W: Ron Aronson - Living Without God
Presented by Ronald Aronson, PhD, Distinquished Professor of the History of Ideas, Wayne State University
About the Speaker
Ronald Aronson grew up in Detroit and was educated at Wayne State University, U.C.L.A., the University of Michigan, and Brandeis University, where he earned a Ph.D. in the History of Ideas. He studied with William Barrett, Page Smith, and Herbert Marcuse. Swept up in the political activism of the 1960s, he became a community organizer in the African American neighborhood of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and an editor of the prominent New Left journal, Studies on the Left. In spring, 1968, as he was completing a doctoral dissertation on “Art and Freedom in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre,” he participated in the “Freedom School” organized in the aftermath of the student strike at Columbia University.
Aronson has taught at Wayne State University since 1968, first at Monteith College, and since 1978 in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, a nationally recognized program for working adults that was abolished by the WSU Board of Governors in 2007. He is now Distinguished Professor of the History of Ideas in the Department of History. Winner of several scholarly and teaching awards at Wayne State, Aronson is the past president of its Academy of Scholars.
He was Visiting Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago in winter, 2004. In 1983-4, he was Research Associate at University College London and in 1987 and again in 1990, a guest lecturer at the University of Natal and other South African universities. The story of his first experience in South Africa, at the height of the struggle to end apartheid, is told in Stay Out of Politics: A Philosopher Views South Africa (Chicago, 1990). In recognition of his scholarly career and political contributions to South Africa, in April, 2002, he was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Natal, Durban, South Africa.
Author or editor of nine books, Aronson is an internationally recognized authority on Jean-Paul Sartre. He has focused above all on the process of Sartre’s transformation to a political thinker and activist. He has been Chair of the Sartre Society of North America and founding editor of the journal Sartre Studies International. With support by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1980 he published Jean-Paul Sartre – Philosophy in the World (Verso); the American Council of Learned Societies supported research for his Sartre’s Second Critique (University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Aronson’s latest book is Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided (Counterpoint, September, 2008). Other recent books include Camus & Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It (Chicago, 2004) and After Marxism (Guilford, 1995). He has published articles in The Nation, Bookforum, The Yale Review, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Washington Post, The International Herald-Tribune, The Toronto Star, The (London) Times Higher Education Supplement, and The (London) Times Literary Supplement.
Aronson has produced televised political debates on democratic values and affirmative action (participants have included Cornel West, Barbara Ehrenreich, Abigail Thernstrom, David Frum, and Dinesh D’Souza) He is co-producer of the feature-length documentary film Professional Revolutionary about legendary Detroit social and political activist Saul Wellman and, most recently, 1st Amendment on Trial: The Case of the Detroit Six, focused on the Federal government’s trial of Michigan Communist Party leaders in the ‘50s.
One of Aronson’s lifelong concerns has been to study and write about the nature of hope, especially as related to political commitment. Since the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, he has been active in the Huntington Woods (MI) Peace, Citizenship, and Education Project.
About the Event
Summary with commentary for the 272nd meeting of CFI- Michigan, held on April 8, 2009.
Our topic for this meeting was Living Without God, presented by Ronald Aronson. Dr. Aronson is the Distinguished Professor of the History of Ideas in the Department of History at Wayne State University, where he was educated, along with U.C.L.A., the University of Michigan, and Brandeis University, where he earned his PhD in the History of Ideas. Professor Aronson is the winner of several scholarly and teaching awards at Wayne State and is the past president of its Academy of Scholars. He has authored or edited 9 books and is an internationally recognized authority on Jean-Paul Sartre. His latest book: Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided (Counterpoint; September 2008) was on sale at this meeting and was what his lecture to us was based upon.
In this book, Aronson argues for the need to develop a coherent and contemporary secular philosophy that will answer life’s vital questions and demonstrate that living without God means turning toward something.
In his presentation to us, Dr. Aronson provided contemporary answers to Immanuel Kant’s three great questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?
