Righteousness

Sorry I didn’t write yesterday. I always have things to write about, there’s a constant stream of ideas in my head, but often they move to fast for me to catch. When it comes to politics one problem is deciding on my audience. The reality is that most of My Gentle Readers broadly agree with me on politics. What good does preaching to the choir do? Often what I end up doing is criticizing the tactics of my ideological allies. One thing that always upsets me is when they borrow the tactics of Trump and his allies. We rightly object to Trump’s schoolyard taunts. Today a friend on the other side of the divide referred to the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee as “Shifty Adam Schiff.” While I’m always in for alliteration in this context it’s juvenile. The whole idea is to lower the level of discourse. Yet I see so many of my liberal friends doing the same thing, mocking the names and appearances of Trump, McConnell. Cut it out. We have real arguments against them. Stick to those. Don’t exaggerate, their actual actions are already extreme. Don’t worry about what they might have done, there’s so much harm that we know they’ve done. Stay on the side of righteousness.

It might strike some of you as odd that an atheist uses a term like righteousness. It shouldn’t. Righteousness is about what’s doing morally right, and morality is not inherently tied to religion. One of the great immoralities of religion is assigning a moral value to belief. I don’t expect many of My Gentle Readers share that idea, but some probably do, and in the general public the idea is not rare. There are many people that think the only path to morality is religion. Even going back to Dante, the righteous pagans are consigned to hell. The pre-Christians went to heaven. But that’s not quite what I’m getting at. I have talked to people that can’t understand how anyone that doesn’t believe in god can be moral. They feel that the only constraint on human behavior is the reward or threat of divine judgement.

I worry about going the other way. There are atheists who disparage people of faith. I had one friend who thought that no intelligent person could believe in god. She had a lot of other issues too. Isaac Newton was devout, that pretty much proves that she’s wrong. There are plenty of other counterexamples, I just went straight to the top. I do take issue with some public displays of faith, like Tebowing. Of course, Jesus felt the same way,

“When you pray, you shall not be as the hypocrites, for
they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and in the
corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. Most
certainly, I tell you, they have received their reward.” – Matthew 6:5 (World English Bible)

See, even an atheist can quote scripture. That was a paraphrase of scripture. I’m getting very meta. My moral guide is the Golden Rule, so if it’s wrong for religious people to think less of me for being an atheist, it’s wrong for me to think less of them for being religious. That’s the same point I made about people that opposing Trump not sinking down to his level. Do I have unconscious prejudices? Of course, we all do. Sometimes they try to raise their voices and become conscious. When they do, I shush them.

I am resisting writing about an event now that makes me think of the Golden Rule. People are being silent went A did something but were irate when they thought B did it, when B didn’t. Why am I resisting? Because it will stir up a hornet nest I don’t want stirred and have the exact opposite effect to that I desire. It would feel good, but it wouldn’t do good.

Tonight is John Platt’s On Your Radar, the guests are my friends Justin Poindexter and Sasha Papernik aka Our Band, Terry Klein, and Kate Callahan. It’s Yom Kippur but as you might have guessed from everything else, I wrote that won’t stop me from going. If you aren’t observing the holiday, you should join me. If you observe because you believe, don’t go, but if avoid coming because of how it will look, be brave and come. I have a friend that’s a more militant atheist than me, that would avoid working or going out on Yom Kippur. I gave him a papal dispensation and now he’s fine with it. It was just a psychological barrier, the way he was brought up. Lots of things work that way.