The Childishness of Modern Atheism
Christianity and Freud have something in common. Freud’s observations about the psyche, along with his contemporaries in the psychoanalysts of the twentieth century, have become so absorbed into our language and understanding of psychology that we don’t recognise it. When we think of Freud or Jung most people imagine stereotypes of fetishistic weirdos who wrote about how everyone has a mother complex. Because their most useful observations (for example Jung’s introvert/extrovert) have become so absorbed into our language we simply see the things that seem strange, we see through what we have absorbed, leaving only what we think we have rejected because we are blind to how such radical thought at the time actually enabled these observations to be made.
Recent decades of iconoclasm towards Christian ideas and the trends of atheism and dismissal of religious belief have a similar character. Take a flick through the medium ‘religion’ section and you will find article after article triumphantly and exhaustingly criticising christianity, without the apparent moment of awakening to the fact that the very categories by which they are criticising it are themselves purloined from christianity.
A plethora of recent books including Tom Holland’s Dominion or Nick Spencer’s The Evolution of the West, have gone to painstaking lengths to describe how many of the basic values we take for granted are not contrived as we would like to believe by post-enlightenment rationalists simply realising we all have human value and dignity, but by thousands of years of theological and religious debates and squabbles. Our modern world, ironically is influenced as much by Origen or Augustine than by many modern figures of culture.
Our age then, is a peculiar one of iconoclasm and amnesia. We are like children spending their parents money, pretending we earned it. Part of the appeal of writing articles with titles like “I’m Saving Christianity By Telling Jesus To F- Off — The more I criticise Christianity, the better it gets” (not made up — actual title of an actual article), is not in it’s truth, but in its feeling of liberation. Nothing flatters the ego more than the death of God, whatever the consequences in the longer term might be. Never mind the philosophy that might enable you to reckon with this seriously, ignore Dostoevsky or Nietzsche, if your barn is full, if your wine vats are creaking, why not have the added benefit of a world where no moral standard might judge you, and you can have the bordering on religious sanctimony of judging it before it gets a chance.
Attacking Christianity today is like shooting fish in a barrel. In the UK the anglican church is mired between listless tradition and pandering to moral fads, and unsurprisingly the church is declining as a whole. Less than half of people in England now even identify as Christian, let alone attend church in any form. American christianity is a disaster, like the country’s politics it seems to be becoming more and more of a kind of preposterous self-parody, a lamentable mix of right wing politics, Trumpism, conflation with nationalism, prosperity gospel and belittling of minorities for the sake of culture war point scoring. And because of the nature of our media, this is exaggerated by the fact that this is all we see of it, this is its public face. If Christians anywhere are quietly doing good things, we aren’t going to see it in the news.
Yet these faults are faults of hypocrisy as much as of untruth. If Christianity is true, these Christians are hypocrites, if Christianity is false, these Christians are hypocrites. The same amnesia that characterise the world of disbelief rather ironically also afflicts many believers in the modern world, an adherence to the idea that problems are solved by the squabbles of culture wars rather than by reference to the highest of moral values. What matters before opinion in the teachings of the bible is character. If christians spend as much time worrying about taking literally passages like “sell all you have and give it to the poor” instead of arguing about, say, race theory, we’d live in a different world.
It has also become somewhat intuitive to assume all of this has nothing to do with its actual truth. That whoever might claim to be the originator of the values we all cherish, that doesn’t make Noah’s arc an actual event, or prove who will or won’t spend eternity in heaven or hell. However this assumption is based on a kind of listless moral relativism, the idea that morals aren’t true, and the language or myth systems that vessel them are therefore insignificant. This assumption is the bringer of so much of the confusion involved in these discussions.
Take for example the idea of hell. Hell is a frequent topic for those wishing to sling mud at believers, sometimes justifiable by the behaviour of Christians in the light of serious moral topics, but so much is overlooked by these squabbles. For one thing, the condemnation of hell as morally wrong is itself a moral judgement, illustrating ironically the fact that no concept of the highest moral good in relation to ourselves as agents can exist without it ‘judging’ us. Our entire judicial system is based on this, we don’t possess the law out of a historical need to keep pests and deviants out of society, but out of the idea that moral good judges us, and that our conscience and moral spirit means we are responsible both as moral agents and as moral judges in this world. This is after all the concept that allows people to make a ‘judgement’ of hell as morally wrong. Perhaps none of these people has ever read, say, Dante, and considered how a moral scheme of the world might in some sense be a metaphor, and that exactly what happens at the end of the end, is to say the least, difficult to say literally, but never mind. We are still under the belief that moral indignation and condemnation should motivate us. Why else would we care?
Atheism in its current manifestations is an adolescent philosophy. It is a phase in the West. It is a kind of ‘up yours mum and dad’ attitude to the moral hegemony that has shaped our very values, and a drunkenness on the idea of our own rational freedom. But like those same adolescents who upon becoming adults have to learn from seriously moral inventory that we are only who we are because someone, in whatever broken form, cared for us, we have to reckon with what it means to accept how much of our moral world is not rational but mythic and religious. We are believing beings, meaning seeking moral beings.
There has always been a tension in the Christian west between the esoteric and individual elements of Christian values. On one hand, much of society is nominally Christian, Christian by name and by broad values but little by practice. On the other hand the most serious and radical elements of Christianity are aspects of individual piety and faith. A prayer from the Puritan prayer book ‘Valley of Vision’ says “Let me learn by paradox / that the way down is the way up / that to be low is to be high / that the broken heart is the healed heart / that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit / that the repenting soul is the victorious soul / that to have nothing is to possess all / that to bear the cross is to wear the crown / that to give is to receive / that the valley is the place of vision.”
Much of the proof of these moral truths is not won by argument, but by individual faith and commitment to the rugged path of enduring love. In a material world, the proof of science is in material and technological transformations. In a moral world, it is in transformations of the heart, the living or a moral and spiritual life, one which makes you a vessel for the Goodness that is all goodness: the love that in Dante’s vision moves the sun and other stars.