here is not to dispute the atheist explanation for the appeal of religion. I intend to turn things around and instead pose the issue of the appeal of atheism. Who benefits from it? Why do so many influential people in the West today find it attractive? If Christianity is so great, why aren’t more people rushing to embrace it?
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\nSome atheists even acknowledge that they would prefer a universe in which there were no God, no immortal soul, and no afterlife. Nietzsche writes that “if one were to prove this God of the Christians to us, we should be even less able to believe in him.” On the possibility of life after death, H. L. Mencken wrote, “My private inclination is to hope that it is not so.” In God: The Failed Hypothesis, <\/em>physicist Victor Stenger confesses that not only does he disbelieve in God, he doesn’t like the Christian God: “If he does exist, I personally want nothing to do with him.” And philosopher Thomas Nagel recently confessed to a “fear of religion itself.” As he put it, “I want atheism to be true…. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God…. I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.”<\/p>\n

The aversion to religion and the embrace of atheism becomes especially baffling when you consider that, on the face of it, atheism is a dismal ideology. Many atheists like to portray themselves as noble figures venturing into the cold night, raging against the dying of the light, and facing the pointlessness of it all. This strikes me as a bit of a pose, and an inauthentic and slightly comic one at that. As Michael Novak observes, if there is no God, what is there to rage at? Is it brave to spit in the face of a volcano or a tidal wave? Natural forces are neither good nor evil; they just are. So where does heroism come in if atheists are merely taking the world as it is?”<\/p>\n

Other atheist writers\u2014and I would place Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins in this camp\u2014seem serene and almost gleeful about living in a world whose defining feature seems to be nature red in tooth and claw. This is an odd reaction, because as a number of evolutionary biologists, like George Williams, have admitted, Darwinism would seem to be a repulsive doctrine. Williams expresses open disgust at the ethical implications of asystem that assigns no higher purpose to life than selfish bargains and conspiracies to propagate one’s genes into future generations. According to Williams, a moral person can respond to this only with condemnation, yet Dawkins and others embrace Darwinism without ambivalence and indeed with genuine enthusiasm. Why are they drawn to such a philosophy and where, in its grim hallways, do they find room for such evident good cheer?<\/p>\n

Biologist Stephen Jay Gould provides a clue. Pondering the meaning of life, Gould concludes that “we may yearn for a higher answer\u2014 but none exists.” Then he says something very revealing. “This explanation, though superficially troubling if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating.” In other words, the bad news is good news. Doctrines that might ordinarily seem to be horrifying\u2014 death is the end, there is no cosmic purpose or divine justice, free will is an illusion\u2014can from another vantage point be viewed as emancipating.<\/p>\n

Emancipation from what? To listen to some atheists, they want to free themselves from the shackles of religion in order to practice virtue. “In a world where God is no longer present,” Santiago Zabala writes in The Future of Religion, <\/em>man is now free “to actively practice solidarity, charity, and irony.” What admirable motives! The only problem is that you don’t have to get rid of religion to be charitable in the name of human brotherhood. As Francis of Assisi or Mother Teresa could have told Zabala, charity and human kinship are two of Christianity’s central themes.
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\nIt is time to look more honestly and critically at the real motives behind modern atheism. These are often different and more interesting than the surface motives usually given by or ascribed to atheist figures. It is widely believed, for example, that Darwin lost his faith when he discovered that natural selection, not God, was responsible for the evolution of life forms. But Darwin himself says he lost his faith because he could not endure the Christian notion of eternal damnation. We also learn from his writings that Darwin suffered terribly from the loss of his ten-year-old daughter, Annie. One gets the powerful sense that he could not forgive God. Atheism, in some cases, is a form of revenge.<\/p>\n

These are powerful motives for unbelief, but they are not the main motive. We have to probe deeper, and one way to do it is to go back in history, all the way back to the ancient philosophers Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius. My account of this is indebted to Ben Wiker’s marvelous book Moral Darwinism.” <\/em>Epicurus is mainly known today as a hedonist, and he was. But like Lucretius and Democritus, he was also a materialist. All three of these pre-Socratic thinkers believed that material reality is all there is. Lucretius and Democritus even suggested that man is made up wholly-of atoms, an uncanny foreshadowing of modern physics. At the time that the pre-Socratics wrote, however, there was no scientific evidence to back up any of their mechanistic claims about the natural world. Why then were they so attracted to teachings that were completely without empirical basis?<\/p>\n

