My Own Two Cents On A Non-Believing Parent

Jamie's post on the recent CNN article was so good, I was tempted to avoid writing my own. But the article was too good to ignore. It got my theological and creative juices flowing. For that, and for other things, I am indebted to both the original blogger over at CNN and Jamie Nguyen for bringing it to my attention and her thoughts on the matter. 

Here are mine:

The original article is here: 

http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-910282?hpt=hp_c3

I am going to take the article piece-by-piece beginning with the introduction and general explanation:

1) First of all, TXBlue08, let me thank you for your thoughtful and insightful post on irreligious parenting. This kind of essay is exactly the kind that religious people like myself need if we are to continue on the quest for truth and fulfillment that we believe we are on. Anyone who refuses to take seriously those who disagree with them do themselves no service. I found much of what you wrote very interesting and indeed I agreed with a large part of it. 

I want to congratulate you on your decision to seek first and foremost to rid yourself and your children of all illusions, to be honest and truthful. You made the right decision explaining to your child what you really believe and why you believe it, and raising them in what you see to be the truth. I think, ultimately, your article betrays this goal, and I will explain why later. But I think that internal inconsistency is logical rather than moral. I also am happy I live in a country where people can raise their children how they see fit, within some legal limits. It makes me proud that a people who believe differently, as you and I do, can be a part of the same national society. I only hope that you share this pride, and the conviction that this freedom is absolutely foundational to a healthy society. I am not sure that you do, given some of the statements in your paper, but I am willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and interpret you as charitably as possible.

One of the wonders of a free society, and a tool like the internet, is the opportunity for genuine discourse. And part of genuine discourse is the need to point out inconsistencies, both in terms of statements and behavior. Any genuine, logical criticism of another's position must include just this kind of analysis, and I will be doing that throughout this paper. Know that this stems from no moral judgment on my part, nor from any desire to hurt or insult you, and rather stems from a genuine intellectual respect which is necessary for respectful and constructive discourse.

I have to wonder how thoroughgoing your commitment to being absolutely honest with yourself and your child is. Do you really teach your child to avoid all illusions, and do you always avoid lies meant to comfort your child? Let me ask you, have you ever picked up your child when they were hurt and afraid, and said "everything will be alright, everything will be alright."? Is this not a lie, from your perspective. It seems to me that a purely empirical view of the world would tell us that it is never true that 'everything will be alright'. The mother that comforts her child in that moment will someday die, just as the child will suffer and die. It may be that when you lie to your child, that lie is based on love, and my point is certainly not that you cannot be a loving parent. But it remains that you must, if this situation is something that sounds familiar to you, admit that you lie for just the reasons you avoided "lying" to the child about the afterlife.

Further, don't you believe that for your child to be healthy and happy, that they will have to live lies for much of their lives. Don't they have to step into experiences that are such that they must life as if hope, joy, and comfort are the centers of the world when, in point of fact, from your point of view they are not? What is humor, but a stepping into a world where, for a moment, joy is the center of existence? What is play but a bracketing off of life as it is normally experienced, and replacing it with a counter-world based on joy? Certainly, these experiences are stepped into and OUT OF for you, and will be for your children, but what would life be if we did not live what must be, in your view, lies much of the time?

Of course I do not think these are lies, but simply another piece of data from which to build my worldview. I, like you, do not want children to live or believe lies. But I have to ask if in a godless world this is really possible. If it is not, yet truth and a thoroughgoing commitment to it seems a given, then it seems necessary to posit God. You seem trapped by the very lies you claim you want to avoid.

I agree with you that beliefs concerning the afterlife can act as systems of control. But surely you realize that Christians disagree on how all of that works, and not all systems function as control systems. Predestination removes the ability to control people by removing people's ability to be confident about whether they go to heaven or hell. No wish-fulfillment there. Universalism removes the threat of punishment altogether. There is also a position called objective immortality that you are probably not familiar with but should investigate. Beliefs about the afterlife can lead to systems of control. But they need not.

2) I agree with you that God as He is believed in and portrayed by most religious believers is not a good father or parental figure. I also agree that the standard free will defense doesn't work, for just the reasons you suggest. In fact, I argued this very thing last night to a friend of mine. When I stop a murderer, nobody would say to me 'well you infringed on his free will'. No, they just say I stopped a murderer. Why give God a pass when He refuses to do, what seems obviously right for everyone else? 