He coined the phrase New Atheists to refer to the raft of recent outspoken voices in support of atheism and rationalism while examining the dangers of religion. Some of these individuals who have authored powerful counterpoints to religion and faith include Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Victor Stenger. Peter Steinfels, who reviewed Aronson’s latest book in the New York Times, alluded to the appellation new atheist, and posited that Aronson, being less of an in your face polemicist, may be considered a new- new atheist. Indeed, Dr. Aronson’s approach is not a truculent, pugilistic or antagonistic one, but rather one which shows non-belief to be a viable alternative to one of faith in living a good life and how atheism can provide all that religion does for the individual but without supernatural freight.
Atheism must now bridge the glory of the Golden Age of Atheism with that of our modern concerns and our contemporary society. Steinfels quotes Aronson regarding this thought: [A new atheism] must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death and explore what hope might mean today. End of quote.
In both his new book and his talk, Dr. Aronson gave us heartening statistics showing how many Americans are now living without God, or at least for whom, theistic concerns are decidedly on the back burner. But this leaves a void and voids hunger to be filled. Positive atheism; the species of non-belief that Professor Aronson endorses, espouses and lives, is something that can do just that. People merely need to be aware of this hopeful and enriching alternative to the old dogmas and doctrines of religious faith which more and more have little to do with the real lives of contemporary people. His new book is a clarion call for making this transition. To put a fine point on what has been alluded to: Aronson’s book is not about bashing belief or attacking religious practices and institutions. It focuses solely on how one can lead a fulfilling, hopeful, happy and satisfying life when that life is one lived without God.
We are constantly bombarded with thought memes that declare that in bringing up children, we must indoctrinate them with religious training so as to instill in them morality and a sound foundation for good conduct. The new (or new-new) atheist might counter this assertion, by noting that giving our young the tools that help them think critically; to not accept, passively, authoritative pronouncements without examination; and to offer the thought that ethical behavior is not best exemplified by living one’s life under the carrot and stick (Heaven and Hell) motivations provided by Christianity, for example, provides a more well-founded moral construct for developing offspring than the traditional religious ones. It is also helpful to instruct our young on the merits of our thoroughly godless Constitution in being good citizens and how the best ideas from most religions are to be found in post-Enlightenment thought.
A solid scientific understanding of the real world cannot help but be a positive value to instill in our contemporary youth, in order to better evaluate all that they are faced with in their modern environment. It is this thinking that we actually employ in modern, enlightened societies. We do not adopt the biblical notions of stoning people to death (including disobedient children), or force all of society to endorse only one religious belief and practice, or treat half the population (women) as chattel, or other such Bronze Age practices. We already live our lives according to concepts and laws that are not to be found in the Bible or, when found there, are universal principles—not original to any single sacred text or to any one religious figure or authority source.
Teaching children to think in black and white dichotomous terms of sinful and blessed and good and evil is not especially helpful in providing them with the ability to form thoughtful and well- founded opinions on the issues that face us today—from cloning and embryonic stem cell therapy to the rights of homosexuals and how to approach conflicts in the Middle East (ones based upon acts by us that might lead to instigating the mythic Second Coming are, arguably, not the most beneficial of approaches.) Just labeling some people as evil or sinners; some approaches as righteous and others as evil, tends to halt further and deeper thought and deliberation on vexing and complex matters.
Many people equate comfort and security with religious faith. However, it has been shown that the more secure and content people are, the less dependent they become on religion to provide a salve for them. Life satisfaction indexes across the globe bear this out; the more secular and irreligious the people, the higher their degree of life satisfaction is seen to be. One book I read noted how Americans defy the norms. If an alien race were to look in on us, comparing our society with others on the planet, they would conclude that we are a war torn, short-lived, impoverished people with a bleak outlook, since we have such a high degree of religiosity relative to our status and other factors. We would look to these aliens like a Third World country, even more so if they factored in our stubborn resistance to evolution in particular, and science and enlightened thinking in general.
