The religion of atheism
There is one tremendous and widespread mistake about atheism: that is, that it is not a religion - that it somehow even opposes religion. Many of us, including many Christians, accept this claim implicitly, using the nouns "atheism" and "religion" as opposites. But that is about as wrong as to say that a shark is not a fish, because you cannot have one in batter with chips on the side. It is mistaking the most frequent and visible externals with the essence.
Why should atheism not be a religion? Because it implies no worship, no dogmatic faith, and no supernatural being? Religion is not essentially above any of these things, unless we commit the egregious category mistake of equating religion with Christianity. Religion is not about worship; it is not about belief; and it is not about God or about supernatural entities. For if we had to accept any of these three descriptions, we would have to rule out, among many other systems, Buddhism. Buddhism defines itself as atheistic and godless. Buddhism is not about worshipping anything: in point of fact, it is so little interested in worship that, wherever it goes, it allows previously existing systems of divine cult to continue unhindered. It is not about belief: a Thai Buddhist monk once asked me during a debate not to use the word “faith” of Buddhism, preferring to call it “wisdom”. And Buddhism is certainly not about any supernatural being. The Buddha is no more supernatural than you or I: he is simply man having achieved everything man can achieve by patient intellectual discipline and self-cleansing - like Plato’s Socrates. That is, the admiration he receives would not be different if nobody had ever heard of any such thing as gods. It is as the greatest of human heroes, achieving by his own effort and insight a level of spiritual perfection that cannot be surpassed, that he receives the tribute of enormous statues and works of art of any kind; not unlike the way that four Presidents and one Indian chief were carved into American mountains, not because they had anything divine about them, but because these men, as men, appear to patriotic Americans to tower over the rest like mountains.
Gods are unnecessary to Buddhism. Their existence is taken for granted, but the religion would lose little if their existence were denied. A Buddhist may even resort to some divine being for power, but he will not think of focusing his spiritual life on them. The point is that the spiritual perfection achieved by the Buddha and sought by his disciples is entirely non-personal. Buddhism cannot believe in any God as perfection, because in its system, personality is the denial of perfection. The gods it does accept are mere beings of power.
That is why it preserves the cults of earlier religions: it accepts the power of their gods, but only their power. Spiritually, it regards them as inferior in degree and kind to the human Buddha. In Buddhist writings, Brahma, who to the Hindus is the very image of Godhead, the animating soul of the world and Self of all that is, is a figure of the world in need of Liberation, begging the Buddha to set out on his career of preaching and save human beings: even Brahma, that is, is radically degraded.
And yet the commonsense of mankind has always agreed that Buddhism is a religion. It was as a religion, as a religious competitor, that an unholy alliance of Brahmins and Muslim invaders swept it out of its Indian homeland. (By unholy alliance, I do not mean that at any point any Brahmin leader sat down with any Muslim khan and actually planned the extermination of Buddhist monasteries; I mean that there was a converging interest between the invaders and the ancient religion of the land, and therefore the actions of Brahmins and Muslims objectively co-operated in the destruction of Indian Buddhism.) It was as a religion that Indian, Chinese and Japanese Emperors built it splendid temples, carving whole hillsides in the shape of the Enlightened One. It is as a religion that the Christian West has faced it, either in the form of faddish showbiz adhesion (even to the extent of actors, singers and models wanting to be married according to a “Buddhist wedding rite” - there ain’t no sich thing) offering some sort of spiritual escape in a world where the rigours of Christianity are not welcome, or in the serious form of intellectual and spiritual confrontation between Western and Eastern mysticism. When Buddhism, in turn, looks for interlocutors and opponents in the West, it does not look for them in the schools and the universities, but in the churches. And if Buddhism is not a religion, what is it that two billion human beings hold as spiritual truth in opposition to undoubted religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism?
No: Buddhism is a religion. And if Buddhism is a religion, then religion is not primarily about God, worship, or faith. Western atheists, and westerners in general, only think so because the religion of their ancestors places a highly personal God, with a human face, at the centre of the universe; because it exists in the form of worship of this God; and because it places faith in Him very high in the order of virtues - “And now there are only three things that will last for ever, and they are faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.” The great philosopher Karl Popper fell a victim to this sort of mistake: he thought Plato irreligious because Plato treated the popular stories about gods with no respect. Of course, Plato's religion was not primariy about such things at all - it was about the everlasting reality of the Ideas and their procession from Zeus - and to call him irreligious because he regarded this or that myth as a concoction created to fool the people is like calling a devout Protestant irreligious because he is not impressed by the blood of St. Januarius.
