Father Orthoduck saw this cartoon on another of his favorite bloggers, Orthodixie. He had quite a laugh over it. Then Father Orthoduck looked at it some more and realized that while the cartoon is funny, it actually is not fully truthful. Atheists have put out many pamphlets and even books. For instance, Bertrand Russell, a noted philosopher, delivered a lecture on 6 March 1927 to the National Secular Society, South London Branch, at Battersea Town Hall. It was called “Why I am not a Christian.” It became and extremely famous lecture and was published 30 years later in a collection of his essays that had that as the title. Father Orthoduck has read it, and it is a strong defense of atheism.
Today there are several people who could best be described as attack atheists. That is, these are people who are no longer concerned about making the strong case for atheism, but rather are oriented toward savaging any who are not atheists. But, few of them truly think through the implications of what it means to be fully atheist. One of the few who did was Jean Paul Sartre. He said:
“The existentialist . . . finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that “the good” exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote: ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. . . . Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimise our behaviour. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. – We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free.”
Sartre’s compatriot, Albert Camus ends up writing the book called, “The Stranger,” in which he has his main character say near the end of his life:
“As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the benign indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself—so like a brother, really—I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.”
Few modern existentialists or absurdists (no Father Orthodox is not insulting them, look up absurdists on Google) or nihilists or atheists are as honest as Sartre and Camus. Most of them make the argument that it is religion which is the cause of all the ills in the world, and that the world would inevitably be a better place if only religion were wiped out. Yet, even if they have the honesty to admit that humans would no longer have any divine support for their ethics, they still somehow imagine a future world in which serendipitously the world would agree on a set of humanist ethics that would provide for maximum personal liberty with maximum community cohesion. Frankly, that takes more faith than some of the Christian beliefs.
You are probably expecting Father Orthoduck to make the argument now that a nation under Christianity would be much better. The answer is, “not necessarily.” If one reads any world history, then one knows that there have been periods in which particular expressions of Christianity have become quite toxic. But what Father Orthoduck will say is that a nation under Christianity is potentially a much better nation. Whether that goes from potential to actual depends ever so much on the actual holiness of its clergy and its government. And, what Father Orthoduck will also say is that a nation under even a mediocre Christianity will, in the long term, be better than a nation under atheism. He argues this out of his family’s (mother, grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins) experience of life in a Communist country. It has been written that the reason Mahatma Ghandi was able to be successful against the British Empire was precisely because there was at least a mediocre Christianity present. There was a moral base which Ghandi could shame into change. The same was true of Martin Luther King and the old Jim Crow South. The marchers swept away by fire hoses and bitten by police dogs shamed the nation into change. Ultimately, Father Orthoduck will argue that even the Reformation was a massive reaction of shame to the excesses of Medieval Roman Catholicism and the Inquisition.
No, Father Orthoduck has no desire to live in an existentialist or atheist or humanist nation. No, give him a nation with a religious base, even if–like the USA–there are strong clauses preventing any one religion from dominating the political scene.
Leave a Reply