One reason that Dr. Aronson suggests for why we see as much robust enthusiasm for religion in our country, relative to other modern industrialized societies, is that there is such a wide and growing disparity now between the very wealthy and the fearful and impoverished masses. Democracy flourishes with a strong middle class and irreligion becomes the norm when people have hope for the future. Once, non-belief was associated with Progress and progressive ideas/ideals— and the sky was the limit. Now, as Dr. Aronson wrote: There is no force operating to make the world better. No longer hitched to the star of Progress, atheism, agnosticism, and secularism have lost conviction and optimism, and thus a main source of their missionary energy. End of quote. A couple of paragraphs later he adds: Given the eclipse of progress, secularists are today faced with a task more daunting than that of attacking religion: the need to develop meaningful secular worldviews that are no longer explicitly or implicitly tied to the belief in human and societal advancement. End of quote. This has left societies in Europe, for example, to become not only post-religious but post- progress; believing in neither very strongly. Security is being replaced by a struggle for survival, yet without the old stand in of faith in a Higher Power to lean upon. Our world is primed to find meaning and hope in a naturalistic worldview, based upon real world solutions and the promise that comes from taking personal responsibility for what occurs in the world rather than attributing it to some unseen, supernatural force.
Professor Aronson next moved onto the idea of Gratitude in his book, while in his talk, this was mentioned later. He writes, on page 42: …[g]iving thanks, central to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is virtually absent from our secular culture. But this deprives those who live without God of much of life’s coherence and meaning. For there is much to be grateful for. Exploring this little-noticed feeling and idea from a secular point of view opens a new way of experiencing our relationship with forces, entities, and beings beyond our individual selves. End of quote.
Being grateful not TO something (such as a god or savior figure) but FOR the good things in life is what Aronson suggests. Also, in seeing how we are all interconnected and part of larger systems (such as evolution and geology and other sciences demonstrates), we are less likely to be antagonistic to those other systems (the flora and fauna of the planet and its resources), including societal ones—regarding other people as kindred, rather than Other and somehow less worthy than us. The O.T. of the Bible iis full of Tribe/Not-Tribe dichotomies with the chosen tribe being given free rein to, and even divine assistance in, the slaughter Others. In the New Testament, Jesus is clear in his disdain for non-Jews and his strong sense of divisiveness. We have moved past these notions now and are coming to realize that we are dependent on each other, inter-dependent and interconnected as beings within natural systems and processes. He writes: We belong to an order, a life system, which, however blind and indifferent to us as individuals, gives us our collective and individual possibilities. End of quote.
We could be grateful to a deity for being alive on a planet that suits our needs, but then, for consistency of thought, we would have to be angry over this deity making a planet for us that existed the overwhelming majority of its time not only without us but without any possibility for multi-cellular life and how dependent were have been on unlikely blind contingencies (the demise of the dinosaurs allowing mammals to grow, thrive and lead to our ancestors ; the development of plant life that could absorb what we cannot exist in- in our atmosphere, while adding oxygen that we require) as well as our own mortal human pluck, such as our hard won knack for making edible foods out of ones that were not— even our daily bread falls into this category; our domestication of animal muscle power; discovery of metals and other resources locked in the Earth to move us beyond a hunter- gatherer mode of existence, etc., etc.
No gods laid out a real edenic environment for us. We were not anticipated, planned for and were not given to without our own work and innovation. But we may be grateful, nonetheless. Not to a non-existent Creator- which makes little sense as a construct when one looks at natural history and geological time and events- but to all those flesh and blood humans who toiled and saw further and further with accumulated knowledge and improved living techniques. When life truly was (as Hobbes expressed it) solitary and poor; nasty, brutish and short, we were the most religious; but there was no divine reward on Earth for us, due to our blind faith. As we pulled ourselves out of those circumstances, religion gained a steadily decreasing hold on humankind; so if improved health, more enlightened thinking, better techniques and technology and greater longevity are our punishment for going astray—-then… mete out punishment, O God of all!
