p13 treachery

Fast Comments on Trust Issues with Atheism

By John Taylor; 2008 Feb 13, 07 Mulk, 164 BE

Last month I read Patrick Glynn's excellent book, "God, the Evidence." Now, going over an older essay on the proofs of God, I find that I had already read at least part of this book almost five years ago. I must be losing my memory because I have no recollection of this book before last month. Anyway, the question of trusting atheists had to come up sooner or later, since it is engraved so deep and often in Holy Writ. In this case, it is brought up in a Tablet Baha'u'llah wrote to a political leader that commented on on March the 3rd, 2003.

2003 Mar 03; Comments on Paragraph 60 of the Suriy-i-Muluk

It is appropriate to talk about exaltation and degradation during this month of `Ala, Exaltation. This month we are tested by the fast, which Baha'u'llah called the "sun" of the religion of God, while obligatory prayer is its moon. Even in terms of physical distance the sun is much farther away than the moon. In spite of its extreme distance, about nine light-minutes away, the sun is far more powerful and influential on earth than the moon.

Human exaltation and lowliness are bound up in belief and denial, in truth and trust. Here Baha'u'llah brings out a theme that runs throughout the Summons,

"Know thou for a certainty that whoso disbelieveth in God is neither trustworthy nor truthful. This, indeed, is the truth, the undoubted truth. He that acteth treacherously towards God will, also, act treacherously towards his king. Nothing whatever can deter such a man from evil, nothing can hinder him from betraying his neighbour, nothing can induce him to walk uprightly." (Summons, Muluk, paragraph 60)

Faith in God is the fulcrum of our exaltation and worth. This faith, Baha'u'llah says, is also the basis of our obedience to Government -- to paraphrase Jesus, "You cannot render unto Caesar unless you render unto God at the same time." Taherzadeh comments on Baha'u'llah's above paragraph as follows:

"In order to appreciate this statement let us remember that many people who believe in God may be truthful and honest in a normal situation. But the real criterion of a man's truthfulness and honesty is his attitude at the time of temptation. When severe tests and trials descend upon man, the only thing which keeps him truthful is his faith in God. If he does not believe in God, there is no motivation within him to resist temptation." (Revelation of Baha'u'llah vol. 2, p. 332)

At about 7 years old I rejected God and entered into atheism. I underwent a strange alteration of consciousness when it happened. It felt like my soul had constricted, shrunk; as if nothingness had seeped into the center of my being. Anyway, lately I came across this personal testimony of another former atheist, Patrick Glynn, which recalls some of the same things I experienced in the following decade of my atheism. Glynn calls the belief system that atheists hold to "nihilism," which in view of the double repetition of the word "nothing" in Baha'u'llah's statement above, seems like a fair enough description.

"Under such conditions one's intentions may be generally good. But if you come to imagine that there is no moral order to the universe, the incentives to good conduct, particularly in private life, are, unfortunately, much weakened. There is little to justify great self-sacrifice, or deep personal commitment. Indeed, it is hard, as I later saw in retrospect, to feel or express love to the fullest extent."

"Even if one cares for others and thinks one cares greatly, one is inclined to be guided in the final analysis by one's selfish wishes. What is there in the nihilist's universe to call forth sacrifice? And without a willingness to sacrifice, one's capacity to care for others is narrowly circumscribed."

"Such was my state in the early 1990's, when, rather than work on a marriage much in need of repair -- and badly strained by my uncompromising commitment to my own intellectual and political projects -- I sought a divorce, amicably, as the saying goes, more or less decently, but still with very painful consequences for my first wife and me." (Patrick Glynn, God, The Evidence, The Reconciliation of Faith and Reason in a Post-Secular World, Prima Publishing, Rocklin, CA, 1997, p. 14)

My atheism entered stage two when I heard a Christian minister talk at a High School Assembly. He seemed the essence of hypocrisy with his holier than thou, "Jesus will save you from your miserable degradation like He did me" pitch. This prompted me to become a fervent nihilist and anti-theist.

Then stage three, Ayn Rand. She is the philosopher for atheists; she proudly proclaims that selfishness is a virtue. In a way she was more "honest" than other nihilists, because she openly recognized that selflessness is foreign to the atheist's universe. She admires the egotism of genius as a heroic stand, as if altruism always were a kind of hypocrisy. Her self-contradictory belief in non-belief took blatant nihilism as a Good Thing. It is as if her openly and honestly admitting the dark secret about atheism that Baha'u'llah exposes above could erase their lack of commitment to both truth and trustworthiness.

By the grace of God, at about 16 years old I read a penetrating critique of Ayn Rand's philosophy and immediately junked her strange idea. Now, after so many years I can see how close that hypocritical preacher who so angered me really was to the atheistic nihilist, Ayn Rand, and her ilk. Stage two nihilism leads to stage three atheism, which rests on it as its sole support. Religious fanatics are from the mold of Ayn Rand's selfish genius-heroes, unabashedly selfish, proudly upholding egoism as a virtue, and denying God. Their pride denies a God Whose exaltation makes us all equal. Like the sun, His virtues of perfection and exaltation put us all on the same level.

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s annual survey of human beliefs, atheism is the world's second largest "religion." The really weird thing is that nihilists and other adherents of non-beliefs like agnosticism, according to surveys quoted in Glynn's book mentioned above, actually admit to praying several times a day (more often I am sure than many believers). So Ayn Rand is the pot calling the kettle black when she says that hypocrisy is built into altruism; rather hypocrisy is built into atheism.

Rand has it backwards, for nihilism is the source not of virtue but of cowardice. To deny God is to deny life; it is spiritual suicide. Which explains why suicide rates are so much higher among non-believers. Here is what the Master has to say about nihilism as manifested in denial of the life to come.

"The conception of annihilation is a factor in human degradation, a cause of human debasement and lowliness, a source of human fear and abjection. It has been conducive to the dispersion and weakening of human thought, whereas the realization of existence and continuity has upraised man to sublimity of ideals, established the foundations of human progress and stimulated the development of heavenly virtues; therefore, it behooves man to abandon thoughts of nonexistence and death, which are absolutely imaginary, and see himself ever-living, everlasting in the divine purpose of his creation."

"He must turn away from ideas which degrade the human soul so that day by day and hour by hour he may advance upward and higher to spiritual perception of the continuity of the human reality. If he dwells upon the thought of nonexistence, he will become utterly incompetent; with weakened willpower his ambition for progress will be lessened and the acquisition of human virtues will cease." (Abdu'l-Baha, Promulgation, 89)