A Thought for Sunday

So a couple of weeks ago, I watched a filmed version of actress and comedienne Julia Sweeney's one-woman show Letting Go of God. I had heard an excerpt from the play on the "Godless America" episode of This American Life. It's a very funny and poignant show as Julia asks some important questions and goes through a spiritual journey from her Catholic faith to a non-theist, naturalist worldview. Anyway, I've been thinking about the show a lot. At one-point she decides she doesn't think anything happens when we die, that our consciousness just fades and stops like our organs do, and there is no soul or spirit that continues on. Then she thinks, '“Wait a minute, so Hitler, Hitler just... died? No one sat him down and said, ‘You fucked up buddy! And now you’re going to spend an eternity in HELL!’ So Hitler just died.” I thought, “We better make sure that doesn’t happen again.”' And a little while later she thinks, “Wow. Life is so cheap and so precious.” When her parents ask her where she gets her peace and isn't she just depressed all the time, she says, “No. I mean it’s sort of turned out to be the opposite. I’m kind of astonished that I’m even here at all. The smallest things in life seem just amazing to me now. . . . If this is all there is, everything means more, not less, right?” Though she also admits that “I guess I do have less peace. I don’t think everything works out for the best, or that there is some grand plan. I don’t think that things happen for a reason other than a tangible, actual reason. The sad things in life do seem sadder.” When she first decides to try on the "not-believing-in-God glasses" for a second, she actually thinks how does the Earth stay up in the sky? Then she thinks what's to stop me from rushing out and murdering people?, and she has to walk herself through why we are ethical. In a Q&A after the show, she says that ethics are much more fascinating from a non-theist viewpoint. If you're religious, ethics are just whatever God, scripture, religious leaders, etc. tell(s) you to do. But for a naturalist, ethics come from natural rights and social norms and our internal moral sense and these things often get codified into law. But as society changes and evolves then our ethics can--and should--change and evolve too. 

So what's the point? Even if you're religious, I think it's important to occasionally put on the not-God glasses and examine the world from a naturalist viewpoint. It's sort of the opposite of Pascal's Wager--which basically states that God cannot be proved or disproved through reason, so it's better to believe in God (or at least fake it) and live accordingly just in case he does exist; if he doesn't exist it doesn't matter, but if he does then you'll be saved. But I think that we should set up our ethics, morals, and laws under the supposition that God doesn't exist--that this life is all we get. Wouldn't that induce us to be better, more loving, more just, more humane people? (Though I guess that depends upon if you take a more Lockean or Hobbesian view of human nature.) I don't think that justice really exists in the world, just a simulacrum of justice. But if you believe that a higher power exists and that justice will be served in the next life, then it's easier to ignore the social inequality, the social injustice, the suffering that occurs every day throughout the world. It's easier to believe that the dictators, the tyrants, the oppressors, the terrorists, the Hitlers will be judged and the victims, the tyrannized, the downtrodden, the oppressed, the exploited will have their reward. But I think that seems too easy. So if this is all we get then I think we need to do what we can to make this "the best of all possible worlds," to protect and uplift the disenfranchised through universal natural, human rights. If God exists in the afterlife and justice will be served, that's swell. But what if Hitler just died? Then we need to make sure the holocaust and other atrocities never happen again--and to solve the current genocides, unjust wars, and human rights violations--because human life is so cheap and so precious. Of course that's easier said than done. Wendell Phillips said, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." Eternal vigilance is no mere task, and it's a burden placed on all our shoulders.  But let's get to work--let us cultivate our garden--so that we can render life tolerable, for all of us, and maybe even better than tolerable.