Epicurus confesses that his goal is to get rid of the gods. He also wants to eliminate the idea of immortal souls and to “remove the longing for immortality.” Lucretius too writes of the heavy yoke of religion, imposing on man such burdens as duty and responsibility. The problem with gods, Epicurus says, is that they seek to enforce their rules and thereby create “anxiety” in human beings. They threaten to punish us for our misdeeds, both in this life and in the next. The problem with immortality, according to Epicurus, is that there may be suffering in the afterlife. By positing a purely material reality, he hopes to free man fromsuch worries and allow him to focus on the pleasures of this life.<\/p>\n

Not that Epicurus was a hedonist in our modern sense. He counseled that people control their sexual impulses and subsist on barley cakes and water. He was less concerned with wild pleasure than with minimizing suffering, what he termed “freedom from disturbance:’ Even death, he said, is a kind of relief, because our atoms dissipate and there is no soul to experience the lack of life or to endure the consequences of a life to come. In sum, Epicurus advocated a philosophy and a cosmology that was purely naturalistic in order to liberate man from the tyranny of the gods. And so did Lucretius, who sought through his philosophy to “unloose the soul from the tight knot of religion.” For these men, their physics was the ground of their ethics. As Wiker puts it, “a materialist cosmos must necessarily yield a materialistic morality.”<\/p>\n

Here is a clue to the moral attractiveness of Darwinism. Darwin himself wrote that “he who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke.” He was implying that a better understanding of our animal nature might radically change the way we view morality. So the appeal of Darwinism for many is that it eliminates the concept of a “higher” human nature and places man on a continuum with the animals. The distinctive feature of animals, of course, is that they have no developed sense of morality. A gorilla cannot be expected to distinguish between what is and what ought to be. Consequently Darwinism becomes a way to break free of the confines of traditional morality. We can set aside the old restraints and simply act in the way that comes naturally.
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\nFrom Darwin’s own day, many people were drawn to his ideas not merely because they were well supported but also because they could be interpreted to undermine the traditional understanding of God. As biologist Julian Huxley, the grandson of Darwin’s friend and ally Thomas Henry Huxley, put it, “The sense of spiritual relief which comes from rejecting the idea of God as a supernatural being is enormous.” And from Julian’s brother Aldous Huxley, also a noted atheist, we have this revealing admission: “I had motives for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently I assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption…. For myself, as no doubt for most of my contemporaries, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation. The liberation we desired was … liberation from a certain system of morality. We objected to the morality because it interfered with our sexual freedom.”<\/p>\n

As the statements of the two Huxleys suggest, the reason many atheists are drawn to deny God, and especially the Christian God, is to avoid having to answer in the next life for their lack of moral restraint in this one. They know that Christianity places human action under the shadow of divine scrutiny and accountability. Paul writes in his letter to the Romans 2:6-8, “For he will render to every man according to his works: to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; but to those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury.” We read in the book of Revelation 21:8: As for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death:’ The implication of these passages\u2014and there are many more like them\u2014is that death does not bring extinction but accountability.<\/p>\n

Here I must pause to note a feature of Christianity that has not escaped the attention ofmost atheists. Christianity is a religion of love and forgiveness, but this love and forgiveness are temporal and, in a sense, conditional. Christian forgiveness stops at the gates of hell, and hell is an essential part of the Christian scheme. While the term gospels <\/em>means “good news” these books also contain warning messages to prepare us for ultimate judgment. This is a reckoning that scripture says many people are extremely eager to avoid. As John 3:20 puts it, “everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.” The point here is not that atheists do more evil than others, but rather that atheism provides a hiding place for those who do not want to acknowledge and repent of their sins.<\/p>\n

In a powerful essay, “The Discreet Charm of Nihilism,” Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz argues that in order to escape from an eternal fate in which our sins are punished, man seeks to free himself from religion. “A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death\u2014the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders, we are not going to be judged.” So the Marxist doctrine needs to be revised. It is not religion that is the opiate of the people, but atheism that is the opiate of the morally corrupt.
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\nIf you want to live a degenerate life, God is your mortal enemy. He represents a lethal danger to your selfishness, greed, lechery, and hatred. It is in your interest to despise Him and do whatever you can to rid the universe of His presence. So there are powerful attractions to life in a God-free world. In such a world we can model our lives on one of the junior devils in Milton’s Paradise Lost, <\/em>Belial, who was “to vice industrious, but to nobler deeds timorous and slothful.” If God does not exist, the seven deadly sins are not terrors to be overcome but temptations to be enjoyed. Death, previously the justification for morality, now becomes a justification for immorality.<\/p>\n

