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featured essay: september 2002 Christianity Plus by Dale McGowan Post-theistic parenting is too often haunted by a nagging defensiveness: we do TOO have a moral compass, we do TOO care about others, our lives do TOO have meaning... It's not entirely surprising, since others are literally praying for the souls of our children --- the Christian equivalent of calling Child Protective Services on us. They mean well, of course, most of them. They've found simple answers to the most perplexing questions of existence, and they're stickin' to 'em. The assumption is made that those of us who've rejected Christianity have also rejected everything Christianity stands for. Good gourd, I hope not. Aside from the first three commandments, most of the actual Christian ethos is pretty self-evidently admirable and wise. Who's willing to declare himself firmly opposed to selflessness, charity, humility, after all? There's a reason for that, of course: the Christian moral code came about not as a deistic grant but as the inheritance of a thousand generations of pre-Christian social evolution. It is utterly unoriginal in its scriptural articulation. "Do unto another what you would have him do unto you, and do not do unto another what you would not have him do unto you. Thou needest this law alone. It is the foundation of all the rest," said Confucius, five hundred years before Jesus (Mt 7:12). And it wasn't even new with Confucius. Call them Christian values if you must, but they are also Buddhist values, Brahminist values, common law and civil law values... in short, they're HUMAN values, articulated over and over in one religious or philosophical system after another because they work, because they are good. So I'd be very hesitant to say I reject them all out-of-hand, simply because our current predominant inelegant world religion attempts to claim them as exclusive property. This line of thought quickly brings up another issue, our own self-concept as non-theists. We can quickly be bullied into seeing ourselves as others see us, as somehow "less than" others, as a worldview based solely on negation. Truth be told, we do it to ourselves as much as anything, with labels like "a-theist" (without theism) and "a-gnostic" (not knowing). And yes, to the extent we limit our articulated worldview to the negation of something else, we do run the risk of diminishing that worldview in the eyes of others, including our children. There's no need, of course. As we often crow, ours IS a complete worldview, a complete life philosophy, lacking nothing. We reclaim the human moral code that was ours to begin with, before the Christians put their thumbprint on it, and have simply thrown away the deity that was never there to begin with. Hm. Still sounds a tad defensive, doesn't it? And defensiveness doesn't sell well to kids. So I've spent a lot of time thinking about how I can best present my worldview to my own kids without a trace a defensiveness. I'm quite proud of that worldview, after all, quite confident in it. If anything, it is a MORE moral system than the Christian system, because it proceeds from integrity, from a position that values truth... Why, that's it. There it is. Once I'd articulated it in that way, I could see where I really stood relative to Christians. My worldview is not "Christianity minus" something, it is really "Christianity plus." I have an additional value, an additional moral priority over and above the obvious foundation of human morality that we share with them. I value the truth. No matter how it affects me, no matter how pretty or ugly it may seem on the surface, I deeply and sincerely value the truth. And there, right there, is the real difference between me and my evangelical friends. The God question, though certainly important, is a secondary effect. It is a by-product of this value. Once I've embraced reason as my guide and humbled myself to its findings, selflessness, charity, humility stay put, but God goes away. The reference to humbleness is intentional. The conviction that atheists have a better grasp on truth than others can sound downright... well, Christian, to be blunt. But that very conviction is one of our most inescapable attributes, one that has led many of the atheists I know to a very unattractive arrogance --- which in turn can potentially make us a less desirable model for our kids than the smiling image of Saint Francis, so it's to be avoided. To step back from the ledge of arrogance, follow the example of Thomas Huxley: humble yourself before the truth. Not the "Truth," the awful perversion of that word twisted by evangelicals to mean "an unsupported hunch," but the original meaning, as explicated by Huxley in the letter to Canon Kingsley (referenced as well in the August essay "The Consolations of Philosophy"): "Sit down before the fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this." Christians are, for the most part, people of very good intentions who simply haven't found their way to that one additional moral priority that would make their worldview more complete, more honest, and a better fit with the soaring human intellect. This one small shift in perspective shows atheism for what it is --- additive, not subtractive in value --- and can make all the difference as we guide our children through their own decisionmaking in the biggest questions of all. |
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