LSP51: Do You Agree with Pope Francis on the Question of Hypocritical Catholics Versus Atheists?

Last week, Pope Francis made international headlines when he criticized hypocrisy among Catholics who rigorously observe Catholic rituals but don't apply Christian virtues to their daily lives. This in itself wasn't an original insight, as anyone who knows the Bible can tell you. What attracted attention was Pope Francis' decision to quote this modern sentiment: "But to be a Catholic like that, it's better to be an atheist."

So is Pope Francis right? Is it true that atheists are capable of leading more virtuous lives than people who believe 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 to take; 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 also, as voiced almost from the moment I met her, a passionate advocate of progressive values and human rights legislation. She claimed to be a person who wouldn't tolerate the slightest form of injustice. As an avowed atheist, she proudly 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 relationships 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 being 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. 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 errors should be eradicated through the humanistic "religion" of perfection. Within this widespread human belief system of virtue, it's axiomatic that permanent perfection can be achieved through the proper application of human logic, law, justice, purity, and holiness. Once stupid superstitions like faith in God are eradicated, there's room for clever humans to get on with the task of building perfection. Those who achieve perfection are virtuous. Virtue confers authority. And authority grants the certainty to set yourself above the laws of justice that normal people (like employees) have to follow.

What laws are better, you ask, than the laws of fairness and common sense and personal responsibility and empathy? Why, the laws of self-justification, of course.  

Naturally, Celia was an expert at self-justification.

What Celia believed in was not justice but 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 place less priority on 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 lead to emotional pain). She didn't want to feel humble. She didn't want to ask difficult questions about God. Or do the hard work of coping with her own messy System 1 sense of meaning. 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 suppression of System 1 brain input) gives her permission to be a controlling, narcissistic, unloving hypocrite who speaks volubly about justice and mercy but who actually prefers to terrorize others through her actions.

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. Photo credit JAT 2015.

 

I've encountered a number of atheists who will resort to ad hominem attacks on people of faith at the slightest provocation, including the mere mention 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 idiocy 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?)

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 (that is, 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 -- 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.

LSP50: Where to Draw the Line on Free Speech? Conscience in the Identity Politics Debate

On this morning's National Post website (February 18, 2017), there's a commentary piece with this headline: "Where to draw the line on free speech? It needs to be guided by judgment and conscience, not rules." The author, Andrew Coyne, raises some good points about mutual obligations in a democratic society such as Canada's. He points out that "the spirit of free speech" is important, that "free speech exists, as a legal guarantee, in part because of the foundation of social values in which it is embedded."

What the author doesn't address in his very reasonable piece about free speech is the underlying crisis our society currently faces with regard to conscience. Conscience -- the source of our ineffable and awe-inspiring courage and inner strength -- is quickly and efficiently being killed off in our society. Without conscience, we simply aren't able to understand our mutual obligations, let alone grasp the meaning of "the spirit of free speech." Without conscience, we don't have the courage to recognize and confront hatred. Without conscience, we stagger from crisis to crisis and hurl cliches instead of insight at complex issues. Without conscience, we can't hold the line against any of the philosophical movements designed to eradicate differences between individual human beings and our neighbours. Without conscience, we start to believe there's only one right way to be: our way or the highway.

In short, without conscience, people aren't able to be the loving and potential-filled individuals we're capable of being.

 

The foundation of social values in which "the spirit of free speech" resides is due in large part to the long arc of Christian values that have slowly evolved over the centuries. Despite a history riddled with Christian leaders who perpetrated mistakes and terrible abuses (some of which have been acknowledged and atoned for), one important aspect of Christianity (and Judaism before it) is the strong emphasis placed on women's worthiness before God. You can't have a fully functioning human conscience unless you're willing to trust that God does not place men above women in Creation or in human society. Shown here is "The Vision of the Blessed Clare of Rimini" by Francesco da Rimini (prob. about 1333-40), on display at the National Gallery, London, UK. Photo credit JAT 2023.

In place of conscience, without much awareness that what we're doing is dangerous to our longstanding sense of social values, we're tacking together a murky blend of laws, ideologies, logic, and dualistic right-and-wrong morality that currently masquerades under the noble banner of identity politics. Identity politics purports to be a salvific trend which will add to our foundation of judgment and conscience once we totally accept and absorb and see the wisdom of the myriad small but necessary laws that must be put in place -- just temporarily, of course -- to protect certain individuals who believe it's their RIGHT to never feel offended and never feel challenged in their personal beliefs. Identity politics is an ideology designed to give people permission to stop listening to their own conscience and to listen instead only to the System 2 pleasure and happiness networks of their own human brains. The strategy can be summed up in this way: if it gives you a brief neurological high, it's great; if it demands you do the hard work of understand and accepting your neighbour (or yourself!), it's not only awful and unfair, but should be made illegal.

