Atheists in Their Own Words

 

Mother Nature: Traditional Indian conception

Honest atheists often understand that, rather than believing in no god, they worship “Mother Nature,” aka Gaia. They personify nature, imagine it is imbued with a will, and is all-powerful. Ergo, God. But what is the difference between this and the Judeo-Christian God? 

A recent correspondent gives us some idea. He neatly if unintentionally refutes the typical atheist argument that the belief in an afterlife is wish fulfillment. He writes that as an atheist, “You don’t have to think about your death, because there is no hell, just like there is no heaven… I don’t think I will fear death as religious people do.” Atheism is wish fulfillment. If there is no God, as Nietzsche pointed out, you can do whatever you want, and need not fear punishment. 

The essence of nature is amorality. Animals operate on instinct. The essence of morality is to sometimes resist our natural urges. 

But this “atheism” is whistling past the graveyard, the logic of the ostrich with his head in the sand. “If I don’t believe in God, he won’t hurt me.” That’s like saying “gravity doesn’t apply to me if I refuse to believe in it.” And jumping off a cliff.

One form of this “nature-worship” atheism is adulation of an imaginary aboriginal religion of nature worship. Christianity came in and ruined this peaceable kingdom, in which the lion lay down with the lamb. “I believe that the First Nations were correct. They saw the holiness of life in all things - -spirit (Great Spirit) existed in the bear, the wolf, the bison, the tree etc.  They didn’t attempt to conquer or manipulate the spirit but worked to live in harmony with the Spirit.”

Of course, this is a fundamentally Christian idea: that of original innocence in the Garden of Eden. It has nothing to do with the actual life of actual Indians. They saw the spirit world as mostly hostile to mankind. And they had no concept of conservation or ecology. It is the Judeo-Christian tradition that sees nature, the physical world, as holy, because God speaks to us through his creation. To most other cultures, including the native Indian, the physical world is ephemeral, only secondarily real. It is not that the spirit exists in the bear; it is that the bear really only exists in the spirit. The physical bear is just food.

Another recent atheist acquaintance avers that it is wrong to “categorize and label.” And this too I have heard before; it is a common sentiment among unbelievers.

An odd sentiment, on its face. There is another word for categorizing and labelling: thinking. Thinking goes beyond this, but it must start with this, with defining terms. Refusing to think is not a good idea. 

Consider the analogy of the eye. This is like saying it is wrong to put on your glasses and see things in focus. Best to leave it all fuzzy and vague.

Why and when would this be best? When there is something you are trying hard not to think about. Remember the wisdom of the ostrich. 

“This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed.”

Another common atheist trope is to see God as some form of impersonal “energy.” “Mysterious, nameless, pure love ‘energy’ inside me and everywhere.” 

This, as William Blake pointed out, is an inadequate concept of God. The human mind can conceive of nothing greater than a perfected human being. “Consider a cloud as holy; you cannot love it. But picture a holy man inside the cloud, and love springs up.” 

Imagine a source of energy—say a fire, or a battery—next to a human being. Which do you see as more important, more worthy of your interest and attention? 

Suppose you had to throw the person into the fire to keep it from going out. Would you do so?

Conceiving God as “energy” running through you is conceiving of him as less than you.

You are thinking of yourself as God.

This is always the bottom line. Welcome to the garden, Eve.