No the free will defense is no answer to the problem of evil, not only for this reason, but because of the mountains of 'natural evil', the suffering caused by nature, that cannot be explained away by it. But let me suggest that the problem is not that God is not a good parent, but rather that God has a limited sphere of influence. That God's power is different from the power that most people attribute to Him. It may be that God's power is persuasive, rather than coercive. That the love of God is His power, and that tells us all He can do, and all He cannot. Certainly, a parent's control over their child is not absolute. A parent can do everything right, and still have a child that makes bad choices, even destructive choices. It is wrong to conclude from the evil of a child that a parent is necessarily evil. In point of fact, genuine suffering takes place in the smallest slice of existence. Most of the universe, especially at the level of the very small and very large, is overwhelmingly wonderful and beautiful. The fact that there are pockets of genuine horrors need not lead us to conclude that God is a bad parent, but rather that like most parents, His ability to influence events has it's limits. In this way we can make sense of all that is wonderful in the universe, and put ourselves behind it with reckless abandon, and still understand and account for the horrors as well. 

3) While your second point about God being illogical is in many ways just a re-statement of your first, I agree with much of what you said there. In fact it mirrors a recent post I made here on this blog: http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-problem-of-evil-mystery-of-god.html

The Problem of Evil cannot be explained by CHRISTIANS by backing up into the mystery of God. I also agree that we ultimately have to take responsibility for many of your own problems. But I disagree that we can look to the answers within ourselves, without any aid from a transcendent source. The simple fact is that people are finite, in terms of inner resources. What is the ultimate difference between me, and a morally committed non-believer such as yourself? In point of fact, I see none, except one. Every day we fight for justice, for right, for a better world. But every day, that struggle is frustrated, is fought against, is undercut. Where do you get the strength to keep fighting and keep fighting and keep fighting? You cannot turn to nought but yourself and the people around you. But surely you must realize that people often let you down, and that if you turn to others for strength in fighting for the good, you will find that they also only have so much to give. So if you keep pulling strength from limited sources, you may find one day that that well has dried up. But I believe that I can pull from a source without measure, that when I am empty I can look without and find wells of strength that were not within (either individually or socially). 

One more issue that I will continue to examine as we go along, is that you seem to assume that tragedies in Newtown are some how bad or evil. Of course, I agree, but do you ever reflect on what MAKES them bad our evil? What makes some things good and some things bad? Certainly there have been many philosophical attempts at making sense of moral statements, but all of those attempts are part of a tradition that goes back forever, and make up an endless cacophony of arguments and counter-arguments, and many look at that tradition as essentially betraying a groundlessness that no one wants to admit. This is what has led to the rise of relativism, the view that what is right or wrong is simply what one individual, or society, decides. I doubt you would be inclined to agree with people like this, but many of them are quite brilliant, and I know of no knock-down, unassailable argument to refute their claims. My point is that your very moral assumptions are no more hard and fast, no more empirically given, than the religious point of view you disagree with. There are many people who would tell you that your own convictions about right and wrong are no more than wish fulfillment, lies you tell yourself so that you can protect what you happen to like. This unanalyzed assumption about morality runs throughout the rest of your article. And it deserves to be challenged. 

4) Your view about God being fair, again, is nothing more than a restatement of the first 'point' you made in the body of your article. Is life fair? No, but life is not fair to God, either. God, I believe, is the repository of all experience, and all value. One of the consequences of believing God to be love is believing that God shares in the experience of all beings. All joy, and all suffering, that is visited on anyone, is also visited on God. And yet God does not disengage, He never stops loving, never leaves us to oblivion. The amazing thing is just how extreme the suffering God endures so that we can have the honor of being alive at all. The unfairness of life is the consequence of a universe that has the freedom to go it's own way. Not because God 'granted' this freedom, but just because that is what it means for anything to exist at all: to be, is simply to self-determine. And so the world has a large mass of free beings. The laws of nature, unfair as they often are, are the consequence of a world where such freedom is present. Note, this is not a 'free will defense', as I am not saying that God 'grants' free will to people. Rather, I am saying God relates to a universe of freedom, where things both living and non-living, both conscious and non-conscious, have the ability to go their own way. What we call the laws of physics are simply regularities, some deterministic and some probabilistic, that result from the action of this sea of freedom. The real shocking thing is not that the laws that supervene on this action aren't fair, but that their is any consistency and order in the world at all! That a universe of countless beings and things with genuine freedom would add up to a world not only of order, but of beauty and creativity on the scale we see is mind-boggling. The unfairness of the system is not the fault of the God who calls us to goodness and beauty, no. It is the fault of those things that refuse to conform to the Will of God as God wants them to. And the unfairness of the system is inevitably visited upon the God whose relationship with the world makes existence possible at all. That is just the consequence of God being not what we wanted...a genie or an all-powerful parent who could keep us from harm but from God being what God is...Suffering Love, whose being leads to the existence of an entire world of inspired but not controlled self-determination.

