Personal Atheism: Atheism as social responsibility

By Robin Marie on October 10, 2010

When I was seven years old, I went to Sunday school one afternoon with a friend of mine. What happened before they sat us all down to draw pictures I do not remember, but my brain has clearly recorded what happened next. The man in charge of Sunday school that day held up a picture of a heart, like any other a young child would draw; except this one was colored in with ugly, clashing colors that strayed outside of the lines of the heart. “This is your heart,” the man explained, “without Jesus. We all have ugly hearts without Jesus, because they are full of sin.” The man then held up a drawing of a perfectly shaped heart, perfectly colored pink. “This is how our hearts look like once we have accepted Jesus into them. Now, I want you all to draw two pictures – one of your heart as it is without Jesus, and one that shows what it looks like with Jesus.”

When my mother picked me up that afternoon, I was bawling my eyes out. “They told me my heart is ugly!” I cried. My mother, not surprisingly, was horrified. “No, it isn’t, your heart is beautiful just the way it is,” she told me reassuringly. I quickly decided that this was quite right and that something was very, very wrong with the people at the Sunday school. This is my earliest memory of encountering Christianity.

To this day, this experience represents my most deeply seated reason for my opposition to religion. True, not all religion – not even all Christianity – encourages self-doubt and self-hatred. But quite a lot of it does. The view that human nature is primarily sinful – that we are not a complex mix of good and bad intentions but rather, always struggling to resist our inner demons which are the true core of us – is something so inherent to Christian culture that it hardly requires you to be Christian to believe it. And as I gained an education in college and graduate school, an appreciation of how much Christian assumptions of human nature color our culture gradually came to me. Our hatred of ourselves is everywhere – from political philosophies that are content to leave the ‘undeserving’ and ‘unrighteous’ to suffer, to our fear of facing the complexities of anything we do not understand.

At the heart of so much of religion – and particularly the historical legacy of Christianity in America – is a rejection of what it means to be human. Because we believe we are primarily sinful, we explain our failures and the failures of others as matters of personal character, reduce complex events that cry out for understanding to battles of good versus evil*, and scold ourselves for emotions and proclivities that are far from being sinful and even, in some cases, are part of a being a whole, healthy human being.** The invention of God has placed mankind in the constant position of falling short – one is tempted to ask, if we are so fallen, what or who provides us with an example of being any better? Rather than dealing with humanity as it exists, we deal with it under the delusion that something much better is ‘out there’ somewhere, and cause untold damage to ourselves and others in the process of rejecting ourselves.

I am not arguing that human beings are not capable of great evil, or that the evil we do commit is simply the result of the misshapen human under the influence of religious falsehood. But I am arguing that as an explanation for why human beings do evil, and under what conditions they do so, religion has a profoundly pathetic record. There is indeed very little in the world that can be explained or solved by the metaphysics of black, white, and the Devil in the Garden of Eden.

Because religion gives us a false understanding of humanity, it helps to thwart the problem-solving capacities of society. Religion in America, firstly, has an amazing capacity to ensure we are all comfortable with the status-quo. Although few people overtly say today that God intends the poor to be poor, plenty of people believe that “everything happens for a reason,” and therefore consider economic inequality a kind of quaint detail in a world ultimately ordered by God’s justice. They are even less likely to stop and consider whether they have earned all the privileges they have enjoyed in their lives - indeed, while Americans often like to talk of God’s blessings, they get very angry when you try to use some of those blessings to help the less blessed, say for example through increased taxation to provide universal health coverage.

Furthermore, because religion gives us a false narrative with which to explain our lives and the lives of others, it prevents our society as a whole from seriously engaging with the existential questions that almost any human being must face. The problems of physical or mental disabilities, the reality of sadness and depression, the inevitability of death – all of these are extremely neglected by our culture, because without the simple metaphysics of God’s mysterious ways and the reality of the after-life, they can be terrifying questions. And assuming that in the end, everything is ordered, and somewhere there is a Being so much better than us that is secretly making sure that it all makes sense, is essential to maintaining happy consumers. Pondering honestly the arbitrariness of life, the limitations of human biology and the finality of death might cause us to pause and question just a little too much. ***

Therefore to me, atheism is about social responsibility. I am an atheist because I do not want to shirk my responsibility as a member of the human community – I do not want to comfort myself with falsehoods so that I might go about my life undisturbed by the suffering of others. I am an atheist not only, and not even primarily, because the claims of religion make no sense and rest on no solid evidence - but because I believe the world, and particularly this country, would be a better place if the vast majority of us were not deluded about what it means to be human, and what it means to be mortal. In the end, I am an atheist because this, to me, is part and parcel of a philosophy that is not only based in truth, but human and humane.

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* The most obvious examples of this dynamic might be the reduction of the Holocaust to the personal evilness of Hitler, and America’s very stubborn resistance to understanding 9/11 and Islamic terrorism as the result of anything other than pure evil.

** There are many examples of this, but the most obvious and least controversial are the consequences of religion making much of human sexuality “sinful”.

*** Sam Harris, in this debate with Reza Aslan, makes the argument about how religion interferes with honest dialogue very well. (Harris’s contribution in this segment starts at about 7:30, but the whole debate is well worth watching.)