The Problem with July 4 and Other High Holy Days of the Chosen Nation

Happy America's Birthday, readers! Sorry if I'm skeptical, but I'm one of those people who grow radical as they grow older (I'm approaching middle age already, though I don't look it) and I haven't called it "Independence Day" since the day I found out America is the reincarnation of the British Empire. Before then, America stood for freedom or something. Now it stands for one and only one thing, Total World Domination (called in our official State religion, Americanism — you know, the one that claims the Second Coming of Christ occurred on this day in 1776 which we're supposed to be celebrating? — Manifest Destiny, freedom and democracy be damned). America Takes Over The World — and after that, United Space of America! Sure enough, what started as the celebration of a young nation's freedom is now the cult day (one of many) dedicated to the supremacy of Our Heroic Imperial Armed Forces who keep the world in subjection. It's the ultimate example of mission creep, which should be in school textbooks after the American Empire follows all other empires in history into the proverbial trash can of history. The worst part of the day, according to my mother (who, among other things, owns two dogs), is that this day's gigantic fireworks orgy terrifies all the animals, sometimes to madness. I've come to the conclusion that it symbolizes America's national strategy of bombing all opposition to smithereens for the sake of our nation's corporate profits, freedom and democracy and the lives of innocent civilians be damned. The conquest of Earth is America's Manifest Destiny, you liberal homosexual commie Eurotrash traitors! Four years ago, I posted here my opinion that patriotism is a sin. Now I know better: nationalism is a cult, the cult of the State, and patriotism is its expression of faith. In other words, a nation is just a glorified tribe. Me, I'm an atheist, and the nation-state strikes me as a pseudo-secular neopagan replacement for the God who abandoned Old Christendom, a search for a God where there is none. Every State believes it and it alone is by definition the one true God, the same way every tribe by definition is the one true master race. But what is a State, really? A giant corporation whose business is tribalism, no less monopolistic and predatory than any other giant corporation. I'm an anarchist because I'm an atheist. So I'm not treating the Fourth of July like the High Holy Day of the Nation that it's supposed to be, any more, say, than I sing "O Canada" three days earlier. I'm going to enjoy the company of my family and tonight's fireworks show (maybe even take pictures). I won't spoil the occasion for my friends and relatives because, hey, I like them. Besides, America belongs to its oligarchs, not its people, and the people — all the people of the world — belong to them too, by definition. Manifest Destiny, y'know. This opinion is my addition to these posts: "When Americans Understood the Declaration of Indepencence", Thomas J. DiLorenzo, LewRockwell.com "How to Celebrate July 4", Sheldon Richman, Free Association (End the empire — now!) "Founding Fathers Quotes You've Probably Never Heard", David O. Atkins, Hullaballoo ("Buncha commies!") "'Deriving Their Just Power from the Consent of the Governed" (as long as they can prove to Republicans that they're worthy)" by Digby, Hullabaloo ("I don't think Thomas Jefferson had this sort of thing in mind when he wrote the great document [Declaration of Independence].") "To be a patriot: Adlai Stevenson, McCarthyism and a message for Independence Day by MrLiberal, Daily Kos (how the liberal Democratic candidate tried to wrest the word "patriot" from Joe McCarthy and lost) ...and other comments by skeptics of the Empire's Birthday. Note that these are posts by liberals, genuine libertarians, and Old Right conservatives. The true Left is, of course, against the very idea of nationhood on principle: humanity is one and should stop listening to the divisive siren songs of would-be messiahs and their giant corporations of tribalism they call nations; We the People need to control our destiny together, collectively, because our future depends on it.

Yes, Reverend, Atheists Grieve Too

I read this post quoting from this article about this opinion in which an Episcopal priest claims that atheists are incapable of grieving because they don't believe in God. Say what? So I felt I had to spell out my own position on this:

1. People who believe in God almost always believe in Heaven as well. Some atheists (not me) surely wonder why they don't celebrate when a dead loved one goes to Jesus or gloat when an unbeliever is "rewarded" with eternal punishment in Hell. (I know of some believers who do just this.)
2. Most atheists don't believe in an afterlife (I'm agnostic on specifically this). If a loved one dies and you've lost them, wouldn't you have more reason to grieve?

