Atheism as a secular religion

The essence of religious feeling does not come under any sort of reasoning or atheism, and has nothing to do with any crimes or misdemeanours. There is something else here, and there will always be something else— something that the atheists will forever slur over; they will always be talking of something else. F. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, II, IV

The Atheism of Frida Kahlo

In her painting “Marxism will give health to the sick,” Frida Kahlo represents an analogy between the holy trinity and Marxism. In the centre of the painting, Frida is represented as the Son, holding a communist-red book. Marx's two large hands, which surround her, represent the Father, the creator. The giant dove, which floats above Frida, represents the Holy Spirit, the force that unites the Father and the Son: Marxism. Frida's corset, symbolizing oppressive capitalist forces, are the chains that enslave the Son. The painting shows Marx's hands trying to free Frida from an orthopaedic corset, an allegory of capitalist restrictions. The image includes symbols of war and peace, with Marx as an angelic figure and the American eagle strangled beneath Uncle Sam fleeing socialism. Karl Marx, incarnating the Father, would have approved her tribute. In a letter written to Engels in Algeria before his death, Marx confesses that his beard and moustache grew to inspire his proselytes: "I have shaved off my prophet's beard and my crown of glory[i].” Marx, needless to say, refrained from being photographed since then. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God. The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, with his characteristic impartiality, wrote in 1965 that such sacrifice had been already proclaimed eighteen centuries before: “Saint Paul had already founded Christianity on the idea that Christ died for our sins[ii]“. I allude to the ideology that Saint Paul identified with divinity and the Christian theology that Nietzsche knew. The death of God is laconic in Romans, 5, 8 Christs uper hmwn apeqanen. Those who discuss the divinity of Christ according to Saint Paul restart the Arian discussion, Cf. Philippians 2, 6. Nietzsche had, in fact, launched his attacks against the religious institutions of his generation. These institutions, as the state, as the philosophical schools, constrained personal freedom. Notwithstanding, Nietzsche's interest in the gospels drove him to praise the Messiah. Nietzsche believed himself to be an atheist, but his atheism was social. In his personal life he was inspired by divinity. Writing his poems Nietzsche replaces the Christian god for Dionysus, that is to say, for an anthropomorphic god. Nowadays, students of philosophy learn that after Nietzsche God has been replaced by man. But this happy discovery can be found in the New Testament as well. When the Jewish priests question Jesus about taking care of the sick on Sabbath, he replies, quoting the Old Testament, that all men are as gods:

I have said, Ye are gods, and ye all are children of the most High. Psalm 82:6 (Geneva Bible, 1599)

From a rational point of view, any discussion on God's existence is absurd. Any negative statement implies an affirmation. This line of thought conforms to the dialectic of Hegel, who, as all the philosophers of German Idealism, was likewise inspired by Heraclitus' fragments: life, as a flow, is a struggle of oppositions: mortality contains immortality. In the sphere of the Realpolitik the concept of divinity is ductile—it fits every mind, even against its will. The raise of radical Islam demonstrates the urgency to discover the definition that each society builds about divinity. After the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights Chart, our civilization has witnessed the fragmentation of religion: the clerical hierarchies lose power as the number of priests and ministers dwindles. Meanwhile atheism cannot find a secure ground. Religion proliferates in the Third World, a fact that seems to corroborate Schopenhauer's saying that the belief in an eternal and happy life is the main consolation of the poor. But his observation doesn't apply to the United States, the most prosperous country of the world, where, according to Gallup, 81% of the people still believe in God or a divine entity[iii]. England, France and Germany might be pointed out as the more secular countries of Europe—even so, the popularity of the mother of God still dazzles materialistic intellectuals. France is the most visited country of the world, and its most visited city is not Paris, but Lourdes, where doctors have certified about one hundred inexplicable cures during the last one hundred thirty years[iv]. In order to preserve an objective outlook, the Media avoids religious debate—this is replaced by superstition, a sort of improvised social creed. We are reminded that Friday the thirteenth is an unlucky day, that the buildings eliminate the thirteenth floor, or that American presidents are cursed to be murdered every twenty years. In the same vein, some journalists idolize nature, attributing an omnipresent wisdom to it—but, contrary to Spinoza and all the pantheist philosophers, they shun reflecting about the purpose of a wise, generous and self-sufficient nature. The popularity of alternative spiritual fashions, such as Buddhism, the Cabala and the Hare-Krishna reveals a metaphysical crisis. There is a will to believe, flourishing together with a deep distrust against religious institutions. There was a time when inquisitors condemned anyone who disagreed with an institutionalized dogma. It was followed by a time when absolute and nationalistic regimes prosecuted those who professed any dogma. In both cases political authority attempted to manipulate man's metaphysical drive. Spiritual manifestations are common to all the cultures of the world, and are often disguised by an atheist or anti-religious façade, such as fascism or the 21th-century socialism. Atheism is founded in the denial of a creed for a more consistent one—as a praxis that prevents men against metaphysical stillness. Theism is its dialectical response. This process occurs at a personal, rather than at a social level. Through it the individual establishes his relationship with his generation and the universe. Divinity, in other words, is constructed on an ethical ground on the basis of a spiritual crisis. Miguel de Unamuno writes in The Tragic Sense of Life that to live without proof of God's existence might be tragic, but endurable—and even healthy.

