Earlier this week I mentioned the rumor being spread that the New Atheists are the new prophets. Well now we can add the following bold conjectures from friend of Camels With Hammers, Clergy Guy:
The church has deteriorated over the years to where we have a great number of thumbsucking, overindulged, lazy people who want somebody to pay for a professional to take care of the religious work.
You know, I have become friends with a few atheists recently, and I much prefer them to many of the “elect.” They often have a real passion for truth that I find lacking in many church members. They are often quite idealistic (even if they won’t admit it). I think Jesus probably prefers them, too—although don’t tell my new friends that because it will start a debate for sure.
If you ask me, the real atheists are often sitting in the pews. They don’t believe. They just want. They’re not racked with guilt; they’re soft with spoiled living. And they whine if things get too uncomfortable.
What do you think? Is the grass just greener on the other side? Or are the people in the pews the most cynical forms of atheists in their hearts? Or is Clergy Guy an atheist in his heart and the only way he knows to express it is to identify us atheists as like him rather than himself as like us?
I can’t seem to find the passage in the books I have handy, but if I remember correctly it was Paul Tillich who noticed that all the great reformers get called atheists at some point—most famously possibly in the case of Socrates and possibly the most ironically in the case of Jesus. This makes plenty of sense to me. Each religion (or at least each monotheistic one) has a nasty, exclusionary, and arrogant habit of defining truth as the dogmas of its particular cult and morality as identical to its rules and dictate. Anyone who challenges either the actual moral virtue of the institution or (worse) the rightness of its moral ideals or its theology rejects morality and god himself in the process. And so, to deny the religion’s instantiation in practice and in teaching, identified with absolute truth itself and with God himself, is tantamount to evil and atheism.
The reformers of morality always look evil by the standards and custom practices of the reigning morality they seek to criticize. How does one criticize a morality without sounding immoral, at least to the ears that accept that very morality? How does one criticize a conception of God without sounding like an atheist to those for whom that conception of God is the necessary meaning of the word “God” itself? And when actually is an atheist in a predominantly theistic world, how can one not be and be perceived as the enemy of the very traditionalism that most people take for morality and for which most people instinctively feel the most irrational tendency to veneration?
And, yet, as those willing to slaughter sacred cows on principle, standing for an anti-traditionalist standard of truth and ethical evaluation, the reformer, the atheist can cut a heroic figure for her willingness to sever all the safety nets of tradition and demand a new, untested future. And for those who see the reinvigorating, reforming possibilities in such habit-denying feather ruffling and yet who also want to remain in the faith and in the tradition, as Clergy Guy has intimated he does, it is only logical to desire more of the atheist’s spirit amidst the faithful. But, in my view, the spirit of atheism in our day demands real atheism. In past ages, being a deist was radical enough for Voltaires and Jeffersons and being radical immanentists was radical enough for the Schleiermachers and Harnacks to be genuinely scandalous reformers. Today though, we’re in an age where the equivalently bold and revisionary spirits must go beyond the deisms and liberalisms that have been reduced to wishy-washy, mealy mouthed, empty cliche propping, and rather accept full blooded atheism (or at least strongly skeptical agnosticism) in order to provoke, reform, and help progress Western culture.
Your Thoughts?
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10 Comments
Daniel, I’m going to have to read this again after I’ve had my coffee–there’s a lot to it.
Just to clear up something, I’m not wishing I could find the nerve to become an atheist. I have some confusion about God, but I do not deny God’s existence. However, I do have some massive problems with the church.
It was interesting how you said reformers have often been accused of atheism. I seem to recall in my Christian history class that the early Christians were sometimes considered atheists because they did not believe in the popular gods of the culture.
As usual you have more to say than I can grasp in on sitting, so I’ll be back.
Peace
Well, I consider it a thing where you can keep calling us atheists really one of you as long as we can keep calling you really one of us. In a way it’s the highest compliment we can pay each other, no? ;)
Well, if you put it that way….
And I did mean it as a compliment in my entry
Good post. I too will re-read it later.
On a side not, I’ve had several Christian friends tell me that I’m still a Christian, which is interesting because I don’t believe any of the proper Christian things any more. I think they react this way because I still treat people with kindness, love and respect.
Yes, I knew you meant to be complimentary Clergy Guy and so I took it flatteringly (insofar as I could presume I was among the new atheist friends to whom you meant to refer).
Mike, I think the issue comes down to this: when someone is trying to claim you is it because they admire you (or things about you) and think that those traits should be associated with what they think is the truth and the good life, then yes, it’s a compliment and not something to be upset about. If they’re telling you you’re just in a phase then there might be a controlling attitude they have which is not coping well with your stubborn refusal to submit your will and become like them. (This door swings both for the atheist and the religious when telling the other it’s just a matter of time ’til they’ll come back—or come around for the first time as the case may be).
Finally, apart from any virtues, I have a friend who teases me that I’m still a Christian simply because Christian structures of thought and Christian priorities (like to evangelize rather than just keep my beliefs to myself) and Christian guilt, etc. all are deeply engrained in me. While I became far, far more laissez-faire and changed many a philosophical, ethical, political, and psychological outlook when I left Christianity, there are some definite continuities of habit and attitude.
And, as I’ve mentioned before, in this post http://camelswithhammers.com/2009/08/20/the-complicated-relationship-of-an-apostate-to-his-religious-friends-and-his-reilgious-past/ I have a friend who says my language drips with religious allusions more than anyone else he knows. And that’s almost always unconscious on my part. It’s just the way my mind works.
As to your last 2 paragraphs I know exactly how you feel! But I do think that having that tendency helps make a much stronger argument – especially in the area of ethics. I will definately be reading more!
Thanks, Mandy! It’s nice to see you here!
I do take it as a compliment, though I also try to point out how it could be taken offensively.
ClergyMan said:
”
If you ask me, the real atheists are often sitting in the pews. They don’t believe. They just want. They’re not racked with guilt; they’re soft with spoiled living. And they whine if things get too uncomfortable
”
It sounds like ClergyMan is using the word “Atheists” in this passage as a derogatory term, to describe the slothful behaviour of church attendees.
I took him to mean atheists to mean the ones who don’t believe in anything. The idea was that the slothful self-centeredness of those in the pews betrayed a real lack of commitment to anything of higher importance. Then he contrasted these people with the actual atheists who by their passion for truth show they actually do believe in something of higher importance and in that way were less “atheistic” (where atheistic has connotations of nihilistic).
All of which I think is somewhat true. If “God is truth” then it makes sense for Clergy Guy, if that is indeed his perspective, to surmise that the atheists who love truth are unwittingly closer to God than the closed-minded, apathetic, lazy Christians who don’t.