Secular Sanity

By Marie Alena Castle

On April 28, 1998, at a Minneapolis symposium on religion in public life that I attended, Lutheran theologian Martin Marty said in his keynote speech, “It is the role of unbelievers to force religions to be benign.”

That’s what we atheists try to do. The liberal Marty would probably be at odds with Katherine Kersten’s uninformed opinion of atheists in her June 7 op-ed column. Traditional religious morality, which Kersten, at least for the most part, supports, is notorious for the astounding number of ways it hurts people. Benign it is not. On a short list are: slavery, subjugation and reproductive control of women, persecution of homosexuals, religious wars, cruelty to children, torture and execution of heretics, denial of end-of-life self-determination, and opposition to every advance in science and medicine that has not conformed to dogma.

There are always individuals, both religious and atheist, who will, if given the power, do evil. We’ve had the fascist-Christian Hitler (who opposed atheism) preaching Christianity’s historic hatred of Jews. There was the atheistic political-economic ideologue Stalin, determined to stamp out all remnants of the czarist-Orthodox feudal system. There have been, and are, and will be, many more such people. The evil they do is made possible by having absolute power, which never fails to corrupt. Only a constitutional democracy can prevent that. There is no support for such a freedom-enabling system in Kersten’s Bible, only for the tyranny enabling divine right of kings and unquestioning obedience to religious authority.

Given our job description and reason for existing, how well do we fit Kersten’s description of us as morally compromised and purposeless hedonists, indifferent to social values? Unlike religious zealots, we don’t cause trouble. We have no rituals or beliefs that require others to accommodate us. We have no unverifiable beliefs to impose on the political system or educational curricula. Of all groups, we are the most committed to secular government, the Bill of Rights, and especially freedom of conscience. We have been in the forefront of every movement to repeal oppressive, unconstitutional, religion-based laws. This includes support for the civil and human rights of women, sexual and racial minorities, workers, children, and the hopelessly ill, as well as support for scientific research to advance human wellbeing. We seek a peaceful world where life for all can be good.

Our humanistic philosophy goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. Since the Enlightenment, religious liberals have developed human-centered views that are essentially the same as atheistic views. We now share with them a common concern for human welfare. However much Kersten wants to, it is impossible to base moral standards on the shifting sands of unverifiable and mutually contradictory religious beliefs. There can only be secular standards set by open discussion and evaluated for their social impact, protection of individual rights, and contribution to the common good.

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