Just as we do not require a belief in a sentient weaver of spectral hues seen in a rainbow to appreciate the beauty of this natural phenomenon, nor do we need to associate some divine message contained in such an event in the sky to be moved by witnessing it, one does not need to conjure up thoughts of a God above to appreciate life and living and how amazing and wonderful it is that we did arise against all odds in unlikely circumstances and to be alive now, in an age where global cross- pollination (and broad and rapid dissemination) of ideas can be accomplished.
A divine being, by its very nature (of being, ironically, NON-natural) is above and beyond us, yet people routinely give thanks to this unseen, unknown and undefined entity. Why not express and feel gratitude for the forces and processes and people of antiquity that are also beyond our ken to fully and completely examine? Being natural and this-worldly and part of known and observable systems, this category of experience seems a better choice as a collective repository of our gratitude. Dr. Aronson wrote: If we choose to experience our connectedness without seeing ourselves as God’s children, we may find new, adult, ways of sensing our unity not only with each other, but also with the cosmos, nature, history, and the social and economic worlds of other people. End of quote. One often hears people talking about how they subscribe to a Higher Power that lends to them a sense of something larger than themselves. On this theme, Aronson writes: What we belong to is always larger than ourselves, much larger, but being part of it, we contribute to it as well. Our gratitude toward who and what makes our coming together possible can give us a profound feeling of belonging to each other and to the universe, and a sense of the strength in doing so. End of quote.
Morality was not given to humankind in one backwards place and benighted time by the etching upon stone of a celestial being, or to another who believed an angel named Moroni provided divine instruction upon plates, etc. Morality, like life itself, evolved. Those practices that could not be successfully adapted to perpetuating the existence of various populations that they arose in, became extinct. This caused certain behaviors, practices and ways of conduct to emerge that became codified into societal rules and laws, becoming (in all groups that survived by adopting these principles) universal moral underpinnings. Human societies would not have been around to make up gods who gave them instructions on basic morality, had they not already had those instincts already. Gods lent authority to what had developed through natural social evolution.
We deem theocratic societies as barbaric and backward, yet our home-grown evangelicals (of the extreme variety, at any rate) fervently wish for us to be such. Those (particularly from monotheistic traditions)who cling the closest to the teachings of their ancient sacred texts do so at the cost of enlightened thinking, ethical treatment of others and progress. Those we call Islamic extremists and fundamentalists are simply following their sacred teachings the most faithfully. It is only to the extent that Modern American Christians DO cherry-pick from their biblical mandates and ARE cafeteria Christians in the approach, that aome semblance of modern enlightened thinking yet exists. In Christianity, as practiced in the West, one may look to the Reconstructionists to provide the Christian example of complete allegiance to the biblical teachings. It is only to the extent that we ignore and have moved beyond the ideas contained in these ancient writings that we do not devolve into the very societies that we deplore.
Believing that there is a divine Plan that we are incapable of comprehending paves the way for us to passively accept of all that occurs. If we believe disease and generational poverty and want is God’s Plan, then we will not strive to usurp it by combating disease and malnutrition; or improve basic living conditions. It has always made little sense to me, personally, that we speak easily of God’s inscrutable ways, and how It (God) is so far beyond our comprehension that we cannot understand how tsunamis and genocides and the other human-induced (but God directed?) and natural occurrences are compatible with a loving, caring, watchful God. What is the point of having a plan for beings (us) who cannot fathom it? If we will only learn of the majesty and righteousness of It’s will after we are in Heaven, then what is the sense in playing it out to us during our time and tenure on Earth? This is the time and place that we could USE such knowledge—not when we are flapping avian wings sprouting from choir robes above the clouds somewhere.
Here, I condense another paragraph from Aronson’s most recent book to further explicate the ideas of this part of the summary: Living without God, it turns out, not only entails taking the world on our shoulders, but also demands a self- confidant determination to take responsibility for our own lives. Both tasks may appear as enormous burdens, but they belong to us only because they have become historically possible. […] Living without God gives us such burdens only because they are our heritage, the product of human achievements- in fact, they are our privilege. End of condensed quote.
