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There is a lie at the heart of beLIEf.
Living a Lie
BE LIE VING
I can't help but see the lie at the heart of belief.
To live a life believing in a thing that you have no evidence to support is to live a lie. I am very clear in my mind that lying is wrong, thoroughly wrong, something a moral person ought to be ashamed of. For brevity I may a well use the word sin. Believing without evidence is a sin. I define a sin as an action that is known to be wrong. The Oxford Concise Dictionary defines sin as
sin1 n. & v.
n.
1 a the breaking of divine or moral law, esp. by a conscious act. b such an act.
2 an offence against good taste or propriety etc.
v. (sinned, sinning)
1 intr. commit a sin.
2 intr. (foll. by against) offend.
3 tr. archaic commit (a sin).
as sin colloq. extremely (ugly as sin).
for one's sins esp. Brit. joc. as a judgement on one for something or other.
like sin colloq. vehemently or forcefully.
live in sin colloq. live together without being married.
sinless adj.
sinlessly adv.
sinlessness n.
[Old English syn(n)]
Strikethrough the word divine and I have no issues with the word or the concept, and of course as an atheist you should expect me to simply treat every concept and word in the same way, simply ignoring as irrelevant and meaningless any references to gods. A sin is the breaking of a moral law, especially by a conscious act, or such an act.
Lying is a sin. It makes no difference to me whether the lie is only told to the self or to everybody who will listen. Lying is just wrong, only justified if it prevents a significantly greater wrong.
To a scientist believing with faith is gross professional misconduct. Nothing should be taken on trust or authority, especially not something that seems to contradict empirical findings.
I see a distinction between having an opinion and having a religious belief held with faith. Everybody is entitled to his or her opinion and to express it, and there is no obligation on the person holding an opinion to have a good reason for holding it, or indeed expressing it. Not having an opinion is rather like trying not to think about an elephant. It is very difficult to do, and the more you think about it the harder it is not to come up with some opinion, even if it is in the form of “I wouldn't be surprised either way”. I am constantly harangued by Christians who think they are the first person on the planet to think that believing there isn't a god (they always write it as “there isn't a God”, which does show their bias) requires faith and that therefore I am a hypocrite. This idea suggests that I recognize hypocrisy as a great sin, and yet of course such people are also likely to pull me up for even daring to use the word or concept of sin! As usual it seems the main thing in debates is that they win and protect their core belief, which is “I am a good person because I am a God person”.
The way I see it is very difficult not to have an opinion on the god question, but having an opinion is a million miles away from having a faith. I see faith in the capital F mountain moving mode as being as different from an opinion as a raindrop is from an ocean. Religious faith is an opinion that changes a person's entire identity and thought processes. A person with a religious faith sends all their thoughts via their faith module, maybe not as explicitly as “which shirt would Jesus choose for the office on Tuesday” but certainly checking decisions for clashes and contradictions. That isn't the case with me. I have a sense of what is right and wrong, moral and immoral, legal and illegal but I very rarely stop to consider if my actions are consistent with my beliefs about the formation of the universe or the origin of man.
I don't see myself as being a smarter or a better person for not believing in gods, at least not in any way more than I do for believing in the germ theory of disease, the heliocentric solar system, or that Belgium is a richer country than Bulgaria. The sentence “I believe my opinion is wrong” is rather absurd, isn't it? Of course I think I'm right about my opinions and beliefs. It is quite absurd to stretch having an opinion into having a faith and therefore having a religion and therefore being just the same as those who recite their creeds and believe in their absurdities.
Do my beliefs (opinions) influence my actions? Naturally they do. If I think it might rain I make sure I'm carrying my umbrella. Not to be influenced by my own opinions would be perverse. Does that mean that there is a religion of atheist evolutionism? I don't think so. My belief in evolution does not depend on my atheism. The Pope believes in evolution too. The fact that I decided that I did not believe in gods, ghosts and fairies before I came to understand what the theory of evolution really was does not weaken my case significantly. I have no doubt that most religious people believed in their god before they knew every tenet and argument for their religion. I knew that there were many scientists who had an explanation for the complexity of biology that did not require a god, and that no intelligent and educated Christians in Britain argued that these theories were incorrect, and that there were other scientists who had an explanation for the stars and galaxies that also did not seem to rely upon any god; that was all I needed. I knew the stories that religion was feeding to me were absurd, nonsensical and in many cases filled with thoroughly nasty implications. Once I knew that there was a valid alternative to believing in God and the supernatural I embraced it and accepted the label of atheist. I was about 11 at the time.
I did not see in the stories of the Old Testament God anything that I could understand, believe in or love. The stories in the New Testament seemed to be describing a mixture between common sense and outright mental illness and religious mania. At school there were regular assemblies. In effect if not design these were secular humanist, I remember picking up a lot of strengthening to my sense of morality but I do not remember anything that tied it all in with having to believe in the story of Jesus in the stable with the baa lambs or that it was only believing in such nonsense that gave a man any reason to be moral. Secular humanist morality came through loud and clear. The lessons in morality and modern moral parables got through to me, the hymns and prayers just got on my nerves.
It annoyed me a lot to see my grandmother, a very well behaved and moral woman expressing all her morality via belief in things I did not believe in. She could make an excellent case for good behaviour and yet it was always expressed as doing what God wanted rather than doing what was obviously right. She did not seem to notice that it was perfectly possible to arrange things morally and sensibly without reference to Jesus or scripture. The only thing that Jesus had said about waiting was “the first shall be last and the last shall be first” but queues seemed to operate in Soviet Russia and Maoist China just as effectively as in England. Fairness, politeness, hospitality and consideration did not appear to me to be limited to places where the writ of the Church of England ran. And I didn't recall anything in the Bible about driving in a hat, at less than 30 MPH and having short hair, but of course to mention such a thing would just be to invite some quotation about honouring grannies or some such. It was strange she never quoted anything about begetting, circumcision, mixed fibres, women being unclean or rejecting your family to follow Christ. It seems it was all to be taken literally, or figuratively, or interpreted, or ignored, or not, but whatever it was all about it was about being respectable and therefore better than those people that were not. She had the right to look down upon the superstitious idolatrous Irish Catholic farm workers, on Indians and Africans and the heathen of Manchester. She was better because she knew Jesus loved her, because he loved everybody. That's why she was better than those who didn't believe the Good News.
As I grew up I found that ethics had less and less to do with belief in a saviour or a Gospel and more and more to do with simple concepts of reciprocity, equality and the entirely secular virtue of doing as you would be done by. This basic self-evidently good behaviour did not require any belief in a god to give commandments or to punish wrong-doers. For all their talk of leaving the judging to God Christians didn't actually do any such thing. They acted as though all wrongs should be righted in this lifetime and that reognized civil powers should express what correct behaviour was and what appropriate punishment should be. To me this seemed inconsistent with their beliefs in punishment after death. Wrong-doers were to be punished on Earth and then also punished for an eternity after death. Why bother? If punishment after death was certain what was the point of punishment in life? If the idea was you were saving the guilty from a worse fate that meant you were acknowledging just how immoral it was for God to give out (or was it allow?) infinite punishment for finite crimes. It seemed to me much more reasonable to imagine that the criminal justice system was actually based upon the unspoken heresy that the reason we should judge and punish people here on Earth was precisely because heavenly justice was either unjust or uncertain.