In a comment on my post below about religion vs. morality, Blanders wrote:
“I've recently had cause to spend social time with a group of vocal atheists (sic.)... who don't know that I'm a Christian. They've unwittingly taught me that if you don't worship God, you invariably end up worshipping yourself. And with that comes viciousness, self-righteousness and an almost unbelievable lack of charity and forgiveness. Suddenly the greatest virtue is self-actualisation, and the greatest sinner is anyone who stands between you and what you want.
A world full of self-worshippers would not be a rational paradise. It'd be a living nightmare.”
Leaving aside the fact that “a group of vocal atheists” is not much of a sample upon which to induce anything universal about morality, lets check a couple of the premises implicit in the comment.
First, there’s the assumption that if you don’t worship “God”, you end up worshipping yourself, and are therefore necessarily vicious, self-righteous, (which, when based on rational premises, is actually a virtue*), uncharitable, and unforgiving. Next comes the assertion that self-actualisation is bad, and necessarily entails sacrificing others, and their values, to yourself and the attainment of your values.
Given these premises… yes, a world full of such people would be a nightmare. But, all of these premises are false.
Christian ethics uphold sacrifice as the supreme virtue. The symbol of their faith is that which they hold as most virtuous – a crucified human, who sacrificed everything, including his life. People who display such virtue are called “selfless”. Those who don’t, are “selfish”.
But in reality, nobody can be selfless, (unless they wish to follow Jesus’ example), and nobody can survive without being selfish. To be selfish means to be concerned with one’s own life and one’s own values… and we all are, because to remain alive, and to enjoy life, requires it. We all must eat, seek shelter, produce, rest, choose companions, and so on, ad infinitum. All of these things require us to ask, “What should I do? What is good for me?” This is selfishness. Being concerned with what is in one’s own interest does not mean one has to harm or disdain others, nor does it preclude charity and forgiveness, if these are understood rationally.
Those who decry selfishness believe that life in society is a zero-sum game: you can either sacrifice your values to others, or sacrifice others to yourself. This is actually what Blanders means when he says that if you don’t worship God you end up worshipping yourself, and in so doing become vicious. But there is an alternative: rational self-interest, or as Ayn Rand phrased it: rational egoism.
The production, attainment, and maintenance of values (material and spiritual) is the meaning of life. But, and it’s a big one, values cannot be divorced from the means employed to attain them. Or, to put it another way, contrary to the popular bromide: the ends do not justify any and all means. A value attained by force, fraud, or deception, is necessarily undermined, is no longer a true value, and cannot fulfill the desire of its “owner”. This is because in attempting to misrepresent reality, we cannot change it.[1] A thief, a liar, or a cheat, is just that, and he knows it, even if he succeeds in fooling others. He cannot attain true values by attempting to cheat reality, and anything so gained is not a true value, and will not bring happiness or “self-actualisation”.
To realize this inductively, look around you. The happiest people you know lead honest and productive lives. The most miserable are the liars, cheats and thieves. This is not an accident, and has nothing to do with the belief, or not, in a god. One does not need to worship a god to be honest and productive, and believing in a god is no guarantee of virtue.
What true self-actualisation means is to take pride in molding your own character to be virtuous – honest and productive. Anything else is not self-actualisation, but some form of self-delusion.
So, not believing in a god does not make one a fiend, acting in one’s own self-interest does not mean harming others, and self-actualisation, rationally understood, is a virtue.
*Being self-righteous is simply passionately defending your beliefs, and has no bearing on whether those beliefs are true or false. Your use of this as opprobrium is disingenuous and hypocritical. Read a couple of your own posts and tell me you’re not well self-righteous when passionately defending your own values.
[1] See Tara Smith’s “Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: the Virtuous Egoist”
