Years ago when I was in grad school, I got into an argument with the professor and a handful of other grad students, about poststructuralist theories. (I’ll try to leave out the boring shit). I said I didn’t like the way those theories left no space for anything to “be any good” —you could talk about how the cultural and temporal location of someone caused them to think that being peaceful and being tolerant of others’ differences was a good thing, but you could not assert that they were actually right.
So they found my notion of any principle or any social practice actually being intrinsically good to be amusing. And someone asked “So, I take it you believe in God?”
I think most atheists, when they identify as atheists, do not mean “I do not believe in any meaning or purpose to anything whatsoever, it’s all a giant wind-up clock of cause and effect and nothing has ever happened on purpose, things only happen because some prior event/context caused it to happen, and it’s all here by accident”. They just mean “I don’t believe there is a guy who made all this shit happen, every ‘God’ explanation of the universe sounds like made-up bullshit to me”.
Reciprocally, most people who identify as “theistic” do not merely mean “I may not be able to specify it but in some vague sense of the word I think there is deliberate purpose in the universe, it’s not just a giant wind-up clockwork”, they actually do mean “I believe the God as promulgated by My Religious Faith is real and more or less as described in My Faith’s Holy Book or Tradition.”
But be that as it may, there are some on both sides of the aisle who do consider any belief in any kind of meaning or purpose, any alternative to the meaningless-clockwork explanation of universe and life, to be fundamentally “a belief in God” and the rest is just specifics. (i.e., you might not believe in semi-translucent male bearded entities who have their own personalities and separate consciousnesses, yet you would still be considered to believe in God).
In the case of the university endowment, you would encounter the notion that since there’s no such thing as “a better place”, just people’s socially-constructed notions that the world would be a better place if more folks were educated, why bother leaving an endowment?
Absolutely not true. One of my closest friends is an agnostic atheist (his terms, not mine), meaning that he doesn’t believe in God, because the current evidence points toward there not being one (or several). But he’s also smart enough to know that he doesn’t ultimately know, and there’s no way of knowing the unknowable, so to speak.
He’s also one of the more moral and ethical people I’ve known, unlike some of the more religious types.
I remember someone making the argument that atheists were less moral/ethical than theists because they didn’t have God to fear in the afterlife. His comment stuck with me, because he basically said (paraphrased) that he’s known far more people who sin gleefully with the expectation of divine forgiveness than he’s ever known atheists who are unfettered by morals and ethics simply because they don’t believe in post-mortem hellfire.
To be honest, I hear it in the opposite way. I hear “I’m feel that there is something more out there, but I don’t someone to think I’m like one of those Jesus freaks”.
I’m going to go all crazy and assume that atheists are like theists in that their beliefs vary widely, in most cases are not something they could defend in a dissertation, and that their activities are not perfectly congruent with what they say they believe.
Example, my parents, who would probably call themselves atheists but would be more comfortable calling themselves humanists. They believe in doing the right thing just because it is the right thing, giving back to their community because that’s what decent people do and it’s what makes society function, and contributing to the present and the future good. For them the idea of believing in God is not so much irrational as in poor taste (one of the deadly sins in my family).
I also guess that nihilists are a pretty small subset of atheists.
I’m Catholic and assume that an atheist has every capacity to care about their legacy or the the state of the world for their children, etc. In other words, that they care about what they’re leaving behind as much as the next person. They just won’t, in cartoon terms, be peeking down from the clouds to notice it.
I mean, the overwhelming majority of my own actions in trying to make the world/society a better place aren’t with an eye on the afterlife so I guess you can just tick that up from 99% to an even 100% for a non-believer.
My flavor of “nihilism” is not in denying subjective meaning to human values, but in denying objective ones. And by objective meaning, I mean not simply something that can be concluded and agreed on by any human, but something that can be concluded and agreed on by any observing entity–clever dolphin, AI, or space alien. You can place as much personal value as you wish of feelings and on actions towards others, but the universe itself has absolutely no meaning or purpose whatsoever, and a trillion years from now noting you ever did will matter in the slightest.
