I don't want to be the one who parsimoniously tries to cut through the nastiness, wondering "why we can't all just get along..." but can't we all just get along?
Atheism is a worldview (it's one that I happen to share) that is in essence predicated on pluralism: it holds that because no one religion has unique access to truth, that no one religion is worthy of belief, which leaves us to figure out those thorny questions of truth, spirituality, morality, ethics, etc. on our own. But a true pluralist knows that his own cosmic understanding is just as partial, just as contingent and just as relative--meaning that criticism of another's beliefs is senseless. Worse, it merely replicates the problems religion had in the first place--which was its claim to have a unique and superior access to truth.
Atheism is not a religious belief, in and of itself. It's the absence of a particular religious belief. I'm an atheist--can I categorically deny the existence of a God or gods, somehow not measurable according to the material, empirical means that I value? No. I can, however, surmise that since the range of religious experiences out there is so wide, and since the "zero-sum game" approach of religious belief, in which one person's being right means that someone else must be wrong is inconsistent with my basic pluralism--that God is unlikely to be the "Christian" god or the "Muslim" God or the Norse pagan pantheon, or whatever. That if "God" exists, he/she/it is firmly in the realm of the unknowable, leaving us to decide for ourselves how we are going to treat each other.
In the end, that's the true measure of a person, to me: how do you treat those who are different, who are less powerful, or whose voices are less strident? How do you address yourself to the essential mosaic of human experience and belief that is at the core of pluralism, which is in the end the keystone to an atheists' beliefs in the first place?
In that, I'm not so different from the deists who founded the United States. Many of them believed in a "watchmaker God," who had wound up the earth and let it run, but who could or would not intervene in its affairs--indeed, who might well be indifferent to those affairs. What that means is that it's up to us to treat each other with kindness and respect, and we can't and shouldn't do it because we will be rewarded or punished in the afterlife, or because we have been transported by some religious experience. We should just do it because it's the right thing to do.
|