“And thus there are social parasites, as Mr. Balfour very well points out, who, receiving from the society in which they live the motives for their moral conduct, deny that belief in God and in another life are necessary to found good conduct and a bearable life... And I say even more, and that is: if a man has faith in God united with a life of purity and moral elevation, it is not so much that believing in God makes him good, but rather that the Being good, thank God, makes you believe in Him. Kindness is the best source of spiritual clairvoyance[v].”

Albert Camus replies in “The Myth of Sisyphus” that a life without God is not tragic, but repetitive and absurd. The European post-war man embraced existentialist philosophy with enthusiasm. Without a proof of immortality man could choose between a struggle against anguish or an active life of sexual excess—an option that Freud had already anticipated in “Civilization and Its Discontents.” Camus, as Kierkegaard, faced a path of existential despair. Jean Paul Sartre tipped towards sensuality. His fundamental work Being and Nothingness analyses through several chapters the virtues of sadomasochism:

“Masochism, like sadism, is a hypothesis of guilt. I am guilty, in fact, simply because I am an object. Guilty towards myself, since I consent to my absolute alienation, guilty towards others, because I provide them with the opportunity to be guilty[vi].”

Camus and Sartre took distance from each other, particularly after the former advocated the Human Rights chart during the Algerian war. Sartre suspected, not without reason, that such a chart articulated the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. The intellectuals of the French Revolution were all consummated disciples of Rousseau, who wrote The Social Contract and Emile in agreement with the ideology of the gospels. As a result of a mystical and anticlerical rapture, Robespierre—the true maker of the French Revolution, founded a secular Church months before his death. Sartre had discovered, as many other intellectuals of his generation, his creed in communism, until the horrors of Stalinism disappointed him. In one of his most famous conferences, “L'existentialisme est un humanisme,” from 1946, Sartre calls himself the father of atheist existentialism in France. The prophetic tone of his proclamation is one of the characteristic traits of philosophy since Parmenides: who accuses or defines God wants, in fact, to become God. Less messianic in his judgment, Immanuel Kant wrote that God was the Idea of the supreme good. His definition has been approved by theologians and sceptics alike. For a metaphysician such as Samuel T. Coleridge God is an a-priori of our mind, whereas for an archaeologist such as Richard Leakey God is a deformity of the mind. Anthropological philosophy prescribes that each man lives in function of a horizon. Such horizon is, needless to point out, a euphemism of God. Who affirms that the modern god is science, accepts the existence of God. What he/she discusses is God's definition. For the communists God was the proletarian; for the ecologists, Nature; for the Pharisees and the fanatics the pomp of the Church; for the capitalists, money; for the Nazis, Husserl and Heidegger, the State; for the anchorites, suffering. More precise, the book of Exodus identifies these horizons with idols that push men away from the Jewish God of the Ten Commandments. Darwin wrote that only the vigorous survive[vii]. His opinion reinforced the positivist thesis of Auguste Compte, the slow agony of six million of human beings under the rule of Nazi Germany and the cold destruction of two Japanese cities in 1945. The great merit of Jürgen Habermas's work has been to establish a criterion of understanding towards minorities in philosophy through communication, combating those who advocate the inexorable weight of the law:

