Humanity Thirsts for Experience

            The meaning of life is experience. How sad and pathetic that so many come to inhabit this world, seeking the answer, and fall away unsatisfied. Worse, those who nobly die with the righteous belief that their purpose for existence was subservience and devotion to a deity. It would shatter their very beings to open their minds and see that God is the greatest lie ever told. So instead they live, day after day consuming purpose via obtuse old rituals written by power-hungry, delusional men. Even the few who break free of the traditional paradigms still may fall into lesser belief structures, such as Paganism, adopting ritual and worship again for the comfort and sense of purpose they provide.

            But true purpose comes from humanity alone. We have evolved from the primordial soup, risen above the base masses of primitive animals, to achieve the ultimate success of intellect, of self-awareness. Of individuality.

            So, where do we go from here? Oddly, we fight against our own progress, and have done so since day one. We develop order and patriotism, laws and structure, then cleave to them as the monkeys we left behind still cling to the absurd comfort, safety, and familiarity of the trees we came down from. The very nature of humanity is change, is daring to take the ultimate, terrifying leap into the unknown. It was once fueled by curiosity, but that human urge has been placated at last by over-saturation. Why bother to be curious now, when all that is knowable (or truly worth knowing, considering our limited scope of the universe) is already known?

            That, however, is a fatal fallacy. We have focused on facts rather than experience, emotions, and empathy. A world at peace, a love without jealousy, a humanity graced with universal acceptance . . . these experiences are real, they are possible, but they are, to this day, mere dreams—as the notion of a man walking on the moon may once have seemed to Copernicus. Should we not, least, abate our hunger for facts, having fully supped, and indulge a while in our thirst for experience? It’s not that we’ll never be hungry again, nor thirsty forever, but humanity itself is a single organism working in unison, as our cells and organs compose us, and like all organisms, its needs—so far as sustenance is concerned—are varied.

            We’ll never come to truly understand how the universe operates until we first experience why it matters at all that we know. After all, we did not discover the horrible wonders of the split atom until we experienced a need for that understanding. But can’t wisdom come from positive, progressive needs, rather than superficial ones—protection, domination, self-preservation in the face of an enemy—and thereby carry with it a mark of pride and accomplishment hitherto unknown to the human race?

            In short, if we may submit ourselves to love and benevolence, rather than fear and hatred, can we not better unlock human potential, solely through the experience of the most beautiful aspects of our shared humanity?

An Atheist Perspective on Morality

Conversations with Christians:

“I am an atheist.”

“So, you don’t believe in sin then?”

            Morality is a human construct. It has no absolute, tangible reality; it is purely a fabrication of the human mind, crafted and honed after generations of experience and emotive development. Fortunately, it is a rather useful human construct that does much to maintain peace and order. It’s hard to imagine anybody who would disagree—even psychopaths acknowledge its power. Indeed, it is their love for promulgating chaos that leads them to defying morality all together. Because morality is catholic (although unique and relative, to some extent, to every individual), it is a tempting bit of evidence to point to the existence of a creator, a deity, a god. However, I intend here to lay that temptation to rest once and for all by explaining an alternative source for morality. I base it on my own experience and welcome responses from anyone who may agree or disagree.

            The key to understanding how a human comes to label any action as moral or immoral, oddly enough, lies within the so-called “Golden Rule.” This “rule” that is so ubiquitous throughout the religious/mythological world—“treat others as you would like to be treated”—need not come from a deity (or a group of deities, for that matter) in order to be explained. Indeed, it is no stretch of the imagination to posit that the same minds that have come to untangle the mysteries of gravity or evolution were able in more primitive forms to discover a sentiment universally felt and accepted. It did not need to be (and it indeed was not) revealed to humanity through divine intervention but through rationalization, emotions, reflection, and empathy.

            To start, it is useful to consider what is often cited as the quintessential moral issue: murder. No rational, emotionally-developed human being will make the case for the virtues of murder, precisely because it is so atrocious on even a global scale. But murder is not bad because Yahweh, Zeus, Allah, or Vishnu says it is so. Murder is bad, immoral, because of how it makes people feel.

            The human imagination is a remarkable vessel for compassion and for manifesting glimpses of purely fabricated situations. In fact, the latter skill is a particularly potent one humans possess, as demonstrated in our ability to experience dreams while we sleep, recall from memory rather vividly a loved-one’s face, or even just imagine the taste of a vanilla ice cream cone. How these processes occur is not yet fully understood, but that it does occur is obvious and has been one of life’s great mysteries for millennia.

