I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas (Day)! It’s good to be back. Just a small housekeeping note as we stand on the precipice of 2021.
My understanding is that SK emails land by default in the GMail “promotions” tab. To make it so that they land in the “primary” (main) tab instead:
(1) click any SK email in the “promotions” tab and drag it it into the “primary” tab; then,
(2) click yes when GMail asks if you would like to do this for SK emails in the future.
Having transitioned from the hopeful season of Advent into the joyous season of Christmas (yes, you can enjoy much more than just one day of Christmas!), in which we recall and celebrate the Incarnation of the Second Person of the blessed Trinity into the flow of human history, it seems fitting to spend some words dunking on the atheists. To clarify, I say that not maliciously but with a certain amount of fondness for them. In fact, I feel a certain amount of sympathy for atheists. Years ago, I was very interested and involved in the debates that animate their “community,” such as it is. But, after a certain point, I became less interested in talking about God—especially whether He existed, but also whether He was omnibenevolent, omnipotent, omniscient, etc.—and more interested in talking with Him, growing in my love for Him.
It was the difference between theorizing about what makes a good spouse and meeting someone who would be a great spouse; there’s just no comparison. The genuine article will always be more captivating. Same with God.
Anyway, I was reflecting on the kinds of things atheists say with utter confidence, like, “I support human rights.”1
Hold your horses there, Secular Sam. Why do you support human rights?
Probably the answer would be something like, “All people should be respected because they’re people, and ‘human rights’ is just the phrase we use to denote that respect.”
Well, OK. But why should we respect people, on Secular Sam’s worldview? Because a world in which that general rule—“respect other people”—is followed tends to lead to good outcomes?
I’ll grant it. But all that would mean is, if Secular Sam could get away with not respecting other people, or their rights, and doing so would benefit him, then he should cut those corners. The only reason for Secular Sam to be altruistic is because it somehow benefits him; he follows the general rules of polite society because doing so in some way redounds to his benefit, not because those conventions are in any way true or correspond to some reality deeper than this world.
Now, put all that to one side.
What are “rights,” anyway? If there’s no God, where do they come from? What grounds them? What limits them? Can they be real, in any objective, normatively binding sense? How does it make sense to talk about human rights—the latter half of that concept is metaphysical in nature (spooky!)—if materialism reigns, i.e., the whole universe is just matter in motion?
And yet, amusingly, Secular Sam is vociferous in his pro-human rights position. He believes in them—their validity and their goodness—with as much fervor (maybe more) as a “fundamentalist Christian” believes in God. Secular Sam believes in human rights even though, on his worldview, they’re ungrounded conventions floating in the ether of a purely physical cosmos. Of course, that’s because Secular Sam’s worldview is parasitic on the Christian world he was born into but ungratefully resents with all his might.
A true atheist recognizes, however psychologically difficult it is to accept, what Fyodor Dostoyevsky knew and spent his life exploring: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
Ultimately, this is why I outgrew the atheists. They’re deeply inconsistent people, and that makes them frustrating to interact with. They run on the fumes of a great civilization, benefit in their own lives from its existence, and think within its Grand Canyon-sized intellectual grooves—even as they relentlessly attack it all as backward, oppressive, and stupid. They fail to follow their own worldview to its logical conclusion and attack so-called inconsistencies in the actions and beliefs of the present-day descendants of the men and women who built the West.
When the moral law is forsaken—when we no longer accept that “all men are created equal” by God—what fills the void is power. You can plainly see this is what’s happening from the Left, on a whole host of issues: abortion, CRT in schools, COVID policies. Where there is no recognition of a universal, unchanging moral law that is binding on the actions of human beings, all that’s left is “might makes right.”
Eventually, all serious people have to stop sitting on the proverbial fence. There’s either such a moral law, and all that its existence entails, or there isn’t, and all that its non-existence entails. You can only be a fellow traveler of Richard Dawkins for so long before you become terribly bored.
The good news is that right now we’re going through a process of evicting the fence sitters, which makes the contradictions more apparent, which in turn accelerates the “crisis of the house divided”—the nation’s “becom[ing] all one thing or all the other.” Ultimately, that painful and dangerous process places us in a position to rebuild society and re-found America in accordance with the truth of God and of human nature. But only if we win.
So, let’s do that, starting in 2022. Who’s with me?
By “atheist” I mean basically your average secularist Westerner—leftists and progressives most definitely included. According to Pew, about three in 10 adults are religiously unaffiliated “nones”—“people who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics or ‘nothing in particular’ when asked about their religious identity.”
Welcome back, Deion! A very nice article. I particularly like what you say about atheists attacking the same society and culture that got them as far as they did; as if a pure materialist who grew up in a society with no conception of human rights would both develop them and determine that they were binding on him and all others. Atheists, particularly those with a deep hatred for Christianity, might do well to study the ancient Greek philosophers, who were hardly atheistic even as they struggled with the failings of their society's religion. The only atheistic moral philosopher whose writings really seem consistent to me is Nietzsche--but he is about as far from a conception of human rights as you can get! Also, what you say about knowing G-d rather than speculating about Him is very on point, and your analogy to a spouse is one I have never heard before, but which makes a great deal of sense. Merry Christmas!