(Atheism)
I: The Willing Suspension of Belief
We have learnt, or at least those of us who have been trained to be decent human beings have learnt, that we ought to respect people’s religious sentiments. For many, this requires them to respect other people’s religious sentiments; for others, this requires them to respect their own religious sentiments, as well as, or in slight preference to, others’ religious sentiments. It isn’t quite clear that this respect applies to, or ought to be applied to, irreligious sentiments. And it so often slips from our imagination that this is desirable, possible, and necessary, that it bears repeating. (Atheism)
That’s probably because we’ve moved from a world of easy tolerance to one in which we are all conscious of our right to be offended. This easy tolerance was, of course always more of an ideal than a reality in the face of bigots, religious fundamentalists, or civilizational supremacists. And yet, it could be said that we were readier to assume good intentions then. Even bigots were politer to those they considered believed other things than they, unless they found themselves in a position to get away with aggression. Now, however, with everyone exercising their right to be offended, it follows that it becomes impossible not to offend people. And so, it has come to pass that so many people do not try not to. (Atheism)
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I’m not suggesting that humanity was fundamentally different or better in some past golden age; just that the rules of public engagement were different. When my grandmother said to me ‘never discuss religion or politics at dinner’, she didn’t mean these were unworthy topics: in a Cold War-dominated world, she, as a person socialized in the era of radio, would listen to the BBC World Service, the Voice of America, and the Radio Moscow English service every morning before she started her day properly; and if we were staying with her, those stations provided the sounds that gradually became meanings as we began to wake up. She knew the minutiae of the Afghan Mujahideen’s positions, funding, and factions; and she was no Commie, but she would have mourned the brutal murder of President Najibullah by the Taliban in 1996. She had views on many things political: but not at dinner; and not in front of relative strangers. (Atheism)
This self-imposed restraint on political self-expression she also exercised on matters of religious orientation, on which she had views that would not have pleased people from her own religion. This made for a pleasant everyday sociability in her environment: everyone there might have disagreed about something that their faiths saw as fundamental, but the implicit rule was that we had enough in common without needing to find out about the disagreements. And this, in a very everyday sense, might well be the essence of what we would regard as a secular public domain: we know we disagree on much, but we know we must agree on enough to make living together and communicating with one another possible, even perhaps pleasant. (Atheism)
In a world of injured sensibilities and endemic mistrust, how does an atheist offer solidarity to any attempt at interfaith unity? If we assume that faith is a category that does not need to be defended by reasonable argument even as justification – that it is sufficient unto itself – then atheism is sufficient to be regarded as a faith. One can no more easily disprove the existence of a Supreme Being than one can prove it. By that criterion, where agnosticism is the more coherent view of prevarication, atheism is a faith. (Atheism)
“Communicating across faiths requires you to suspend your own judgement. For one thing, it is hard to be clear to what extent one’s judgement is a matter of faith, prejudice, habit, or reason.”
And it follows that, where faith is by definition a suspension of rationality, it is by willfully disregarding or suspending the norms of one’s faith that one can communicate across the boundaries of faiths. This makes interfaith dialogue, or interfaith conversation at all, an exercise in the willing suspension of belief. It’s a good way away from a Kantian categorical imperative, which states that you must do unto others as you would have done to you. It might be closer to the Gospel’s ‘he who is without sin, cast the first stone’. Both these positions hinge upon the reliability of one’s own judgements, or the soundness of one’s own moral position, but the latter demands of you that you do not act upon your perception of the correctness of your moral judgement, whereas the former insists that you do. (Atheism)
Communicating across faiths requires you to suspend your own judgement. For one thing, it is hard to be clear to what extent one’s judgement is a matter of faith, prejudice, habit, or reason. A ‘community of faith’ reinforces the pattern: since we have persuaded, coerced, or habituated one another to certain patterns of behavior, we cannot be sure that it can be inter-subjectively normative. And it is only when we are faced with judgements or norms that are clearly different from our own that we might be aware of different forms of reasoning, or different belief systems that are hard to reconcile with (our own sense of what constitutes) reason. (Atheism)
Is it, then, worth the effort to reconcile differences of faith? Would it not be easier to find spaces where faith plays a negligible role in adjudicating amongst differing positions? A space where no one faith makes up the rules, where no faith is at an advantage or disadvantage? Might this be what we once called a secular public domain? (Atheism)
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II: A Universal Disrespect for Faith(s)
This all appears to be a bit abstract: but it might be worth trying to set out a few examples that illustrate what the stakes are. The usual tactic of interfaith communication is to find a common principle upon which all faiths agree at least upon the basic parameters of the principle. Let us, then, resort to a similar tactic. Perhaps one of the few principles upon which most religious teachings, and not a few irreligious teachings, agree, is that homosexuality is a transgression of the social and moral order. This is rationalisable as a pro-procreation injunction, since same-sex pleasures do not have the side-effect of making babies, and most faiths are keen to increase their numbers.
