Are you an atheist? Do you hate religion? “Well, I don’t hate it,” I can hear you say. “Or at least, I don’t hate religious people. I just think that fundamentally it’s better not to be religious, because religion isn’t true. And I do really hate a lot of what people do in the name of their religious beliefs, such as trying to pass laws to make me follow them. It’s not like I go around being a jerk to religious people and telling them their beliefs are wrong just for the hell of it.” I hear you. “I’m not even going to say that religion is a greater force for negative than positive in the world because clearly a lot of people have religious motivations for being moral.” I hear that too.
Let me give you two cases to consider of atheists who are not altogether opposed to religion, along with a suggestion of who to emulate.
Case #1: Jonathan Haidt
Jonathan Haidt is a psychologist who studies morality. His stance is that the vast majority of moral judgments are intuitive in nature, reached more because of gut feelings than deliberate reflection. In order to better understand the bases from which people from different political factions derive their emphasis, he has articulated separate domains of moral concern such as reciprocity, purity, and liberty and argues that the reason liberals and conservatives so often talk past each other is because they assume priorities for these domains differently. He says:
What’s an atheist scientist like me doing writing good things about religion? I didn’t start out this way. As a teenager, I had contempt for religion. I was raised Jewish, but when I read the Bible, I was shocked. It hardly seemed to me like a good guide for ethical behavior in modern times, what with all the smiting and stoning and genocide, some of it ordered by God. In college, I read other holy books, and they didn’t make me any more positive toward religion. In my 20s, I obtained a Ph.D. in social psychology and began to study morality. I ignored religion in my studies. We don’t need religion to be ethical, I thought. And yet, in almost every human society, religion has been intimately tied to ethics. Was that just a coincidence? In my 30s, I began to study the emotion of “moral elevation.” That’s the warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you see acts of moral beauty. When you see someone do something kind, loyal, or heroic, you feel uplifted. You can feel yourself becoming a better person — at least for a few minutes. Everyone who has watched an episode of Oprah knows the feeling, but there was absolutely no scientific research on this emotion. Studying moral elevation led me to study feelings of awe more generally, and before I knew it, I was trying to understand a whole class of positive emotions in which people feel as though they have somehow escaped from or “transcended” their normal, everyday, often petty self.
I was beginning to see connections between experiences as varied as falling in love, watching a sunset from a hilltop, singing in a church choir, and reading about a virtuous person. In all cases there’s a change to the self — a kind of opening to our higher, nobler possibilities.
Now, one may or may not agree with Haidt about the importance of religious kinds of “moral elevation” (which you can read more about in his book The Happiness Hypothesis and apparently the newly published The Righteous Mind, which I haven’t read yet but am eager to). Haidt believes that the moral domains are evolved tendencies– and that includes the domain of purity, which is tied most directly to religion– and there is considerable room for disagreement there. However, Haidt recognized some things which really shouldn’t be a surprise:
- Religion is both causal (it makes things happen) and caused (things make religion happen),
- We don’t understand nearly enough about how either one works, and
- The causes and effects of religion can’t be nearly summed up in the truth or falsity of religious beliefs
In my book, I argue that believing in God is, for me as for many others, simply not possible. At the same time, I want to suggest that if you remove this belief, there are particular dangers that open up – we don’t need to fall into these dangers, but they are there and we should be aware of them. For a start, there is the danger of individualism: of placing the human being at the center stage of everything. Secondly, there is the danger of technological perfectionism; of believing that science and technology can overcome all human problems, that it is just a matter of time before scientists have cured us of the human condition. Thirdly, without God, it is easier to lose perspective: to see our own times as everything, to forget the brevity of the present moment and to cease to appreciate (in a good way) the miniscule nature of our own achievements. And lastly, without God, there can be a danger that the need for empathy and ethical behaviour can be overlooked. Now, it is important to stress that it is quite possible to believe in nothing and remember all these vital lessons (just as one can be a deep believer and a monster). I simply want to draw attention to some of the gaps, some of what is missing, when we dismiss God too brusquely. By all means, we can dismiss him, but with great sympathy, nostalgia, care and thought.