What, then, do religions have in common, if not gods or worship or faith? Or, to put in another way: how, on what grounds, does Christianity confront Buddhism? How does Islam confront Buddhism? How did Hinduism confront Buddhism before Buddhism was exterminated in India? How do the religious systems of China and Japan confront Buddhism? The answer in all cases is: as a way of describing existence. As systems about “life, the universe, and everything”. Religion is a philosophy of existence. Catholic Christianity demands a certain kind of cult, involving a certain kind of sacrifice; but it demands it because it holds a particular view of existence. This view involves the existence of a God with particular characteristics, the fact that the universe depends on this God for existence, and a particular view of God's relationship with mankind. All of these are parts of its description of reality - including both the idea and the description of God - and all the ritual and religious activities implied by Catholicism depend on its view of the world. Likewise Buddhism is an account of existence, including such a thing as a transmigrating soul, but no such thing as an ultimate God; and the ritual and religious activities it demands depend on its picture of existence. The picture of existence, the philosophy of existene, is everywhere the primary fact, which motivates all others.
To show the importance and significance of philosophical doctrines of existence in religious systems, let’s talk about the just-mentioned idea of creation. Most religions, apart from Islam, do not believe in “creation” in the sense of “creation out of nothing”, although many handbooks of comparative religion sloppily call “creation stories” what are really stories of re-creation, of the re-ordering of a previously existing, and indeed eternal, material universe. Both Buddhism and Hinduism believe in the eternity of existence, as did all Greek philosophical/religious systems, and the religion of ancient Egypt. Creation is nothing but a Christian idea, followed by Islam, and anticipated by certain strands of Hebraism. (Though by no means all. The Book of Genesis, which is a synthesis of two different pieces of pre-existent Jewish sacred writings, has both: its first chapter has the Spirit of God hovering over a pre-existent primordial mass which it simply puts in order, while its second chapter clearly describes creation out of nothing.)
Now what this means is that everything that exists depends upon the assent of God for its existence, in effect owes not only its form, but everything that makes it, to one single source - and that source a personal one, a will, an assent. (Thomas Aquinas once pointed out that, though a beginning in time is a part of the Christian faith, it is nevertheless possible to conceive of a universe that is infinite in time and that nevertheless depends upon the will of a transcendent God for its existence.) In Christian philosophy, we owe not just our life, but our being, to the fact that the God in three Persons made a conscious decision, something that can actually be compared to a human decision, to create; and that He could have decided otherwise . This creates a bond of dependency. God is as responsible for our being as our very parents, only even more so. And this involves two specific emotions, gratitude and love. Indeed, it can involve the opposite. I have known people who hated God because they hated their own existence. But Aristotle, who regarded God as the Soul of the World rather than as its ultimate creator, would not have known what any of us meant, either by thanking God, or, like Byron, by rebelling against Him. The great philosopher once remarked that we would think it rather strange to hear of someone loving Zeus. It is a Christian reaction, impossible in Hinduism or Platonism or Buddhism. And because of this personal link and sense of gratitude or otherwise, the Christian tradition involves a whole way of speaking of God which makes no sense whatever in Buddhism or Islam. A Buddhist who heard you speak of “Man’s quest for God”, which is a commonplace of Western pseudo-religious talk, would look at you blankly, or simply reinterpret your statement within his/her own categories, understanding it as “Man’s quest for Liberation” and removing the intensely personal emotion of the Christian and post-Christian world altogether. A Muslim would regard it as a self-indulgent religious frippery; God, he would say, is the one who is to find you - and when He does, God help you! Such difference does a difference in abstract doctrine make.