            To prove my overarching point, let’s devise a brief thought experiment. Unpleasant though it may be, close your eyes and try to imagine a scenario where someone whom you love very much has been killed. It need not even be from murder. Or, if this is an experience you’ve had already, you may try to recall the precise feeling you had when you were first broken the news and the subsequent sentiment that no doubt lingered on your mind for a very long time after. The feelings you are presently experiencing are not unique. Our human faculty of empathy allows us to powerfully experience in our minds both things we’ve never encountered and events we have already met with in our lives. This fact is central to understanding my conception of how morality arose and how I as an atheist have shaped my own understanding of morality.

            I do not kill people precisely because I would not want someone else to kill me or someone I care about. Although I suppose I would not be aware of my own death if someone were to kill me, I can consider now, while still alive, how the murderer would have cut short my small sliver of allotted time to live, experience, and love. The very notion of my murder thus affects me deeply due to the sheer ignorance and cruelty of the committer. Moreover, when I consider (selfishly, I admit) the pain I would experience upon having anyone important to me wrenched from my life, it exacts a visceral response deep within me. My sense of empathy prevents me from doing anything I would not want done to myself.

            It’s pretty easy to see, then, how even a primitive human mind could arrive at such basic moral understandings as the wrongness of murder, rape, or theft, purely through reflection upon one’s own feelings. That is not to say that all primitive humans stumbled upon this understanding, but at least one human did and likely shared it with his or her peers. What’s important to grasp is that this knowledge did not come from some outside force but from humanity itself. Very likely, it came from real experience and empathy, not from imagination at all. With the human mind’s impressive ability to assimilate facts into knowledge and comprehension, it seems very probable indeed that the first person to acknowledge the wrongfulness, the immorality of any action, was a victim of that very action.

            Beautifully, empathy does not merely restrain one from committing heinous acts. To the contrary, it encourages benevolent behavior. If one avoids bad deeds out of fear of reciprocation, then it follows that one also will actively share good deeds in hope of reciprocation. It may be simple to make the case then that all good deeds are committed selfishly in order to promulgate an economy of good deeds in the hopes that some will spring back upon the self. However, the same argument could easily be made (and rather frequently has been made) that religious morality and charity are simply the carrying out of duty in hopes of reward from a deity. It’s impossible to get around this conundrum, for even if one should say that good deeds are inherently good, it is really the good feeling that comes along with them that makes them occur at all.

            Fortunately, this age-old paradox isn’t that troubling at all. In fact, it helps further my suggestion that morality is based on emotions. The same primitive minds that conceived of the pain caused by murder that decided to not murder in order to avoid reciprocation likely stumbled upon the truth that kindness often propagates kindness. Over time, these two basic truths—cruelty begets cruelty, benevolence begets benevolence—came to be expressed in various mythologies the world around via the Golden Rule. Consequently, I believe that humanity does not possess morality because of religion, but that religion possesses morality (albeit, often perverted) because of humans. This question is no “chicken or the egg” paradox, but a very easily-understood anthropological phenomenon. Humans invented morality, and then they invented religion as a source of higher authority for that morality. Religion was likely invented, at least in part, as a safeguard to maintain and enact this economy of kindness and agreement to avoid immorality.

            Interestingly, I posit that it is precisely this introduction of religion to enforce morality that both spread basic moral codes and ultimately corrupted the essence of morality. The threat of punishment by a supreme deity or by supreme deities would certainly keep a less-sophisticated mind from committing so-called “immoral deeds,” and it did a fine job of doing so for a very long time, I admit. In some respects, it continues to do so today. But various other rules became introduced over time that lack any moral basis—kosher laws and circumcision are perfect examples from the Judeo-Christian tradition. These laws, some suggest, were introduced in response to legitimate dangers in the world (for example, shellfish may have been banned as a result of food poisoning, and a circumcised penis is much healthier for both genders in a society lacking sophisticated hygiene techniques). Moral code thus became a useful survival tool, but something much less founded on morality (Richard Dawkins suggests that this use of religion as a survival tool is precisely why religion itself has survived—the tribes that had religious laws preventing them from harm were more likely to survive than those without it, and thus, more likely to reproduce and pass on their moral codes). Worse, political groups eventually grew to recognize how easily religion could be exploited to maintain order and control; the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity is a clear, famous example.