”Today the most common form of legitimacy is the belief in legality, the compliance with enactments that are formally correct and that have been made in the accustomed manner. The distinction between an order derived from voluntary agreement and one that has been imposed is only relative. For as soon as the validity of an agreed upon order does not rest on unanimous agreement— as has often in the past been held necessary for complete legitimacy— but on de facto compliance with the majority within a given circle by those who hold different views— as is very often the case— then the order is actually imposed on the minority[viii].”

Christian theology, on the other hand, struggles against the selfish purposes of modernism. The secular posture of the Western governments agrees with Christianity in terms of ideology. The concentration camps, as we understand them today, were extermination camps, created to eliminate unwanted elements of a "pure" German race; although Hitler, in his ignorance, forgot that in the fifth century Attila's warriors had already raped the Gothic women, matrons of the German people we know today. In 1929 Bertrand Russell, the philosophical consciousness of England, conceded importance to those men whose behaviour was inspired by the spirit:

“[Some people believe that] acts inspired by certain emotions are good, and those inspired by certain other emotions are bad. Mystics hold this view, and have accordingly a certain contempt for the letter of the law[ix].”

The sufferings of Auschwitz and Jerusalem have proved to humankind that impiety is the path to self-destruction. Buddha believed that happiness was possible by disengaging from goods and affections. His creed was based on resignation, and it might explain why the Eastern countries still approve the death penalty. The principal merit of Christianity has been to place Ethics over religious rituals. Morality changes from one society to another according to political and economic factors, but the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth about unconditional love and forgiveness prevail over these changes. Before Gandhi displayed a non-violent revolution, Christianity's philosophy of forgiveness conquered the Roman Empire. Prosecuted by the Caesars, the Christians declined vengeance and retaliation against their oppressors. Accused by Nero of destroying Rome by fire, their blood was spilt over the sand of the coliseum, for the entertainment and enjoyment of the mass. Contrary to the Emperors’ wishes, the sacrificed victims displayed love and compassion towards their murderers. After two generations, their attitude turned a violent crowd into a pious Church. Forgiveness was also the ideology that appeased the cruelty of the barbarian hordes that scourged Italy during the coming centuries. Towards the end of the sixth century Pope Gregory asked his congregation to depose their arms and to sing in their churches and cathedrals before the invading hosts of the Lombard king Agilulf. The melodies of the Gregorian chant preserved the unity of a civilization on the brink of destruction:

“The Lombard King Agilulf being melted by Gregory's prayers and greatly moved by the wisdom and religious gravity of this great man, he broke up the siege of the city [x].”