Before I go on, I want to add that the idea of gratitude for existence strikes me as one of those points at which the Christian revelation appears so entirely natural, so suited to reality as we experience it, so relevant to our lives and our feelings, as to give emotional and possibly even logical support to the faith itself. To love is natural, and to be grateful for what you love seems to me such a natural development that a religion that does not allow us to feel that gratitude seems to me deficient in the primary appreciation of reality. That is why that tremendous outburst of gratitude for life and breath, Beethoven’s Ninth, says so much to me. Western atheists of the monistic-materialist kind, as it has long been pointed out, are particularly unfortunate in this. They are no less than the rest of us the heirs of a tradition of emotional connection to the fact of existence; yet they find themselves in the emotionally unsatisfactory place of having to be grateful only for lesser things. I can be grateful to Beethoven for this or that masterpiece; but, if I were an atheist, to whom would I be grateful for Beethoven? Thankfully, I know exactly Who to thank.
If, then, religion is primarily a philosophy of existence, then monistic materialism certainly is a religion; and it is for this reason, too, that I feel nothing but contempt for Wicca, as for Asatru, James Hillman’s post-Junghianism, and all the other neo-paganisms. They do not even begin to claim that they have any real view of existence; all they say is that their message will suit people’s psychic inner realities, that is, that it will make them feel better. I regard all these neo-paganisms as religious masturbation. The person who moves from Wicca to atheism has taken an enormous step forwards in terms of intellectual responsibility, honesty, and religious truth.
Monistic materialism, on the other hand, is religious in everything except its outer trappings. Its own discourse about itself, its use of language, its relationship with the world, are all typical. To begin with, the claim of monistic materialism is historical: its main doctrine is that “today” - in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first century - we can no longer believe what our more ignorant fathers believed. Our time has received a newer and more advanced revelation of the nature of reality, which overpasses and replaces theirs. But this is the claim of all the world religions, from Zoroastrianism to Buddhism to Christianity to Islam. There always is a point in which a “true” doctrine about the nature of the universe is reached, which is bound to replace all the previous ones, which are either insufficient (doctrine of the earlier religions as praeparatio evangelica; Muslim view of “peoples of the Book”; Buddhism) or positively wicked (Zoroastrian view of the religoin of the Divs; occasional Christian claims that all previous religions except Hebraism were ran by demons; Muslim view of jahiliya). This is an inevitable by-product of the growing consciousness of civilized man that history is a real and a changing force. Not all great religions share this feature: those which do not arise from a reform or historical revelation - Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism - do not postulate a similar break. But it is certain that the break in question is a religious phenomenon.
Another religious feature of monistic materialism, which arises from the same root, is its implicit demand for exclusiveness. To be what is normally called an atheist does not allow you to entertain any opposing view of reality. This is easily understandable: the only justification for such a historical movement of reform is that it represents a genuine advance in our understanding of reality - that its claims are true, or at least truer than any other - and that, therefore, to entertain the possibility of opposite claims is to slide from the better to the worse. Western Atheists make a claim to intellectual clarity and focus that demands that they should not allow their intellects to be fuddled by the claims of what they call “religion” - that is, all religions which are not theirs. Many of them would feel something like guilt if they found themselves drawn, on any grounds (e.g. emotional) to any other religion; especially to the bête noire, Catholic Christianity.
This is reflected in the way monistic materialism speaks of itself, a way which, incidentally, has effectively taken over our culture. In ordinary discourse, and, as I hope I am making clear, very much against the logic of the facts, the word “religion” is generally used as the opposite of the word “atheism”. This use is strictly comparable to the early Christian use of the word “pagan”, village-dweller. Christianity came into the world in opposition to a multiplicity of cults. When it gained political, social and intellectual victory, it invented a term for the opposition that greatly simplified matters: it labelled them all as "village practices" paganism (from pagus, that is the kind of village that is too small to have an autonomous existence or to count even as a small town). All of them, from the superstition of an Egyptian villager to the lofty philosophy of Plotinus, were no more than country stuff, fit only for ignorant and backward people left behind by the progress of knowledge. And in exactly the same way, just as Christianity labelled or libelled all other religions as “village practices”, so too monistic materialism labels all competing views of the world as “religion” - irrational, backward, unscientific. The exclusion is on exactly the same grounds: times have moved on, leaving the "ignorant, backward and easily led" believers in "religion" to toy with their village superstitions. Please reflect on the fact that these usages both tend to treat the highest achievements of the human mind as no less superstitious and irrational, ignorant "village practices", as real rustic superstition. Socrates and Plotinus are no less pagan than the ignorant rustic leaving a sacrifice to his village god; and Beethoven composing the Ninth Symphony and the Solemn Mass is as much under the grip of superstition as the most ignorant Neapolitan waiting for the blood of St.Januarius to liquefy.
