Atheism in the News

I'm not totally comfortable with Richard Dawkins representing my side in the popular dialogue about atheism vs. theism. It annoys me when he snarkily points out in his opening statements that he doesn't believe in Zeus or Thor either. He has valid points to make, but he comes off like a bit of a tool sometimes. Other atheism proponents tend to look just as bad, squawking in their Chicken Little voices about how the planet's religious zealots are bringing about the end of the world. On the other hand, if I were a Christian, I'd be downright mortified by the morons they are dredging up to defend the Biblethumpers' point of view.

Facing off against the head of American Atheists in a recently televised "talking-head pundits" show, I actually saw a preacher accuse atheists of not having ethics. He reasoned that ethics came from the Bible, and if you didn't accept the Bible as fact, how could you have ethics? This question is so shockingly ignorant, that it was not a surprise when this preacher later went on to bash gays and followers of other faiths.

Ethics, it should be obvious, come from your parents, your teachers, the books you've loved, the movies and television shows you've watched and the friends you've talked to, and (hopefully) from the private thinking you've done about life and how to live it. The Bible is certainly one source of values (though a little violent for my tastes.) And so are the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, and Winnie the Pooh's Adventure in the 100 Acre Wood. So are the works of Roald Dahl, the Lord of the Rings, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater and Princess Mononoke.

The idea that one's ethics can be defined by a single collection of antiquated texts is sad rhetoric. Martin Luther King Jr., maybe Christianity's greatest modern statesman, was heavily influenced by Gandhi. If he hadn't opened his horizons to incorporate the values and teachings of various cultures and philosophers, he wouldn't have been the leader that he was. What does The Bible have to tell us about civil rights activism, or violence in video games, or about stem cell research or about a person's right to euthanasia? Only what we can loosely extrapolate. Frankly, that's not enough for me. I require other sources of information to make up my mind about how to live and what to believe in. I require the graphic novels of Alan Moore, and the 1995 Seattle Mariners, and Jack Keruac's On the Road, and Goya and Judy Bloom and Feargus Urquhart and John F. Kennedy and Frank Miller's Daredevil and the plays of Edward Albee and Vaclav Havel and the music of Nick Drake and Joe Strummer.

The idea that I don't have ethics because I don't believe in God is offensive and ignorant. I have done more thinking about personal ethics and live more in accordance with a set of ethics than most Christians. Just because I'm influenced by various sources and my ethics have evolved over the years doesn't make me different. Christians also learn and grow and change as they mature, and Christians are also influenced by media and pop culture. And yet atheists remain the single most distrusted minority group in America. Sad.