"No gods" MEANS "No gods"

For the past couple of years, I've been listening to the Scathing Atheist podcast, and from there got into a couple of their other podcasts too. It's been refreshing to hear the perspectives of other people who arrived at the same conclusion I did by different paths, and to hear them being every bit as angry as I am at the harm religion does. It's also been refreshing to hear these guys talk passionately about social justice issues that I care about (and most religious people either only pretend to care about or actively oppose). In particular, hearing them as men eloquently speak about the importance of defending women's rights.

So it was certainly disappointing to learn on Thursday that Andrew Torrez - a part-owner of their company, their company's lawyer, and an occasional guest on the show - has been credibly accused of sexual harassment by a number of women (and admitted to at least engaging in behavior that made those women uncomfortable, in the way that a lawyer trying to avoid litigation would kinda sorta apologize without actually admitting guilt).

It was far more disappointing to read from several sources that apparently at least one, and possibly more, of the guys who do this podcast knew about the behavior for the past five years but didn't do anything about it until it finally came out in the news. There were reasons they didn't (for example, it's difficult to cut out your business partner, especially when he's the only lawyer you know and you would need a lawyer to cut out your business partner; and in at least some cases the victims asked the guys not to say or do anything). But still, not the level of advocacy that I'd have hoped for from such vocal advocates for women. In the language of my old beliefs: in the case of the guys who weren't sexually harassing women but also weren't stopping their partner from doing so, this was a time when "sin" didn't mean deliberate or malicious harm, but aiming for a difficult-to-reach target and falling short of reaching it.

It's been interesting to see how the online community of the show's fans has been processing this. I very much recognize and resonate with what a lot of them are saying. As an Ex-vangelical driven away from Christianity in part by the obvious hypocrisy and shortcomings of the leaders of Evangelicalism, as someone who remained a believer for decades even while learning that church after church after church was covering up and enabling sexual abuse despite preaching continually about sexual morality, as someone who tried to convince myself that the god of Jimmy Swaggart and the Bakkers and multiple child-abuse-enabling Popes and so many other Christian leaders was real even after those leaders turned out to be very much fakes, as someone disappointed time and time again by people who claimed to be guided by a higher standard and yet behaved as if there were no standards, as a man who knows and cares deeply for many women who have experienced sexual abuse at the hands of men who pretended to be good people but weren't... it felt VERY familiar in many ways.

All but one.*

I don't feel any need to question the worldview itself, even if it turns out that some of its most eloquent proponents didn't behave in accordance with their professed moral standards.

Christianity claims to convert its believers from sinners to saints. It claims that an all-powerful god is working in the hearts and minds of its believers to make them into better people, gives them strength to resist the temptation to fall into sin, makes them less likely to harm their fellow humans. And one look at the results makes it painfully obvious that this claim is untrue. Every religion out there theoretically exists in large part as a way to try and impart morality to people, and every one of them fails spectacularly at doing so. Most in fact make their adherents LESS moral. In practice, the more a society is controlled by religion, the less moral it is - see the Middle East and the Middle Ages for a number of examples.

Atheism makes no such claims. Atheism just means calling bullshit on the claim that someone's imaginary friend is making them a good person - no one ever said that the LACK of an imaginary friend makes someone a good person. Only that people can be good people without needing imaginary friends promising to support or reward them in that endeavor, or imaginary enemies promising to punish them if they fail. 

And the thing about religious leaders is, they claim to speak for an infallible and perfectly moral god - which means, whether they say it in so many words or not, that they expect to be treated as infallible and perfectly moral. If you're claiming to be the channel through which your god speaks, then essentially you're expecting to be treated as the god. Your god's followers are really your followers, and when you fail and fall your god does. Because the god was never really there, the god was never really saying or doing anything, the god was never really giving people guidance on how to become better people... but you were. 

Atheists don't have to have heroes. We go in KNOWING that the people who say things we agree with are speaking only for themselves, not for some higher being. We go in KNOWING that they are flawed humans and will only become as moral as semi-sapient apes are capable of choosing to become, and that if they don't KEEP choosing morality every moment of every day they will stop being moral... because there's no angel on their shoulder except themselves to keep them on the straight and narrow, and no devil on their shoulder except themselves to tempt them into things that make them feel good at the expense of others.

When I was a Christian and learned about Christian leaders sexually abusing women, there was always a moment of wondering whether Christianity itself could be true, whether the message could be true if the messenger was false. There was a moment of questioning whether the god could be real... because the reality was that I hadn't been inspired by a god, I had been inspired by people. If the people were lying about their god redeeming them from their sins, what else might they be lying about? (Spoiler: EVERYTHING).

But as an atheist, I have no gods. I don't have to believe in paragons. I don't have to pretend that ANY human is being divinely granted the capacity to be any more than... human. To the extent that someone is saying true things, I can concur that they said true things, and not have to question the veracity of those things when they say other things that are untrue. Andrew Torrez was apparently not the kind of man he said that men ought to be - respectful of women, willing to take "no" for an answer, honest with his wife/ sexual partners. But those principles continue to be true even if he was bullshitting when he said he believed in them. His business partners may or may not have been the kind of men they said that men ought to be - believing and supporting women who report abuse, calling out their fellow men for mistreatment of women. But those principles continue to be true whether they turn out to have measured up or not. And the underlying philosophy behind all their morality - there is no god to do justice in the world, so we humans must do it, though we can't and won't do it perfectly - doesn't stop being true just because they fell short of doing justice. 

I already knew that Jesus, who was supposed to be perfect and a god, wasn't. So I'm not surprised that flawed human beings who never claimed to be anything else, or have support from anything else, didn't behave like gods. I had already stopped believing that a moral paragon exists, and that I nevertheless have a responsibility to become as close to a moral paragon as I possibly can even without any gods to show me the way. So I don't need atheist leaders to be moral paragons in order for atheism to be believable, the way I needed Christian leaders to be moral paragons in order for Christianity to be believable. I can immediately drop any leader who fails to measure up to the standard, without any question that the standard is still right.

There are no gods. So we must be, as famous atheist Terry Pratchett said, the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. And we must keep teaching the ape to behave more like an angel, even as the angel keeps trying to behave like an ape.

Atheists are willing to admit that we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men, so one of them behaving accordingly doesn't mean that's untrue. 

It means we still have more evolving to do. 

* Postscript: Another HUGE difference is that the remaining podcasters appear to be genuinely working to address the problem. The Evangelicals who continually talk about repentance could learn a lot about what it ACTUALLY looks like from this atheist:

Scathing Atheist Diatribe 521 - YouTube