5) Your next point about abused and neglected children is yet another restatement of the last three points. But let me say that hating God for the hurting of the innocent is like blaming the victim. God, being the repository of all experience and value, necessarily shares in the pain of the victim. In the end, any person who hurts anybody in such a manner, knowingly or unknowingly cuts themselves off from God, in that moment. God conditions the world for beauty and goodness, He cannot guarantee that beauty and goodness will be the result.

6) Your fifth point about God being present is, simply put an example of 'the fallacy of begging the question'. It is the question of whether God is believable that is at issue. There are many good reasons to believe in God. I have a long apologetics series you could look at: http://ljtsg.blogspot.com/2013/01/my-grand-apologetics-project-3c-f.html

Bill Vallicella over at the blog Maverick Philosopher (http://maverickphilosopher.typepad.com) takes a vastly different approach to apologetics. But I for one would not want to be an atheist who debates him on the subject. Would you?

There are many metaphysical posits that are based on something less than unassailable foundations. Let's take a simple statement: 'nothing you cannot prove with sensory evidence is true'. What is the evidence that this statement is true? It's negation 'there is at least one thing that is true that cannot be proved with sensory evidence' is consistent with not only every observation we have, but with every CONCEIVABLE observation. Empirical data is not the only way to prove something true, and proof is not the only way to know something is true.

Science itself proceeds on a set of what philosophers would call 'epistemological foundations' or 'epistemological assumptions' that cannot be scientifically proven. To try to prove them scientifically is circular, and besides any attempt to do so is fated for frustration. For that the universe is a place of consistency and order cannot be proven scientifically. It must be assumed if science is to proceed at all. The principle of uniformity, that the whole universe works about the same way and always has, is a similar assumption. So is Ockham's Razor, or the need for predictive efficacy. 

And if you move away from hard science it gets worse. Notice that a relativist that simply wants to deny that there are any genuine moral laws at all, or that there is any 'truth' or 'falsehood' behind any moral statement, is not doing anything much different from what you are here. They simply assume the falsehood of your beliefs, and then ask you to justify them from premises that both you and they would share. But it is doubtful that a morally committed person shares the types of foundations that would provide common ground for the strict relativist. Wittgenstein once said that we have a hard time facing the groundlessness of much of our knowing. And that's about right

7) Your next paragraph has a clear internal inconsistency. On the one hand, you claim that you want your child's morality to be 'internally' rather than 'externally' focused. Yet you end that paragraph by making a point that one of the reasons a child who has no belief in God will do the right thing in part because they will make their family proud. But this is an external, not internal focus. If you truly want morality internalized, then what anyone thinks should mean nothing at all to the moral agent at issue.

But of course a purely internal moral experience is senseless. Everyone gets their moral rules from somewhere. And one can ask why a purely internalized moral structure would look anything like you expect it to. If I am my own judge, if moral rules supervene on my own mind, then why not just structure morality however I wish? It is I who decide not only whether I will do what is right, but what right even IS, at all. In the final analysis what ground does a selfless person stand on when the selfish person simply turns to them and says "I know how you feel, but that just isn't 'goodness' in my philosophy"? See, this view, if made consistent, makes all morality simply a matter of taste. You and I may share the same tastes, and we can celebrate this fact. But we are in no way better off than anyone else. Oh you try to dance around this by insisting that people who 'act a certain way' will be better and feel better about themselves, but this simply begs the question. There are plenty of people who live rather selfishly  who seem by all lights happy and proud. I know of no way to prove them otherwise.

One of the most dangerous things for non-believers is the thrill of evil, of rebellion. Dostoevsky wrote about this a lot. Realizing that you make your own moral rules, that whatever is good is whatever you decide it to be, brings with it an intense thrill that non-religious people never seem to be able to account for. Rebellion in the most extreme sense of the term is thrilling for it's own sake. Religious people call this 'making yourself your own god'. Irreligious people seem unaware of this, you certainly come off as if you are unaware of it in your post.

8) I found it ironic that this section followed the last one. It seems to me that there is a great danger of narcissism in your musings on so-called internal morality, than you realized. Moral experience is one of the most powerful experiences people can engage in. Believing that this experience derives solely from within seems one of the most narcissistic thoughts one could have.

