Of Atheists, Scientists, and the “Civil" of Civil Rights

Back in the middle of the 19th century, this little scruffy German guy, obscure crackpot revolutionary type, wrote “Religion is the opiate of the masses". (Actually, what Karl Marx wrote was “Die Religion ist … das Opium des Volks", and it was probably Friedrich Engels, not Marx, who wrote it. But I digress.) A few decades later, a whole bunch of people discovered Marx and thought he knew what he was talking about. So they discarded religion, and discovered opium in the process. Opium became the religion of the masses. Today, the survivors of that experiment have discarded both Marx and (so we’re told) opium, and discovered God. Forward into the past ...

And the seasons, they go round and round,
And the painted ponies go up and down.

The Circle Game, Joni Mitchell

I got started on this carousel because of an article that made it to the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle this morning. It was about an atheist group, complaining that, in this “religious" age, its members are facing discrimination. A homosexual can get and keep a job, their speakers argue, in a line that probably was the reason they got on the front page of the Chronicle, but not someone whose religious faith is the absence of one.

To be sure, if they’re right, this discrimination is a clear violation of their civil rights, guaranteed under our Constitution’s First Amendment. But it’s a discrimination that the Founding Fathers, none of whom could conceive of a world without “God" even as they denied the superiority of any one denomination’s expression of that conception, would not have imagined to be possible. And, perhaps, it’s a right that many of us would be uncomfortable granting.

All of this thanks to a pack of nomads in a Middle Eastern desert three thousand or more years ago. Who, first among all the peoples of Earth, conceived of a God who could not be pictured, whose supreme knowledge included a flawless understanding of human ethical conduct, and who chose a people to model that understanding of ethical conduct on Earth. (The Gods of most other peoples before that time behaved, basically, like a bunch of superhuman spoiled brats. The NBA of antiquity.) That God was Eli, who became Jahweh, the God of Judaism, and (as “the Lord") Christianity, and (as “Allah") Islam.

Now this is a neat trick. Why? Because, if your God is the total embodiment of ethical behavior, then anybody who doesn’t believe in your God is automatically devoid of ethics. Incapable of proper social conduct. Evil. Even better, you yourself, as one of the Chosen, are an embodiment of what is Right and Proper. So if you don’t like what you see, it’s Right and Proper to cast it down, George.

This doesn’t leave the atheist a great deal of room to maneuver. Your friendly neighborhood atheist likely has just as strong and accurate a notion of ethical conduct as any imam, but, understandably, has a hard time gleaning from personal observation that there is an Entity out there who will, on call, suspend the natural laws of the universe for a single prayerful petitioner of Name Your Religious Ingroup, confessedly unworthy. A person without a God is not necessarily a person with a Devil, but how do you go about proving that? After all, if God is Ethics, and you have no God, how can you possibly have ethics?

This situation doesn’t help the scientist much either, since the scientist must, as the first rule of the profession, operate on the basis that the natural laws of the universe are never suspended by any Supernatural Force. Consider: how many people in popular culture can avoid affixing the prefix “Mad" to “Scientist"? The guy – it’s always a guy, please note, since we’re talking about discrimination and inappropriate images – the guy, say I, in the white coat and the wild hair and the Coke-bottle glasses and the manaiacal laugh. The one with the huge dark lab, and the malformed minions, and the complete absence of a notion of ethical conduct. And no God.

So how do you convince a “religious" world that the atheist, and the scientist, are just as capable of ethical conduct as the believer? Especially since many scientists aren’t atheists, though the faithful among them face a difficulty with the conflicting teachings of their professional and religious lives. A conflict I resolve by recognizing that a faith system is a powerful metaphor for ethical conduct, one that, for many people (but not me), loses its power if it is not hitched to an overwhelming concept of “the Divine".

I guess the convincing needs to start with knowledge, both of what atheism truly represents, and of what the First Amendment of our Constitution promises to those whose belief system does not include belief in a Divinity, as well as to those with different models of who or what the Divinity is.

But then I think back to the McCarthy era, when those who followed Marx in rejecting religion were subject to a witchhunt. It doesn’t give me much hope that our civility extends to the acceptance of truths we find uncomfortable, or the granting of rights in recognition of those truths.

A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.

The Boxer, Paul Simon (Simon and Garfunkel)

  - O Ceallaigh

Copyright © 2006 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.

All opinions are mine as a private citizen.