The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality

This one is way out of our genre, so it probably is not be up your international spy thriller, crime novel alley.

“The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality” will only appeal to you if you are very interested in what the title suggests is its theme. This 2006 book explores the misunderstanding of so many people in the western culture that one must have a faith in deity in order to be spiritual. He initiates the book by defining God and religion, God being transcendent, religion being immanent (of this world). God is reputed to be perfect, and religion could never be so. After he poses the question, “Can we do without religion?” Comte-Sponville opines that we can do fine without religion, but we cannot do without communion, fidelity or love. He writes that love is more precious than hope or despair and that there is no need to wait until we are saved to be human.

The author announces that no one can either prove or disprove the existence of God. He does not claim to know that God does not exist, but he believes that he does not, and he titles himself a “nondogmatic atheist.” He wrote that physicists teach us that being is energy. “But to believe in God is not to believe in an energy; it is to believe in Someone! And that – that will, that love, that Someone – the God of Abraham and Jacob, the God of Jesus or the God of Mahomet – is what I personally do not believe in.”

He summarized the three arguments in favor of God’s existence, all of which were deemed to be quite weak, as well as three stronger arguments against God’s existence. Epicurus was quoted: “Either God wanted to eliminate evil and could not; or he could and did not want to; or he neither could nor wanted to; or he could and wanted to. If he wanted to and could not, he is impotent, which cannot be the case for God; if he could and did not want to, he is evil, which is foreign to God’s nature. If he neither could nor wanted to, he is both impotent and evil, in which case he is not God. If he both wanted to and could – the only hypothesis that corresponds to God – where does evil come from, or why did God not eliminate it.” Lucretius added, “Life is too difficult, humanity too weak, labor too exhausting, pleasures too frivolous or rare, pain too frequent or atrocious, chance too unfair and haphazard for us to be able to believe that so imperfect a world is of divine origin!”

One of my own rather frequent remarks is that I’m not impressed with our species, and Comte-Sponville picks up on that point when he describes human mediocrity: “Let’s say I don’t have a sufficiently lofty conception of humanity in general or myself in particular to believe that a God could be at the origin of this species and this individual. Everywhere I look, there is too much mediocrity, too much pettiness, too much of what Montaigne called nothingness or vanity – ‘Of all the vanities, the vainest is man.’ What a poor result for omnipotence!”

One of the author’s most moving passages was in his discussion of the term acceptance. He told the story of Etty Hillesum, and he quoted her just a few days before her death at Auschwitz: “People sometimes say to me, ‘Oh, yes, you look on the bright side of everything.’ What a platitude! Everything is perfectly good, and at the same time perfectly bad…. I have never felt that I had to force myself to see the bright side of things; everything is always perfectly good, just as it is. Everything situation, no matter how deplorable, is an absolute and contains good and evil within itself. By this I simply mean that I find the expression ‘seeing the bright side of everything’ just as repugnant as ‘taking advantage of everything.’” He commented that the suffering and death of Ms. Hillesum “in no way obliterates what she lived, what she called ‘acceptance,’ ‘acquiescence’ or ‘comprehension,’ and which is very akin to love.”

This is a scholarly work that refers to a wide range of literature and philosophy, but like so many books about atheism, this one is overly intellectualized. It seems to me that atheists, like myself, spend far more time talking about God than many of my very religious friends. Still, given my own interests in the topic, I’m glad that I read this, and I come away from the book feeling less defensive about my own atheism – let others prove that God exists before I get into an argument that he does not.