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Atheism on a bus (part one)
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PHOTO: INDIANA ATHEIST BUS CAMPAIGN
Late last month, a program was initiated by the Indiana Atheist Bus Campaign to place large advertisements on Chicago buses that argue, “You can be good without God”, and “In the beginning, man created God”. At last count, twenty-five city buses have been thus encumbered. Not unexpectedly, a number of Christians and Christian organizations promised to mount their own counter-campaigns reaffirming the reality of God . . . programs centered, for the most part, on Bible study and apologetics.
Bible study is good; so is the study of Christian apologetics. But I don’t think the theological sky is going to fall on us simply because twenty-five buses, sporting atheist slogans, are rumbling around Chicago. In fact, these signs may do us all some good because, to a certain extent, what they say is true. You can be good without God. Anybody familiar with the thought process of men such as Isaac Asimov, Gene Roddenberry, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., or more recently, Andy Rooney, Ron Reagan, Jr., and Christopher Hitchens, know as fact that each of these self-proclaimed atheists has a great deal to say about being good and doing good.
And, yes, I think those of us who believe in God have also, to one extent or another, “created” God in our own images. I have a certain perception of God . . . about what he thinks is important, what he thinks is trivial, how he manifests himself, the degree to which he does or does not manipulate history, the nature of his relationship to Jesus Christ, etc . . . that does not correspond exactly with how he is understood by others who also claim the name of Christ. Faith is, always has been, and always will be, a relative experience, unique to the individual relationship each of us experiences with God.
It’s a good thing to remember this every now and then. Keeps us from being too smug about ourselves, too self-righteously exclusive in our commerce with one another.
But I do have a couple of questions.
To begin with, what is it that atheism offers me? Certainly not the promise of any meaningful afterlife. That’s a given, but even on a temporal level, atheism seems achingly sterile. Charles Dinsmore, a Christian author of some repute, made the point well:
Religion, by deepening the soul of man, has been the prolific and fostering mother of music, architecture, letters, drama and all the arts. Atheism writes no hymns; agnosticism does not burst into song,; skepticism constructs no institutions. The singing and building eras of the world are periods of stalwart belief.
As I’ve already said, an atheist can speak effectively of goodness. But it’s a goodness that is much more utilitarian than it is inspirational. It’s a goodness designed to keep me at peace with my fellow man, to ensure social harmony, to promote commonweal. These are important objectives, but on a personal level, they don’t run very deep. I need more. The goodness for which I’ve been made . . . for which all of us have been made, I think . . . is not so much an efficient goodness as it is a celebratory goodness. I need to rejoice in it. The goodness to which I am not only drawn, but to which I aspire, is a goodness which does not begin and end with a social contract. I need to look beyond my social responsibilities, beyond my horizontal relationship with humankind, beyond even my own self. Give me, in the words of the rock group, “Poison”, something to believe in. Give me something transcendent, something that goes beyond the first person self-centeredness of “I”.
For me, that “something” is the goodness of a God that redeems me . . . a goodness beyond my self that causes me to rejoice and, if I am to live up to my created potential, a goodness I am constrained to mirror. I say, “for me”, because I understand that not everybody shares my belief in transcendent redemption. Some souls, I know, are touched deeply by heart-haunting poetry, some others by natural wonder, still others by the point and counter-point of great music. I readily admit that we can be edified by any number of influences, religion being one, but not the only, example.
But tell me, please, how the real center of my self . . . that which most clearly identifies me as human . . . can possibly be touched, much less celebrated, by the words, “I do not believe in God”. I’d like to know.
(I’ll ask my other question tomorrow, in the second part of this article.)
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