Does Atheism Make You a Better Person?
by Asa Boxer
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I’d like to take a break today from my frontal assault on specific new atheists (which you can find here and here). Admittedly, I have been engaging in the ad hominem over the past two weeks and totally intend to continue until I’ve rounded up the so-called “Brights” or the five most prominent proselytisers of the new atheist movement: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. I realise I’m courting outrage here, but there is a difference between courting it and indulging in it, and I’m taking some licence here. Allow me to explain.
The ad hominem has its place. In this instance, my sense is that it’s called for because these aggressive atheists present themselves as strictly rational role models who represent a standard of intellectual rigour and ethical rectitude. The idea they hope to convey is that their sciency orientation makes them superior in every way and they ought therefore to command total authority over our brains and behaviours, down to how we think, what we think, and how we vote. Their methods however are hardly rational and tend toward the supercilious. In a case like this where the claim is that your way of seeing things renders you superior, critiques of your ideas necessarily lead directly to attacks on your character. In other words, in such cases, the ad hominem is not a distraction or bad-faith, rhetorical strategy, but instead critical to the subject. And let’s face it, it’s their fault for investing their ideas with so much ego in the first place.
Does atheism make you a better person? The Brights certainly think it does. It’s a pretty childish stance, but it’s rolled up with ideas of science and the scientific mind. Readers of analogy magazine will know that we’re not talking about science at all here, but fanatical scientism and belief in scientistic systems and their institutions along with the authority of those who represent these institutions and systems.
A more urgent reason for bothering with all this is to provide embattled readers with some tools to understand what’s happening when they meet the smug followers of this cadre of false intellectuals and representatives of TheScience™. They are ubiquitous after all and vicious. The new atheist tool kit, however, is very limited and predictable, and once you’re familiar with its elements, you’re less likely to be bamboozled by their strategies, and more likely to laugh at it and call it out for the irrational claptrap that it is.
Today, I’d like to call your attention to the central, motivating theme underlying this magazine: the problem of trying to make everyone believe the same as you do or suffer the consequences of excommunication, cancelation, or segregation, and damnation to hellfire.
I’ve been reading Algernon Blackwood’s short story collection, Incredible Adventures, and have fallen in love with this author. Without hesitation, I place him among the greats, alongside Jospeh Conrad, Graham Greene, and Edgar Allan Poe. Every other page, he hits you with an insight that makes you close the book a moment and then reopen it and read it again, and then close it again to go fetch a pencil to mark the margin. Top shelf!
Directly relevant to my subject today is Blackwood’s “The Damned”—a tale about a haunted mansion. The narrator finds the notion of “haunting” a little vulgar, and resists quite putting it in those terms. But ultimately, he must admit it’s the case: the house is haunted by successive cults from the Druids down to the last man to have had his ultra-pious Christian cult convene there. What all these fanatical societies have held in common is the desire to make everyone conform to their beliefs or suffer dire consequences. The spirits of these various sects exist in the mansion and on its grounds as hosts of intellectual energies that vie for supremacy, each working to keep the others down, since each believes its vision is the only True vision, and that its contenders are damned. Consequently, they are all damned, and though there’s a sense that something momentous is immanent, “Nothing happens.” The way this plays out for those living there is the subject of the tale, and I will leave those specifics to readers whose curiosity is piqued enough to seek out Blackwood’s writing.
In the denouement, the narrator relates an anecdote about a group of children at play on the grounds of the estate. I’ll quote directly:
I heard screaming in the rose-garden that runs along the stable walls—it was one afternoon not far from the tea-hour—and on hurrying up I found a little girl of nine or ten fastened with ropes to a rustic seat, and two other children—boys, one about twelve and one much younger—gathering sticks beneath the climbing rose-trees. The girl was white and frightened, but the others were laughing and talking amongst themselves so busily while they picked that they did not notice my abrupt arrival. Some game, I understood, was in progress, but a game that had become too serious for the happiness of the prisoner, for there was a fear in the girl’s eyes that was a very genuine fear indeed. I unfastened her at once; the ropes were so loosely and clumsily knotted that they had not hurt her skin; it was not that which made her pale. . . .
And the boys, not one whit alarmed at my intervention, merely laughed shyly when I explained that their prisoner had escaped, and told me frankly what their “game” had been. There was no vestige of shame in them, nor any idea, of course, that they aped a monstrous reality. That it was mere pretence was neither here nor there. To them, though make-believe, it was a make-believe of something that was right and natural and in no sense cruel. Grownups did it too. It was necessary for her good.
“We were going to burn her up, sir,” the older one informed me, answering my “Why?” with the explanation, “Because she wouldn’t believe what we wanted ‘er to believe.”
I think this wee scenario speaks for itself and hardly requires analysis. In the context of Blackwood’s narrative, it sums up the tale, driving home a profound point regarding what we might call “the human condition.” And like I said, this is the driving theme of analogy magazine, and my purpose in pantsing those who seem keen on playing this “monstrous” game (for our own good, of course) in a manner that has “become too serious.”
