Nov 25 2007
It’s the soul, stupid
There’s a depressing, though in a way amusing, piece in this week’s Time called, “Sunday School for Atheists.” No, that’s not a typo. The gist of the piece is pretty well summed up in this passage:
But some nonbelievers are beginning to think they might need something for their children. “When you have kids,” says Julie Willey, a design engineer, “you start to notice that your co-workers or friends have church groups to help teach their kids values and to be able to lean on.” So every week, Willey, who was raised Buddhist and says she has never believed in God, and her husband pack their four kids into their blue minivan and head to the Humanist Community Center in Palo Alto, Calif., for atheist Sunday school.
Of course, it seems not to have occurred to these people that structure and content might be related here. People don’t just go to Church to socialize or spend time with supportive friends. It’s not about some abstract “values” education – this is the worship of God and study of Christian morals. There are certainly a plenitude of accidental values to attending church – the community, friends, moral support, et al – but it is essential acknowledge the context all those things take place in, as it is this context which makes those accidental properties so potent. The context is the loving community of Christ.
Now, as a conservative, I am of course happy to see that others are recognizing the value of community qua community. But there is danger in thinking one can siphon off certain aspects of community and still achieve the same result – especially when trying to mimic the benefits of religious community.
But more important than all of this, what the article really serves to remind us is that man is a spiritual animal. I often find it kind of funny when I hear things like this, attempts by secularists to basically turn atheism into a religion. But then I realize it’s not funny, it’s tragic. And it’s ironic. People adamantly and vehemently assert the non-existence of God and oppose all the religiosity of God-fearing believers. They assert the absurdity of Faith, try to find holes in theology they don’t understand, and point to hypocrisy by believers and evil in the world as evidence that God couldn’t exist. And then they go and make a church of their own; they crave the psychological comfort.
I’m not going to lie and claim that part of the comfort afforded in Christian communities is psychological. Sure it is. And that doesn’t lessen it’s authenticity; we are human, after all. God designed us and God knows how to speak and care for us. I do believe, however, that there is more to the soul than the psyche, that nothing can replace God’s Grace. Hence my view that this atheistic religiosity is tragic; it is but a hollow shell of what these types of communities are supposed to be.
(CC) 2010
When you write “But there is danger in thinking one can siphon off certain aspects of community and still achieve the same result – especially when trying to mimic the benefits of religious community,” do you mean to suggest that any religion can have such benefits, or do you mean to restrict it to Christianity (and perhaps Judaism)?
It seems to me that other religions clearly have communities with the same social benefits and same self-ascriptions of worship and spiritual value. Yet clearly not all religions are true, which means that either some of the participants are self-deceived or that the benefits do not require the religion to be true. I think the latter is better supported by the evidence.
Since I happen to think that there is no true religion, I don’t see the problem with what these humanists are trying to do. I’ve recently attended memorial services of deeply religious evangelical Christians, of a liberal universalist Christian, and of an atheist, and they each evoked the same emotions and sense of community and fellowship with the people at the services; in my case, I felt a deeper fellowship and companionship with those at the atheist service since those are like-minded people. The emotions were the same–a combination of grief at the departure yet happiness at the memories of the departed’s life–yet there was no self-deception about seeing the departed again in the future.
BTW, it is somewhat ironic for a member of such a syncretistic religion as Christianity to criticize an atheist group for “trying to mimic” a religious practice. Virtually every component of the Christian religion was appropriated from other religions, and that’s not even counting holiday celebrations. The most rapidly growing religious sect in the world today, Pentecostalism (from 0 to 400 million members in about a century), is also quite syncretistic, appropriating components of local religions everywhere it spreads.
Thanks for the comment, though I’m going to avoid the trap you layed of trying to address the truth of differing religions. The salient and animating difference between religious churches and atheist ‘churches’ is, simply put, a belief in God. As I openly noted above, I encourage the strengthening of communities in general and freely acknowledge that the humanist organizations mentioned in the article will achieve *some* of the benefits found in religious churches. However, when it comes to actually teaching morals and “values,” those taught in a secularist setting ultimately ring hollow.
As for being a syncretistic religion, I’m not sure how this weakens my argument. The irony I was pointing to is when atheists denounce organized religion and then turn around and make atheism itself into an organized religion. And again, one of the big differences has to do with a belief in God. There’s nothing alarming in various religions appropriating certain practices or liturgy, when relevant. But when a group largely opposed to religion itself, particularly organized religion, starts mimicking religious groups, one can’t help but chuckle.
Mark, thanks for your response.
I think that it is fair to criticize any atheist who criticizes an aspect of organized religion and then adopts it for an atheist organization. But I’m not convinced that’s occurring here. I think most atheists recognize that there *is* value to the social and community-building aspects of religion.
BTW, Mark, I don’t think it was a “trap,” it was a genuine dilemma for your position. And keep in mind that there are *many* religions which do not involve a single God. Arguably, the God of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is not a single God, either. It’s only the Bahai who say that all religions worship the same God (and thereby disagree with all religions).
Noted. It is, indeed, quite an interesting topic. I just know that answering it, or even simply addressing it, is quite a complex task and one which I didn’t feel was necessary to answer your concerns. As such, I didn’t want to run the risk of providing a muddled answer by addressing something unrelated.
Oh, and for the record, I would say it is in fact *inarguable* that Christianity holds there is one, singular God.
[...] That assessment seems spot-on to me, unfortunately. In essence, “Moralist Therapeutic Deism” is a shallow cop-out of an alternative to institutionalized pseudo-religious atheism. [...]