Posted on April 19, 2008

What Atheism Offers: A Sense of Purpose

Without religion, won’t life be meaningless? Won’t we all collapse into nihilism, muttering “What’s the point?” while we waste away our years in front of the television, waiting for it all to end? Not at all. In fact, exactly the opposite. The religious obsession with life after death, with the entrance criteria of heaven or hell, and the never ending crusade to win the love of a deity leads billions of believers worldwide to devalue worldly living, biding their time until they can make the posthumous passage to paradise. This leads to everything from Mother Teresa’s cherished suffering to suicide bombings of discos and public markets.

The atheist, on the other hand, sees this life, the one each of us is currently living, as all we get. Death is final. Thus we need to make the most of life and instill great value in every moment because those moments are of limited quantity. When you have eternity, pieces of that infinity are worthless. Scarcity creates value. What’s more, the atheist recognizes that everyone else is living their own, finite existences. We respect life more because of that, since we know deep down that all humans are enjoying the only lives they’ll have a chance to live. Far from breeding nihilism, this sense of life as finite manifests purpose beyond living to impress a deity. It’s a purpose of one’s own creation, a variety we already recognize as more valuable, or at least as valuable, as a purpose handed to us by another.

Through much of childhood, we live for our parents. What do they want us to do? How do they want us to behave? Which behaviors cause them to beam at us in happiness? But then, perhaps during our teenage years, perhaps earlier, most of us learn to live for ourselves. We study topics in college because they interest us, not because they’re what we think our parents want. We get jobs that hopefully ignite our passions, disregarding our father’s desire that we run the family furniture store or our mother’s wish we become a doctor. Over the course of our lives we create our own purpose.

Yet for the believer, the parent never gives up his guiding grip. When mom and dad have lost their influence, Jesus or Muhammad, Yaweh or L. Ron Hubbard, step into the role, guiding and providing goals. Purpose in life becomes a quest to live to their standards, to become the type of person they want you to be. To clarify this distinction, try imagining two children born at the same time and into similar circumstances. Call them Brian and Alex.

Brian’s parents own a chain of dry cleaning stores, started by his grandfather and now run by his father. His family as a strict sense of what’s right and what’s acceptable, so Brian’s childhood was filled with proper, sit down family dinners, little league and soccer in the summers, swimming and wrestling during winter. Growing up, he never thought about whether this was what he wanted because doing all these things made his parents so happy and Brian loved seeing their pleasure and receiving their approval. He was happy and never resented his upbringing. When it came time to head off to college, Brian chose business administration as his major with the intent of taking over the string of cleaning franchises upon graduation. Doing exactly that, Brian settled into middle age as the inheritor of his father’s business and plans to pass it along to his own child someday.

Alex came from an equally loving family, but one that avoided the structures of Brian’s. They ate together when convenient and encouraged the children to spend their summers doing whatever they fancied, even if that meant hanging out with friends and whiling away the hot days. At an early age, he became enraptured by photography and his parents helped him get into a private high school specializing in art education and never told him he should look to a different career as the years stretched out without financial success. Eventually, Alex had an opening, sold photos, and managed to work his way into the life of a professional artist. He got married, had a child, and now attends middle school football games, encouraging his son to pursue his own dream of playing in the NFL.

Who has lead a fuller life? More crucially, can we easily say that Brian’s life has been better and more filled with purpose than Alex’s? It’s clear that the answer to this latter question is no. Some may prefer Brian’s life but there’s simply no objective way it is more fulfilling than the path Alex took.

Why, then, is the need felt to find purpose in a god’s wishes? The simple fact is that we all make our own purpose in life. Some do it by reading the words of the Gospels and saying, “That’s how I ought to live.” Others develop different criteria. None are better than the rest so long as, at the end, each of us is content with the choice we made.