Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart

by Lex Bayer

  John: Let’s move on to a very different kind of killing: Do you believe euthanasia is moral?

  Lex: I’ve seen the suffering of elderly and sick people firsthand, including some who were very close to me. This strongly shaped my opinion that even though the preservation of life is generally good, euthanasia is a moral act in certain carefully bounded situations. I sympathize with people who suffer and the pain they have to endure, so I support their desire to end their own suffering, as long as it is their own uncoerced choice and they are of sound mind. Seeing that suffering end would make me happy, even though their deaths would greatly sadden me.

  John: I know your background is Jewish—do you believe in the teachings of Judaism?

  Lex: I was born and raised as a Jew, but I don’t believe the teachings of Judaism that profess to know about the nature of God. I do realize that many of my happiness preferences have been shaped by exposure to Jewish values and culture. I still strongly identify with, and derive happiness from, associating with Jewish culture. I see a vast separation between the cultural aspects of a religion and the faith in its sanctity. I like chopped liver and herring. I like family dinners around the Passover table. I like the Jewish sense of humor and the history of the Jewish people. I am culturally Jewish yet, at the same time, a fervent atheist. And I’m far from alone in those views.

  John: So do you think you value living a moral life because of your past exposure to religious values, or is there another reason?

  Lex: I choose to live a moral life because of the happiness I expect to derive from living such a life. I take pride in conducting my life in a moral manner and in my ability to derive happiness from the happiness of others. I believe that such a life will lead me toward a rewarding and fulfilling existence. I value living in an ethical society and encourage and promote good behavior among the people with whom I interact. I feel good when my friends think of me as a person of high morals and integrity.

  A few patterns emerge from Lex’s statements. For one thing, he exhibits a bias toward his personal upbringing and his exposure to liberal Jewish values, as well as his own natural tendency toward gratifying his own desires, coupled with a desire to act rationally.

  While his ethical opinions may differ from yours, his ability to answer these questions shows that a person with a subjective ethical perspective can effectively confront the ethical dilemmas he or she might encounter in life. Moreover, he demonstrates that our Ten Non-commandments for the Twenty-first Century do provide the necessary tools and concepts for evaluating ethical situations. We’ve also seen that moral behaviors can exist within a system of subjective ethics and that a belief in God is not necessary for a person to value moral behavior and strive to be a moral person.

  The Final Non-commandment

  Having subjected our Ten Non-commandments to a system test, we can now say that the framework appears to be coherent, comprehensive, and useful. We can then conclude that the three core assumptions we originally selected appear to be sufficient to form a framework of belief that encompasses beliefs about both facts and ethics.

  It’s taken a good amount of debate and probing to get us to this conclusion. The whole purpose of this book has been to present and illustrate ways to form, validate, and refine a belief system. A critical element of this process has been testing our beliefs along the way to see if they hold up and remain consistent.

  We can then add this essential step—testing, refining, and validating—to our list and finally arrive at the complete list of Ten Non-commandments:

  I.

  The world is real, and our desire to understand the world is the basis for belief.

  II.

  We can perceive the world only through our human senses.

  III.

  We use rational thought and language as tools for understanding the world.

  IV.

  All truth is proportional to the evidence.

  V.

  There is no God.

  VI.

  We all strive to live a happy life. We pursue things that make us happy and avoid things that do not.

  VIII.

  There is no universal moral truth. Our experiences and preferences shape our sense of how to behave.

  IX.

  We act morally when the happiness of others makes us happy.

  X.

  We benefit from living in, and supporting, an ethical society.

  XI.

  All our beliefs are subject to change in the face of new evidence, including these.

  Now that the list is complete, we can ask: How do these non-commandments stack up against the biblical commandments?

  The first four biblical commandments relate to the existence and worship of God. In contrast, the non-commandments have one belief related to the contrary position—the nonexistence of God—and four additional beliefs about the nature of existence and truth in the world.

  The remaining six biblical commandments list the moral imperatives to honor our parents and never murder, commit adultery, steal, lie, or covet. The biblical list is woefully incomplete. Why ban coveting your neighbor’s property but not ban rape? Why is a ban on lying more important than a ban on slavery? Certainly slavery and rape have inflicted more needless suffering and caused more senseless damage throughout history than lying about your age or wishing your neighbor’s new car was yours. Honor your father and mother? What if they’re abusive? Don’t kill? What if it’s in self-defense? Don’t steal? What if my family is starving?

