You can't dance to atheism

[rug]

Any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and its myths

Posted by
Andrew Brown
Thursday 6 September 2012 08.06 EDT
guardian.co.uk

I finished the series of articles I wrote on Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution with a definition – a religion is a philosophy that makes you dance. It pleased me because the book itself can be read as a history of how philosophy grew from dance. But is it any use?

The great difficulty of definitions like mine is that they leave the content of religions entirely to one side. We are still enough of the heirs of Christendom to feel that religions must involve doctrines, heresies, and a commitment to supernatural realism. The trouble is that a definition with doctrines, heresies, and supernaturalism fits many varieties of atheism just as well. You will object that atheism bans, by definition, any belief in the supernatural. Yet almost all sophisticated religions ban at an intellectual level all kinds of belief which sustain them in practice. Buddhists worship; Muslims have idols. "Theological incorrectness" is found wherever you look for it.

And atheism can be just as theologically incorrect: today's paper told me that: "our bodies are built and controlled by far fewer genes than scientists had expected". The metaphors of "building" and "controlling" have here taken a concrete form that makes them palpably untrue. Genes don't do either thing. It seems to me that a belief in tiny invisible all-controlling entities is precisely a belief in the supernatural, yet that is the form in which entirely naturalistic genetics is widely understood in our culture. Religion can't really be about doctrine and heresy either, because these concepts don't make sense in pre-literate cultures. You can even ask whether the concept of "supernaturalism" makes any sense in most of the world without a developed idea of scientific naturalism, and scientific laws, that would stand for its opposite.

The serious weakness of my definition is that philosophy itself is a very late development and not one that has really caught on. As Bertrand Russell observed, many people would rather die than think, and most do. So maybe it would be better to say that religion is a myth that you can dance to. This is useful because it suggests that atheism is not a religion as you can't dance to it. There's no shortage of atheist myths – in the sense of historically incorrect statements which are believed for their moral value and because it's thought that society will fall apart if they're abandoned. The comments here are full of them. But they are no longer danceable.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/andrewbrown/2012/sep/06/individualistic-atheism-cant-dance

[enough]

1. Oh sure you can. (nt)

[GodlessBiker]

2. Genes don't control our bodies in any way? They don't control if and when a man goes bald?

Or when we go gray? They don't control our natural skin color or the color of our eyes?

Come on. The author is setting up a straw man by stating that unless genes are "all-controlling," they don't control at all. No one would or does suggest that our genes control each and every aspect of our bodies. Certainly, while genes may control my susceptibility to skin cancer, my decision to expose myself to the sun without sunscreen has something to do with whether I get skin cancer.

[HereSince1628]

3. It may be that religionists don't recognize an atheist's dance as dance.

Vesting this argument in metaphor doesn't really resolve the question. Setting atheism as outside the possibility of being religious seems to be a problem of first assumptions. One could say reality really begs that question.

As a biologist I see life dancing everywhere...in the excited leaps of electrons boosted and falling 'glowingly' within the photoarrays of chloroplasts, in the assortment of chromosomes in mitosis, in the PQ-shuttle within mitochondrial membranes, in protein synthesis, in daily blood sugar levels, in the mating rituals of many animals, in the seasonal migration of flights of birds, and in the global interweaving of carbon between respiration and photosynthesis. It seems to me that life is filled with dances at all scales of resolution, and it appears, empirically, to dance without god(s) or religion.

The a priori foreclosure of dance to atheism makes no sense to me beyond the manner in which such restrictive first conditions are often used by theists to rig the outcome of argumentation.

[djean111]

4. The comments to this opinion piece are spot on.

Atheism is not a "belief" in the way religion is a belief.

[Goblinmonger]

5. Perhaps not, but the sex is awesome.

And guilt free!

[bongbong]

6. Huh???

> a religion is a philosophy that makes you dance

No, religion is a philosophy that assures you that you won't turn into worm food when you die. "The Denial Of Death" is still an excellent read about it.