I don’t understand how human feelings and values can be considered as anything other than purely subjective without invoking a god.
I’ve been an atheist for almost 60 years, and I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard something along the lines of “Oh, you don’t believe in anything”, even from my own parents, who knew me very well. For many religious people, belief in God is so firmly entrenched in their brains, that they literally cannot comprehend the mind of a non-believer. For them, “belief” is synonymous with “belief in God”. For them, God=Reality, so an atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in reality, e.g. a nihilist. The OP needs to point out to his friend that, though he doesn’t believe in God, there are many thing he does believe in, and these things are important to him and won’t simply vanish upon his death. Leaving money to his college is not dissimilar to someone leaving money to his child.
Actually, I think that in the context of our conversation, these were the same thing. I didn’t say anything about arrangements other than this scholarship fund, mainly because I know how to simply leave money to friends and relatives. It was the structure of leaving money in a the form of a trust to an institution (as my friend is doing with his church) that I was seeking advice on.
Sorry if my description wasn’t clear on this - it’s a subtle point.
That might be regional. Here (in the not-very-religious northwest), it means “I like that part at the end of yoga where everyone says ‘Om’ for a few minutes.”
I was raised to believe that atheists were people who either hadn’t heard the Word of God or had heard it and rejected it so they would never be able to feel God’s love. The first group could be saved by good works and be offered a second chance on Judgement Day. The others were doomed, because they were blasphemers.
When the Universalist church opened everyone called it the Devil Church, because people who went there were atheists who worshiped the devil. That was a common theme. The adults in my life also talked about how Madalyn Murray O’Hair was a devil worshiping atheist.
When i started having doubts myself about my religious beliefs I was absolutely terrified that even my questions were a call to Satan himself and every doubt separated me further from Christ’s light.
IIRC, the main 2 “brands” of nihilism are as follows;
Laws/rules/morals/ethics are completely arbitrary constructs enforced by some level of social/societal pressure…rules to keep us in line and get with the program.
Your rules don’t apply to me!-the philosophy of sociopaths and those with oppositional defiant disorder.
Laws/rules/morals/ethics have no value. Severely depressed, suicidal people at the end of their rope come to this conclusion
Either way, someone who is nihilistic needs help.
I’m an atheist and I don’t believe in any objective right and wrong, so I don’t have quite the same values as a lot of people out there. I believe if you break things down there really is no such thing as morality, its a human invention. The thing is though I’m a social animal who evolved to a certain degree to need others and to enjoy socialization and also to possess emotions and empathy. In a way I’m still guided by things that are irrational and emotional. I don’t think you can objectively prove its wrong for me to go around killing people and stealing their stuff, but I like people and would feel emotional pain and guilt if I did stuff like that, I like people, I enjoy helping others, it would cause me personal distress to engage in such behavior.
A Christian moralist once tried the argument on me. “Without external moral guidance, what’s to keep you from doing anything you want, like murder or rape?”
The answer was easy: It would make me feel bad. I don’t want to be that kind of person.
There’s something Abraham Lincoln once said that’s very similar to this, but I can’t seem to find it via Google.
As an Actual For Reals Christian, can I just apologize for all the idiot theists in the world?
(I sometimes wonder if Christians and Right-Wingers have mandatory classes in “How To Build A Strawman”…)
I figured out as a high schooler that the atheists I knew were generally more moral than the church-goers. I decided they just had less baggage, and the Christians could rationalize almost any behavior (historically treating minorities terribly because they were “heathens” or that was their pre-ordained lot in life).
I usually like to turn these type questions back on the moralist.
“It frightens me that without external moral guidance your first tendencies would be to murder and rape.”
My solid answer has always been: “Because I’m a good person and I wouldn’t do those things in the first place.” If they want to push, then my push-back has always been to ask how good a man can truly be if, in his mind, he would freely do these things but for the fear of God.
I don’t see why. I think our history as a species shows that we are definitely inclined to murder and rape “the other” if left to our own devices. External moral guidance doesn’t have to be religious - there are plenty of secular philosophies of morality.