The Necessity of Atheism in a Religious Society

I recently finished reading the Dalai Lama's latest book, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World. In this book the Dalai Lama makes the case for the need of an universal ethical framework that can ground all of humankind's moral actions. He says:

…any religion-based answer to the problem of our neglect of inner values can never be universal, and so will be inadequate. What we need today is an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without: a secular ethics.

I could not agree more. To grossly oversimplify, every religion sources its ethics from one of two great traditions. Ethics are either handed down by a powerful deity or group of deities, or ethics are built into the way the universe operates. In essence religion relies on either God or Karma to establish and arbitrate Ethics. True, there is a theological approach that borrows from philosophy to provide some sort of scientific rigor to these two broad ideas, but I would contend that too often theology is used to support a pre-existing conclusion, and is not concerned with going to where the evidence points.

Within this grand and admittedly simplified schema there are thousands of differences in the way in which faith helps determine ethics. Some of these differences are as small and innocuous as genuflecting at an altar, others have great consequences on individual lives, such as a prohibition on blood transfusions. Still others may affect all our lives as religious beliefs impact global politics and economics, such as the Catholic prohibition on condoms in AIDS ridden Africa or the ongoing discussion and fears surrounding the Muslim concept of Jihad. These differences do not exist in a vacuum, they have existed for as far back as our history seems to stretch.

I don't really have to explain this to you, of course. We are all aware of the divisions in our society, and those divisions are not just religious, but cultural, economic, classist and sexist as well. These differences and the battles that ensue from them are part of our history- indeed they are what our history is.

But there is another strand in history that we don't pay as much attention to, in my opinion. This is the that part of the history of ideas concerned with crossing those religious and cultural divides to find common cause with each other. It can be as simple as a group of ministers and church leaders united simply by geographical location getting together to address issues of common concern like poverty, or it can be a bunch of kids on either side of a contentious border getting together to play an impromptu game of soccer.

Look at soccer, or football, as they call it everywhere else in the world. I read an article recently on the Common Ground News Service by Mustafa Abdelhalim entitled "Can Soccer Unite Muslims and Christians in Egypt?" which pointed out that the coach of Egypt's Olympic soccer team is a Coptic Christian, and he is well respected by the Muslims he coaches and Egyptian society in general. Abdelhalim says,

Egyptians should create sporting leagues across the country in which participation is based on skill and not on the athletes' religious or sectarian affiliations.

The rules of soccer, a secular sport, trumps the rules of religions that might call for sectarian violence or segregation. This is powerful stuff in small doses. Imagine what such a concept could mean on a global scale.

The only way a group of people of different faiths, religions and cultures can work together is by putting aside their differences and agreeing on a new set of rules, a secular set of rules. A Christian may accept the golden rule, to do unto others as you would have done unto you, as important because Jesus claimed this to be the most important commandment. A Buddhist might see the golden rule as fundamental to the way in which karma deals out justice in the never ending cycle of rebirth or reincarnation. A pragmatist might point out that the rule is simply good common sense, derived from years of living in the real world and observing human behavior. Finally, a game theorist might point out that such a rule seems to evolve naturally out of the constant stream of decisions we as primates make every day when we consider the options of cooperation versus self interest.

Each person gets to this important ethical rule in slightly different, or even in a combination of different ways. If I were to explain why I think the golden rule is important to the way I behave, it might be very different from the way another person sees it. But in the end, the fact that we both adopt this rule is important because it gives us common ground from which to work together.

Imagine three countries with a treaty that declares that newly discovered islands, and all the resources there of, can be claimed by the first country to land a citizen on the island's shores. One day a new island is discovered, and the first country paddles out to the island via canoe, the second country sails there using the wind, and the third country travels there via helicopter. The means of travel is immaterial to deciding who gets to claim the island as their own. The island's resources are claimed only by whoever got there first. In this way moral truths, like the golden rule, are not dependent on how they were decided upon, they are dependent upon how useful they are as guides to human behavior.

If we want to establish that ethical truths are in some way universal, that is, they apply to all human beings all the time and everywhere, we need to do some philosophical work independent of religion.

This is where atheists like me come in. Atheism is not just the rejection of a belief in God. Atheism, like Christianity, or Buddhism, describes a wide range of beliefs. In my case atheism simply means "a" as in "without" "theism" as in "God." What this means is that not only do I not believe in God, or indeed in any kind of supernaturalism including karma, I don't even think that the question of God's existence is all that important. I live without God, without a concern for what God may or may not want. God, were it to exist, is big and powerful and beyond my ability to help. I concern myself with people around me, with the great mass of humans and other persons out there in the world who are not big and powerful and are within my ability to help.

This is my humanism, and my Humanism, my Secular Humanism, allows me to create a moral, ethical framework that guides me in my interactions with other persons, independent of religion, God or Karma. This humanistic and secular approach to ethics says nothing about what religious claims are true or false. Secular ethics are concerned only with the smooth running of society and in adjudicating the ways in which we treat each other. For instance, secular ethics does make a claim as to the morality of same-sex marriage any more than it makes a claim as to the morality of opposite-sex marriage. It judges both actions on the basis of harm to individuals and society, and seeing no harm, allows both.

In seeking to maximize individual freedom of choice, curtailing such choice only when the probability of harming others is reached, secular ethics does allow for what many religious institutions will see as sin to become pervasive in our society. Acceptance of non-normative sexuality, equality for women, reproductive freedom, and a thousand lesser religious slights will become permissible. In western society we already live in a multicultural world that challenges religious ideas. Stores are open on the day of rest, pork products are sold in virtually every supermarket and subjects like evolution are taught in our schools.

And this is as it should be. It's the protections found in a secular society that allows the great variety of religious points of view we see today. The multicultural melting pot of ideas and beliefs would not be possible in John Winthrop's Boston, one of the earliest conceptions of America. It becomes possible only in the reformulation put forward by Rhode Island's founder Roger Williams, as a land which promotes freedom of, and yes, even freedom from, religion.