In the chapter called Choosing to Know of the book Dr. Aronson based his presentation on, he addressed willful ignorance; where facts are there to be obtained but one chooses to ignore them, particularly if they come in conflict with what one wishes to believe or wishes to be true. He discusses how, in our modern world, we must become active, intentional, and adaptive learners of new ideas and information rather than passive absorbers of a relatively stable body of knowledge (pg. 136). He equates acquiring this habit of thinking and approach to learning with living a life without God- notions. He also maintains that people who do this: […] will be more likely to sense their connectedness with the rest of the universe, nature, history, and the global society, and will be more disposed to understand both the centrality and limits of their own responsibility, for the rest of the world and themselves. End of quote.
Professor Aronson also provided statistics indicating how active learners—those who attain higher educational degrees, are prone to having dogmatic beliefs drop off precipitously. This is especially true when they are actively engaging in research rather than merely recalling information to spit back out again. Aronson also treated the often- heard expression that everything happens for a reason. This is one of my personal grimace- evokers. This is linked to belief that there is some mysterious larger Plan that is instigated by a superhuman Planner—whose will and plans are unfathomable to we mere humans (so again, what’s the point?). Perhaps, if there really was a God, we would be to It as ants are to us. If a child comes along and scuffs out an anthill with the heel of his shoe (with no real malice—just in a willy-nilly sort of way), should ants see this act as part of some divine will that certainly MUST have their best interests at heart—but is inscrutable to them? Should there be ant apologetics experts to tout humans as loving caretakers of ant- kind even when it is hard to see this? Should they pray to us even though (with relatively rare exceptions such as E.O. Wilson, et al) they are far below our personal awareness radars? Since random good and bad things occur, it would appear that if a god exists, it is indeed, regarding us, as we are to the ants.
One of the core Kantian questions our presenter explored was: What can we know today? In doing a survey of people he came across, where he asked them what they thought life’s most important unanswered questions were, the responses he got were interesting. He shared these in both his talk and his book. A sample of these responses follows: How can the world become a better place? After death, will you meet the people from your life who have died? What causes envy? Is paranormal experience possible? What is beauty? What causes cancer? Are we reborn in different forms? Is there a soul that exists separately from the body? He realized that people were pondering life’s great mysteries—most of which were unanswerable and/or not susceptible to scientific methodology in order to attempt to gain insights into the questions. He was disappointed that people wondered about these things rather than focusing on the great achievements of human efforts to make sense of the world. What Aronson was looking to were those matters that pertain to the here and now world that we live in.
He prefers, then, to focus on the answerable questions of life. Some examples of questions that ARE amenable to our powers and techniques of investigation and are not necessarily doomed to never be answered (indeed many have already been satisfactorily addressed with strong indications that the answers are apt to be correct), and are part of the real natural environment of matter that we can experience, include: How human freedom evolved, why creationism flourishes in the United States, how the human brain operates, why Americans are more religious than people in every other advanced society, why the Holocaust happened, why the US murder rate is higher than in other advanced nations, why Greenland and the polar ice caps are melting, why Palestinians and Israelis are reluctant to make peace with each other….and so on. So much knowledge already belongs, or will soon belong, to the human community. This is exciting and stimulating! Thinking only of imponderable mysteries leads only to dead ends and a throwing up of hands—and then to pat answers from authority sources that are not really answers at all—and lead to abandon further exploration or mental stimulation- or even in sensing the connectedness of all knowledge, ultimately.
Living without God also means not being haunted by extraneous and unfruitful thinking or dread when it comes to death. Dr. Aronson quotes Epicurus in expressing the thought that death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not. Professor Aronson expanded on this when he wrote: It is not terrible to no longer be alive, because what happens afterwards is not judgment, reward, or punishment, but the dispersal of what were once our atoms. There is nothing to fear. We will be no more—that is all. End of quote.