  In contrast, the non-commandments provide four beliefs about the nature of human behavior, including the formation of morals and the benefits of ethical societies. It provides a holistic framework for evaluating any moral situation, not just a list of selected prohibitions. While having a clean list of dos and don’ts might seem appealing, human life is (fortunately) much too rich and varied for any finite list to govern. It is far better to develop a framework for moral reasoning than rely on the rote ability to follow rules. Our list provides such a framework.

  Most importantly, our list includes a belief about the need to test, revise, and edit our beliefs as we gain knowledge or as the culture evolves over time. This stands in stark contrast to the biblical commandments, which are rigid, absolute, and beyond debate or revision. The non-commandments can evolve; the biblical commandments are literally set in stone.

  Finally, the non-commandments are beliefs that have been justified and explained. They are beliefs that are accompanied by evidence and rationales. They follow a path of logic with one belief leading to the next and together forming a coherent framework about the world and the people who live within it.

  Harmony, Happiness, and Atheism

  The motivation behind this book was to put forth a positive set of carefully considered beliefs consistent with the atheist mind and the humanist heart. While it has taken a fair bit of explaining, the system of belief described and these Ten Non-commandments for the Twenty-first Century have established that you can still hold strong positive beliefs about the world and act morally without any belief in a deity. No assumption of a God is necessary in order to make sense of the world, live in harmonious societies, or achieve happiness.

  Negating God does not leave a vacuum of belief—it liberates the beliefs you can hold. Now beliefs can be justified by reason instead of appeals to authority, and they can be tested by evidence rather than being accepted out of faith. Ethics can be debated intelligently rather than imposed. Beliefs can evolve and change over time as we learn and evolve rather than remain
rigid dogma.

  So we can correct G. K. Chesterton’s famous assertion, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing; he believes in anything.” Instead, we can say with confidence, “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t then believe in nothing; all beliefs are instead based on reason and evidence rather than faith.”9

  The benefits of examining those things we hold true, and those we hold good, far outweigh any detriments. Let’s work together, led by the thirst for knowledge and the light of reason, to live the best lives we can.

  12

  Finding Your Own Non-commandments

  Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.

  —Aristotle

  The Ten Non-commandments for the Twenty-first Century we’ve proposed are our best attempt at putting down on paper the ten most fundamental beliefs we hold. We arrived at these after much time, thought, and debate. We have tried to make our beliefs universally relevant, but we realize that these beliefs, anchored as they are to our own subjective perspectives, come with biases and flaws.

  For that reason, we want you to improve on our beliefs and come up with your own. We invite you to correct our errors, overcome our deficiencies, and construct your own “top ten list” of beliefs. We hope your list will prove as useful to you as our list has been to us. The inner resolve, clarity, and comfort that arise from reaching a state of self-understanding cannot be understated.

  More than anything, the structured process we followed proved invaluable—perhaps even more so than the set of beliefs we eventually arrived at. This process was based on a few critical principles: writing down your beliefs, building a system from the foundation up, explaining why and how you arrived at each belief, and reaching the essence of your beliefs.

  Why is committing your beliefs to paper so important? As noted in the introduction, we discovered an interesting thing while writing this book. We often thought we had a part of the puzzle solved in our minds. It all seemed to make sense while locked up in our heads. But when we wrote it down using language, not thoughts, and read it back to ourselves, we often found issues and flaws.

  The exercise of writing down and examining the words, phrases, and logic really does help you understand what you’re saying. We have no doubt that as you read this, part of you might think you already have your beliefs all figured out. We challenge you to write them down and see if you still come to the same conclusion or if it leads you to a different result.

  Too often when people debate values, beliefs, and morals, they simply talk past each other. The reason is simple: each person is working from different assumptions or fundamental beliefs. Without disclosing what those fundamental beliefs are, people approach things from different angles and so don’t understand why they can’t make sense of each other’s views. By writing down your beliefs, you gain clarity on what your core beliefs and assumptions really are.

  Finally, by writing it down, you’ll be confronted by the words staring back at you. This is very powerful. Are those really your core beliefs? Writing them down means mentally committing to them. They will be recorded in time with the weight and consequence of history. You can return to them later to see what has worked and what hasn’t, and you’ll be able to see how your thoughts have changed over time.

  Revising your core beliefs is part of the process of making them better and stronger. But before you can revise, you have to record your first version. Committing them to the page also makes the fifth and final step of the scientific method possible: sharing your thoughts with others so they might offer a constructive critique and help you refine your views. It can also encourage and inspire them to engage in their own thoughts. So we invite you to a dialogue about what’s truly important in life and what you really believe about knowledge, reality, and ethics.