It is akin to the ‘that-thing-you-do-with-your-hands, very bad’ insistence that we do not spill our seed upon the ground. (The female of the species might, indeed, be paradoxically freed from its usual bondage in matters of preserving the species in this regard: since in their case seed is not misspent, what might in men be evil is for them merely immoral.) Then again, this could be seen as an anti-pleasure-principle paranoia: pleasure detached from the duties of being fruitful, multiplying, and replenishing the earth might distinguish the higher animals from the lower, but in humans is accompanied by various forms of anxiety, guilt, and remorse, generated, perhaps, by centuries of religious indoctrination (with some faiths better than others at sanctioning the selective use of pleasure). (Atheism)
“In effect, when we cross the line from ‘our’ faith to outside it, we must assume that our universe’s certainties cease to operate.”
Not a few persons who think of themselves as having faith in a supreme being (as first cause, as moral guide, as lawgiver, or as force of justice or vengeance) give themselves the right to pick and choose among that supreme being’s alleged moral orders; and perhaps they have found that parts of these moral orders are amenable to reason, and can be taken outside the remit of authoritarian ethics. Or perhaps they are simply good at dissociating. (Atheism)
We can rationalize matters of faith to adapt them to what we feel comfortable with – always assuming that there are no superior powers, a papacy, or a Sanhedrin, ulama, or pandit class, who are endowed with the right to judge what exceptions we can now make to ancient or medieval doctrine or practice, in effect exercising a veto over our judgements as mere mortal individuals un-endowed with direct or delegated divine authority. Here again, faiths differ on the extent to which individuals have rights and can make their own decisions, and in what spheres. Intra-faith dialogue itself founders all-too-often on the assumed right of the (male) elders to speak for the collective, and to impose their laws upon everyone else. Inter-faith dialogue is still far away. It does seem, then, that a universal disrespect for everyone’s faith-based norms and judgements, including one’s own, has to be the basis for inter-faith dialogue. Or, indeed, the universal avoidance of faith-based norms: which comes to the same thing. (Atheism)
III: The Necessity of Atheism
This brings us back to the awkward question of where atheism might fit into interfaith dialogue. It will suffice for our purposes to create a situation in which there is a need for every faith to assume a person not of the faith who must be persuaded of a cause. Without the assumption of the incommensurability and incompatibility of our faiths and therefore our forms of justification, we cannot have this dialogue: because if there were no differences, there would not be faiths in the plural. (We can leave out, for the purposes of this exercise, the problem that we have already encountered: what makes a dialogue intra- or inter-faith is based on where we agree that the boundaries have been set. (Atheism)
In effect, when we cross the line from ‘our’ faith to outside it, we must assume that our universe’s certainties cease to operate. We must find room to operate in which we cannot find any common ground or common cause with anyone else except through reasoning: a reasoning that does not require shared assumptions to start with, though we might find some as we go along. We are all, in this respect, all operating outside our comfort zone. And here we are in the strange no-man’s-land of not being able to resort to the persuaded, coerced, or habituated forms of thinking that come from ‘our faith’. The atheist must imagine a god or gods, the person of faith must think without one. (Atheism)
And here we are back in my grandmother’s world. We might not be persuaded that our faith is one among many that all have some claim to a superior truth. But we must find a space where, if we don’t think that another faith is equal to our own, we do not express this thought. And along with the secular public domain that this gives rise to, we have also discovered the principle of liberal tolerance: we are free to do what does not interfere with someone else’s freedom. The paradox of liberal tolerance which goes with this, is that a freedom granted can be used to curtail the freedom of they who grant it. (Atheism)
Accompanied by a sense of the superiority of a faith, it is all too easy to believe that you should take the space you are granted by others to curtail their spaces. Faith marches on into the space where no faith is at an advantage, and tries to make up the rules, or to impose theirs on those that exist. Which is why we now must return to steps one and two: a willing suspension of belief, and a universal disrespect for all faiths. Which, of course, implies universal respect; for it is in the power and within the rights of any individual to be in dialogue with faiths, or with absent faiths. (Atheism)
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Benjamin Zachariah works at the Georg Eckert Institute for Educational Media works at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, and with the project on the contemporary history of historiography at the University of Trier. He was trained in the discipline of history in the last decade of the previous century. After an uneventful beginning to a perfectly normal academic career, he began to take an interest in the importance of history outside the circle of professional historians, and the destruction of the profession by the profession. He is interested in the writing and teaching of history and the place of history in the public domain.