The philosopher who best understood this “liberation” was Nietzsche. Contrary to modern atheists, who assure us that the death of God need not mean an end to morality, Nietzsche insisted that it did. As God is the source of the moral law, His death means that the ground has been swept out from under us. We have become, in a sense, ethically groundless, and there is no more refuge to be taken in appeals to dignity and equality and compassion and all the rest. What confronts us, if we are honest, is the abyss.<\/p>\n

Yet unlike Matthew Arnold, who saw the faith of the age retreating like an ocean current and was terrified by it, Nietzsche in a sense welcomes the abyss. He is, as he puts it, an “immoralist.” In his view, the abyss enables us for the first time to escape guilt. It vanquishes the dragon of obligation. It enables us to live “beyond good and evil.” Morality is no longer given to us from above; it now becomes something that we devise for ourselves. Morality requires a comprehensive remaking, what Nietzsche terms a “transvaluation.” The old codes of “thou shalt not” are now replaced by “I will.”<\/p>\n

Therefore, in Nietzsche’s scheme it is not strictly accurate to say that God has died. Rather, man has killed God in order to win for himself the freedom to make his own morality. And the morality that Nietzsche celebrates is the morality of striving and self-assertion, “the deification of passion,” “splendid animality,” or in Nietzsche’s famous phrase, “the will to power.” Any goal, even one that imposes massive hardship or suffering on the human race, is legitimate if we pursue it with energy, resolution, and commitment.<\/p>\n

There is a recklessness and savagery in Nietzsche’s rhetoric that thrills the heart of many modern atheists. We see it in the French existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, who used Nietzsche as their foundation for a philosophy based on moral freedom. I also hear aNietzschean strain in Christopher Hitchens when he protests against the moral supervision of God, whom he portrays as a jealous tyrant. But most contemporary atheists\u2014Hitchens included\u2014aren’t willing to go as far as Nietzsche does in reviling the traditional norms of pity and Christian charity. Their rebellion is more confined. It is, one may say, a pelvic revolt against God.<\/p>\n

It is chiefly because of sex that most contemporary atheists have chosen to break with Christianity. “The worst feature of the Christian religion.” Bertrand Russell wrote in Why I Am Not a Christian, <\/em>“is its attitude toward sex.” Hitchens writes that “the divorce between the sexual life and fear… can now at last be attempted on the sole condition that we banish all religions from the discourse.”25 When an atheist gives elaborate justifications for why God does not exist and why traditional morality is an illusion, he is very likely thinking of his sex organs. It may well be that if it weren’t for that single commandment against adultery, Western man would still be Christian!
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\nMalcolm Muggeridge, the noted commentator and convert to Catholicism, pointed out that eroticism is the mysticism of materialism. Oddly enough, this doctrine is set forth most clearly in the work of that apostle of sexual deviancy, the Marquis de Sade. His Dialogue Between a Priest and a Dying Man <\/em>features the dying man’s confession that abandoning a belief in God is the first step to unleashing the genitals and enjoying life. In Philosophy in the Bedroom, <\/em>de Sade features a fifteen-year-old nun who has shed her faith in God and discovered in its place the delights of incest, sodomy, and sexual flagellation.<\/p>\n

Most modern atheists find de Sade as excessive as Nietzsche, and they confine themselves to promiscuity, adultery, and other forms of illicit sex. I am not objecting to their passions here. These are completely understandable to every religious believer. Recall the newly converted Augustine, praying to God to make him chaste, “but not yet.” Augustine would not find it puzzling or mysterious that a whole generation of young people today rebel against Christianity because of its teachings on premarital sex, contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and divorce.<\/p>\n

The orgasm has become today’s secular sacrament. This is not because we are living in an age of sensuality but because, in a world of material things that perish, it gives people a momentary taste of eternity. In this context I cannot resist a personal story. I once met a monk who admitted to me that he fasts regularly and sometimes even beats his legs with a small whip to “mortify my body for the love of Christ.” I was quite shocked to hear this, but the fellow had an interesting response. The same people who laugh at monks for mortifying their bodies for spiritual purposes think nothing of undergoing painful surgeries to produce cosmetic improvements. Nor do they shrink from the most punishing physical regimens in order to lose weight and tone their bodies for sex.<\/p>\n

