Cruel gods & Atheists

Is atheism a misnomer? Are atheists entirely without gods?

Some societies worship a malevolent deity: a punishing god who enjoys inflicting pain, or worse an inscrutable god, or worst of all an indifferent god paring his fingernails as we suffer, enthroned in grim splendor on some frozen metallic orb in a distant corner of the universe.

What separates atheists from devotees of these cruel deities? Both see a meaningless, disordered universe abandoned by the Christian God, bereft of His love. Both fear and hate and adore these callous gods, these idols. If you think atheists are indifferent, you need to explain why they are so ferocious and obsessive in their denunciation of divinity and so hilarious in their devotion.

Some envision God dwelling on a cold and crystalline plane of timeless mathematical perfection, silent and self-absorbed. Others see reality as a hot muddy mess enlivened by screams and made up only of matter. While these views seem like opposites they actually have much in common. Wouldn’t an absentee god let the universe get run down and ratty?

Let us look at examples of cruel and capricious and aloof gods and how they mingle with atheists.

1) The Greek philosopher Epicurus believed in gods who never bothered about humans. He also believed in an entirely material universe.

A Roman disciple of Epicurus, Lucretius, wrote in his In the Nature of Things Book V that the gods did not create our faulty world:

That in no wise the nature of all things For us was fashioned by a power divine- So great the faults it stands encumbered with. First, mark all regions which are overarched By the prodigious reaches of the sky: One yawning part thereof the mountain-chains And forests of the beasts do have and hold; And cliffs, and desert fens, and wastes of sea (Which sunder afar the beaches of the lands) Possess it merely; and, again, thereof Well-nigh two-thirds intolerable heat And a perpetual fall of frost doth rob From mortal kind. And what is left to till, Even that the force of Nature would o'errun With brambles, did not human force oppose,- Long wont for livelihood to groan and sweat Over the two-pronged mattock and to cleave The soil in twain by pressing on the plough.

2) Gnostics believed that Yaldabaoth, the Demiurge, created the inferior physical realm. This is how the grotesque Yaldabaoth came to be:

Something imperfect came out of her Different in appearance from her. Because she had created it without her masculine counterpart She gave rise to a misshapen being unlike herself.

Sophia saw what her desire produced. It changed into the form of a dragon with a lion’s head And eyes flashing lightning bolts. She cast him far from her, Outside of the realm of the immortal beings So that they could not see him. [She had created him in ignorance.]

See: Against the Gnostics by Plotinus

3) Manichaeans also believed the material world was base:

Kingdom of Darkness, however, consisted in five Chambers,

these are Smoke, Fire, Wind and Water and Darkness.

Their resolution crawls in them,

moves them and spurs them on to make war with one another...

All the Powers of the Abyss he spread out to the ten Heavens and to eight Earths, he shut them up into this World and made it a dungeon for all the Powers of Darkness.

4) 14th century philosopher William of Ockham believed in a dark and brooding God, majestic but maybe unknowable:

Ockham is successful in his attempt to defend God against what he considers to be the encroaching heathen, perhaps too much so, for his success comes at a price. God is omnipotent but perhaps arbitrary. God is free but perhaps nonsensical. God is independent but perhaps unknowable. God has, in a sense, become hyper-transcendent, or virtually meaningless to the human knower and faith alone provides any certainty. Given this situation it is perhaps inevitable, and certainly under- standable, that the human will attempt to regain certainty, and since God has cost the world its intelligibility it is un- derstandable that the answer is to replace God with the hu- man as the source of order.

Cybele nature goddess

5) Pantheist and anti-humanist Baruch Spinoza thought man lacks freedom, the universe lacks harmony, and God lacks concern for mankind.

Ethics Part 1 Appendix

Spinoza also wrote in his Political Treatise 2.8: I also conclude that—because everyone has as much right as he has power—what each man attempts and does, whether he is wise or foolish, he attempts and does by the supreme right of nature.

Stoic pantheists, on the other hand, think of God as a generous father.

Epictetus The Discourses Book One Chapters 3 and 6

For pantheists the problem of evil is especially acute. To solve the problem they can either make god evil or pretend evil doesn’t exist.

6) Prominent atheist Friedrich Nietzsche saw Nature as pitiless, indifferent.

You desire to LIVE "according to Nature"? Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine to yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference?

Nietzsche also revered the more savage Greek gods and delighted in cruelty: The Genealogy of Morals II 6

7) Some Darwinists worshipped Nature red in tooth and claw, cherished beastliness, and made “survival of the fittest” into a moral code. For example, Karl Pearson wrote: You will see that my view — and I think it may be called the scientific view of a nation — is that of an organized whole, kept up to a high pitch of internal efficiency by insuring that its numbers are substantially recruited from the better stocks, and kept up to a high pitch of external efficiency by contest, chiefly by way of war with inferior races, and with equal races by the struggle for trade-routes and for the sources of raw material and of food supply.

Others like Thomas Huxley acknowledged the rule of Nature in sadness.

8) In Herman Melville‘s Moby Dick Chapter 135 the whale, representing god, is full of malice: “the whale, which from side to side strangely vibrating his predestinating head sent a broad band overspreading semicircular foam before him as he rushed. Retribution, swift vengeance, eternal malice were in his whole aspect, and spite of all that mortal man could do, the solid white buttress of his forehead smote the ship's starboard bow, till men and timbers reeled.”

9) Satanists are conflicted. Does Satan exist or doesn’t he? Should Satanists revel in evil or engage a public relations firm on Satan’s behalf.

10) Atheist A.C. Clarke in Childhood’s End wrote of a godlike alien intelligence, the Overmind, which is indifferent to human welfare and exterminates all life on earth.

Quote: So this, thought Jan, with a resignation that lay beyond all sadness, was the end of man. It was an end that no prophet had ever foreseen-an end that repudiated optimism and pessimism alike.

Yet it was fitting: it had the sublime inevitability of a great work of art. Jan had glimpsed the universe in all its awful immensity, and knew now that it was no place for man. He realized at last how vain, in the ultimate analysis, had been the dream that had lured him to the stars.

For the road to the stars was a road that forked in two directions, and neither led to a goal that took any account of human hopes or fears.

Conclusion

Edmund: Thou, nature, art my goddess; to thy law

My services are bound. Act 1 scene 2 King Lear

Those who believe in rarefied gods or forbidding gods or chthonic gods or disciplinarian gods or no gods or detached gods or unhinged gods, maybe we can place them in the same basket.

Some atheists are angry at God for not existing, others are enraged at Him for existing. Some atheists are mad at god for making life too difficult, others want god or the devil to torment enemies or even themselves.

When God has been refined out of existence what is there to do but follow our programming and indulge our most atavistic impulses until we die of boredom.

Epistemology & Ontology

idealism vs. materialism

Middle way: Aristotle & Aquinas

common sense and science

Christian socialism vs. liberty and patriotism

cynicism vs. naïveté

pessimism vs. optimism

Puritans vs. Pangloss

Middle way: God designs a beautiful world but it is partially corrupted by Satan and his minions

Stalin, Hitler, Barbra Streisand

pantheism vs. gnosticism

monism vs. dualism