A Hunk of Red Meat

From time to time I like to hurl a chunk of bleeding meat into the cave where the Atheist readers of this site lurk, waiting longingly for a chance for a good superior snarl at those stupid, unteachable believers, just to hear the snapping of their jaws.

I know they enjoy it, and it is fairly harmless. I quite enjoy it too. But since completing the index, I've been less inclined to go over old ground - those really interested can look up what's been said in the past and perhaps try to avoid saying it again.

This post is prompted by responses to my clarification last week on teaching Christianity as truth in schools - something I will in future describe as 'Teaching Christianity as a Faith' to protect myself from deliberate or accidental misunderstandings. I would also point out to those who moan that I seek to 'impose' Christianity, that I specifically stated that those who did not wish their children to undergo such education should be entirely free to opt out. As usual, they didn't read what I said with any care. Or they didn't care what I said and just hate me anyway.

I'm quite relaxed about that, but they shouldn't pose as friends of reason if they want to behave in this way. I might add that there's a lot of justified stuff here about how long it took Christians to discover that slavery was absolutely wrong. Christians are human and imperfect, and not always quick to discover the true direction of the law. But when they get there, they get there.

Still, it seems odd to me that this discussion of slavery seems to end in the 19th century, as if that was that.

Since the subject of slavery is so dear to the hearts of the Atheists, it does seem necessary to point out that the 20th-century reinvention of slavery, on a positively Pharaonic scale, was the work of Atheist Communists. In the early 1990s I would ride the Moscow Metro each day, conscious of the macabre fact that its gorgeous vaults and deep, deep tunnels were the work of slaves no less oppressed (and quite possibly worse

treated) than those who built the Pyramids. If I travelled east towards Siberia or Karaganda, I could see whole cities and industrial complexes built by slaves, some even in my own lifetime.  Likewise the grandiose apartment block on Kutuzovsky Prospekt in which I dwelt, constructed in the late 1940s by enslaved German Prisoners of War.

But, to return to the thing which now bothers me,  once again I received comments claiming that Christians believe that they behave better than Atheists, and that Atheists are immoral.  I've never said or thought anything so absurdly oversimplified, , and have repeatedly explained why not but it never seems to get through. The blazingly simple logic that, if the Universe has no purpose, actions can only be judged on an ad hoc basis, seems to me to the whole point of Atheism ( a position of choice not mandated or endorsed by any objective truth) anyway.

Atheists can describe their actions as 'good' or 'bad' but to do so they have to borrow the necessary measuring device from believers. Otherwise they can only measure things against themselves and against their immediate effect or appearance. If it *looks* level, then that will have to do.  East is roughly over there, isn't it?  That's roughly two feet long, isn't it?

etc etc. I wouldn't build a garden shed, or fit a shelf, or go on a hike on Dartmoor, on that basis. No more would I make moral ( as opposed to

practical) judgements about actions without reference to a moral system based on absolutes. Such a system will lead you pretty fast to being the person in charge of a torture chamber, or at least the person defending the use of one,  because it gets the immediate results that you wanted. Look at the popularity of Jack Bauer in '24' in the supposedly civilised West.

This borrowing is perfectly all right.  If I have troubled to buy a tape measure, a spirit level or a compass, I am quite happy to lend it to a neighbour provided he acknowledges that it is a loan and gives it back to me. It's only if he then pretends that he bought it himself,  or that he could have managed perfectly well without my help and my measuring devices, that I get shirty.

Why are Atheists so coy about admitting that they don't actually want there to be an absolute code, when this is precisely why so many of them (especially the modern angry campus breed) are Atheists in the first place?

Didn't the Atheists  pay to stick the following declaration on the sides of London buses 'There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life'. (I believe the Advertising Standards people told them they had to insert the word 'probably', thanks to the absence of proof on this subject, which is quite funny). I don't, by the way, recall any Atheist or other secular group protesting against this slogan.

Well, if 'There is no God, so stop worrying and enjoy yourself' is a logical progression in their minds (and it usually is) why should unbelief cause anyone to stop worrying and 'enjoy' his life? Well, of course it's because it liberates him from tedious external restraints, which instantly lose their meaning if there is no God. Why else should it matter so much and make these people so woundy cross-tempered if someone says 'actually, I believe there is a God'?  What else can it mean?

The interesting reverse of the bus slogan, , the Christian understanding that actions matter in a way we can't readily observe or understand if we reject the eternal, is hauntingly expressed in this passage from a 'Father Brown' story 'The Sins of Prince Saradine'. 

"Do you believe in doom?" asked the restless Prince Saradine suddenly.

"No", answered his guest. "I believe in Doomsday."

The prince turned from the window and stared at him in a singular manner, his face in shadow against the sunset. "What do you mean?"he asked.

"I mean that we here are on the wrong side of the tapestry," answered Father Brown. "The things that happen here do not seem to mean anything; they mean something somewhere else. Somewhere else retribution will come on the real offender. Here it often seems to fall on the wrong person."

I particularly like that phrase 'the wrong side of the tapestry', as it is such a good metaphor for the way humans so often completely misunderstand the circumstances in which they find themselves. And the idea that our actions 'mean something somewhere else' sends a shiver down my spine whenever I think about it, as well it might.

I've had quite a few letters (though interestingly not recently)  from ex-believers, urging me to join them in their Godless universe and savour the sense of liberation which they feel from tiresome obligations, now that they have cast aside the religion of their childhood.

As if I didn't know. I was one of them myself, as I describe in my book 'The Rage Against God'. I also quote at length in that book from W.Somerset Maugham's autobiographical novel 'Of Human Bondage', especially the passage in which the hero, Philip Carey, abandons his Christian faith and experiences a vast sense of liberation.

I will give my younger self this, very nasty as he was. I immediately grasped the advantages this brought me, especially in a world where others continued to be bound by absolute morals.

And perhaps this is it. The Atheist knows perfectly well that , in a world without absolute morals, he is liberated. As long as he isn't found out (and how many of us are found out in our lifetimes? In my experience, hardly any) he can behave as he likes.  His own ethical system, of enlightened self-interest and common decency, depends on people knowing about each other's misdeeds. If a man can appear to be good, then he can expect others to be good back to him (within the limits of common decency, not under the much more demanding rules of unrewarded selflessness mandated by faith). If he is a privileged and wealthy person (which most young Western men and women are by any standard), he can buy his pleasures at the expense of others (often people thousands of miles away whom he will never

meet) and feel at ease about them. He can also feel entirely self-sufficient and not in need of any forgiveness or grace.

But what if everyone latches on to this formula? Then it is not so pretty, is it? If we all cast off our obligation of selflessness, and all believe the law is what we can get away with, where shall we all be?Somewhere near

Mogadishu, by my guess. Or Babylon, anyway. Best pretend that it is

nothing to do with this, and get petulantly angry at suggestions that Atheism has moral consequences.