Atheist Humility
August 21, 2014
by Daniel Fincke
Christians will often say that being an atheist means “thinking you’re your own god” or “acknowledging no higher power than yourself“. Christians obviously think that God is our all powerful and perfectly good creator and that we as humans are merely his creations. He didn’t need to create us. There’s nothing He requires us to do that He cannot do Himself. He creates us purely out of a free decision. Since he’s so much greater than us in both power and goodness, it should put in perspective how relatively weak and morally imperfect we humans are. Since we utterly depend on Him to exist at all or to have or exercise any of our human powers, we must gratefully trust in His grace. For without Him we are nothing. And so Christians talk about how they humbly know that they can do nothing of their own power. And so we atheists must be the opposite. We must be the polar opposite of humble. We must arrogantly believe we are all powerful gods who know everything and who may do whatever evil things we want.
But of course that’s not true. Some atheists are arrogant or think they’re smarter than other people of course. But the same goes for some Christians and for some anything. That’s not an atheist problem, it’s a human problem. But what I want to look at is specifically the run of views and values that representatively make up atheistic humanism and point out the thread of humility in what we actually say and actually think.
We do not think we’re the most powerful beings in the universe. Christians reveal they know this when they employ an opposite and contradictory talking point that says we atheists are a bunch of nihilists who think we just crawled up from the ooze and there’s no point to anything and then we die.
Atheistic humanists are neither narcissists nor nihilists. We do believe there are things more powerful than us as individuals. There’s collective humanity. There are institutions. There are the laws of the universe which we can only learn to obey to our own purposes but never change ourselves. And we know that we’re fragile beings made of countless constituent molecules made of further constituent particles that we depend on for our being.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/camelswithhammers/2014/08/atheist-humility/#ixzz3BXTUKMH7