Inherited pietas and native respect towards things that are instinctively experienced as great do not allow most atheists to push this way of speaking and thinking as far as it should logically be pushed; but the terms require it. If Beethoven was serious, as he certainly was, when he solemnly declared, as the very climax of his symphony and indeed of his career: Brüder! Überm Sternenzelt/ Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen!/ Ihn stürtzt nieder, Millionen?/ Ahnest du den Macher, Welt?/ Such Ihm überm Sternenzelt!/ Über Sternen muss Er wohnen ("Brothers! Above the canopy of stars, there must dwell a loving Father! Do you knee before Him, millions? Do you feel the Maker, world? Seek Him above the stars' canopy; there, above them, must He dwell!") - then Beethoven was promoting superstition, and, to be blunt, wasting his talent in a bad cause. To any coherent atheist, this is at best a piece of historically-determined nonsense, the superstitious transfer of a father-figure into the top of the world; that was how the Soviets of old used to present it, as soon as they realized that they could not altogether get rid of religion in all the culture they lay claim to. That, above all, is the implication of the use of the word "religion" to oppose "atheism".
To sum up my argument, the opposition “atheism/religion” is false. Far from being linguistically neutral, is a particularly fraudulent piece of linguistic imperialism. Atheism is not the opposite of religion, any more than Christianity is the opposite of religion. The effect of this false opposition, bought like a pig in a poke by the whole of contemporary culture (including even C.S.Lewis and not a few churchmen!), is to cast the whole intellectual past of man into the shadow of one tremendous new revelation; which is exactly what the world religions, from Zoroastrianism on, did.
Atheism, in fact, what some silly people describe as humanism and some pedantic ones as monistic materialism, is utterly and totally a religion. It declares that a certain way to think of and describe reality is correct, or at least closer to the truth than any other; it makes a clear and definite statement about reality. And there is this too, that it carries the emotional corollary of rejecting all other competing theories, and often of experiencing them not only as mistaken but as temptations.
Why should atheism not be a religion? Because it implies no worship, no dogmatic faith, and no supernatural being? Religion is not essentially above any of these things, unless we commit the egregious category mistake of equating religion with Christianity. Religion is not about worship; it is not about belief; and it is not about God or about supernatural entities. For if we had to accept any of these three descriptions, we would have to rule out, among many other systems, Buddhism. Buddhism defines itself as atheistic and godless. Buddhism is not about worshipping anything: in point of fact, it is so little interested in worship that, wherever it goes, it allows previously existing systems of divine cult to continue unhindered. It is not about belief: a Thai Buddhist monk once asked me during a debate not to use the word “faith” of Buddhism, preferring to call it “wisdom”. And Buddhism is certainly not about any supernatural being. The Buddha is no more supernatural than you or I: he is simply man having achieved everything man can achieve by patient intellectual discipline and self-cleansing - like Plato’s Socrates. That is, the admiration he receives would not be different if nobody had ever heard of any such thing as gods. It is as the greatest of human heroes, achieving by his own effort and insight a level of spiritual perfection that cannot be surpassed, that he receives the tribute of enormous statues and works of art of any kind; not unlike the way that four Presidents and one Indian chief were carved into American mountains, not because they had anything divine about them, but because these men, as men, appear to patriotic Americans to tower over the rest like mountains.
Gods are unnecessary to Buddhism. Their existence is taken for granted, but the religion would lose little if their existence were denied. A Buddhist may even resort to some divine being for power, but he will not think of focusing his spiritual life on them. The point is that the spiritual perfection achieved by the Buddha and sought by his disciples is entirely non-personal. Buddhism cannot believe in any God as perfection, because in its system, personality is the denial of perfection. The gods it does accept are mere beings of power.
That is why it preserves the cults of earlier religions: it accepts the power of their gods, but only their power. Spiritually, it regards them as inferior in degree and kind to the human Buddha. In Buddhist writings, Brahma, who to the Hindus is the very image of Godhead, the animating soul of the world and Self of all that is, is a figure of the world in need of Liberation, begging the Buddha to set out on his career of preaching and save human beings: even Brahma, that is, is radically degraded.