The assumption of some believers, especially those most involved in spreading the religion, is that belief in God is the prerequisite for morality. If there is neither God nor heaven, the reasoning goes, then morality does not exist because by definition it comes only from On High. Presumably the converse is therefore true, that believers are by definition moral — against which I give you examples such as the Crusaders, the Inquisition, Al-Qaeda, and the Cult of Reason that justified the Jacobins' massacres during the Reign of Terror that ultimately destroyed the French Revolution. Against the main point (God makes morality possible), there's the uncountable number of unbelievers who are good people living moral lives based on relationships with themselves and other people as opposed to some absolute monarch ruling from Heaven. I'll probably get counterexamples thrown at me, atheists who the believers believe prove their point: Ayn Rand, Joseph Stalin, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins. All this proves is that dogmatism is as dangerous and destructive among atheists as it is among believers. The pessimistic case: life is short, we all die, eventually it's as if we never lived, so some kind of escape is necessary, even if only into fantasy. The assumption here is that the lack of an afterlife drains life of all worth. But from the viewpoint of objective realism, isn't it truer that if one life is all we have, it's the most valuable thing in the world? And since we humans are social animals, it also means we need to value each other all the more. It's not true that lack of religion necessarily leads to nihilism. (I skirted close to nihilism myself once — when I was young.) In fact, it may be a sign of a mature and realistic worldview. And whereas the devout aren't required to mourn those who after all are going to Jesus, those without religion who have just lost someone forever have all the reason in the world to grieve.

Ayn Rand, Religion, and the Problem with the New Atheists

You've probably heard of the so-called "New Atheists": Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris. Their books against religion are red-hot in a still religion-mad America. However, there's a shrillness about their tone that outrages even many atheists. That shrillness, especially in Harris, struck me immediately as very familiar. It's the same tone you find in a figure I discovered three years after her death (i.e., in 1985); one whose books have been remarkably consistent bestsellers ever since they were published in the mid-to-late 20th century; one whose heavy influence Harris openly acknowledges: Ayn Rand. Problem is, Rand is notorious as the guru of a cult.

Rand was one of the true founders of the New Atheism, one of its two twentieth-century godmothers. The other was Madalyn Murray O'Hair, founder of American Atheists, who dedicated her life to relentless struggle against religion. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris aren't fighting a new battle; they have simply picked up the swords left by the founding mothers of their movement.

I was once a closet believer in Rand's philosophy, unknown to anyone in the movement. (In my first decade on the Internet, roughly 1995-2005, I was strictly a lurker, keeping my presence hidden; I similarly didn't reveal myself to the online Objectivists.) I'm familiar with her writings, not just her three major novels but her many books of essays. I also studied the history of Rand, her philosophy which she named Objectivism, and the movement she founded on it. I'm as familiar with the philosophy as just about anybody in the movement. My entire realist worldview derives to a very large degree from Rand's. But there's something about how Rand led the movement, and in how she wrote, that is suspiciously religious. Many have gone so far as to call Objectivism a cult: Murray Rothbard (the free-market economist and a former Rand associate), Michael Shermer, Albert Ellis, and Jeff Walker, among others. Even no less a figure than Rand's one-time protégé, Nathaniel Branden, has made a detailed critique of Rand's philosophy, pointing out its weaknesses, which happen to be the most religious of her tenets.

Nihilism and Three Levels of Mindsets

In my previous entry Atheism Without Nihilism, a pious Christian posted an anonymous comment that, in retrospect, made me realize that between people with differing mindsets, no communication is possible. To the religious mind, atheism is defined as nihilism. Why? Because of religion's definition of "value": all value is of God, and is therefore supernatural by definition. If God doesn't exist, then value doesn't exist. Ergo, atheism = nihilism. period. And so if you deny the existence of a Supreme Being, to avoid nihilism you must redefine the meaning of value so that it refers to this world and not the world above. However, you can only make the redefinition if your mind has evolved to a sufficient level of complexity. Thus, I need to speak of mindsets.