Manichean ethics judge forgiveness as weakness. The true injustice is punishment, as the lethal injection or the bombing over civilians has shown. During his lifetime Jesus of Nazareth nursed the unbeloved, without discriminating them for their faith, past, or ethnic background. His attitude has not only inspired philanthropists such as Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa. It has become the backbone of Western sensitivity. It is worth asking, in fact, what the sympathies will be in America and Europe in the hypothetical case that an extra-terrestrial nation manifests itself by punishing the richest countries with bombings. Forgiveness defeats, as Desmond Tutu also proved to our generation in South Africa. This forgiveness must be first ideological and social. The supporters of Mr. Sharon enumerate the monstrosities perpetrated by the Palestinians in order to justify their vengeance. A radical Palestinian man will act alike, as a terrorist from Congo, from North Ireland or Colombia. The thirst for revenge prepares their self-destruction—blinded by hate, the avenger believes that his attack might harm his enemies, without wondering about his self-inflicted harm. His arrogance is emulated by the humbleness of the martyr, who dies forgiving. Nietzsche saw in this passivity a force capable of defeating empires. Through several passages of his work, he denounces with anger the strategy of the martyrs, whom he called weak and cunning. The superman had to be, therefore, a mix between the forgiveness of Jesus and the cunning of Napoleon. Beyond good and evil, human nature becomes closer to the martyr than to the warrior. Only a covetous mind admires the intrigues of Alexander or Napoleon. Struggle, rather than forgiveness, is the cause of the decline and fall of civilizations. Towards the beginning of the thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan decided to exterminate the Chinese, a Mandarin persuaded him that his people would submit to his service without hate. Genghis' decree was derogated. We may interpret the fall of the Soviet Union as an act of forgiveness. Gorbachev could start a war in order to hide his finances—instead, he opted for reconciliation. Atheism as a secular creed Faith is a path that not everyone follows, as Raphael already understood when he portrayed Plato pointing to the sky and Aristotle pointing to the earth in “The School of Athens.” Coleridge believed as well that humanity was divided between the Aristotelians and the Platonists. More simply in the representation of such divergent perceptions, Kipling represents in Kim a lad who announces to those he meets that his teacher is a Tibetan monk to whom the gods have given the privilege of contemplating secrets that few mortals have access to. Faith requires unwavering trust and dedication in every decision throughout life that not everyone is willing to commit to. That said, those who seek the truth without prejudice, those who challenge what they have been taught without critical analysis, demonstrate singular courage. Their willingness to explore and question established reality is the reflection of a search for truth without predefined limits. Faith and reason are not opposites, but sides of the same coin. The search for truth can manifest itself through multiple paths, both in faith in the divine and in intellectual and rational exploration. These passages do not necessarily have to converge, but they can coexist in harmony, respecting the individual search for truth. Doubt about God is no longer seen today, as it was in the dark times of the Inquisition, as an obstacle to faith, but as a stimulus for an enriching cogitation of spirituality. Kierkegaard pointed out that to be a true Christian one must first question one's faith, lose it and be reborn in it. The concept of the denial of God, therefore, far from being an obstacle to spiritual understanding, is the path to truth, an individual journey that takes multiple forms, including scepticism, the first step towards doubt, and from there to probability, primal understanding of the immortality of the present and spirituality. Unlike the agnostic, the atheist sees the need to unravel what or who God is, not only for one but for all religions. In the effort to demonstrate God’s non-existence, they see the need to define it, forging arguments that, although valid in the field of science, and although they refute from archaeology the literal belief in the symbolic passages of the scriptures, lose validity when apply to believers who see God in his attributes, whether they are volitional or emotional, as in saints and visionaries – “Love is more important than God”, Böhme –, or rational, as in Kant – not a being anthropomorphic but rather an a-priori universal idea of reason. Cioran wrote that without Bach God would be a second-rate character; His aphorism shows the transcendental function of art. Hegel defines art as the sensitive expression of the idea, but said sensitivity is, ipso facto, psychic. Art is the spiritual expression of what science cannot grasp: a love, a wait, a thought, a hunch, a story to tell, even more so if this is the discovery of God, immortality and a world of future delights. that dispenses with time and space, categories specific to this universe according to Swedenborg, and that Kant plagiarized and adapted to his philosophy as universal categories of intuition. Writing, as art, is prior to the phenomenal reality of man, and it is from it that civilization is created; Without desires and abstract formulations, the concrete would be impossible to achieve. Sincere atheism, open to debate, thus finds in the divine attributes of truth, love and compassion a point in common with religions, rescuing their best facet. The atheist's reflection is thus not only valid, but necessary as a tool that renews spiritual growth. There is no judgment on those who doubt or question the existence of the divine. Doubt is not a barrier to spiritual understanding, but rather a catalyst for more meaningful understanding and pursuit. Each person has their own journey and their own way of approaching the truth, and this process should be respected and appreciated. Joseph Campbell, a believing atheist Through comparative studies of religions, Joseph Campbell has significantly contributed to a secular acceptance of religious mysticism. Campbell described himself as a "positive agnostic." This meant that he did not claim to have certainty about the existence or non-existence of God but focused more on the mythological and symbolic aspects of religions and their impact on human culture and psyche. Despite not identifying specifically as a believer, his research and writings were deeply interested in the meaning and influence of religions on human history and society. Campbell often cited the evolution of religious eras, citing a 12th-century abbot, Joachim of Floris, who foresaw the dissolution of the Christian Church and the direct communication of the Holy Spirit with humanity. Campbell further elaborates on this notion, drawing parallels with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in different historical periods; the age of the Father corresponds to the Old Testament; that of the Son to Christianity, and that of the Holy Spirit to a world where each human being becomes a temple of God, and where no one lies, steals, or kills. Campbell encourages in his books an approach to art, often pointing out the prophetic function of poets, while advising a move away from traditional religious structures and a step towards a more personal and experiential encounter with spirituality.

