Posted on April 19, 2008

What Atheism Offers: The Value of Life

Citing Stalin, Mao, and Hitler, religious believers frequently condemn atheists for not valuing human life, and condoning and causing widespread death and human misery. Setting aside the genuine question of Hitler’s religious standing, it ought to be clear that these atrocities, while committed by men who professed a lack of faith, were not enacted in the name of atheism. To claim secularism as the genesis of the Cultural Revolution or the purges of the 1930’s is as nonsensical as blaming Christianity for gang killings in our nation’s cities. And, as a study of the past makes clear, religious beliefs, and not their absence, have brought about far more death and dismay than the humanist perspective.

In fact, religion and war concurrently order the lives of humans at every point throughout history’s millennia. While one does not always cause the other, the assertion that the former inhibits the latter is equally unfounded. Religion does not stop people from being cruel to each other, it doesn’t prevent theft or abuse, hate or murder. The question that ought to be asked, both by religious and atheists, is whether faith makes those crimes less frequent by its existence. Would an atheistic society be worse?

Secular Europe and Japan have significantly lower crime rates than more religious nations, but that fact alone doesn’t provide an answer. After all, they’re richer, too, so we might say that it’s not atheism that promotes non-violence but access to resources and quality of living. Still, can atheism, and especially its lack of belief in an afterlife, promote peace?

The value of life–of living life, not a dreamed of posthumous eternity–is higher in the atheistic framework. Killing carries far greater existential weight, murder becomes a more poignant moral wrong. When discretionless bombing leads not to thousands knocking on heaven’s edifice but to lives snuffed out and ended entirely, leaders and citizens, commanders and soldiers are less willing to employ their weapons in the destruction of humanity. And when suffering leads not to favor in the eyes of God but to horrendous conditions in the only life the sufferer will live, the Christian fascination with the meek and miserable is revealed as a shameful doctrine of pain.

Through the unsubstantiated notion of paradise in the afterlife, religion turns to sadism and the good intentions of faith become the harrowing yoke of worldly sorrow. The part is always less valuable than the whole and seventy years compared to eternal life look insignificant indeed. But to the atheist, who sees those seventy years not as prologue but as finality, every moment is to be cherished and made the most of–both for himself and others.

Yes, there are atheists who don’t adopt this stance, just as there are religious believers abhor the devaluing of individual lives exemplified by so many of the faithful. People will always exist at the margins of any philosophical position. The point is not to entirely strip religion of its moral worth. Atheists have tried this, making such silly claims as “All evil in the world comes from religion,” but no thinking person buys it. Instead, this perspective on the value of life is meant to show that atheists do not logically see human lives without worth as a result of rejecting god, the soul, or an afterlife.

There’s an appreciation of life in atheism that is impossible to deny. This doesn’t merely take the form of the argument from limitation given above. No, there’s also a degree of wonder incompatible with a divine creator. The world around me is intensely, staggeringly fascinating because there is so much about it I don’t know. Complacency in these questions is inconceivable since there is no supreme being upon which I can fall back. The religious person always has the option–an option that has been utilized feverishly since humanity first learned to inquire–of saying, “Oh, that’s the way it is because god did it.” Weather, plague, human development–for history’s humanists, these have been terrific puzzles. But for most of human history and for most of humanity, their solutions could be readily found in immutable ancient texts.

Human life is the most intriguing puzzle of all. And because it hasn’t been answered, it needs to be explored. Inflicting suffering upon it or killing it without evidence that it will continue afterwards, effectively limiting the ability of others to explore their own lives, is anathema.