The ‘problem’ with God and miracles as I see it is that they devalue humanity.
In early times, man could not explain the coming of rain and winds, why lightning flashed from the sky and why some were struck down by disease and others were spared. These mysteries caused men to fear nature as they could not control or predict it. Some men of greater insight could recognise the coming of these events and once recognised they could be predicted. However these men were still bound by their fear of the unknown. They interpreted these signs as portents from unknown, supernatural agents and when they saw no signs, they would appeal to these agents, placating them with prayers, sacrifices and complex ritual. This practice of magic in its most primitive form as a component of hysterical superstition formed the basis of early religion, fashioned gods from the sun and the rain and through religion man began to construct his first, great civilisations.
Customs and rituals developed over time from priest-magicians, descendants of those men of wisdom, who were charged with placating and divining the future from the gods. But this was done only in ignorance. It was only done because we could not explain what we saw.
The truth is, humans survived for hundreds of thousands of years due to adaptability and intelligence.
The trend with modern religion (and for the most part I mean Christianity here) is that it fosters dependence on a supernatural entity which has not provably done anything in 2000 years or so (if not more and if it happened at all).
Humans do not need to ascribe to the supernatural that which comes from their own wit, their own skill, their own temerity, their own will, their own desire. But thousands of them do. And they profess how it could not have happened without faith when, in every known case, it happened absolutely without faith.
Do not abdicate your victories to a myth. Do not give a fairy tale the credit for the success that you have worked so hard to achieve. Revel in your own ability, the strength in your arms, the beating of your heart, the ideas in your mind. These are yours.
This is why I do not describe myself as an atheist. I am only a humanist. Humans are brilliant. We don’t need to believe in a myth to get through the day. Belief in ourselves is more than sufficient.
And yet I have seen reports that defy human-centered viewpoints such as this.
Very nicely put.
I dont like the negativity in the term ‘Atheist” – I would probably describe myself as a humanist were I not quite so misanthropic. I like the term ‘Skeptic’ except that it gets misused so widely.
Better stop before I burst into a chorus of “I am what I am”.
Hi David,
The negativity in Atheist is definitely one thing I dislike about the word. When I was younger I played with the notion of ‘agnostic’ (One who believes that it is impossible to know whether there is a God.) which seems to be the position of many in tonights Twitter debate but I was more attracted to the term: Secular Gnostic taking Gnostic to mean:
gnostic Of, relating to, or possessing intellectual or spiritual knowledge.
Labels are somewhat meaningless. But it helps to explain a position.
Let me add, the main problem with believing in miracles is that they tend to make people think NO EFFORT is required on THEIR part. “God helps those who help themselves” — that damned well should have been an 11th Commandment.
An odd comment from an atheist:
The one key thing I don’t like about humanism, is how evil humans – or indeed just the basic structure of all life, is. The musician moby says it a little better, but basically, we live in a pretty cruel world, and every instance of anything positive is naturally conjoined with the negative.
http://www.res-alian.com/main/moby/eiw/
So no – screw the human race. They’re bastards.
If we’re gonna glorify anything – glorify IDEALS. In tossing out the idea of a god – don’t toss the baby out with the bathwater. Just because worshiping some giant bearded jehovah is a little silly, doesn’t mean glorifying certain notions that are traditionally attached to ‘a god’ – such as “goodness”, “truth”, and “love” is a bad idea. In fact that’s the wonderful thing about ideals – they’re agnostic to any dogma and immune to any sort of baggage, because they are the purest, most atomic form of the notions they represent.
They might be impossible to achieve, but they’re a better thing to chase after than treating what humanity is like, right now, as the best thing the universe will ever come up with. Hell no.
Hi Jet, it takes humans to enact those ideals.
Yes, it’s a cruel world. Everything we have now was built upon the slaughter of innocents. As we speak, someone has just died in a cruel and avoidable way. This is, to my mind, incontrovertible evidence that there is no vast benevolent supreme being.
But cruel is not the right word as it implies emotion. It’s an uncaring world. A world that is completely ambivalent about human existence.
And yet humans are brilliant especially in their diversity. I’m interested in humans because they dream, they invent ideals. And yes, we have bad eggs but nothing is perfect.
“But cruel is not the right word as it implies emotion. It’s an uncaring world. A world that is completely ambivalent about human existence.”
Agreed, and well put.
“And yet humans are brilliant especially in their diversity. I’m interested in humans because they dream, they invent ideals.”
