What is Godlessness?

Why atheism isn’t enough.

Superficially, atheists are godless, meaning they have nothing to do with gods or with spirituality, religion, and the like.

But “atheism” is better thought of as an accusation leveled by members of a particular religion, since that’s how the term was originally used. Atheists are just foreigners or unbelievers in some creed.

In ancient Rome, Christians were atheists, and once Christianity became Rome’s official religion, pagans became the atheists. “Atheism” was a relative term so neither Christians nor pagans were atheists in the sense of being perfectly godless. They were nonbelievers in certain gods, but they had their native religious practices and alternative myths and theologies.

Atheism and Godlessness

When new atheism was a thing (a fad), Richard Dawkins liked to say that atheists merely go one step further than Christians, Muslims, or any other religious people, since the latter reject all gods and religions but theirs. The atheist rejects all of those too, plus the gods of the last religion standing.

This is the unphilosophical level of thinking common to science-centered atheists. Atheism becomes just a matter of simple arithmetic, you see. When the atheist is talking to a Christian, she takes all the non-Christian deities they both reject, and she adds the Christian’s god to the list. Poof! That’s how you can make an atheist — a godless person — out of a Christian. You merely convince the Christian to negate one further deity.

What this conception of atheism leaves out, though, is all the other aspects of religiosity, such as reverence, worship, and spirituality, which re-emerge in secular forms.

Take idolatry, for example, the worship of money, power, or pleasure, or the holding of these material goods as effectively sacred and worthy of ultimate concern. Is the atheist godless when she treats something as though it were her god, when she trusts in the merit of some way of life while lacking sufficient reason for doing so?

Soviet communists were explicitly atheistic, but they effectively worshipped the state as an ultimate good, revered Vladimir Lenin as a saint, and treated Josef Stalin as an absolute monarch able to decide the fate of millions on a whim. That political model of absolute rule is saturated with religious connotations, since for thousands of years deference to a king was justified theocratically, by appealing to religious myths about how the gods confer authority on the ruler, making the king or queen an agent of divine order.

Likewise, the Nazis worshipped the Volk, the essence of a purified ethnicity, and they revered Adolph Hitler as the visionary leader of this spiritualized supreme race. Nazis saw themselves as fulfilling Nietzsche’s expectation that a new religion would have to replace the old ones after the functional death of the ancient and medieval gods at the hands of modernists.

Liberalism defeated both Soviet communism and Nazism in the last century, creating the new, supposedly secular world order of capitalism, consumerism, democracy, and endless technoscientific progress.

So is this liberal world godless? Does this late-modern civilization lack any deified person or sacred object?

Certainly, there’s no dictator or god-man ruling over bastions of liberty, although cults like Scientology and Trumpism demonstrate that the religious urge to worship can still surface paradoxically in secular parts of the United States. And while people are free to worship privately in liberal societies, this freedom is meant to be patronizing, since religions are merely tolerated by those with the liberal sensibilities that determine the nature of the ruling institutions.

The idea of liberalism is that all individuals have equal value because of their capacity to exercise rational self-control. “Individual person” is an abstraction, one which used to be identified exclusively with rich, white European men, but which eventually moderns understood to apply to free-thinking, responsible minds and bodies in general. Liberalism entails, then, that everyone should be free to pursue their goals. Society should reflect that equal freedom of every individual, by empowering them and by getting out of their way.

Mythos and Ethos

Here we approach the crux of godlessness, which we can identify by posing this question: Does the liberal have the equivalent of religious faith in the worth of her desires and in the rightness of her pursuit of her freely chosen ends? In other words, is the liberal as secure in her lifestyle as the Christian, Muslim, or Hindu, because the liberal, too, trusts in certain myths that direct her liberty and give her a sense of purpose despite the old faiths’ loss of authority?

There is, after all, a civil religion even in liberal societies like the United States, as historian Robert Bellah pointed out. Americans revere their Bill of Rights as scripture and regard their “Founding Fathers” as saints. Americans believe their country has a manifest destiny to act as an exceptional, indispensable nation, that the US is a beacon of hope for the world and a shining city on the hill (as drawn from Matt.5:14).

This myth of exceptionalism shows up in the Hollywood trope of the action hero who has to “go it alone” and buck the system (i.e. international law) to stop the bad guys that are too powerful for ordinary mortals (for nations that aren’t superpowers).

Moreover, average Americans are encouraged by the American Dream, by the expectation that the US is a place of opportunity and upward mobility, where anyone can succeed if they work hard, because the playing field of the economy, as it were, is fair. This myth is reinforced by corporate advertisements and political speeches and campaigns that promote American consumerism.

As liberal, fact-based historians understand, these are all secular myths. For example, the US falls behind Europe, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand in upward economic mobility, and this mobility has been declining in the US since the 1940s.

