Get Off The Bus

I was kicking around the 'Comments' area of Guardian U.K. a little while back and came across an idea for an ad which was to be placed on the panels of some London buses, sponsored by Professional Atheist Richard Dawkins, which would feature an atheistic message. This in response to ads sponsored by different religious influences, and the specifics aren't that important. You can imagine - "GOD IS GOOD. FREE CRACKERS AT 11:00."

But what is the Dawkins message?

"THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE."

Clever? Nothing could possibly be clever enough to hide the inherent desperation and sadness enclosed in this message. What an utter failure. Why?

Well, read it again. "Probably" no God. We know that atheists don't believe in God, so this is not really a message that honestly represents their view. As a matter of fact, the monolithic atheist mission right now seems to be to eliminate all possibility of God or spiritual experience. This certainly doesn't seem to do that, and opens up the door to the possibility of God due to the use of the word probably, all courtesy of the world's most popular advocate for atheism. If the ad is selling godlessness to the public, it isn't doing much of a job, probably because it's hard to sell the lack of something and also rather pointless.

"Now Stop Worrying" - really? About what, everything? I know that Mr. Dawkins is making what seems to be a good living from The God Delusion, which stayed on the New York Times non-fiction best seller list for about a year. He tours, he dances, he shares his views and is paid to do so. This is partly because he is a worthy contributor to healthy debate, but seemingly a humorless one. He may be financially secure and may not have the emotional intelligence or moral structure necessary to give a damn about the issues of the world, but most of the rest of us have a lot to worry about. Oh wait, I'm sure he wants to strip down religious influence so that we can conduct ourselves as civilized people, and religion has a brutal history - that's the popular argument. This completely ignores the fact that these religions, while deeply flawed, provide a moral code that atheism can't. We need something that enshrines empathy as a "godly" thing - whether God can be proven to exist absolutely or not. Our societies are fragile, and we need these religious mechanisms to help massive numbers of our world population learn the importance of caring for each other, and those mechanisms provide people a higher reason to do so. The Golden Rule is good, but of course those who seek power know that they can treat others as they please without the fear of reciprocal treatment most of the time. The Golden Rule succumbs to trickery. Individuals need a moral reminder to varying degrees - I don't need to go to church to know that I should be good to people - but to destroy the whole religion thing and trust atheism and soulless pursuit of satisfaction and the Golden Rule to take care of ethical things would be a sure way to destroy selflessness and empathy and all of the other, higher expressions of human dignity. We need those to continue our civilizations, along with notions of liberty and equality. The conceptualization of a higher power structure gives those ideas more weight and unifies people under them.

That's the idea behind the Declaration of Independence, for example: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." By mentioning a "Creator," men aren't just bestowing all of these rights, in an elitist fashion, to all of the people: They are uniting everyone, including themselves, and the now sacred ideals of meaningful life and liberty, under a greater power. It's more brilliant and effective than anything a godless moral code has to offer. To take morality for granted would be foolish - the success of the civilized world is not ensured, but the lack of a moral code goes a long way toward ensuring its failure.

Finally, "Enjoy Your Life." Anton Lavey spawned a brand of agnostic, atheistic Satanism that challenges Christianity not based on worship of Satan, instead using Satan as a representative rebellious figure in the pursuit of questioning Christianity. Not surprisingly, the moral code boils down to fulfilling urges, so Lavey Satanists are hedonists. This nearly non-existent moral code is similar to the code that results from Ayn Rand's Objectivism, although she was starting from a very different place: Establishing the primacy of reason and barely acknowledging the function of human emotion as a tool for gaining worldly knowledge. Her moral code also featured an empty pursuit of happiness model - happiness being a measurement of one's success in meeting the challenges of the world. No mention of caring for others, no mention of the clear failures of Darwinistic "survival of the fittest" theory applied in reality to the human condition, which dooms the meek to misery and poverty and death. The anarcho-capitalism that results from application of her worldview aggrandizes the logical self, rewards the wealthy and dooms nearly everyone else. We've seen how that has worked in America in recent years. The manifestation of this ideology results in failure for most people, and great wealth for a very privileged few.

So Dawkins got his bus ad, and now some buses roll around in London and maybe other cities in England with his agnostic/atheistic/hedonistic message, although the ads were nixed at the last minute in Italy. Dawkins gets what he wants: more publicity, which surely leads to more paid speeches and more recognition and more money. So he's enjoying his life and maybe he has no worries? The rest of us have plenty to worry about, militant atheism and Richard Dawkins and bankrupt moral codes included.