If sex is unhooked from the old moral restraints, there are going to be unwanted pregnancies. Here we get to atheism’s second sacrament, which is abortion. The real horror of abortion is not that a woman kills an unborn child but that a woman kills her own unborn child. The guilt in doing this, for all morally healthy persons, can only be tremen- dous. So it is necessary for atheism to pave the way for abortion with a clear conscience. The first step is to get rid of God, because then there is no spirit of the dead child to disturb the conscience, no hell to pay for violating the commandment against the deliberate taking of life. The second step is to define the fetus as not really human. As Sam Harris puts it in The End of Faith, <\/em>“Many of us consider human fetuses in the first trimester to be more or less like rabbits” who do not deserve “full status in our moral community.”Bioethicist Peter Singer invokes Darwinism to make the point that there is a continuum, not a clear separation, between humans and animals. Therefore animals should be given some of the rights that are now given only to humans. Singer also argues that humans should be denied some of the protections they now have on the grounds that they are not fundamentally different from animals. If man is the product of evolution rather than special creation, Singer contends, then the whole structure of Judeo-Christian morality has been discredited. Indeed we cannot continue to speak in hushed tones about the sanctity of life. Therefore abortion, euthanasia, and infanticide all become permissible and in some situations even desirable. In Singer’s work we see echoes of both Darwin and Nietzsche; indeed, Darwin becomes the weapon with which to strike down Christian belief and clear the ground for Nietzschean immoralism.
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\nIn a now famous article in the New York Times, <\/em>Steven Pinker invoked the logic of evolution to explain why it’s really not such a big deal for mothers to kill their newborn children, even after they are out of the womb. Pinker’s article was written in the wake of some disturbing news reports, including one about a teenage girl who gave birth to a baby at a school dance and then dumped the newborn in the trash. Pinker sought to reassure the American public, noting that “a capacity for neonaticide is built into the biological design of our parental emotions,” thus encouraging parents, if a “newborn is sickly or if its survival is not promising,” to “cut their losses and favor the healthiest in the litter or try again later on.” Pinker added that many cultural practices are “designed to distance people’s emotions from a newborn” precisely so that the child may be killed without too many qualms. “The problem with Homo sapiens <\/em>may not be that we have too little morality,” Pinker writes in The Blank Slate. <\/em>“The problem may be that we have too much.”<\/p>\n

Pinker is right that abortion and infanticide are quite common in world history. The reason that they have been forbidden for centuries in the West is because Western values were shaped by Christianity. Ben Wiker makes the point that “the laws against abortion and infanticide in the West are only intelligible as a result of its Christianization, and the repeal of those same laws is only intelligible in light of its de-Christianization.” If America were a purely secular society, there would be no moral debate about child killing. So one reason that Pinker and so many others attack Christianity so bitterly is precisely to remove its moral influence and make society hospitable for abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.<\/p>\n

It may seem strange to see all this callousness toward human life in a society whose primary social value is compassion. But the paradox is resolved when you see that it is precisely because we are so awful in our private lives that we need to pretend to be virtuous in our public lives. People who do things that are morally disgusting, like cheating on their spouses and killing their offspring, cannot escape the pang of conscience. Thus it is of the highest importance to deflect that conscience, not only to give other people the impression that we are kind and wonderful, but also to convince ourselves of the same. For the person who has just slept with his business associate, it is morally imperative that he make a sizable contribution to the United Way.<\/p>\n

My conclusion is that contrary to popular belief, atheism is not primarily an intellectual revolt, it is a moral revolt. Atheists don’t find God invisible so much as objectionable. They aren’t adjusting their desires to the truth, but rather the truth to fit their desires. This is something we can all identify with. It is a temptation even for believers. We want to be saved as long as we are not saved from our sins. We are quite willing to be saved from awhole host of social evils, from poverty to disease to war. But we want to leave untouched the personal evils, such as selfishness and lechery and pride. We need spiritual healing, but we do not want it. Like a supervisory parent, God gets in our way. This is the perennial appeal of atheism: it gets rid of the stern fellow with the long beard and liberates us for the pleasures of sin and depravity. The atheist seeks to get rid of moral judgment by getting rid ofthe judge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon “It is wonderful not to have to cower before a vengeful deity, who threatens us with eternal damnation if we do not abide by his rules.” \u2014Karen Armstrong, A History of God IN THE PREVIOUS […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6702,6707],"tags":[7449,7284,7498,7499,7500,7501,5665,7502,7496,3658,7503,7504,7505],"class_list":["post-3475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thechrist","category-studies-thechristcontents","tag-bertrand-russell","tag-dinesh-d-souza","tag-escapism","tag-eternal-damnation","tag-irresponsible-behavior","tag-karen-armstrong","tag-karl-marx","tag-religious-commitment","tag-secular-morality","tag-self-fulfillment","tag-sigmund-freud","tag-vengeful-deity","tag-wish-fulfillment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}