[+/-] An atheist confronts disaster
Jason Kuznicki nicely summarizes my own thoughts about the tragedy in Indonesia:
We find it meaningless to invoke God in the good times; we find it both meaningless and cruel to invoke him in the bad.
Atheists don't expect life to be fair, except insofar as we make it so. Look at nature: Does anything within it correspond, except by merest chance, to the human conception of justice? Is there any reason, discernible in nature, to expect that it should?
Atheists fight disaster with penicillin and iodine, with airlifted rice and, proactively, with seismic early-warning networks. This is not to say that believers reject such methods--on the contrary, they tend to be quite charitable about them. We unbelievers, though, hold that in life there is no reckoning--save the one we create for ourselves. The good is here, and now--or never. We embrace nature, in all its unfairness, and seek to change it. We hold that the height of human purpose is to redress the wrongs of mere nature, to bring it--at least as far as humans are concerned--into accord with the justice we imagine.
posted by Nanovirus @ 23:18 permalink
your thoughts? 4
4 Comments:
I agree except maybe on the "seek to change" nature. I see the atheist response to nature more as a willingness to adapt our habitat structures to the possibilities of nature, and to, as you say, deal with the here and now of the unexpected. Maybe this is a different perspective; maybe a different way of saying the same thing (?).
Good questions, all. The original post is not mine, so I can't address what the author means, I will just provide my own thoughts.
Nature is unfair in the sense that it lacks justice. If you ever watch a nature show -- especially those designed for younger audiences -- there will likely be a scene that unfolds like this: the predator is searching for its prey... prey is alerted... there is a brief struggle, and they prey escapes this time.The outcome seems "just" (as in justice): the poor (and usually cute) prey gets away from the big bad scary predator. Outside of tv, however, nature has no concept of justice. Perhaps this is also what the author means about "changing nature." That is, trying to create a more just world. Ask him?
As for your question of why it is important to show charity to others, my answer is humanistic: humanity is better off when we all show charity, and worse off when we do not. No deity required.
I don't think that doing what is good for humanity is part of human instinct. Otherwise the people that are taking advantage of this tragedy must be inhuman. CS Lewis argues that if we only acted on instinct then we would have sex whenever we wanted to for example. There is something we have learned, some voice that tells us to think before we act. (Or at least strive to!) It is not instinct. What does this come from? Why is that some people do not think about how their actions affect everyone? Are they not human? Are they evil? Are they republican? (ha-ha) Whatever you call your it, a God or Humanism, there is something spiritual, something intangible that makes some of us want to do good.
sheer arrogance.
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