The secular American myths may be atheistic in that they’re based on modern ideas rather than drawing explicitly from ancient religions, but they’re functionally religious and faith-based. Therefore, even the average, secular American — or Westerner or First World cosmopolitan more generally since non-American secularists have their civic religions too — isn’t godless in the full sense of having nothing to do with religion. A civic religion is still a religion, and a prized secular mass delusion is tantamount to a myth or to what Plato called a “noble lie.”

In Homo Deus, the historian Yuval Harari shows why this religiosity should be expected, when he compares religions in the ancient world to corporate brands. While Christianity focused on policing thoughts, most religions were ways of life that were distinguished by how certain symbols motivated social behavior.

Just as the icons of Apple, Google, Tesla, or Americana codify commitments to buying certain products or buying into a national faith, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, and Chinese were drawn to symbols of sacredness that made them feel special and at home in a local undertaking.

In a nutshell, mythos is grounded in ethos. Mythos is the Marxian “ideological superstructure” of the material reality of cultural markers. Myths are fictions we tell to cooperate in our civilizational or national enterprise.

The New Atheistic Pretense of Hyperrationality

Although atheists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are loath to concede that science has any religious aspect, science fiction functions as a repository of science-centered stories that seize the public imagination and guide our attitudes towards science and technology.

Until the surge of anti-intellectualism in the United States, due to social media and the right-wing infosphere, Americans trusted that scientific and technological advances were socially progressive. They assumed they were establishing the kind of secular wonderland or substitutionary Heaven depicted in optimistic sci-fi since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Rather than agreeing that science-centered myths prop up the secular faith in science and industry, Sam Harris maintains in The Moral Landscape that no such myths are needed, since the meaning of life is self-evident, as supposedly revealed by Harris’s utilitarian thought experiments.

There are the Good Life and the Bad Life, he says, one way of life filled with pleasure and opportunity, the other with anguish and oppression. Intuition tells us to prefer the former to the latter, and that’s all we need to know about what our ultimate values should be. Science steps in to tell us how to achieve the Good Life or how to be happy and then we’re off to the races.

Yet even if Harris were correct about our intuitions and even if there were some rational argument that showed we ought to trust them, liberal societies pursue happiness not because of any such argument but because of liberal myths such as those shown daily on television and in Hollywood films.

We need stories to assure us not just that happiness is possible and likely for everyone or that one person needn’t be happy only at someone else’s or at nature’s expense; we need fictions to convince us that a happy life isn’t tarnished when considered from an objective standpoint, from one that transcends a particular ethos.

Godlessness and Skepticism

This, then, is true godlessness, the philosophical perspective that sees through the secular myths that uphold every ethos, every large-scale collective lifestyle. Those who have nothing to do with religiosity eschew all idols and are therefore condemned to regard their freedom as absurd. Godlessness is rooted in existential philosophy, in scientific objectivity, and in the modern forms of empowerment that liberate the individual from the delusions that domesticate the masses by boosting our faith-based ethos and automating our civilized behavior.

There are two kinds of liberal, then, the naïve and the philosophical or hyper-skeptical one. The naïve liberal is an upstanding member of the civic religion, trusting in the secular or theistic myths that justify the people’s ethos. This naïve liberal is far from godless even if she’s “atheistic” in the sense that she dismisses ancient religions and the old gods.

The paranoid or skeptical liberal does herself the disservice of doubting even the ground she’s standing on, including the mores that hold up the society that keeps her from having to fend for herself in the inhuman wilderness. Needless to say, she doubts the American civic religion, preferring objective history to national flattery or folklore and to corporate propaganda.

She’s nominally part of liberal society but she lives a double life, because secretly, at least, she suspects her life is pointless. This is because she can’t help but regard the entire liberal (capitalistic and democratic) civilization as a mass hallucination that runs a grotesque, self-contradictory exercise. Happiness for her would require a dance she can’t perform because she’s too smart for her good. She’s tragically curious about intellectual matters, because she doesn’t like what she finds towards the end of rational inquiry.

Real godless folks have an unfulfilled appetite for meaning. They’re often “postmodern” in that they’re unable to trust in any institution or authority figure because they’re liable to think all myths are moves in an empty power game. The godless may eventually become cynical, nihilistic, and apathetic.

At any rate, the godless aren’t the same as new atheists. The leading members of the latter are liberals in the first sense or else they’ve branched off in the alt-right direction and made a cult out of masculinity. By contrast, the godless or the atheists in the fullest sense are more likely to be marginalized since they don’t respect social norms, not even those of “enlightened,” modern liberal society.

The existential quest for the non-naïve atheists is to live with godless honor, to find meaning in life despite the horrors of objective knowledge, and without resorting even to secular myths, fantasies, and frauds.