And yet the commonsense of mankind has always agreed that Buddhism is a religion. It was as a religion, as a religious competitor, that an unholy alliance of Brahmins and Muslim invaders swept it out of its Indian homeland. (By unholy alliance, I do not mean that at any point any Brahmin leader sat down with any Muslim khan and actually planned the extermination of Buddhist monasteries; I mean that there was a converging interest between the invaders and the ancient religion of the land, and therefore the actions of Brahmins and Muslims objectively co-operated in the destruction of Indian Buddhism.) It was as a religion that Indian, Chinese and Japanese Emperors built it splendid temples, carving whole hillsides in the shape of the Enlightened One. It is as a religion that the Christian West has faced it, either in the form of faddish showbiz adhesion (even to the extent of actors, singers and models wanting to be married according to a “Buddhist wedding rite” - there ain’t no sich thing) offering some sort of spiritual escape in a world where the rigours of Christianity are not welcome, or in the serious form of intellectual and spiritual confrontation between Western and Eastern mysticism. When Buddhism, in turn, looks for interlocutors and opponents in the West, it does not look for them in the schools and the universities, but in the churches. And if Buddhism is not a religion, what is it that two billion human beings hold as spiritual truth in opposition to undoubted religions such as Christianity, Islam and Hinduism?
No: Buddhism is a religion. And if Buddhism is a religion, then religion is not primarily about God, worship, or faith. Western atheists, and westerners in general, only think so because the religion of their ancestors places a highly personal God, with a human face, at the centre of the universe; because it exists in the form of worship of this God; and because it places faith in Him very high in the order of virtues - “And now there are only three things that will last for ever, and they are faith, hope and love; and the greatest of these is love.” The great philosopher Karl Popper fell a victim to this sort of mistake: he thought Plato irreligious because Plato treated the popular stories about gods with no respect. Of course, Plato's religion was not primariy about such things at all - it was about the everlasting reality of the Ideas and their procession from Zeus - and to call him irreligious because he regarded this or that myth as a concoction created to fool the people is like calling a devout Protestant irreligious because he is not impressed by the blood of St. Januarius.
What, then, do religions have in common, if not gods or worship or faith? Or, to put in another way: how, on what grounds, does Christianity confront Buddhism? How does Islam confront Buddhism? How did Hinduism confront Buddhism before Buddhism was exterminated in India? How do the religious systems of China and Japan confront Buddhism? The answer in all cases is: as a way of describing existence. As systems about “life, the universe, and everything”. Religion is a philosophy of existence. Catholic Christianity demands a certain kind of cult, involving a certain kind of sacrifice; but it demands it because it holds a particular view of existence. This view involves the existence of a God with particular characteristics, the fact that the universe depends on this God for existence, and a particular view of God's relationship with mankind. All of these are parts of its description of reality - including both the idea and the description of God - and all the ritual and religious activities implied by Catholicism depend on its view of the world. Likewise Buddhism is an account of existence, including such a thing as a transmigrating soul, but no such thing as an ultimate God; and the ritual and religious activities it demands depend on its picture of existence. The picture of existence, the philosophy of existene, is everywhere the primary fact, which motivates all others.
To show the importance and significance of philosophical doctrines of existence in religious systems, let’s talk about the just-mentioned idea of creation. Most religions, apart from Islam, do not believe in “creation” in the sense of “creation out of nothing”, although many handbooks of comparative religion sloppily call “creation stories” what are really stories of re-creation, of the re-ordering of a previously existing, and indeed eternal, material universe. Both Buddhism and Hinduism believe in the eternity of existence, as did all Greek philosophical/religious systems, and the religion of ancient Egypt. Creation is nothing but a Christian idea, followed by Islam, and anticipated by certain strands of Hebraism. (Though by no means all. The Book of Genesis, which is a synthesis of two different pieces of pre-existent Jewish sacred writings, has both: its first chapter has the Spirit of God hovering over a pre-existent primordial mass which it simply puts in order, while its second chapter clearly describes creation out of nothing.)