            When government became involved in religion, moral law began to lose its utility. The cause is a tendency of politicians to line their own coffers while “representing” the people, as can still be seen today in pork-barrel laws or accommodations politicians make for powerful lobbyists. I see no reason to believe that such a practice is new, nor to deny that it had a hand in crafting many of the more bizarre laws found in various religious codes. Moreover, scientific advancements and fuller medical/anatomical understandings have done much to render many old religious laws obsolete. Unfortunately, many have survived on tradition alone, not on logic or emotion at all. Often, this survival can be dangerous to a society.

             In closing, it’s time humanity bind together to produce a universal moral code based on empathy alone. No more should we tolerate a world that incites religious wars and acts of terror. No more should we tolerate a world that punishes a woman for revealing too much flesh. No more should we tolerate a world that challenges the importance of rational thought and skepticism in favor of blind faith instead. It’s time to shake off the clingy stain of religion-based morality in lieu of something progressive, logical, and based entirely on empathy alone. Such a change would lead to impressive, desperately-needed social and political changes. The only path to a truly moral world is to finally give up on the gods.

Empathic Musings

A funny thing happened yesterday, and it has prompted me to write a new blog post about a subject near and dear to my heart. I was talking with my parents on Skype, as I’m wont to do on Sunday afternoons, and my mother was telling me about how she used a “big word” that day at work and was very proud and excited to tell me about it. She laughed and suggested I should teach her some new “big words” that she could use from time to time. Naturally, my first thought was Ernest Hemingway’s famous rebuttal to William Faulkner:

Does he really think big emotions come from big words?

That said, I am a bit of a logophile, so I do have a penchant for admiring the savory goût of an unusual word. In fact, just a few days prior to my chat with my mother, I had raided my classroom for tools I could use in my ESL classes, and therein, I found a promising old box of “English Vocabulary Cards,” proudly containing 1,000 useful words.

Well, that box had been sitting on my desk up until Sunday, virtually unopened. But the moment seemed to proscribe its perusal, so I suggested my mother and I dive into its contents together and see what we’d find. I lifted the dusty lid and reached somewhere into the middle of the cards, ultimately selecting an unpresuming one from their midst. I was shocked at the word I randomly selected!

Why so surprised? Well, empathy has long been one of my favorite words and a concept I often discuss with people. Truth be told, I think it may be the single most important faculty we have in order to be good human beings. Here’s how the card defines empathy:

Of course, I’m not much of a person for the metaphysical or to think about crazy ideas such as fate or destiny. But I have to admit, it seemed rather fitting that, of 1,000 cards, I’d randomly be drawn toward this one, wonderful word. Yes, pure coincidence, I know. But still, cool.

So, what’s the big deal about empathy? I first began thinking about it in college, when I came to realize that a writer’s most useful tool is empathy. If you cannot actually experience the emotions—good or bad—of another person, as vividly in your mind and heart as that person experiences them, then it becomes a great challenge to ever effectively (and affectively!) write about the human experience. One of my favorite examples is the following poem, “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” by the great Romantic poet William Wordsworth. Chances are, if you’ve spent any real time talking about literature with me, I’ve suffered you to hear a reading. So, here it is:

She dwelt among the untrodden ways

Beside the springs of Dove,

A Maid whom there were none to praise

And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone

Half hidden from the eye!

—Fair as a star, when only one

Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know

When Lucy ceased to be;

But she is in her grave, and, oh,

The difference to me!

In all honesty, every time I read this poem, I feel a shudder down my spine when I reach the final two lines. My cheeks grow flush and I feel a distinct flutter in my chest. That’s how powerful, how affective, this poem is. Wordsworth is famous for his slightly cryptic “Lucy poems,” and this is by far the finest. He praises this girl he loves, this girl whom nobody ever bothered to notice, with the most fittingly delicate imagery. But the kicker is that she has died, which has had no impact on anyone—expect for its having made all the difference in the world to the poet. He loved her, but he never got the chance to tell her. Lovely, simple, and harrowing. This poem is about unprofessed love and untimely death, and if your sense of empathy is sharp enough, you will feel (even if only for a mere moment) the exact heartache of the bard. Simply put, empathy allows us to connect and share. Empathy necessarily requires creative thinking and a certain openness with one’s sentimental side. Yet while it demands that openness, it also enhances it in the process—it acts as a cyclical process. The more you allow yourself to connect with people, the easier it will become, the more you’ll want to do so, and the more open others will be to empathizing with you. Instant karma.

I invite everyone who reads this to consider how open they are to feeling empathy toward fellow human beings on a daily basis. You’ll perhaps find it remarkably refreshing!