Thor's Day: Alternative terms for "atheist" and "theist"

From "Can an Atheist Be a Fundamentalist?" by Anthony Grayling

Edited by Morris Dean

[British moral philosopher Anthony Grayling's essay is the 46th selection in Christopher Hitchens's 2007 book, The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever. In the course of answering the question, "Can an atheist be a fundamentalist?" Grayling proposes more appropriate terms for "atheist" and "theist."]

Thor's Day: The courage not to pray

Primo Levi in Konzentrationslager Auschwitz

By Morris Dean

In 2007, Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) dedicated The Portable Atheist to Primo Levi (1919-1987). Levi spent a year as a prisoner in the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, where, Hitchens comments, he "had the moral fortitude to refuse consolation even while enduring the 'selection' process."

The Portable Atheist concludes

The 47^th "essential reading for the nonbeliever" included in Christopher Hitchens's Portable Atheist is Ayaan Hirsi Ali's "specifically written essay on her decision to say farewell to all gods." And the following paragraphs are its (and the whole book's) concluding ones:

Now I told myself that we, as human individuals, are our own guides to good and evil. We must think for ourselves; we are responsible for our own morality. I arrived at the conclusion that I couldn't be honest with others unless I was honest with myself. I wanted to comply with the goals of religion—which are to be a better and more generous person—without suppressing my will and forcing it to obey an intricate and inhumanly detailed web of rules. I had lied many times in my life, but now, I told myself, that was over: I had had enough of lying.
    After I wrote my memoir, Infidel (published in the United States in 2007), I did a book tour in the United States. I found that interviewers from the Heartland often asked if I had considered adopting the message of Jesus Christ. The idea seems to be that I should shop for a better, more humane religion than Islam, rather than taking refuge in unbelief. A religion of talking serpents and heavenly gardens? I usually respond that I suffer from hayfever. The Christian take on Hellfire seems less dramatic than the Muslim version, which I grew up with, but Christian magical thinking appeals to me no more than my grandmother's angels and djins.
    The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more. [pp. 479-480]

The point, though, is that, however much we might want more, we are not going to get it. An individual's project in facing la condition humain is as it has always been: Deal with it.
    I started to say that to deny the "nothing more" aspect of it (as religious indoctrination routinely programs children to do) is not to deal with it, but to avoid it. While in a purely semantic sense that is so, people "deal with" all sorts of things by simply avoiding them. If we aren't equipped to face up to something (and it takes a lot to be able to face up to the fact that we and all of our friends and relatives are going to die), what are we going to do? Many people party as much as possible—the "eat, drink, and be merry" approach...And others take shelter in the comforting myths of religion.
    Critical questioners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali find that they can't square that avoidance with the dicates of conscience and mental health.

Testimony of a nonbeliever

The several dozen statements of nonbelievers collected in Christopher Hitchens's Portable Atheist just keep on being rationally inspirational. Here's an excerpt from the next-to-most recent I've read, by Elizabeth Anderson, the Arthur F. Thurnau Professor and John Rawls Collegiate Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor:

Surveying the religious booths every year at the Ann Arbor art fair, I am always struck by the fact that they are staffed by people who are convinced of their own revelations and miracles, while most so readily disparage the revelations and miracles of other faiths. To a mainstream Christian, Jew, or Muslim, nothing is more obvious than that the founders and prophets of other religions, such as Joseph Smith, the Rev. Moon, Mary Baker Eddy, and L. Ron Hubbard, are either frauds or delusional, their purported miracles or cures are tricks played upon a credulous audience (or worse, exercises of black magic), their prophecies false, their metaphysics absurd. To me, nothing is more obvious than that the evidence cited on behalf of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam is of exactly the same type and quality as that cited on behalf of such despised religions. Indeed, it is on a par with the evidence for Zeus, Baal, Thor, and other long-abandoned gods, who are now considered ridiculous by nearly everyone. –If God Is Dead, Is Everything Permitted? [no], pp. 345-346 in Hitchens

What's inspirational about Professor Anderson's testimony is that we have reason to hope that religion will fade away eventually. Two problems with this, however: (1) Religion isn't rational and doesn't listen to reason very well. (2) Everyone alive on the planet now, and for some time to come, will die long before religion does.¹
_______________

1. As my friend Ken privately wrote me recently:

   ...when religious institutions begin to fragment and wither. We still need several more centuries for that. [emphasis mine]

   I quote Ken, not because he is my friend, but, like Professor Anderson, he is an astute, critical thinker.
   

Local assessment of atheism

On the off chance, I went into Fifth Street Books yesterday afternoon ("ALL BOOKS 99¢").
    Do you know whether you have any books by Christopher Hitchens?
     "What does he write about?" asked the clerk.
    (I'm thinking, What doesn't he write about?—or used to, before he got cancer.) I'm looking for his books on atheism.
    "Well," she said, "they might be here," indicating what I gathered from several copies of Gary Zukav's Seat of the Soul might be the New Age section.  "Or over here, in the Religion section."
    Okay.
    "But," she added, "if you don't find them in either of those places, try Fiction."

Oh, how I would love to have found a copy of God Is Not Great or The Portable Atheist in the Fiction section! Confirming the local assessment of atheism.
    That I'd try to share with the author. But it might hurt him to laugh that hard.