We've seen its ilk before under other names, names such as fascism and totalitarianism and religious fundamentalism of all stripes. These philosophical movements may appear different in the specific political and economic laws they apply to their citizens, but one thing they all have in common is the methods used to eradicate conscience among their citizens. Once you kill off conscience in the majority your citizens, of course, you can do pretty much anything you like, as successful tyrants such as Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot and Mao have shown us.

Regimes such as these -- along with many others now and in the past -- start by trumpeting their claims for Truth. (Obviously, they're not going to tell you it's really a Big Fat Lie.) Next they bombard you with a constant stream of words and speeches and polemical essays filled with countless "wisdom words" (e.g. peace, justice, liberty, equality, fraternity, sacredness, oneness) to try to force their way into the System 1 networks of your brain -- the networks that are responsible for important emotional and spiritual traits such as empathy, courage, trust, love, morality, fidelity, curiosity, patience, and openness to change. These networks are programmed to respond to cues around relationships and learning and purpose, so they're vulnerable to attack through heart-based words (as every spin doctor in history has figured out).

I should stop here and point out that System 1 (what we tend to call "the Heart") is one of two major processing streams used by the brain. The other is System 2 (what we tend to call "the Mind"). Researchers in Dual Process Theory, which posits the operation of two different yet equally important processing systems in the brain, are starting to see both the benefits and the pitfalls of having two brain systems with different priorities that can, under certain circumstances, start to compete with each other -- a problematic situation that all too many people today have experienced firsthand.

Once the non-empathetic but highly logical and fiercely dogmatic leaders of a ideological movement have forced their way into your brain's System 1 networks, they start to chip away at your own natural, built-in sense of self. They try to make you doubt your sense of self. They try to make you doubt that you should even have a sense of self. They try to force relativism on you and they try to force determinism on you (both at the same time!). They tell you there's no such thing as free will (i.e. a conscience through which you can apply your empathy and courage and other System 1 traits). They tell you that because people have no conscience and no free will, chaos will ensue and everyone will become traitorous and cannibalistic zombies who will attack you on the street and rape you and murder you if you don't obey your new leaders. (Of course, these things won't happen if you and your neighbours have a conscience and know how to use it, but what the heck, who needs the truth about conscience when they're shovelling out their Big Fat Lies?)

Once you start to believe these lies, your brain will start to rewire itself to reflect your new beliefs. (This is the principle of neuroplasticity at work, and it's the scientific reality that explains how ideologies can reshape your brain if you're not careful and if you're not paying attention to what you're putting in your brain.) Your brain will try to do what you've told it to do -- it will start to demolish network connections that deal with System 1 emotional and spiritual priorities, and it will try to strengthen connections in the cortical layers that deal with logic, rules, competitiveness, agreeableness, neuroticism, schadenfreude, status, and happiness (which is not the same thing as meaning or purpose). You'll turn yourself into a virtue-signalling member of a hive mind, or, as Star Trek writers describe it, a member of the Borg Collective, or, as Battlestar Galactica writers would say, a Cylon who's going backward instead forward in his or her relationship with Creation and God.

This doorway originally served the narthex of a 19th century Ontario church. Eventually the staircase that led to the door was entirely removed. You can still see the doorway, but you can no longer reach it. This is what can happen to your conscience if you allow System 2 ideologies to dominate your brain. You can still see the words that describe your conscience, but you can no longer access the feelings that accompany a fully functioning interior doorway to wisdom. The part of you that's supposed to express independent free will and conscience becomes all show without actual function. Feelings of depression and anxiety often soon follow. Photo credit JAT 2014.

After you've turned yourself into a member of the hive mind comes the worst part. Your ideological leaders, who with one hand have stripped your brain of its ability to "know where to draw the line," mercifully offer you with the other hand the blueprint you need in order to become a happy and productive member of society. It will be a pure System 2 blueprint, of course, with eradication of anything resembling free will, conscience, empathy, openness to change, plus all the rest of the amazing human traits you're truly capable of. The System 2 blueprint will be presented to you as a salvific act of self-transcendence intended to create more justice and more righteousness for the victims in your society. But really the blueprint is just about the need for certain System 2-dominant brains to compete, to gain power and status, and to take pleasure from the suffering of others who have lost their own ability to tell right from wrong. Tyrants thrive where human hearts suffer.

