Maybe atheists and Christians just have different filters? (On morality)?

Question

I was thinking about this over the weekend. I think that the average (if such a thing exists!) atheist has a positivist outlook on life. He/she believes that deep down, most people are inherently good, and that we all have the tools within ourselves to be moral people and contribute to society and form meaningful relationships. When such a person makes a bad choice, they see it as an aberration, and not the sign of a character flaw, and decide on their own power to do better next time.

The Christian, on the other hand, has at his/her heart a fundamental sense of "brokenness"--the sense that, without the help of a more powerful and "Good" being, they would tend to make choices that were harmful to themselves or others, because deep down, people are selfish at heart. When such a person makes a bad choice, they see it as a symptom of their inability to do good on their own power, and proof that they need to seek a "Higher Power" to become who they want to/are meant to be.

Thoughts?

Charles, I appreciate your position, but would venture to say it is a much more nuanced version than *most* Christians hold to.

Answer 1

I somewhat agree with your statement. The only difference is that I TRIED to do the right things before I was saved. I TRIED to take control of my life and make the right choices. I TRIED, but I could not succeed. I could pick myself up and do the right things for about a month or so, but then something would happen and I would immediately fall back into my old ways. It was a constant struggle. After salvation, however, the changes in my life were almost effortless even though I still believed that I could not make those changes. I was counting on God's grace and forgiveness to get me through life, I never thought that He would actually change who I was. I assumed that I would always be a drug addict and alcoholic that was saved by grace. I never expected that God would change me into a sober minded individual. He surprised me with a gift that I never expected to receive.

I think the basic fundamental difference between atheists and believers is pride. I am not too prideful to admit that I need help to make it through this life.

Answer 2

I think you may have mischaracterized what Christians believe. We hold that god's creation is fundamentally good, and that as a part of creation, people are fundamentally good. Moreover, those of us who are Aristotelian do hold that people have to learn to do the good just as they have to learn to speak well, study well. We do hold, it is true, that there are virtues that are not available without the divine in some sense; but justice, friendship, generosity, courage and the like are available to all who have the capacity to learn them. People *do* have the power to do the good, and they have the capacity to learn to do the good.

There is a good life, then, available to all of us independent of the Faith. The Christian assertion is that such a life is a good life, but it is not the *best* life. If one is committed to the best life for people to live, the Christian assertion is that such a life is available in a particular community; a community where one learns to value humility (a virtue Aristotle would not have recognized). As a consequence, Christians learn to transfer to god the source of their own human goodness as is required by the virtue of humility. Humble people always refer credit for the good to others.

Hence, it is possible for someone on the *outside* of such a community to miss the point of the role of the virtue of humility and assume that the people in the community see people as unable to do the good without the divine.

HTH

Charles

Answer 3

No, I think that atheists know that nature has always carried a certain amount of hit and miss, and that it is up to us humans to take responsibility for our own morality, and deal honestly with the world we find ourselves in.

I think most of us are neither optimists nor pessimists, but realists: many religious people imagine past and future "golden ages", both out of our control. Atheists, on the other hand believe that the past tells us where we've come from, and our present and our future are (to a large extent) what we make them.

Answer 4

Yea that's an interesting point. The only problem is, you're assuming that all amoral people want the opportunities that come with being Christian, which is kind of weak. Perhaps there are other opportunities in the Atheist communities which they prefer. I'm an amoral Atheist btw. lololol green meklar is an idiot

Answer 5

Atheists have chosen to not be equivalent to a 4 year old and there belief for santa. As opposed the catholic people who believe in somone who seems impossible to exist. The idea of almost everything in the bible is just plain odd. People involved in wirting this book were all a little tispy on there wine!

Answer 6

Makes total sense to me.

I was raised Christian, and I was always taught things like "You don't steal because Jesus said not to" and "You shouldn't do things that cause major harm to your body because Jesus said that the body is your temple."

I remember thinking, even as a child, that those things that "Jesus" said not to do should be things that any human being with common sense and a lick of moral fiber should know already without a book telling them so. I've always believed that people are inherently good and that people aren't "born sinners" who need to be washed clean of their filthiness. That's just silly to me.

Answer 7

Atheists are different to other people...in the larger size of their ego's. Smarter, more logical, more moral, better, faster, stronger, better looking, all because of one choice they have made in their lives.

Answer 8

i think you have hit upon a likely attitude line...i think you can account for alot of beliefs in this way...