Ideals aren’t something we invent, in much the same way we don’t invent science or math. We are simply naming something about the nature of the universe, and how it behaves, which was always present, and which life gradually understands as it gets more intelligent. Just because an ant doesn’t understand quantum physics doesn’t mean he isn’t governed by it. Rather than being seredipitous creations, it’s quite probable that most of our valued aspects like love and such are the only good solution to certain survival problems. Much like wings convergently evolved from radically different species, because with our laws of physics, they’re the only solution to flying – it’s quite probable that most of our vaunted “human” achievements were basically predestined as the natural course any species like us would take to solve the problems we’ve solved. We didn’t invent this stuff – when the laws of physics solidified in the first few moments of the big bang into the specific set of laws we’ve got – that’s when these ideas we’re “uncovering” were put in the rules.
All we are is basically a record player – the laws of the universe are the groove etched in the vinyl. These are not ‘our’ achievements. Also, keep in mind those laws could have formed differently, the consequences of which are pretty much impossible for us to even fathom (for example, try and imagine a universe without time).
“And yes, we have bad eggs but nothing is perfect.”
Ideals are. (By definition).
The reason I harp on this is; we humans might be capable, but we don’t justify our own ends. We might be monsters. We’ve wiped out hundreds of species, done lots of bad things, etc – but I don’t know where it’s going to stop. We might go all the way. We might be the “bad guys” after all – which is something not one, but several recent sci-fi flicks have asked. It might be some other species that ends up carrying the torch, and we might be a predatory, brutish footnote in history.
We’re only important as a means to an end, we’re not the end itself, no more than apes or lesser mammals were. It took stepping from apes to humans to “unlock” all the things you say make us valuable. In fact, the things that are “essential”, and without which we’re just animals. Many animals share important things, like love, with us – but in many more (such as lizards), they’re completely absent.
And that’s the catch – it’s myopic to think that what we have thus far are the only “aspects” to unlock. We may, (in fact, almost certainly are), lacking things that some more advanced species might consider as important as love. We’re interesting, but we’re not the masters of the universe. Yet.
Self-assurance is a really dangerous thing. In fact, it’s pretty much the source of every evil the ‘church’, or any religious zealot out there, has ever done. But although often caused by religion, it’s actually completely orthogonal – it’s caused by us thinking we’re the special ones. Replacing ‘divine anointment’ with ‘human achievement’ as the excuse for that does nothing to solve the problem. The problem is our self-assurance.
That’s why, as an atheist*, I think “humanism” is our biggest, most dangerous ethical concern. It puts “the human race” as the end that justifies any means.
* I feel weird pointing this out, I’m only doing it because several religions are notoriously anti-humanist, and it’s easy to lump any anti-humanist sentiment in with them (abrahamic ones in particular, but even buddhism has a lot against human nature in it). Not all are – many shamanistic/spirtualistic traditions are very pro-humanist.
You know, I disagree. But I think it may be a semantic difference. You’re conflating the word ideal with the ‘laws of the universe’ which I don’t agree with.
We invent ideals. We engage in senseless altruism. This is not a natural force, this is something we empower through our development, our efforts. The universe is uncaring, it is up to us to provide compassion.
“Love” is a mistake. It’s a social response to a social problem. It is meant to enforce pair bonding which will hopefully result in the rearing of healthy offspring. Of course, Love doesn’t work like that. We’ve used it for our own ends. We have turned a simple racial survival characteristic into an ideal, which means we see Love where, if biology and survival were the only influences, it shouldn’t exist. And that’s brilliant.
I disagree about the wings analogy. There are lots of methods of enabling flight, from the subtle aerodynamics of the birds wing, to the frenetic flapping of a bat, the superspeed twitching of insects, jetting waters of squid, the silent parachutes and helicopters of the plant and fungal worlds.
And we are special. We are the only creature on this earth capable of such magnitude of thought, capacity of reason. But we’re not masters of the universe. The universe is vast and diverse. On the scale of the galaxy we’re a tiny speck both in geography and time.
I can’t be atheist because I cannot absolutely disprove the existence of a god and as I write above, I find the term to be negative. Humans, on the other hand, are the active agents in our world which can enact these ideals we have invented.
Meh, I’ll leave it as a semantic difference. I’ve made my point, and you’re being a gentleman about responses, so there’s no point in belaboring it.
Anyways, thanks for the blog, and have a nice life. I’ll just retreat back into the internets from whence I came.
“it fosters dependence on a supernatural entity which has not provably done anything in 2000 years or so”
You wanting a chariot in flames out of the sky kinda doing something?