Selfish Snowday's are for Atheists Too

Everyone becomes self-centered on a snowday (with the possible exception of snow removal professionals but even they are making money when it snows)

At church we are talking about sin and confession right now. My boss is not a Christian but we talk a lot about faith, goodness and the like. She emailed me last night after work about some psychologists who had been doing studies that showed that Christians aren't any more moral than atheists. Apparently Christians and Atheists were uspet. So I sent her this response. I used some big words like altruism and mentioned a philosopher so I thought it was blogworthy. And the context is that it snowed a foot yesterday and no one felt like we should be at work.

People are selfish – all of us. People would rather go home on a snow day and watch TV than work. I wanted to go home early yesterday even though it wasn't snowing that hard. I would have gone home early if you (my boss) had said “What do you think? Should we call it a day?” This is part of who we are. And whether we guise this in altruism or not, it seems that we are not by nature prone to extreme good nor are we naturally prone to extreme evil although we are capable of both. Anyone with a reasonable perception of humanity can see that we are somewhere in between – like a good and evil parfait. The vast majority of orphanages in Haiti are staffed by evangelical Christians yet a group of evangelical Christians is also trafficking kids. The paradox is there. No one is immune.

Christian and Hebrew scriptures never make the claim that people are all good or all evil. In fact, there are some commandments in the Hebrew Scriptures that have never been accomplished due to the severity of the cost. One of these is called the year of Jubilee – you may be familiar with it. In the year of Jubilee – every 49 years, the community of God was to cancel all debts, release all indentured servants and to return all property to its original owner – a total redistribution of wealth. This is one of those commandments we overlook because it is too hard.

I guess what I am saying is that Judeo Christian thought sees God as good. It sees us as made in the image of God – created for good but prone to sin and in need of redemption. Christianity seeks not to create good people but, like AA, to force us to take a serious look at ourselves and to admit our brokenness and capacity to harm others, our inability to fix ourselves. Therefore we must rely on something greater than ourselves for life.

So the distinguishing feature of Judeo-Christianity – grace comes into play. That God wouldn’t call us to be moral beings but forgiven beings who offer forgiveness to others. That we might, in the person of Christ and the crucifixion, see grace and forgiveness personified and then respond - not from compulsion to be better people but from a place of grateful response. Part of goodness is the ability to identify with the sufferings of others – to suffer with them. Christ suffers with us and for us. This is the height of “morality.” And at its best, Christianity is Desmond Tutu, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther King Jr, William Wilberforce and a host of others who are willing to suffer in order to free others.

What I think is interesting is that everyone, regardless of religion, makes poor moral choices. Where do these ideas about poor moral choices come from? I believe the author (of the forwarded article) makes a valid point to assert that most of our ideas about moral choice hail from a Western cultural norm which is predominantly Judeo Christian. And while we are no longer Judeo Christian in our beliefs about the nature and existence of God, we still hold largely to the morality of Judeo-Christian beliefs. Even our beliefs about tolerance and equality flow from a system of law that was based largely on Judeo Christian ethics.

Alisdair McIntyre – currently a philosopher at Notre Dame wrote an entire book on these issues called, “After Virtue.” It was the greatest philosophical work of the last 30 years in the field of ethics. An atheist before writing the book, he described the irrational nature of trying to call others to a universal ethic while maintaining no rationale for the validity of that ethic. He was also very harsh about the probability of one person being their own moral guide – rather he thought this would justify a person in anything they wanted without recourse. He consequently converted to Catholicism. Perhaps an evolutionary view of ethics (as espoused in the article) is popular – we do what will allow us to survive. But I must at this point agree with C.S. Lewis that if we view everything in life from the viewpoint of natural selection or biological necessity, there is no higher meaning to love, art, poetry, music or social work other than the propagation of the species. This seems to devalue the very things that exhibit our humanity.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
- C.S. Lewis