Nor is it narcissism to think that God has a plan for a person or loves them in a unique way. I love my wife in a unique way, and I think she is special. I also love my sister in a unique way, and think she is special. No one need draw some special conclusion about their worth or value from my love and special vision of them. Narcissism is the view that one is better than other people, or the center of the world. But if God loves every person, and loves them in a unique way, and has a plan for all people, then narcissism should not result. Anyone who really thinks about the view that God loves every person and all people should be able to see how inconsistent it is to draw narcissistic conclusions from it. What's more, most Christians think God's love is an undeserved gift to a wretchedly sinful humanity. Such a view should never lead to pride. Quite the contrary. If God's special love was believed to be earned or deserved, and (and both of these things need to be true) I think that such a love is given to some people and not others, then that indeed would be narcissistic. But few Christians believe this cognitively. Of course many Christians ARE narcissistic. And they use their religion to justify their pride. But intellectual pride, and moral pride are just as common among non-believers. People are prideful, the justifications they offer for that pride are backwards-looking.

On the issue of God having a plan, it is ridiculous (I think) to believe that God's plan for any person is unassailable, or even very specific. You have plans for your children, I gather. You want them to be healthy, and happy, and to make a positive difference in the world. No doubt, you can see skills in them that would make them better at that in some capacities over others. They may or may not live out these visions, but you would be remiss not to help them see that this is what is best for them and the other people around them. The truth is that the Bible is full of passages where God's plans are frustrated, and where God changes plans in reaction to human decision making. Imagine that a friend of  yours needs a kidney. God calls you to give that kidney, but because of fear or doubt you don't do this. Your friend dies. God now calls you to a new life, maybe one where you tell your story to inspire others to do what you did not. Of course, God did not want your friend to die. God's plan was simply for you to do what was best. Now that this plan was frustrated, God comes up with a new plan. This doesn't mean that something wasn't genuinely lost when you failed to actualize God's earlier plan. Indeed, there may be entire universes of possibilities lost because your friend died. But GIVEN the facts as they are NOW, God is bringing some good out of what is left. 

Saying God has a plan is no different than saying that God wants us to do what is right. God's vision for that is no doubt tailored to every individual's particular situation. But only a morally blind fool believes God wills anything other than the good for all people all the time. And only a person who is already a narcissist sees in God's particular call to him or her any reason to be prideful.

9) Your definition of humility is way off. Humility is not having a bad or lowly self-image. Humility is simply having an accurate self-image. Maybe what humans do in this world is supremely important, maybe it isn't. But you have given no reason to think anything one way or another. Certainly you think you are right, but as you've said, your belief about your rightness is no indication that you are, in fact, right. What you paint here is a picture of meaninglessness. See, in the end, a universe where we make no real difference is a universe where what we do doesn't mean anything. It is a way of saying that what we do doesn't 'matter'. But think about this statement: "doing the right thing doesn't matter". Does this make sense? Isn't this just another way of saying that one shouldn't care if one does the right thing or not? For what could 'mattering' be, but simply significance? If what we do has no significance, then every action, every choice, every belief, is meaningless. You began with a conviction about truth. Truth is more important than happiness. But then you end at a place where it doesn't matter if you believe what is true, or what makes you happy. Given that fact, why not just believe what makes you happy? It doesn't matter anyways. In the end your essay is an Oroborous, it eats it's own tail.

And the truth is that we have direct, unfiltered experience of the importance of many of our actions. You betrayed just such a sense at the beginning of your post. If your child is in danger, does it not FEEL like it is the most important thing in the world, in that moment. Maybe you can later brush this off as a false belief, brought into your mind by evolutionary forces. But what is this but to say that we must, sometimes, lie to ourselves? And isn't this just what you wanted to avoid? Further, why is a stultifying skepticism preferable, or more believable, than an experienced significance?

10) Your final statement about keeping religion away from the public sector so leaders can make decisions based on 'logic' 'justice' and 'fairness' reveals a fundamental inconsistency in your thinking. For what is 'just' or 'fair' or even 'logical' is not clear. There is no such thing as an un-embeded value-neutral reason or logic. Look up Graham Priest's dialethteism, or fuzzy logic, logics themselves are choices, choices made on pre-existing intellectual prejudices. And if logic itself is up for grabs in the market of public discourse, then morality even moreso. Metaphysical prejudices color your every musing, your every statement. And so you end with a lie, the very kind of lie that you began trying to avoid... a lie about yourself, and about who we are as people. For there is no greater self-deception than the deception that our own metaphysical and moral positions are those that are clear to any and all rational and clear mind. The hardest thing for people to face is that intelligent, rational people of good conscience can disagree on important issues, both moral and metaphysical. The pretense to cetainty is a warm blanket people wrap themselves in to avoid facing the hard truth of our limitations. To demand that religious people stay out of public discourse is to betray an intellectual prejudice and to reveal in yourself the very fear that you wanted to keep from motivating and animating your child. Don't do that, stay the course, be true to your original commitment to truth and self-honesty. No true position need ever fear the light of day or the rigor of debate. Good day and much love to you and yours.