It's a form of spiritual rape. To enter somebody else's brain and intentionally try to strip away their core sense of self and their access to their own free will and conscience is an unspeakable act of violence.

If we really want to have a society that understands "the spirit of free speech" and the meaning of mutual obligations, we must do everything in our power to raise our children so their brains can process and balance both System 1 and System 2 priorities -- and be able to tell the difference between the two. Only when individuals grow, maintain, and cherish their personal sense of conscience can we act together to recognize tyranny in all its insidious forms.

Conscience is our true protection against tyranny.

LSP26: Materialism, Buddhism, and Karma

Sometime in the 6th century BCE, in a region now known as Nepal, a man was born who is credited as being the Awakened One. Siddhartha Gautama -- known to us as the Buddha -- crafted an entirely new philosophical system in response to the problems he saw in Hinduism (as it existed then). His teachings are currently of great interest to spiritual seekers in the West who are tired of the turmoil created by our cultural norms.

From the earliest years of the movement, the Buddha's core teachings looked very different on the surface compared to Hinduism's ritual-bound, authoritarian teachings. Therein lay Buddhism's appeal. Unlike the highly supernatural Hindu teachings, the earliest Buddhist teachings were empirical, scientific, pragmatic, therapeutic, psychological, egalitarian, and directed to individuals.* The Buddha's original religion (or way of life) was therefore long on intense self-effort, short on metaphysical speculation, devoid of authority, devoid of ritual, devoid of tradition, and devoid of the supernatural.**

Unfortunately, because the Buddha continued to uphold the laws of Karma -- not only using Karma as the main root system for his philosophy but pushing the logical implications of Karma to their ultimate purified form -- the religion he founded is also devoid of relationship with God.

Technically, Buddhism is referred to as a non-theistic religion or philosophy because there's no room in it for a personal God. This isn't to say that God doesn't exist -- just that a personal God isn't needed. Or wanted.

This is a strong statement, so before I say anything else, I want to emphasize that my comments in this post refer only of those narcissistic individuals (some of whom I've had heartbreaking dealings with) who use the core teachings of Buddhism for their own selfish purposes and gain. Most Buddhists, I'm sure, try not to misuse the teachings -- just as most Pauline Christians try to rise above the low bar set by the Church for their personal conduct.

The Buddha's earliest teachings are intensely transpersonal -- trancending the self -- in the way that all apophatic teachings strive for. A personal God is discarded and replaced with the numinous cloud of Knowing/Unknowing that many people now call Source or Godhead. It's this unknowable cloud of universal law that lies behind the theories of Karma in the East and Gnosis in the West.

As with all major world religions, Buddhism isn't a single religious entity, but is instead an umbrella term for various schools and branches that have diverged from the earliest teachings. A common belief in the doctrine of Karma is one of the uniting threads among diverse forms of Buddhism. This statue fragment of the Buddha is from the Gandharan art collection of the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, Ontario. Photo credit JAT 2017.

According to Karma's teachers, the cloud's Materialist laws of cause and effect (i.e. Karma) are THE laws you must obey. There's no way around the absolutism of the consequences you bear for your choices. Although it's daunting to be stuck with these laws, the good news is this: whoever who can read the cosmic laws encoded in the cloud acquires great power -- infinite power, actually. Whoever who reads the cosmic laws and controls them no longer needs a relationship with God because he or she has, in a sense, become God.

In other words, once you have law, who needs love?

And who needs forgiveness and humbleness? The laws of Karma, which purport to originate in a universe of pure morality, haven't the teeniest tiniest crack within them for the seeds of Divine Forgiveness. This point alone demonstrates the stark contrast between the Buddha's teachings and Jesus' teachings.

Bear in mind an important point here, a point which is often overlooked: it's the people who claim to have achieved nirvana who get to tell the rest of us what the Karmic laws are. It's the normal, regular, everyday people -- not the universe or the planet or the laws of non-Materialist science or the laws of neuroscience -- who are dictating the meaning of universal justice. It's the ones who obey the traditions of their lineage who don't have to explain themselves. We're simply expected to trust that anicca (impermanence), dukkha (suffering), and anatta (absence of a permanent personality or soul) tell us everything we need to know about life on Planet Earth -- because the Buddhist philosophers have told us so. (When they see this pattern of top-down authority in Christianity, we call it revelation.)

