Erika, I’m afraid I don’t understand your sentiment here. Or elsewhere, when you mention that Christians perhaps don’t “understand” atheists. Lots of us are converts, reverts, or wanderers-in, as I’m sure you know.

“Organized religion seems to me about men making rules for everyone else.”

My wife will be sooo miffed when she finds out I’m fallible.

I do think that the kind of atheism that you talk about does exist, and some of it does contain submerged belief. There are those who reject God like adolescents testing their limits, and break all the rules to see if God will care. This can do a lot of harm, and such people might well be better off returning to the church. It is not unlikely that they will, since their atheism really is mere rebellion.

I think a lot of Christians assume that all atheism is like this, like the phases of doubt and rebellion they may themselves have been through. But that’s not always the case.

I am deeply interested in virtue, truth, and beauty, and I do see that there is some of that in some parts of the vast Christian world (more in some parts than others). I would freely admit that I owe some of my outlook and morality to Christian thought and Christian values, but I don’t think that obligates me to take on Christian beliefs in their fullest form. It would be easier, I admit, to join a church and let my values be dictated by that community. But I cannot see churches as other than human concerns, or those at the pulpit as other than human beings speaking their own minds and creating their own values, which many times stray far from what the Bible seems to say on the face of it.

I don’t trust human authority. I understand that for some people following tradition and respecting authority works, and gives them a path through life. I don’t have that experience. I have my reasons for not trusting authority and tradition, and they are not trivial. I cannot joyfully return to the fold and place my trust in God, pretending not to know that words about God come from fallible men, and can be used to manipulate, to dominate, to hurt. This is a source of considerable disappointment to me. I love the idea of tradition– the reality, however, is too complicated for me to wholeheartedly embrace.

So although I am just as interested in truth, and virtue, and beauty as you are, following my conscience and understanding of truth as well as I can keeps me out of church at the moment. There is some amount of independence in this, certainly, some amount of following my own discernment, but it is not arrogant or materialistic. Is it sad? Well, maybe it’s a little bit sad. But I can see the beauty in bags flapping in the wind. Reality is beautiful everywhere you look. That’s something else that can be missed.

That said, there remain some unanswered questions. A self-identified atheist may in fact be “well-adjusted” and virtuous, but that doesn’t solve some fundamental problems. Just as Christians may not live lives of virtue consistent with their faith and thus be less than that which is vouchsafed to them, so also atheists may be inconsistent as regards the connection between their beliefs and their actions, and thus be better persons than their beliefs imply. Such, at least, seems to be the trajectory of Nietzsche’s thinking on this issue. Is their virtue a residual of Western morality? Have they, to use MacIntyre’s analogy, simply picked up and clung to fragments of the tradition, even while they reject it in toto?

Then too, I make no judgment concerning the difficulty any particular person may encounter in pursuing such a path. I don’t assume it’s easy. Indeed, if one comes from a deeply pious background such choosing may be accompanied by tremendous personal heartache and conflict. This makes one wonder even more why a person would choose such a path. Could such choosing, despite their own self-understanding, be related to impulses of superbia? Might it involve a type of negation, and if so, why? These seems to me questions worth asking.

Finally, I am intrigued by the notion of atheists being “well-adjusted.” The obvious question is: to what, exactly, are they well-adjusted? If we take Freud seriously in claiming that civilization involves adjusting the desires of the individual to the surrounding culture, then I have to confess I would expect to find atheists to be among the best adjusted persons in this culture, and Christians among the worst. But that might well be more a commentary on the state of the culture than on the veracity of any adopted belief.

My own interest in this subject has two experiential sources I’ve identified: 1) the profound attractiveness of atheism; and, 2) the belief that Christians haven’t extended basic charity in trying to understand atheism, both from within the atheist experience, and also in terms of allowing the claims of atheism to shape Christian experience. I have much more I could say about that, but will leave it there for now.

I know many of the hard-working, “well-adjusted, moral, virtuous and loving” atheists Dave describes, and I think it unfair to assert that all atheists are simply hedonistic, rebellious, or lazy. I know from experience that challenging faith and living with faith are equally difficult. I know a number of atheists who describe the path to unbelief as a harrowing, difficult experience. Far from being lazy or rebellious, (and given that many of my atheist friends grew up leading simple Mennonite lives by the work of their hands, certainly not hedonistic), these atheists are some of the most well-adjusted individuals I know.

Which was how Jeremy Beer was putting it when talking about liberals in his thoughtful, well-written essay. As is yours. I’m struck by the coincidence of having you write that atheism is “..symptoms of a pathology…a refusal to engage in the hard work that a well-ordered but ultimately satisfying life requires….the conviction that divine intentions act as barriers to the greatness we might otherwise achieve.”

I’m not certain that you have enough shades of atheism. Sometime people just come to the conclusion that religion is a power game, a way to control what people think and do. Sometimes they conclude that it’s a bronze-age mythology, outdated and irrelevant. You know, it’s hard to rebel against something which one does not believe has existence.

Anyway, maybe it’s possible to live with an overarching sense of awe and wonder and reverence for life and humans and the earth without any religious belief.

But that’s not my point – I’m neither a theologian nor a Richard Dawkins clone – your essay is thoughtful and insightful, and I enjoyed it very much. I simply would have liked to seen a bone thrown out to that one atheist who’s actually well-adjusted, moral, virtuous and loving. It’s possible. But maybe it’s hard work – as you say so eloquently, “the hard work that a well-ordered but ultimately satisfying life requires.”

I’ve had a similar discussion on atheist boards, except my position in that case was on the side of religion. I volunteer for hospice, and was making the point that from my own experience religious belief often provides tremendous sustenance for both the dying and their families. I found it quite difficult to get people to move past the opening position that religious belief was symptomatic of some pathology.

I am guessing that this is indicative of a general insecurity in our present society – taking the other seriously, granting that the other may have a reasonable, intelligent and yet polar opposite view perhaps feels too threatening. I don’t know, of course. Just curious.

Moreover, I don’t see Rickey as a tragic figure, for that. There are certainly beautiful objects, people, places in the world to see and record. Rickey and the movie, can be “redeemed,” if you will, within the film’s own thought and aesthetic system.

Rights are made pedestrian these days , not a grail but something as common as grains of sand on a beach, thus easily deformed by the waves of ideology that storm into our midst with regularity. Everything we discuss as a social construct should be held up to the light of the Good, not in the prosaic manner of morality that is bandied about by the constantly scheming political class but the simple, unadorned and immortal light of Good. Thanks for this piece.