  Why is it so necessary to build a belief system from the foundation up? If we were put on the spot and asked what we believe in strongly, most of us could list a few principles we hold dear. But these are often just a list of strong opinions that don’t form a comprehensive system of belief. A simple way of thinking about the foundation-up approach is to think of the list as a prioritized list. If one belief comes ahead of another, it means that the first belief is more fundamental than the later one and is required in order to arrive at the subsequent belief. Prioritizing beliefs facilitates a holistic systems approach and reduces the likelihood of ending up with a list of logically disconnected or inconsistent statements.

  Why should each of your beliefs be justified and explained? For nonbelievers, justification and evidence are essential. A rejection of God is almost always driven by a search for evidence for God’s existence that ended in a fundamental lack of such evidence. Any new belief system that is not to be rejected for the same reason has to provide support for its propositions. The same drivers behind the atheist mind—critical thinking, clear reasoning, and explicit justification—dictate that we follow these very principles when constructing a new system of belief. Beliefs without clear justification are arbitrary, and any alternate belief would be equally valid.

  Why is reaching the essence of your beliefs important? Distilling your ideas facilitates clarity and allows you to get to the heart of what you really believe. It’s been said that you can’t fully comprehend something until you can say it in its simplest terms. Ten beliefs might seem an arbitrary number, but it does force you to distill your concepts and sharpen your views.

  As we’ve said and shown throughout the book, there’s good evidence to favor simplicity. A crystallized list of ten beliefs in short sentences and clear language helps promote that simplicity. If you come up short at nine beliefs, or run a little long with eleven, that’s fine by us. Inspired by our belief that “brevity is the soul of wit,”1 we think that ten non-commandments should give you sufficient form to spell out your own views while remaining brief enough to be easily read and understood by another person.

  We’ve offered some principles for constructing the framework. Here’s a set of proposed guidelines for the actual process:

  Write down your beliefs.

  Order the beliefs by importance.

  Explain why and how you arrived at each belief.

  Try to think of counterexamples to your beliefs. Test out your beliefs in practice.

  Show your list to friends who are interested in the subject to get feedback.

  Revise or re-explain as your ideas evolve.

  We would further recommend a stylistic approach of structuring your beliefs so that the first group of beliefs relates to the nature of existence, truth, and facts, and the second group relates to human behavior, morals, and ethics.

  Don’t be intimidated by the process. Just start by generating your first potential belief. Then ask yourself the question, “Why do I believe in that?” Whatever your answer, ask yourself again why you believe that particular answer and how it satisfies the question. Keep following this iterative process of asking yourself why? until you reach a belief that is so fundamental and core to your worldview that no other beliefs can be used to justify it. You’ll know you’re there when you run out of answers and are left with something like, “I don’t fully know why logic works, but I can’t conceive of a world without it.” Boom. That’s the sound of hitting bedrock—a source belief.

  After arriving at your source beliefs, continue to derive and build additional beliefs until you arrive at a comprehensive framework. Throughout the process, just like a curious young child, keep asking yourself that very simple question: why?

  Here are a few questions that were useful to us in our journey. Perhaps they can help you jump-start your own thought process:

  How do you justify your beliefs?

  Do you believe in the value of science as a means of inquiry?

  How do you define facts or truth?

  Do you believe in God? What type of God?<
br />
  How should you behave?

  How do you define morality?

  Do you believe in a universal moral truth?

  Can you describe the ideal society that you would like to live in?

  Now it’s time to commit your beliefs to paper. We hope your journey through these pages will have brought you closer to already knowing many of your own answers. We encourage you to borrow and steal from us, but never accept anything on our authority. Instead, always ask yourself why you believe what you believe. We also encourage you to reshape our list in your own way, to reject our views as needed and start afresh. And, of course, we encourage you to reflect, debate, and ponder.

  Our list took us several years of thinking, many months of writing, and pages of explanations. We hope our example will make the process easier for you. Even if you can’t yet get clarity on all your beliefs, perhaps you can start with just the first one. Write it down. Let it germinate, and come back to it. Maybe it will change. Maybe it will lay the foundation for the next belief.

  For your convenience, we’ve provided a template, which follows. (We completed this same template for our Ten Non-commandments in appendix B.) Copy this template or use it as a guide in creating your own non-commandments. You can also download the template from our website. Better still, at our website you can post your version online to share your ideas with others and become part of a grand dialogue to discover what to believe. Visit us at www.AtheistMindHumanistHeart.com.