Excerpt from "Toward a Positive Psychology of Religion: Belief Science in the Postmodern Era" (in press), by Robert Rocco Cottone. Scheduled for publication in the Fall of 2010, by John Hunt Publishing, Ltd., of Hampshire, UK, under the imprint of O-Books.
Atheists do not believe in an afterlife. They, like proponents of all belief systems, seek to promote a set of principles to live by: (a) believe that there is no god; (b) act as if there is no eternal life; (c) seek to communicate with other non-believers to spread the word of atheism, and (d) convince others that they should behave a certain way, not because of fear of what will happen in the afterlife, but for concern about what will happen in life. Atheism meets the criteria for a belief system. It is acting with others as if some socially defined concept (atheism) represents truth.
A postmodern critique of atheism would go something like the following. First, atheism is a universal absolute truth claim: "There are no gods" (Maisel, 2009). As with all universal and absolute truth claims, those that do not believe are viewed in a negative light. You are either with us or against us (there is no in-between with a universal absolute truth claim). So Christianity condemns those who do not believe Jesus Christ is the "only begotten son of God” (John 3:18), and Islam promises "unbelievers, the fire of hell" (Sura IX: 60), as examples. Because atheists believe that their view is scientific, and that atheism is justified based on data, they define non-believers as intellectually challenged or intellectually dishonest. They operate purely from a modernist objectivist viewpoint. Dawkins (2006), in The God Delusion, is a good example. He presents scientific "facts" as evidence of faulty belief in a deity. Dawkins obviously is not a postmodern thinker. He reifies science, and he does not understand the postmodern stand that scientific truths are influenced by the rules of the scientific community. Scientific truths exist within the context of a community of scientists, and from a postmodern perspective, they do not constitute universal truth claims (see Gergen, 2001, who makes a detailed comparison of modernist and postmodernist science in psychology). Scientific understanding, like all understanding, is within bracketed absolutes. The scientific constants in nature, from a postmodern perspective, will change, because the “constants” are not outside of the relationship to the observer; the constants are in relationship to what observers can experience. Our senses and our measurement instruments will evolve and change, and so too will what modernist thinkers hold as constants. So atheists, as a general rule, take an unyielding position on the non-existence of god, act from a stance of intellectual superiority, and criticize non-atheists as non-scientific or intellectually dishonest.
A final criticism of atheism is that it hedges a non-moral position. The science that atheists reify is a science that is supposed to be value neutral. It is supposed to be non-moral. Atheism, as a belief system, is not logically or necessarily associated with an ethical stance. An atheist, based on atheism alone, is no more right or wrong to kill and steal than to value life and the property of others. One can never know, by another's claim to atheism, whether that person subscribes to a code of ethics. Dawkins (2006) made the claim: "There is a consensus about what we do as a matter of fact consider right or wrong: a consensus that prevails surprisingly widely. The consensus has no obvious connection with religion" (p. 298). And then, Dawkins presented a "New Ten Commandments" which he believed reflected atheist morality. The first is: "Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you." The second is, "In all things, strive to cause no harm." And the list goes on. Dawkins must be kidding! The fact that he sought and presented a list of atheist "Ten Commandments," and then promoted ethical standards that are some of the most religiously established ethical principles on earth (e.g., the "Golden Rule"), identifies him as a person who is steeped in religious culture and tradition. His arguments for a moral atheism distinct from religion are less than credible. There are no secular ethics that emerge from languages and cultures that are enmeshed in religious traditions—that is the postmodern perspective. Atheism, and the modernist science at its foundation, are non-moral. So atheists who seek to align with a moral philosophy must find it in some other community, because atheism has nothing to offer in this regard. Arguments by other atheists that a moral code may be found through something akin to an individual, subjective, moral conscience (cf., Maisel, 2009) fail from a postmodern perspective, because there is no individual moral conscience in postmodern thought as presented here.
When an atheist dies, all that his or her atheist colleagues know with certainty is that his or her life is completely finished in this world. There are no alternative states of being—no heaven, hell, paradise or nirvana. There is no coming back through the lives of others. It’s over. The colleagues of the atheist know that the person no longer exists. This is their shared belief. As with all beliefs, it has validity within its community of believers.
And if the atheist suffered a harsh life, one of pain and suffering, what reason was there to live? If an atheist experiences disability, a shortened painful life due to disease, the fate of the poor and downtrodden, torture or trauma, then what hope is there? The message that he or she carries forward is “This life is all there is.” And if one’s life is horrible, then suffering is the best that one can expect. One leaves no legacy for others in pain (especially children) when the message one carries is a message of no hope beyond suffering.
Life is a one-way street. And for some of us, the street is a rocky road. Atheism leaves a legacy of despair for those who are the most unlucky among us. You live a painful life, and you die.
Atheism, although vulnerable to a postmodern critique, does have its place. It will likely be attractive to relatively healthy, secure, modernist-thinking intellectuals and those who act outside of culturally imbedded moral standards.
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