So is Pope Francis right? Is it true that an atheist is capable of leading a more virtuous life than a person who believes in God? Are atheists generally less hypocritical than Christians?
First, I want to be clear about the definition I'm using for atheist. I'm not talking about the people who are troubled by doubts and questions about God and who therefore aren't sure which direction they should turn in; I'm talking about the people who are no longer troubled by such doubts or questions because they've a made a clear and conscious decision to reject the notion of a living God.
In my experience, it's the people who are most conscious about their decision to reject God who are the most hypocritical individuals I've had the misfortune to meet.
A few years ago, I worked for such a person, a store manager who was the boss from hell. For the purposes of this essay, I'll call her Celia.
Celia was a woman in her 40's who had worked in retail for many years. She was a married mother of three, and she had a special love for nature photography. She was also, as voiced almost from the moment I met her, a passionate advocate of progressive values and human rights legislation, a person who wouldn't tolerate the slightest form of injustice, and an avowed atheist who spoke with righteous logic about the many harms caused by organized religion. She was, in short, the very model of a virtuous Canadian atheist.
But Celia had a dirty secret. She was profoundly hypocritical. She used her position as a retail manager not to lift others up through positive example but to bash other people down through a particularly insidious form of schadenfreude that loves the law but not the spirit of the law.
Celia lived to find fault in others so she could judge them as unworthy citizens who had committed crimes and deserved to be punished, all in the name of righteousness. So, instead of doing her job as manager, she would sit in the back of the store and obsessively watch the store's security cameras so she could catch small infractions of the "rules." She would make new rules, fail to communicate the new rules to staff members, punish us for breaking the rules, then set aside the new rules and replace them with more new rules the next day. She seemed unaware of how fickle and unprofessional and downright nasty her actions seemed to the rest of us. Meanwhile, she was so busy hunting down criminals, she wasn't leading the sales floor, or organizing stock, or promoting good relationships among staff so the store could operate efficiently and compassionately. She was just . . . dedicating herself to her "higher calling," her calling as a righteous warrior.
She was living in her own little world of purity and justice, and, from her point of view, she was righting a whole series of terrible wrongs. So she felt justified in firing anyone who didn't meet her standards, which was pretty much everyone. (After a while, I started keeping a list.) At any given time, she had a "favourite" employee and a "probational" employee, though you could quickly and quixotically fall from being favoured to hated. One by one, she pushed us under the bus. I knew my time was coming to an end when she'd already fired everyone else who had given her "just cause." I was frantically looking for another job, but I wasn't fast enough. She'd set her vigilante sights on me, and there was no salvation for me. I got the boot because I dared to say in private to some other employees what I thought of her treatment of us. One of those employees was foolish enough to trust Celia's words about fairness and justice, and told Celia what I'd said. That employee didn't last much longer there than I did.
Celia's real problem was that she lacked any sense of true humbleness (with the meaning I've written about in previous posts). She was deeply narcissistic and absolutely certain of her "right to be right" (a brain issue I've also written about). She couldn't tolerate her own mistakes, so problems and doubts and questions always had to be somebody else's fault. Not only were the mistakes not her own, but she devoutly believed that all mistakes could be eradicated and that permanent perfection could be achieved through the proper application of human logic, law, justice, purity, and holiness -- with she herself, of course, being an excellent example of how to bring about a state of permanent perfection without relying on stupid superstitions like faith in God.
Well, guess what, folks. What Celia believed in, and what Celia lived by, was pure System 2 thinking and pure System 2 folly. Over the years -- perhaps as the result of a difficult childhood -- Celia had trained her brain to stop accepting the valuable input of her brain's System 1 processing system. She didn't want to feel empathy for others (because System 1 empathy, trust, and faith, unlike System 2 agreeableness, sometimes hurt from within). She didn't want to feel humble. She didn't want to ask difficult questions about God and do the hard work of coping with messy System 1 meaning and purpose. Most especially, she didn't want anyone else to tell her what to do or how to do it. She wanted control. She wanted to be in charge of the rules so she could change them at will and have a sense of power over others. She wanted to say she's a virtuous person without having to give up her "right to be right," her right to be happy in whatever way she damn well pleased.
In short, she wanted an excuse to proclaim herself a righteous warrior without ever having to do the hard work of loving your God and loving your neighbour as yourself.
She's an atheist because the atheistic worldview (with its eradication of System 1 brain input) gives her permission to be a controlling, narcissistic, unloving, hypocrite who speaks volubly about justice and mercy but actually prefers to terrorize others through her action.
I've encountered few atheists who will not resort to ad hominem attacks on people of faith at the slightest provocation (that provocation often being the simple wearing of a cross or the simple mentioning of God). Atheists who go on the attack (and many of them seem to believe it's their moral duty to attack) don't just argue on the grounds of logic or science but find it very easy to slip into hate-filled diatribes about the stupidity of anyone who trusts in God. The viciousness of an atheist in hot pursuit of a faith-based target is a scary sight indeed. (Survival of the fittest, no doubt?)
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| One aspect of being a cataphatic nature mystic is the sensitivity one develops to metaphors from nature. So when I went through my photo files to find an illustration to describe what it feels like to be attacked by an atheist, this photo, from a particularly nasty February 2015 storm, jumped out at me. The cold and vicious winds drove their payload of snow so strongly at every target that even the vertical bricks of my neighbour's house weren't spared. My personal faith is as sure and steady as these bricks, but when an atheist chooses to attack . . . it feels as if I've been blasted by calculated waves of pure, cold, logical hatred. |
I agree with Pope Francis that all atheists will go to heaven, and I agree that all atheists should be treated with dignity and respect because they're human beings and children of God just like everybody else.
But this doesn't mean I find the moral choices of atheists acceptable.
There's no virtue to be found in an atheist's "right to be right." And atheists aren't less hypocritical than System-2-dominant Christians (the Catholic hypocrites Pope Francis has complained about). The only way for any of us to stop living as hypocrites is to embrace the full capacity of our human brains (System 1 and System 2 balanced in harmonious ways), to learn what it means to love and forgive and learn and grow at the deepest levels of heart combined with mind combined with soul combined with body on an ongoing basis till the day we die.
If you think you can do all this without asking God for help, you must really think highly of yourself.
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