Now what this means is that everything that exists depends upon the assent of God for its existence, in effect owes not only its form, but everything that makes it, to one single source - and that source a personal one, a will, an assent. (Thomas Aquinas once pointed out that, though a beginning in time is a part of the Christian faith, it is nevertheless possible to conceive of a universe that is infinite in time and that nevertheless depends upon the will of a transcendent God for its existence.) In Christian philosophy, we owe not just our life, but our being, to the fact that the God in three Persons made a conscious decision, something that can actually be compared to a human decision, to create; and that He could have decided otherwise . This creates a bond of dependency. God is as responsible for our being as our very parents, only even more so. And this involves two specific emotions, gratitude and love. Indeed, it can involve the opposite. I have known people who hated God because they hated their own existence. But Aristotle, who regarded God as the Soul of the World rather than as its ultimate creator, would not have known what any of us meant, either by thanking God, or, like Byron, by rebelling against Him. The great philosopher once remarked that we would think it rather strange to hear of someone loving Zeus. It is a Christian reaction, impossible in Hinduism or Platonism or Buddhism. And because of this personal link and sense of gratitude or otherwise, the Christian tradition involves a whole way of speaking of God which makes no sense whatever in Buddhism or Islam. A Buddhist who heard you speak of “Man’s quest for God”, which is a commonplace of Western pseudo-religious talk, would look at you blankly, or simply reinterpret your statement within his/her own categories, understanding it as “Man’s quest for Liberation” and removing the intensely personal emotion of the Christian and post-Christian world altogether. A Muslim would regard it as a self-indulgent religious frippery; God, he would say, is the one who is to find you - and when He does, God help you! Such difference does a difference in abstract doctrine make.
Before I go on, I want to add that the idea of gratitude for existence strikes me as one of those points at which the Christian revelation appears so entirely natural, so suited to reality as we experience it, so relevant to our lives and our feelings, as to give emotional and possibly even logical support to the faith itself. To love is natural, and to be grateful for what you love seems to me such a natural development that a religion that does not allow us to feel that gratitude seems to me deficient in the primary appreciation of reality. That is why that tremendous outburst of gratitude for life and breath, Beethoven’s Ninth, says so much to me. Western atheists of the monistic-materialist kind, as it has long been pointed out, are particularly unfortunate in this. They are no less than the rest of us the heirs of a tradition of emotional connection to the fact of existence; yet they find themselves in the emotionally unsatisfactory place of having to be grateful only for lesser things. I can be grateful to Beethoven for this or that masterpiece; but, if I were an atheist, to whom would I be grateful for Beethoven? Thankfully, I know exactly Who to thank.
If, then, religion is primarily a philosophy of existence, then monistic materialism certainly is a religion; and it is for this reason, too, that I feel nothing but contempt for Wicca, as for Asatru, James Hillman’s post-Junghianism, and all the other neo-paganisms. They do not even begin to claim that they have any real view of existence; all they say is that their message will suit people’s psychic inner realities, that is, that it will make them feel better. I regard all these neo-paganisms as religious masturbation. The person who moves from Wicca to atheism has taken an enormous step forwards in terms of intellectual responsibility, honesty, and religious truth.
Monistic materialism, on the other hand, is religious in everything except its outer trappings. Its own discourse about itself, its use of language, its relationship with the world, are all typical. To begin with, the claim of monistic materialism is historical: its main doctrine is that “today” - in the eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-first century - we can no longer believe what our more ignorant fathers believed. Our time has received a newer and more advanced revelation of the nature of reality, which overpasses and replaces theirs. But this is the claim of all the world religions, from Zoroastrianism to Buddhism to Christianity to Islam. There always is a point in which a “true” doctrine about the nature of the universe is reached, which is bound to replace all the previous ones, which are either insufficient (doctrine of the earlier religions as praeparatio evangelica; Muslim view of “peoples of the Book”; Buddhism) or positively wicked (Zoroastrian view of the religoin of the Divs; occasional Christian claims that all previous religions except Hebraism were ran by demons; Muslim view of jahiliya). This is an inevitable by-product of the growing consciousness of civilized man that history is a real and a changing force. Not all great religions share this feature: those which do not arise from a reform or historical revelation - Hinduism, Taoism, Confucianism - do not postulate a similar break. But it is certain that the break in question is a religious phenomenon.
