This is from someone who won the 2018 Harvard and MIT Humanist of the Year.
"To me, the great attraction of humanism is not that it holds us to a higher standard, but that it asks us to hold ourselves to a higher standard. It’s relatively easy to do the right thing because of a looming reward or punishment—even in an afterlife. It is much harder, and therefore more meaningful, to do the right thing simply because it is the right thing to do—particularly if doing the right thing appears to involve personal trade-offs in the here and now."
I never was impressed by moral reasoning that went something like “do the right thing, or we’ll burn your ass in Hell for all eternity.”
That, of course, is not how the moral reasoning of any religious ethic goes. Even in Dante’s Comedy, where the Inferno is all too real, that reality is for all too human reasons – there is no God here, that focus on revenge, retribution and punishment is an all too human ethic, far removed from God’s justice.
The caricature of the religious ethic in this piece – which I note received the usual dozens of ‘likes’ on social media –push button morality - can be explained by one or two things, probably a mixture of both – ignorance and prejudice.
Reward and punishment are at least as prevalent in humanist ethics, and a whole lot more so in my view, whether we refer to contractualism or utilitarianism or the domination of the cash nexus in human relations. Doing the right thing because it is the right thing, without regard to personal trade-offs, is central to any God-centred religious ethics. It’s called sacrifice and service to others, as exemplified in the figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Not that humanists, consumed by their own self-importance, could ever understand that, intoxicated as they are by the vision of humans “taking morality into our hands.” It’s all about power and possession to me. Oh, and the convulsive self-importance of human beings. God is needed to stop human beings from curving in on themselves.
Nick Hanauer, I read, is a Seattle-based serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author, and activist with a knack for identifying and building transformative business models. He sounds like a very busy man, a practical man. I don’t get the impression he knows anything about religion, or thinks it worth his time and effort to know anything, time is money and all that.
You see, there is an obvious self-contradiction in the humanist argument. If God really is a human creation, a mere myth and legend, then a God-centred religious ethic is very much a humanism, it’s a morality that humans have created, and if humans still do rotten things to each other – as they have done throughout history – then the cause is to be found in themselves.
One of my favourite philosophers Mary Midgley died last week. She was sage and sane. Although she didn’t believe in God, she defended religion as perfectly reasonable and eminently human: "It turns out that the evils which have infested religion are not confined to it, but are ones that can accompany any successful human institution. Nor is it even clear that religion itself is something that the human race either can or should be cured of." (Midgley, Mary (2003). The myths we live by. p. 40.)
Midgley's book Wickedness (1984) has been described as coming "closest to addressing a theological theme: the problem of evil." (McEachran, Alan (May 2009). "Mary Midgley" Erasmus Darwin Society. But, Midgley argues that we need to understand the human capacity for wickedness, rather than blaming God for it. Midgley argues that evil arises from aspects of human nature, not from an external force. She further argues that evil is the absence of good, with good being described as the positive virtues such as generosity, courage and kindness. Therefore, evil is the absence of these characteristics, leading to selfishness, cowardice and similar. She therefore criticises existentialism and other schools of thought which promote the 'Rational Will' as a free agent. She also criticises the tendency to demonise those deemed 'wicked', by failing to acknowledge that they also display some measure of some of the virtues.
I’ll take Mary Midgley any day over these opinionated humanist popinjays with their crass assertions for the consumption of folk in the age of ‘convulsive self-importance.’ (Weber).
Flick through the history books, read the tales of war and woe, murder, torture, repression. Look around the world today, a living Hell for millions. It is easy enough to blame religion for that. Religion is the cause of all the trouble in the world, religion is responsible for separating people and turning them against each other. Religion is responsible for more deaths than any other cause. So it is claimed, and many people agree. Because it is easier to say that than it is to analyze the real causes of division and conflict. Human beings are advanced animals, symbol-making creatures who act out of principle, and kill for principle. That's humanism. That’s not God’s world. God didn’t create Hell, humans did, and spread it all over God's 'good' Earth. That desecration is all the work of human beings, taking morality into their own hands, and everything else they could get their acquisitive hands on along the way. Self-made man and his undoing. You want a humanist ethic, you have it. Because if you are right, and it’s all a human invention, then not only is there no God, there never has been – it was all made up by freely choosing humans. Or do you have a particular ethic in mind for humanism? If so, tell us precisely what that is, beyond generalities, and tell us what standards you are using, outside of the relativism of time and place, to define that ethic.
I do appreciate an ethic that is focused on joy and the affirmation of life. If that's your atheism, then fine. So long as you also recognize fragility and failure and weakness. Not all of us can live up to your very high standards of super-rational, fit, healthy and hygienic humans. The broken, humbled, powerless figure of Jesus Christ seems more human to us, but we try our best as we go. Caricature and bigotry I can't stomach, nor the conceit and arrogance that goes with it. That kind of atheism I can live without, 'the philosophy of the comfortable' as Rousseau called it.