MY LIFE

An inteteresting piece, unfortunately titled “Unlocking the misery some atheists feel“, by Paul Bloom, tries to address a real problem in America.

Many Americans doubt the morality of atheists. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, a majority of Americans say that they would not vote for an otherwise qualified atheist as president, meaning a nonbeliever would have a harder time getting elected than a Muslim, a homosexual, or a Jew.

Many would go further and agree with conservative commentator Laura Schlessinger that morality requires a belief in God — otherwise, all we have is our selfish desires.

In The Ten Commandments, she approvingly quotes Dostoyevsky: “Where there is no God, all is permitted.” The opposing view, held by a small minority of secularists, such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, is that belief in God makes us worse. As Hitchens puts it, “Religion poisons everything.”

Sadly, many people actually agree with Schlessinger, which is why there is such hatred toward atheists.  They actually believe that morality begins and ends with a supernatural entity, although they’ve never produced valid support for that reason.    Others, on the opposite end of the scale, agree with Hitchens that religion is all of the source for society’s problems.

As Bloom points out, there are some benefits of religion — namely, the social benefits — because humans are social creatures and we do best when we are connected with other humans in one way or another.  Some people are fond of repeating the ignorant claim that religions are responsible for schools and charities, more so than atheists, but they make this claim because religious charities exist to promote their religion, while those humanitarian programs don’t exist to promote atheism.  They exist to help people, without strings, without drawing attention to a religion (or lack thereof).

Unfortunately, for the religious folks, studies continue to show that societies not built on religion are better in nearly every measure.

In various online discussions, people who live in non-religious societies, they say that people who admit to being religious (especially the fundie Christian type) are viewed as odd, and to be avoided.   Yet here in America, it is the atheist who is viewed as odd, and often held in contempt because people still believe atheists have no morals.

The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. In fact, Zuckerman points out that most Danes and Swedes identify themselves as Christian. They get married in church, have their babies baptized, give some of their income to the church, and feel attached to their religious community — they just don’t believe in God. Zuckerman suggests that Scandinavian Christians are a lot like American Jews, who are also highly secularized in belief and practice and have strong communal feelings.

American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. Studies cited by Arthur Brooks in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous than the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality.

The sorry state of American atheists, then, may have nothing to do with their lack of religious belief. It may instead be the result of their outsider status within a highly religious country where many of their fellow citizens, including very vocal ones like Schlessinger, find them immoral and unpatriotic. Religion may not poison everything, but it deserves part of the blame for this one.

Yup.