But that’s not all. Blackwood manages to convey a further insight of especial significance worthy of our attention. First I must back up a bit to provide a bit more material from “The Damned.” The person of central concern to the tale is Mabel, the lady of the house, whose deceased husband was a former cult leader. This staunch, authority figure threatened with hellfire all those who did not abide by his strict and inflexible prescriptions. The punishment for non-compliance with his vision was eternal damnation, and thus he had frightened Mabel into his sect and also into marriage. Thus he had tied her up in it all, much like the little girl in the anecdote above. Despite his being dead some two years, however, Mabel has not been able to entirely extricate herself from his influence and has become a hollowed-out shell, emptied of vitality.
The narrator and his sister, friends of Mabel’s, attempting to understand her condition surmise as follows:
“Then why does nothing happen?” I enquired mildly. “A place so thickly haunted ought to produce a crop of no ordinary results!”
“There lies the proof,” she went on, in a lowered voice, “the proof of the horror and the ugly reality. The thought and belief of each occupant in turn kept all the others under. They gave no sign of life at the time. But the results of thinking never die. They crop out again the moment there’s an opening. And, with the return of Mabel in her negative state, believing nothing positive herself, the place for the first time found itself free to reproduce its buried stores. Damnation, hell-fire, and the rest—the most permanent and vital thought of all those creeds, since it was applied to the majority of the world—broke loose again, for there was no restraint to hold it back. Each sought to obtain its former supremacy. None conquered. There results a pandemonium of hate and fear, of striving to escape, of agonised, bitter warring to find safety, peace—salvation. . .” [my italics]
And this, my friends, pretty well sums up our troubles. I draw your attention to the italicised bit. What’s required for the forces of evil to gain psychological ascendancy is a “negative state, believing nothing positive.” In the context of the story, negative does not mean pessimistic or bad mood, but refers instead to an inner emptiness. In other words, Blackwood is pointing to the need for inner development and the trouble that arises from a lack thereof. We learn that after the death of Mabel’s husband, she no longer believes in his threats of damnation to all who don’t do things his way. But she also has no other belief to fill the void left by the departure of his uncharitable and barbaric teachings.
The message here is that we all harbour evil like a remissive cancer. Given the right conditions, it “crop[s] out again the moment there’s an opening.” The root of the trouble is the belief that there is only one right way to which others must conform or be damned—that is, suffer torment and die (and often suffer further torment in the afterlife for eternity, or if you don’t believe in an afterlife, then reputationally in perpetuity, since you were on the wrong side of history).
What does all this have to do with atheism? Let’s start with what atheism actually means. Too often, atheism is ill-defined, and may refer to (a) a flippant disregard for any form of interiority, (b) a kind of glib and even cruel, selfist nihilism (based in mechanical accidentalism), or (c) a serious and positive belief in personal responsibility without the comfort of a higher power to relieve that burden. The first two types are by far the most common, the first being the one I encounter most.
What I’m after when it comes to the new atheists is that, lacking self-awareness or any true philosophical qualities, they don’t address their atheism beyond the superficial and therefore come across as falling into the first two categories. I’ve touched on Dawkins’s selfism before and the ethical trouble it entails. Indeed, Dawkins tells his readers in no uncertain terms in The Selfish Gene that we are all robots. And as you’ll see down the road, Sam Harris subscribes to the same machine analogy. When they present themselves as role models, they pay lip service to the third type of atheism, but lacking the tools for conscientious self-reflection, they have never developed the inner qualities requisite to serious atheism, and instead wind up egomaniacs who truly count themselves brighter than “the most brilliant people who ever walked this earth.” In short, they are shallow, most definitely irrational, and by the standards of self-development, utterly vacant and asinine characters.
There are further implications here for our culture at large. I cannot underscore enough how a negative inner state undermines the psyche and leaves it vulnerable to hacking or hijacking by all manner of self-destructive and socially-destructive ideologies, religions, and cults. Atheism is particularly good at creating this negative inner state, as I keep pointing out. (Bad religion is particularly good at this too, but atheists insist that their atheism is a kind of armour against the troubles of bad religion.) What I find especially compelling about Blackwood’s “The Damned” is his observation that our coercive compulsions amount to a “monstrous reality”; and moreover, that such barbarism is rooted in one’s sense that one is in possession of a final revelation or The One True Truth, and that therefore all who do not conform are essentially benighted and damned heretics who must be punished (and will be!) for not believing what we want them to believe.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.
Having never heard of Blackwood, I have discovered what a huge body of writing is his. The local library has 2 or 3 of his books on the shelf but something like 20 available as e-books. I will pick up a couple this week. I was struck by the example of the boys who wanted to burn up the girl who did not think they way they think. We are overly familiar with this kind of intolerance, but actually destroying the enemy in the flesh crosses the line that the woke around us don't have to cross. They never have to smell burning hair or hear screams of pain, something like bomber pilots who drop their bombs and fly away to their home base. The power of the woke underscores the need for alternate avenues for speech and community, and thank you for so generously providing them.
Blackwood was a great writer of cosmic horror - my personal favourite, in fact, for the depth and frequency of his insights written in crystalline prose - and as you so insightfully show, his ideas about the human condition are relevant to modern society, namely how the "monstrous reality" you illustrate comes to life when the ruling elite and its bourgeois hangers-on impose their hollow version of reality on society, shrinking the inner life of the spirit and magnifying the world of empty materialism to horrifying proportion. It's uncanny, in fact, what a vivid, lucid mirror Blackwood's best stories hold up to our decadent society. Thank you for bringing his timeless work to our attention.