In a recent editorial in the Dallas Morning News, columnist Gordon Keith rose to the defense of the new Atheist church coming to Dallas. He argues that the new church will be a useful resource in the community by providing a sense of "community and clarity", as if the church will be little different than the Kiwanas Club or a local debating society. Ah, but perhaps I am being too judgemental or quick with my thoughts. The church being proposed will not be established on garden variety atheism, but what has come to be called "spiritual atheism".
Unlike true atheists who acknowledge the emptiness and meaninglessness that results from their lack of belief, "religious" atheists seek transcendence and purpose in the void. But in the atheist universe there is none to be found. Purpose and meaning must be created, cobbled together out of the desideratum of existence. They collect the emotions, thoughts, and feelings that appeal to them and reject the unseemly and the cruel. The difficulty is that religious atheists offer a transcendence that cannot be justified in the void. They can only assert an innate beneficence and urge people to demonstrate kindness. They pluck Jesus' commandment to love your neighbor as yourself and do unto others as you would be done unto out of context and thereby deprive it of any imperative. It becomes a caution, a hedge against future misfortune.
Without God or religion, there is no imperative to behave with kindness, show compassion, or demonstrate any other moral act. There is no call to transcend our selfish impulses. Acts of kindness, charity, and compassion depend entirely on noble impulse which, more often than not is dormant in humanity, buried beneath the exigencies of life and the pursuit of self determined ends. Moreover, there is no penalty for disregarding them. The disapproval of others for whom one has no regard is no disincentive to vice or immorality.
Pan Moralists hold out a genteel atheism of love, shared values, and tolerance. They offer a polite, middle class spiritualism better suited to
conversation than salvation. They hold a sapless moral and ethical
system built on the shifting sands of sentimentality. But there is also the brutal atheism of Nietzsche and Marx. Those who assert we can love and respect others in the absence of God can offer no reason why their vast, untethered morality should triumph over nihilism outside the consciences of the genteel atheist mind.
There can be no such thing as an atheist church for there is no transcendence in atheism. At best you can have some sort of well mannered spiritual society for those seeking to fill the spiritual void left behind when God is rejected. For those not so well brought up or who lack the sentiments of comfortable, well behaved atheists, there is only the the world and the brief time we have in it to satisfy our desires and achieve our ambitions. Those who appeal to nature as source of morals wear blinders. They see harmony, coexistence, and beauty. They ignore the brutality and cruelty of nature. The see lionesses nurturing their cubs but ignore the hyenas tearing those cubs to shreds. Nature is a machine that cares for nothing and no one. Nature will kill us all.
The thin gruel of "values" cannot sustain the human soul. Man requires substance for his spiritual and moral health. The object of religion is to bring men closer to God, not to be a source of social harmony and justice. All the good that flows from religion, love, charity, compassion, mercy, are its fruits. You cannot chop down the tree of religion and still hope to gather its fruit. There can be no atheist church because there is nothing at its center. There is nothing to set the church on. To attempt to infuse atheism with a sense of transcendence and spirituality is a fool's errand. To worship nature or a set of feelings and ideas is not a religion. It is a cult.
Pan religionists
and moralists are often more concerned with concord than truth. Yes,
different faiths can get along if they try, but there is no need to gut a
faith or dilute it into a thin broth to satisfy the demands of those
who have become wary, or even rejected the idea of universal truth. If
there is truth you recognize it. If you do not have truth you seek it. If you can't find it, make do with what you can cobble together. Religious atheism is an echo of real religion. It is a sentimental yearning for what it left behind.