“After the Fall in the Garden, he said, God had to compensate for the disaster and reintroduce the spiritual principle into history. He chose a race to become the vehicle of this communication, and that is the age of the Father and of Israel. And then this race, having been prepared as a priestly race, competent to become the vessel of the Incarnation, produces the Son. Thus, the second age is of the Son and the Church, when not a single race but the whole of humanity is to receive the message of the spiritual will of God. The third age, which this philosopher [Joachim of Floris] in around 1260 said was now about to begin, is the age of the Holy Spirit, who speaks directly to the individual. Anyone who incarnates or brings into his life the message of the Word is equivalent to Jesus -- that's the sense of this third age. Just as Israel has been rendered archaic by the institution of the Church, so the Church is rendered archaic by the individual experience[xi].”

God speaks to the atheists with a smile, "Admirable are those who question with style, Who dared to doubt what others believed, And sought for answers that were not received. The path of faith is not for everyone, It requires trust and a heart that's undone, But those who seek truth without prejudices And challenge what's given, without calculation They show a courage that’s eternal A willingness to question and redefine, The very essence of what's divine, And ponder mysteries beyond time. So, fear not, my children, if you don't believe, For your doubts are seeds of wisdom, And though you may not walk the path of faith, Your search for truth leaves a wake of faith For I am not a judge who punishes the doubters, Nor a tyrant who demands blind followers, I am the light that shines on every soul, The love that nurtures and makes us whole. So, keep questioning, seeking, and exploring, For truth is not static, but transformative, And in the end, you’ll find that faith and reason, There are but two names for the same doubt

[i] Wheen, Francis. (Op. cit.). Page 379. [ii] Deleuze, G. (1965). “Mais déjà saint Paul fonde le christianisme sur l'idée que le Christ meurt pour nos péches.” Nietzsche. PUF, 30. [iii] Jones, J. M. (2022, June 17). Belief in God in U.S. Dips to 81%, a New Low. POLITICS. https://news.gallup.com/poll/393737/belief-god-dips-new-low.aspx [iv] See Harris, R. L. (2014). Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age. Penguin UK, and Duchaussoy, J. (2014). The Miracles of Lourdes: A Personal Account of the New Testament. Gracewing Publishing. [v] Unamuno, M. de. (1930). El sentimiento trágico de la vida. Madrid, Renacimiento, 31. [vi] Sartre, J. P. (1943). L'Être et le Néant. Gallimard, 446. [vii] “The vigorous, the healthy, and the happy survive and multiply,” p. 79. Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species (London: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd, 1971). [viii] Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action (Vol. 1). Beacon Press. [ix] Russel, Bertrand (1929). 'Ethics' in An outline of Philosophy. Allen & Unwin, p. 237. [x] Prosperi Cont. Havniensis ap. M. G. SS. antiq. ix. p. 339. Homes Dudden, F. (1905). Gregory the Great. His place in history and thought (Vol. 2). Longmans, Green and Co. [xi] Campbell, J. (1988). The Power of Myth. Anchor Books, 179.