There has been nothing found that survives the death of our bodies/brains. When these stop, so does our existence and sentience. People who have survived brain injury demonstrate that injuries or trauma to specific brain areas produce predictable loss of function. Therapies that work to help the brain rewire itself in order to restore some of that lost function, are geared toward rerouting neural pathways and depend upon brain plasticity. No soul steps in to take over when a brain is damaged and nothing immaterial comes into play to help or hinder progress in regaining control of function. If it were truly a spiritual aspect of the human that was in need of therapy, would we not then just pray and leave out all the physical, medical and cognitive therapies? Everything we have learned about brain structure and function shows us that it is the material brain and nothing else that makes us who we are—our physicality, our personality and our mental abilities.
The only purpose that I have ever been able to assume for concocting the notion of an immaterial soul, is that it has the (unexplained) means of getting to another (unknown and unknowable) immaterial realm (Heaven) in order to be with its (undefined and indefinable) superintendent that is also immaterial. No part of that chain has anything within it that involves atoms or physical and universal laws or detectable energy or…well, anything to indicate that it/they exist.
Professor Aronson quoted Camus: […] there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside of the curve of the days… I can see no point in the happiness of angels. […] The world is beautiful, and outside there is no salvation. End of quotation. Aronson went on to write [page 157]: In accepting the bitterness and absurdity of death one most intensely appreciates what one has and knows. [He ends the paragraph by writing]: I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. End of quote.
Because children in more modern times and cultures such as ours are shielded from death, vague and foggy concepts are given to them to explain it, with the idea of providing comfort. But amorphous and unimaginable notions of an invisible aspect of one’s self going up to some undetermined unclear place somewhere… does not arm a child with the knowledge and reality that could help him/her cope better with death and to make sense of it all. It also further disconnects the child from life itself and with all other living beings—particularly in societies that instruct their children that only people have souls that enter Heaven.
Aronson has a paragraph on page 162 of his recent book that neatly encompasses many of his key concepts—our connectedness with everything, gratitude, living full lives without guilt and dread of being born wretches fit only for salvation, our interdependency on each other and all natural systems and how to go about living in our modern world with our current level of knowledge. It goes as follows: If living without God means anything today, it means living as completely as possible, every day of our lives, experiencing all that there is to experience, freeing oneself from obstacles in doing so. At bottom, I want to encourage our having the fullest possible awareness of our place in the universe, our belonging, our dependency, our responsibility. I want to encourage our seeing and experiencing life as fully as we can. If this was as true of our guilt and resentments as of our gratitude, of our complicity as our power to rupture with it, it is no less true of our dread of death. End of quote. To paraphrase the last few lines of that same paragraph, he notes that to be fully alive, we must be aware of the negative as well as the positive and must know life’s pain; not shunning any human experience, but rather embracing all the aspects of living— of life.
Many of the self-assessment questions that we ask ourselves—am I a good friend, parent, spouse, worker; am I acting morally or in ways that will enhance my community; am I making good use of my abilities?- are injected with an urgency (as Aronson put it) when we come to grips with the reality that this is all we have. We cast it, as those living without God, in the past tense—have I done/been these things? This judgment does not allow for altered pasts and different choices made. There is no Last Judgment by a Heavenly Father, or Pearly Gates that one is allowed through or denied; we alone are responsible for our own judgments and outcomes. The late humanist rabbi, S. Wine once wrote a book- length treatment of keeping one’s sanity in an insane world. There is no innate sense to the world; we must make our own. There is no intrinsic purpose and no divine Plan; we must find and make our own. We become courageous and bold and find our own inner capacities and strengths in coming to the end of a well- lived life that we have taken personal responsibility for, without the balm of a God who has made a place for us for all eternity.
Here are the last two sentences in the chapter called Dying Without God: What we have done, and who we have been, remains part of the wider universe long after we are gone. This is only one of many things we might hope to affirm in the face of death. End of quote.