Intellectual diversion

Having finished reading The Girl Who Played with Fire over the weekend and not yet having a copy of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (the second and third unputdownable volumes of Stieg Larsson's "Millennium Trilogy"), and finding a bit difficult for the moment the final chapters of Richard Dawkins's Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, about the bacterial life of two billion years ago from which evolved all life on Earth today, I've returned to Christopher Hitchens's Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever.
    The excerpt from Bertrand Russell's "Outline of Intellectual Rubbish" (from his book, Atheism; Collected Essays, 1943-1949) was quite diverting. Here's a snippet (more text online):

Other passions besides self-esteem are common sources of error; of these perhaps the most important is fear. Fear sometimes operates directly, by inventing rumors of disaster in war-time, or by imagining objects of terror, such as ghosts; sometimes it operates indirectly, by creating belief in something comforting, such as the elixir of life, or heaven for ourselves and hell for our enemies. Fear has many forms - fear of death, fear of the dark, fear of the unknown, fear of the herd, and that vague generalized fear that comes to those who conceal from themselves their more specific terrors. Until you have admitted your own fears to yourself, and have guarded yourself by a difficult effort of will against their mythmaking power, you cannot hope to think truly about many matters of great importance, especially those with which religious beliefs are concerned. Fear is the main source of superstition and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom, in the pursuit of truth as in the endeavor after a worthy manner of life.

Also diverting were the two poems Hitchens selected from the work of Philip Larkin (1922 – 1985). For your diversion, I've snipped from "Church Going" (complete text):

Once I am sure there's nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
    ...Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.
    Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
...
    ...I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,
    Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special shell?...
    A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

I myself have been thinking about my dead of late. My father, all of his eight brothers, one of his two sisters, my mother, all of her three brothers and three sisters, two of my four sisters, five of six brothers-in-law, two of quite a few nephews, cousins, teachers, friends, former classmates and colleagues, pets.
    And me, in not very long.
    There's no solace in churches, however many dead lie round them. I can find no comfort in the thought of all the wasted effort that went into building monuments to non-existent entities. Parallel efforts went into torturing and murdering people labeled "witches," even if only to be able to confiscate their property after they were done away with. (That from The Portable Atheist's entry from Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Sagan even entertainingly characterizes the whole "go kill a witch" enterprise as an "expense-account scam," since a number of people were remunerated for various activities involved in collecting and transporting and disrobing and examining and probing and torturing and suffocating and drowning and burning the victims.)

Suicide is painless

In my day job, I coordinate for North Carolina an arrangement involving all of the southeastern states by which they share "not commonly available" academic degree programs with each other's residents at in-state tuition rates.
    At least, I thought I did. For years I've quoted "not commonly available" thinking I was quoting from the regional guidelines governing all of the participating states. But yesterday I discovered that the guidelines don't even touch the topic. The arrangement actually permits participating states to share with each other any of their academic degree programs they want to share, however commonly or uncommonly available they may be. The word "common" or "uncommon" isn't even used in this context. The only regional restriction on sharing is that the states can't approve another state's degree program for their residents if they have a similar program.
    There is the proviso, though, that each state may have additional guidelines based on its own needs. And North Carolina does have an additional guideline, one that was written into the legislation that authorizes our participation in the arrangement. That is, it's the law. We may

select for participation only...programs that are likely to be unique or are not commonly available in other participating states.

    I'd always read the legislation as simply codifying for North Carolina the regional guideline affecting all of the participating states. And I'd always read the regional guidelines sure that they stated somewhere that the states could share only their "not commonly available" degree programs. But I recently became aware that another of the states doesn't consider uncommonness of availability, and I asked the state coordinator, "How can you just ignore the regional guideline?" She asked me to show her what in the guidelines I was referring to.
    I pored over their every line but couldn't find the phrase anywhere, nor any language remotely like it. It was all just in my mind.

Self-deception is so easy, at least as easy as suicide is painless, a clause from Robert Altman's 14-year-old son Mike's lyrics for the song from M*A*S*H:

Suicide is painless,
It brings on many changes,
And I can take or leave it if I please.

    Self-deception, though, isn't at all easy to take or leave. Several days of email exchanges were required to bring me to the definitive reading of the regional guidelines. Self-deception hides from us, even weaves a thick web of supporting deceptions to protect itself. That is, we hide the deception, we weave the web.
    I haven't been able to discover that I had any powerful motive for deceiving myself about "not commonly available." Somehow or other I got the idea that it was in the regional guidelines, which seemed eminently sensible. How could it be otherwise? All of the states were simply sharing their uncommon programs. That was what it was all about, that's how I'd explained the arrangement to hundreds of people.
    I must have heard dozens of clues, during email exchanges or conversations or at meetings of state coordinators, that it just wasn't so, but my woven web "protected" me from picking up on them, even enabled me to neutralize conflicting statements or simply reject them as uninformed. I understood it better than they did.

If we can do this in matters with little at stake, think how well we must be able to do it in matters of love, life, and death. We believe that we're loved when we're not (or that we're loved more or more often than we really are). We believe that someone is looking out for us when no one is. We even believe that the someone is the Best Someone There Could Be.

...Few people know that most airports have houses of worship: they tend to be white, high-ceilinged, scrubbed, and soundproof, imbued with a spirituality so general that even atheists can find refuge in them. They go unused, for the most part, except in times of emergency and terror—after a crash or when a war breaks out. They're eerie little niches but also restful and perfect for catching up on paperwork....[p. 103, Up in the Air, by Walter Kirn, 2001]

...[Owners] of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they draw the conclusion they they are god...Religion, then, partakes of equal elements of the canine and the feline. It exacts maximum servility and abjection, requiring you to regard yourself as conceived and born in sin and owing a duty to a stern creator. But in return, it places you at the center of the universe and assures you that you are the personal object of a heavenly plan. Indeed, if you make the right propitiations you may even find that death has no sting, and that an exception to the rules of physical annihilation may be made in your own case....[p. xvi, Introduction to The Portable Atheist, by Christopher Hitchens, 2007]