Answer 9

This excerpt from Marcus Borg answers perfectly and is worth reading:

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I owe the exposition that I'm about to share with you to the 20th Century American theologian H. Richard Neibuhr. In his last book, The Responsible Self, actually published about six months after his unexpectedly early death, Neibuhr speaks of three ways of seeing the whole, the whole of what is. He argues that each way of seeing the whole shapes our response to life and, hence, the title of his book, The Responsible Self. It doesn't mean the dutiful self, but the self which responds. How we will respond to life, again, depends upon how we see the whole. Neibuhr describes three ways of seeing that he thinks are a comprehensive, exhaustive spectrum of the way you can see the whole. Let me now go through each of these three ways of seeing the whole and the response to life that each generates.

The first way you can see the whole is to see it as hostile and threatening. Of course the extreme form of this is paranoia. But you don't have to be clinically paranoid to see the whole this way. The bottom line is none of us gets out of here alive. It will get us all, and not just us as individuals, but everybody we love. We are also told that five billion years from now the sun itself will burn out and when it burns out it will explode and most of the solar system, perhaps all of the solar system and certainly the Earth, will be incinerated. The bottom line is that we and everything that is are destined for oblivion.

If you see life as hostile and threatening, how are you going to respond to life? Well, you're going to respond in a very self-protective way. You will try to do what you can to protect those whom you love from this hostile and threatening world and this hostile and threatening universe in which we live. Very interestingly, Neibuhr, as a Christian theologian, points out that this is the most common and widespread way Christianity basically sees the whole. And God is the one who is going to get us unless we believe the right things, offer the right sacrifices or whatever it is that you need to do to try to propitiate the devouring fire that will otherwise consume you.

Think of forms of Christianity that are very familiar to us. You've got to believe a certain way or you risk ultimate damnation, and you'll get left behind when the Rapture happens. Apocalyptic Christianity is a classic example of seeing the whole as hostile and threatening and God as the One who will rescue a few but destroy everybody else. This is the violent God, the killer God. So, that is the first way you can see the whole, and it exists in both secular and religious form.

The second way you can see the whole is as indifferent to us. It's not "out to get us" in particular. It simply is, and it's vastly indifferent to human life. It may be full of wonder, but ultimately the cosmos is indifferent to us. This is probably the most common secular way of seeing the whole that's emerged in the last 300 years in Western Culture--that vision of the universe as ultimately made up of the space time world of matter and energy, where swirling masses of atoms are interacting with each other. It's brought us forth, but it's basically indifferent to human ends.

If you see the whole this way, how will you respond to life? Probably in not quite as threatened a fashion as the first way of responding to life, but you're likely to respond to life by enjoying what you can while you're here and building up at least modest systems of security in the face of an indifferent universe--taking the precautions that any prudent person would take-- financial security, gated communities, etc.

Thirdly you can see the whole as life-giving and nourishing, as bringing us forth in a quite spectacular way. It really is remarkable that we are here. Not only as life-giving, but also as nourishing. The theological word for this is to see the whole as gracious. This is the view that Neibuhr is advocating.

Neibuhr is not being a naïve optimist when he speaks about seeing the whole as life-giving, nourishing and gracious. He knows about the Holocaust. He knows about all the brutal and horrible things we are capable of doing to each other. He knows about all the random accidents and premature terminal illnesses that happen to people. But his case is that it makes an enormous difference how we see this reality within which we live. Faith, according to Neibuhr, is seeing the whole as gracious, perhaps in ways that we can't even understand.

The response that seeing the whole as gracious generates is very different from the first two responses. It frees us from anxiety. It is this way of seeing that Jesus is inviting in those passages I quoted. It can free us from self-preoccupation and the concern with the security of the self. It can lead to what one scholar has called "the self-forgetfulness of faith" and all of the freedom that goes with that including, the freedom to love and to be compassionate. It leads to a willingness to spend and be spent (I love the use of both the active and passive voice there.) for the sake of an over-arching vision. It leads to the kind of life that we see in Jesus, in the Buddha and in the saints known and unknown. Not just the famous saints, but those local saints that nobody ever hears about beyond their own communities. It leads to that kind of life described by St. Paul with the word freedom, joy, peace and love.

Thus, faith as visio is seeing reality as gracious, and its opposite, unfaith, is seeing reality as hostile and threatening. Even if that hostility and threatening character is couched in Christian terms, it is still unfaith, in the sense of faith as seeing the whole as gracious.

These last three understandings of faith are all relational understandings. They have very little to do with beliefs. Christians over the centuries have believed in an extraordinary variety of things. Beliefs are quite relative. What really matters is faith as faithfulness to the relationship with God--faith as a deepening trust in God, flowing out of that deepening relationship. Faith as a way of seeing the whole that shapes our relationship to what is.

Answer 10

People suck.