Another religious feature of monistic materialism, which arises from the same root, is its implicit demand for exclusiveness. To be what is normally called an atheist does not allow you to entertain any opposing view of reality. This is easily understandable: the only justification for such a historical movement of reform is that it represents a genuine advance in our understanding of reality - that its claims are true, or at least truer than any other - and that, therefore, to entertain the possibility of opposite claims is to slide from the better to the worse. Western Atheists make a claim to intellectual clarity and focus that demands that they should not allow their intellects to be fuddled by the claims of what they call “religion” - that is, all religions which are not theirs. Many of them would feel something like guilt if they found themselves drawn, on any grounds (e.g. emotional) to any other religion; especially to the bête noire, Catholic Christianity.
This is reflected in the way monistic materialism speaks of itself, a way which, incidentally, has effectively taken over our culture. In ordinary discourse, and, as I hope I am making clear, very much against the logic of the facts, the word “religion” is generally used as the opposite of the word “atheism”. This use is strictly comparable to the early Christian use of the word “pagan”, village-dweller. Christianity came into the world in opposition to a multiplicity of cults. When it gained political, social and intellectual victory, it invented a term for the opposition that greatly simplified matters: it labelled them all as "village practices" paganism (from pagus, that is the kind of village that is too small to have an autonomous existence or to count even as a small town). All of them, from the superstition of an Egyptian villager to the lofty philosophy of Plotinus, were no more than country stuff, fit only for ignorant and backward people left behind by the progress of knowledge. And in exactly the same way, just as Christianity labelled or libelled all other religions as “village practices”, so too monistic materialism labels all competing views of the world as “religion” - irrational, backward, unscientific. The exclusion is on exactly the same grounds: times have moved on, leaving the "ignorant, backward and easily led" believers in "religion" to toy with their village superstitions. Please reflect on the fact that these usages both tend to treat the highest achievements of the human mind as no less superstitious and irrational, ignorant "village practices", as real rustic superstition. Socrates and Plotinus are no less pagan than the ignorant rustic leaving a sacrifice to his village god; and Beethoven composing the Ninth Symphony and the Solemn Mass is as much under the grip of superstition as the most ignorant Neapolitan waiting for the blood of St.Januarius to liquefy.
Inherited pietas and native respect towards things that are instinctively experienced as great do not allow most atheists to push this way of speaking and thinking as far as it should logically be pushed; but the terms require it. If Beethoven was serious, as he certainly was, when he solemnly declared, as the very climax of his symphony and indeed of his career: Brüder! Überm Sternenzelt/ Muss ein lieber Vater wohnen!/ Ihn stürtzt nieder, Millionen?/ Ahnest du den Macher, Welt?/ Such Ihm überm Sternenzelt!/ Über Sternen muss Er wohnen ("Brothers! Above the canopy of stars, there must dwell a loving Father! Do you knee before Him, millions? Do you feel the Maker, world? Seek Him above the stars' canopy; there, above them, must He dwell!") - then Beethoven was promoting superstition, and, to be blunt, wasting his talent in a bad cause. To any coherent atheist, this is at best a piece of historically-determined nonsense, the superstitious transfer of a father-figure into the top of the world; that was how the Soviets of old used to present it, as soon as they realized that they could not altogether get rid of religion in all the culture they lay claim to. That, above all, is the implication of the use of the word "religion" to oppose "atheism".
To sum up my argument, the opposition “atheism/religion” is false. Far from being linguistically neutral, is a particularly fraudulent piece of linguistic imperialism. Atheism is not the opposite of religion, any more than Christianity is the opposite of religion. The effect of this false opposition, bought like a pig in a poke by the whole of contemporary culture (including even C.S.Lewis and not a few churchmen!), is to cast the whole intellectual past of man into the shadow of one tremendous new revelation; which is exactly what the world religions, from Zoroastrianism on, did.
Atheism, in fact, what some silly people describe as humanism and some pedantic ones as monistic materialism, is utterly and totally a religion. It declares that a certain way to think of and describe reality is correct, or at least closer to the truth than any other; it makes a clear and definite statement about reality. And there is this too, that it carries the emotional corollary of rejecting all other competing theories, and often of experiencing them not only as mistaken but as temptations.