Dr. Aronson observed that all around us we encounter arguments supportive of the idea of withdrawal from participation in wider collective hopes. Be as he offers in his book, rich possibilities which people see as personal today are really social possibilities. He writes: Whether surfing the Internet or walking in the woods, traveling to Bali or falling in love, the truth of our experience, of our belonging- of our being- remains both individual AND social. To accept seeing ourselves otherwise is to submit to the deadening of a vital dimension of ourselves, a bit like pretending that we do not live in nature, or have no history, or that our ideas make any sense outside of the world that nurtured them. End of quote.
Religion is often thought of as a way of bringing people together and connecting them to something larger. That makes sense on the face of it; the root word that the word religion is derived from means to bind, after all. But I believe that there is a natural affinity between non-theism and the deep understanding of our intimate connection to the universe. Conversely, major religious texts articulate the antithesis to any connections that might be made. Man is separate from woman; humans are special creations, set apart from other animals and here to dominate them; all creation occurred on separate days with discrete events that never shade into each other occurring on those distinct days. There is a greater and lesser light (the Sun and the Moon), but no notion of other planets with moons, and our Sun has nothing to do with the countless stars, that it is actually just an ordinary example of… our planet is covered over with a dome (the imagined firmament) that makes a barrier between us and the rest of the cosmos… and so on. Sunday is considered to be the most segregated day of the week and different denominations get very ugly toward each other (euphemistically speaking) over slight discrepancies in doctrine—let alone the horrors of conflicts between the major religions… or between them and non-believers.
Non-theists tend to be individualistic and independent thinkers- yet are keenly aware of our evolutionary connection to all life forms. They are often better versed on how all life was affected by- and entwined with- geological events and evolutionary processes over geological timeframes—and how our planet is connected with the solar system and this system with the galaxies and they with the universe itself—and how we are made up of starstuff—the universe is in us just as we are part of it. Freethinking groups are seldom (ever?) seen discriminating between the sexes or barring one gender from significant positions. There are no special barriers to clear if one is a homosexual or part of any other maligned segment of society in non-theistic groups. Non-belief is an exemplar of the blending of individualism with a sense of being a part of everything else—the very universe itself. We didn’t start off a few thousand years ago—but are connected back to the beginning of our cosmos- nearly 14 billion years ago… Somehow certain religious groups are considered to be humble—even while believing that they have dominion over all and have THE Truth among all religious permutations and are the special pet of the Creator of all things…hmmm. Seeing our real place in the universe is the ultimate humbling experience. And it provides the ultimate inspiration of awe in us.
Seeing our connection with others and the Earth gives us a sense of a common destiny, purpose and responsibility. Knowing that we have only this one life to live makes the time we have all the more precious. We don’t have the Us and Other so commonly seen between various antagonistic religious denominations and sects. The great principles that we take seriously such as democracy, solidarity and equality stem from the realization that we are dependent on each other as inherited from a collective past.
Aronson wrote, near the conclusion of his chapter on hope: Living in connection with the rest of humanity and the best of its history can open us, even fleetingly, to one of the richest dimensions of existence. Times of collective hope are no less profound, no less worthy of reverence, than what believers in God call sacred. What, after all, is the feeling and mood of solidarity? The sense of community? What does it mean to act on behalf of freedom and equality? And what kind of people are we who do this? In sharing these moments, we experience the best about ourselves and others, join this with what is best in the human heritage, and seek to remake the world in its image. End of quote.
Viewing human history and our individual lives without God, is meaning- filled and meaningful and it calls to us to take responsibility for ourselves and each other and beyond. Rather than directing our eyes upward toward an imaginary being, we may look at each other and see our common humanity- and that humanity within a common evolutionary history. Rather than kneel, rendering our legs useless, we may rise up and become active toward a common good. Rather than clasping hands together in a manner that makes them incapable of work, we may offer open hands for the benefit of others and our world. Praying for a Being somewhere above the clouds to come to our rescue is a poor alternative to talking with each other—humankind being the true active agents in the world- which allows us to take responsibility for our own destinies while not mouthing inanities about unfathomable Plans for why bad things happen, or crediting a supernatural entity with anything deemed good.
Living without a God in the heavens means living with each other on Earth.
Synthesized by Charles LaRue
