Belief
During a recent exchange I had with some online friends, the subject of religious belief came up, as it is wont to do. In the course of the conversation, one of the others (a religious person) wrote:
I . . . think many people who think they are atheists have a spark of belief deep inside.
I’ve already mentioned how much this kind of thinking gets under my skin, so you will not be surprised that I said as much, remarking that assumptions like that were somewhat offensive to me. A third person chimed in, in response to my response:
This works in a reciprocal fashion. I’m also somewhat offended when talking with my non-Mormon, ex-Mormon, agnostic, and/or atheist friends who seem to view my continued “grasp” at Mormonism as juvenile and immature. They approach it as, “Well, you obviously haven’t thought through it all well enough to come to the same conclusion that I have. As such, your opinion is regarded in a like manner: juvenile.
Well, the debate has petered out in that particular circle—for now—but I thought I’d give my full(er) opinion here.
I’ve been guilty of this transgression both as a believer and a non-believer. Believers who really believe, for whom belief is an integral and inseparable part of their world view, don’t know how to imagine life without belief. A believer might think,
If he were an atheist, he wouldn’t be happy and loving and kind, because when I think about being an atheist I am unhappy and don’t feel loving or kind. So either he’s not really happy and loving and kind, or he’s not really an atheist.
or
My religion teaches that we all have a tiny bit of God’s light in us that whispers the truth to us. So even atheists must have that little light in them, or else my religion would be false. And it isn’t false. So atheists are simply mistaken when they say they don’t believe.
Likewise, a non-believer could think,
Since I stopped believing when I thought about all the evidence, if believers would just stop and consider all the evidence they wouldn’t believe. So if they still believe, they are either lying or mistaken when they say they’ve considered all the evidence. Or maybe they’re just stupid. Or juvenile.
or
Believers are really good at lying to themselves/compartmentalizing/rationalizing/ignoring obvious facts. I have no respect for people who do any of those things, so I have no respect for believers.
This kind of lazy conclusion-jumping is true even for people like me who were once believers; it’s hard for me to accept the fact that I ever actually did believe, because now I view religious belief as an embarrassing lapse in judgment, and I like to think of myself as an intelligent person who avoids such lapses. I read about this kind of phenomenon, this inability to correctly remember our past situation, in the fascinating, if slightly flawed, book Stumbling on Happiness, by Daniel Gilbert: when we imagine how we felt in the past, or how we will feel in the future, we imagine how we feel about that subject right now and extrapolate from there, so our present situation almost always clouds our memory of past feelings or our prediction of future feelings.
In conclusion, I wouldn’t have a problem with believers if y’all would keep it to yourselves instead of flaunting it for the world to see. Have the decency to be ashamed of your deviance!
That is all.
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October 30th, 2007 at 7:39 am
I actually kind of agree with the idea that most athiests have a spark of belief deep down – but not because ‘it’s true there’s a god and therefore they must know it on some level’. It’s more that I think it’s human nature to want there to be order or reason in life. Which I guess really makes it a spark of HOPE, not of belief. I think people sometimes (almost subconsciously) wish there was a higher power, even if they really don’t believe there is.
This isn’t any kind of new idea. Really it’s the same thing that explains why religion exists at all, if there really was no God to start it all.
October 30th, 2007 at 7:42 am
Of course none of that excuses the kind of religious person who basically pats an atheist on the head and says, ‘oh, I’m sure you really DO believe in God, even if you don’t want to admit it’.
October 30th, 2007 at 8:05 am
Personally, my favorite thought about atheism relates to our condition post-death. It’s trite, I know, but here it is anyway.
Atheists have the most faith of anyone.
For if the atheist is right and the zealot is wrong then there is no difference between them after death. However, if the zealot is right…
October 30th, 2007 at 9:51 am
Chosha, have you read Daniel Dennett’s discussion of the origins and present realities of religion, Breaking the Spell? Whether Dennett’s theories are correct or not, it’s still a good read.
In my opinion, atheism is much more compatible with a desire for order and reason in life than religion, with science the answer to the first component and personal determination the answer to the second. Religion has a poor track record in addressing either, from what I can see. I also find it interesting that you link your posited “spark of belief” to hope, instead of fear, as I would be much more likely to fear the existence of a Biblical deity than to hope for it.
Playa, I don’t see why atheists would need to have any more faith in that instance than Mormons, since both will be going to a special hell if the evangelical Christians turn out to be right. If the Jehovah’s Witnesses are right, on the other hand, it won’t make any difference to the atheists—their consciousness will simply be extinguished, which is what they are expecting anyway.
In other words, Pascal’s Wager is trite because it is logically vapid, not because it’s a truism.
October 30th, 2007 at 10:11 am
I haven’t read that book, but I’ll give it a go.
In saying that people hope for a higher power, I really only meant in the sense that they would like to think life has some meaning. Some people (often those to whom life is more unkind) want to feel that there’s a reason for the ‘trials’ they suffer. I wasn’t thinking of a Biblical god in particular – rather any religious belief that attempts to explain what life is all about, or at least give a sense that it’s about something rather than nothing.
The idea that science and person determination bring order and reason is relatively modern. Whether or not religion actually fulfilled those needs is irrelevent, because the point is that religion was perceived (for millenia) as fulfilling them. Even after the Enlightenment began, science wasn’t always thought incompatible with religion (with natural law theories and the like).
I’m not saying that every single person feels these things, or that you must necessarily feel them, but only that the fact that every culture in the world developed with some kind of belief system that touches on the numinous suggests that human beings generally want to believe, or have needs that belief addresses (whether well or not).
October 30th, 2007 at 8:00 pm
I do believe that some or most humans do yearn for a connection to something beyond themselves. Whether that yearning is born in our society, our brains or our genes I don’t know; I’ll let the smart people fight that out. It is interesting to observe it’s effects on society, though, from a purely anthropological standpoint.