I learned about three evolutionary levels of mind by reading Richard Brodie (his site here), specifically Virus of the Mind. These levels are:

1. gene-driven, meaning concerned only with one's instincts and appetites;
2. meme-driven, meaning concerned with one's ideology or religion, sometimes at the expense of life itself, one's own or others'; and
3. self-driven, of a sufficiently high level of consciousness that one can define the way one defines their life.

These three levels of consciousness are obvious enough if you observe people long enough. They were first described by, believe it or not, the ancient Gnostics, who were notoriously unworldly but who saw the effects of people's level of consciousness and divided them into "hyletics" or materialists, "psychics" or conventionally religious people, and "pneumatics" or truly spiritual people. Modern science made the "pneumatics" into objective realists, people who treat reality and themselves with objectivity. The religious mentality has become every bit as apparent among Gnostics as among more conventionally religious people. So the schema itself has evolved, from ancient times and the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.

Now the thing about mindsets is that minds operating on a higher level can understand those at lower levels, but lower-level minds cannot understand those at higher levels. The religious mind cannot understand the scientific mind; people who operate according to dogmas (religious or ideological) defined as Absolute Truths cannot possibly conceive of the higher mindset in which people submit everything to objective inquiry and take nothing on faith.

So, to answer the question as to whether atheism is nihilism: yes &mdash but only on the second, meme-driven, dogmatic (religious and ideological) level of consciousness. But on the third, self-driven, scientific level of consciousness, definitely not. Indeed, the Level 2 belief in a Supreme Being, or at least Absolute Truth, strikes the Level 3 mind as itself nihilistic, because it drains all value from the world and leaves it a desolate wasteland from which Level 2 longs to escape to the world above. So Level 2 minds like my anonymous commenter's and Level 3 minds like mine are doomed to talk past each other. Less tolerant Level 2 minds simply declare "holy war" against all other minds that are like them, and become terrorists.

Atheism Without Nihilism

In some of the many books packed in the bookcases in my living room, and in some of the books I've checked out at the library, I've been reading about how some atheists have become convinced that life is meaningless because there's nothing to look forward to after death. They think this makes this life meaningless. But one of the things I learned back when I was a closet disciple of Ayn Rand is that, though the universe and existence as such have no intrinsic meaning (one way of interpreting her statement that "existence exists" is that the universe just is; it is its own meaning), life itself has meaning, especially human life. All living organisms have purpose; this is the primary difference between living and nonliving things. Living things are goal-pursuing things; for example, green plants constantly seek light. But human beings don't just pursue goals; we create meaning. One can even go so far to say that the highest purpose of human life is to give meaning to the universe; thus we have science, art, religion, etc. So even if the soul perishes with the body at death, life and reality are not meaningless.

Why am I writing this? I've heard and read that some of the most intelligent and sensitive people have been driven to suicide by their belief that if there is no God and no immortality of the soul, then life is meaningless and you might as well kill yourself. I'm saying that this "existentialist" — really nihilistic — position is nonsense. The belief in a "higher power" implies that no value is possible in life and reality because value, meaning, and purpose emanate from On High. Well, science, and objective realist philosophy, have dispensed with the supernatural Platonic realm and have been all the better for it. Metaphysical idealism, the belief that truth belongs to the supernatural realm alone, has the unfortunate side effect of sucking all value out of this world. Objective realism places truth and value right here on earth and in this life, where they properly belong. Truth is what is, and value is in the goals we pursue.

So throw away those pills, or take that gun away from your head, and start living your life in the here and now. If God is dead — and there are many philosophers and scientists throughout history who have dispensed with the need for a Higher Power entirely — then let's return our attention to living the life we're in now. Nihilism is an error that consists of deleting God from transcendentalism and then wailing that God's death has killed all meaning and value. Don't look for meaning and value in a supernatural realm that has disappeared, if it has ever even existed at all. It's all here. Truth is in reality, and value is in your life. You might find that there was never really any need for Higher Powers at all.