In its purest, earliest form, the teachings of Buddhism are no different than the teachings of other apophatic mystical traditions that seek to depose God as a person (actually, two people) and elevate the human mind to a position of authority it doesn't deserve.

Ironic, yes?


* Huston Smith, The World's Religions (New York: HarperCollins, 1958 and 1991), page 98.
** Huston Smith, The World's Religions, pages 94-97.


For Further Reflection:

Sometimes, when we've been born and raised with certain beliefs about how the Universe works, we discover it's no easy thing to set aside those beliefs even when we're sure they're wrong.

A few researchers in recent years have been looking for evidence in the human brain for "the God Spot" or "the God Code" to explain why most people seem to want and need religion in their lives. Some researchers have noticed there's a sort of "God-shaped conceptual space" in the brain that tends to fill up with non-Materialist beliefs. But it's really more complicated than this. From the moment of birth, the biological brain starts looking for evidence of two things: (1) how the 3D Universe works and (2) how the self fits into this strange new 3D Universe.

Bear in mind that, for the soul, the 3D Universe of baryonic matter (i.e. atoms and molecules that respond to the laws of classical physics) are not the norm. Souls (angelic consciousnesses) are born into the non-baryonic quantum world that governs 95% of all energy in Creation, a world where Divine Love and Divine Forgiveness and non-locality and quantum weirdness are normal parts of everyday life. Souls are used to weirdness. So when we choose to incarnate, we hit the ground running (so to speak) as we try to take in all the sights and sounds and gravitational laws that apply to 3D life on Planet Earth.

In our early years, we rely heavily on our own built-in observational skills as little scientists-in-human-form. We're constantly exploring the laws of classical physics, testing and retesting (yes, the peas still fall when I threw them!), and filling up our brains with all sorts of important data sets. Soon we start to ask more advanced questions about the laws of classical physics, and at this point we turn to the wisdom of the adults around us. We absorb what they tell us about how the Universe works. We also absorb what they indirectly imply through their own choices and their own responses to the world around them. We use the wisdom of adults as a sort of macro to filter and sort our understanding about the laws of the Universe. And this is a sensible thing for us to do because there's so much to learn and process.

When the adults around us live and breathe a highly specific cosmogony -- for example, Young Earth Creationism in Christianity, or Karma in Buddhism -- our growing brains start to accept this cosmogony not as a working theory but as an actual scientific truth. Based on our acceptance of cosmogony as truth, we then build an internal moral code that's consistent with our cosmogony. We do this because we want our inner selves -- our inner laws and choices -- to be in harmony with the laws we believe govern all Creation. This is the only approach to life that makes sense, because even when we're very young, we sense that we're not alone in Creation, that our lives are fully interdependent with the forces that govern all Creation. So we want to flow with the forces as we understand them, not against them.

You can imagine, therefore, how the biological brain will shape itself in childhood and early adulthood if the laws of Karma are upheld as scientific truth (even though in actuality the laws of Karma are pure conjecture). Planet Earth will, of necessity, look like a very grim place to you, and your lot in life will seem like a scientific reality that you must deserve and can't do anything about unless you commit to the path of letting go of the one thing that's truly yours: yourself.

The System 2 networks of the brain, scarily enough, see the logic in this path. But the System 1 networks, which hold within them the seeds for the path of love and forgiveness and meaning and empathy and relationship with God, will fight and fight against this ghastly "truth" until their biological networks are finally broken apart through constant suppression and denial.

Eventually, the brain's networks, so overgrown with the tenacious kudzu-like roots of Karma, can only see the world as proof of the theory itself. It's a vicious cycle, one that reinforces the theory of cyclical time and further damages the brain's ability to objectively assess religious doctrines.

One final note: You might think that a theory that's been around for a long time is surely correct simply because of its longevity. But many spiritual and religious theories have existed for centuries, even millennia, before being discarded. So longevity is in itself no proof of anything. In the past few centuries, Christianity has been undergoing a process of sorting and winnowing, and now many Christians are proud to say they don't accept ancient doctrines such as patriarchy and infallibility. We're constantly being called upon as children of God to be honest with ourselves about doctrines that create and sustain harm.

I personally believe that no religion anywhere on Planet Earth is -- or should be -- exempt from this constant process of reexamination, healing, and redemption. This is how we make the world a better place, one choice at a time. But we can't do it without Humbleness.