One of the common points that a secular humanist has is the argument that God is more important than people.
That’s a good point, and one that I still have some affinity with. Prioritizing the concept of God over and above people is problematic for the secular humanist.
However, I’m not at all sure that agreement makes me an anti-theist if I am not prioritizing God over people, but rather examining the concept of God as something that a lot of human beings, who I am working so hard to help, constructed this being for their own reasons.
If I am a humanist, and dedicated to the well-being of individual human beings, I have to wrestle with the fact that human beings created God. God wasn’t invented in a vacuum of human desires, wants, needs, etc. It was built by them. The concept of God, as our creation, tells us a lot about ourselves.
What that means for me is that if I am going to prioritize human beings above all else, I can’t walk away from the question of what human beings see in God, and why billions of people seem to need this being they created.
Although theists may see God as personal, as a nonbeliever I see God as a philosophical construct that isn’t real. And as I examine that construct and try to figure out how it functions, it becomes hard for me to be an anti-theist and humanist, because I see God as a human construction that not just a stray few, but billions, of people have found necessary, for some reason or other, in carrying out their lives.
I’ve discussed, previously, how individuals such as Barack Obama have taken constructs even as problematic as the concept of “grace” in Christianity and turned them into messages that powerfully impacted me, as an atheist, because he treated these concepts as constructs of human beings — as a kind of language that human beings use to communicate — and in doing so he gave a message to a church that could also be given in secular language without really losing any of its points, although he used the words “God” and “Jesus.” It was fascinating, but not surprising, to see how this could be done, despite my discomfort with those words (the word “Jesus” still can put me in a bad mood, depending on context).
So yes. I see myself as a secular humanist, and I agree, in a sense, that God is not more important than people. However, God is an expression that billions of people find necessary for their lives, so if I care about these people, I think it may be important for me to know why the expression is important and necessary to them. This does not entail undue politeness while religious people run roughshod over our rights. It’s simply an attempt to understand the concept by asking why so many people believe it. And in answering this question, I’m also curious as to how we can fulfill those needs, as a secular humanist, while enriching human well-being.
Here’s the truth, in my mind. Our decision to prioritize human beings is a decision. It’s not a “just so” fact. It’s a decision that we’ve decided to make for our mutual well-being. Humanism isn’t a given; it’s a construct. The value of that construct is in the lives it enriches, but the decision to uphold that value is unnecessary and based on human preferences.
Think about it. Is it true that human beings are more important than animals? Maybe the reflex is to say “yes,” and leave it at that. And for the day-to-day life, that simple affirmative seems to be plenty good enough. But just for a moment, I want to push it further. I want to ask why. And when I do that in different places, I tend to get reactions of personal preference, personal hopes, dreams, aspirations, and desires. It’s not so much an objective fact that human beings are more important than animals as it is a subjective conclusion, albeit one I share.
There are many philosophical paths one may travel in humanism to privilege humans above animals, and one of them is the philosophical concept of God. As a secular humanist, I don’t think that concept is real, but I recognize that part (not the whole, of course, but part) of the reason the concept exists in many minds is to justify the importance they place on themselves and others as human beings. As a humanist, I don’t particularly think this prioritization needs any justification outside of a construction of human consensus, but I realize that this construction is done in different places in different ways. I don’t believe God is real, which means I see “God” as a mechanism, a function, a tool, an expression of the human beings I care about. And in some places, “God” fills in the gap for caring for other human beings. I, on the hand, might fill in this gap with something I call “love” or “a sense of connectedness” or something similar.
Now, to move on a bit from the anti-theism/non-anti-theism/theism debate for a moment, I’d like to point out that one of the major risks we take in prioritizing human beings above other living things is of making a “human” an exclusionary construct. To some extent this is obviously unavoidable; we have to distinguish human beings from other living things somehow. But in the past, people have indicated that, just as gorillas are subhuman, so black people are subhuman. They may be close to humans, sure, but they’re a bit less and thus can be treated like inferiors. This phenomenon is not limited to religion or the lack thereof; infamously, in the early twentieth century this criticism of black people was made by many nonreligious intellectuals and rationalized by theories in evolutionary psychology (and some may continue to make similar arguments today).
In many ways, our current dominant understanding that human beings are above the animals, and our definition of human beings as all equal, is a social construct. And it’s a construct that may take various means to preserve, in different contexts, for different psychologies, for different people. At the same time, it is something that I, as a member of a traditionally marginalized group, am very much interested in.
This, to me, is the bedrock of humanism. The harm to human beings, the inequality between human beings, is something that is, to me, the greatest moral wrong. And I’m willing to work to prevent that “by any means necessary.”
You might have first heard that expression from Malcom X. But the truth is that Malcolm X was quoting Jean-Paul Sartre’s character Hoederer, who said, “I was not the one to invent lies: they were created in a society divided by class and each of us inherited lies when we were born. It is not by refusing to lie that we will abolish lies: it is by eradicating class by any means necessary.” In my mind, even though the myth of human superiority may, indeed, be a myth or “lie” in a sense, in order to prevent harm I’m willing to protect that myth and insulate human beings from harm.
While a more accurate picture of the world may empower us to produce better results for all concerned, the language, feelings, and concepts we use to navigate this accurate picture are based on us; they come from us. We’re fundamentally in charge of them. There is no God — there is just the need some need that human beings feel for the concept. And when I say I am not an anti-theist, what I mean is that I am trying to understand that need and that I am not necessarily in favor of eradicating the world of it. Indeed, I am not sure such a thing is possible; it is extremely difficult to determine what another person does and does not need.
What I am against — as a secular humanist who has brought into, as a just-so and uncompromising subjectively constructed fact, the concept that all human beings are equal — is any concept that leads people to treat some people as less valuable or “human” than others. Insofar as the idea of God serves as a construct by human beings to protect the status of human beings as valuable (which some liberal theists claim it is), I have less of a beef. But where it – or any other concept – seeks to dethrone this status of human beings as equally valuable, especially if it is done in a way that takes away the rights of human beings in our current culture – I begin to have a problem. My focus is on harm to human beings, not on God for its own sake.
What I’m saying is that I suspect the concept of God is a construct by human beings to protect the status of human beings, and insofar as it serves this function it seems necessary for people who want to prevent harm to human beings to deconstruct this concept carefully. The concept of God as something that is wrong “just because” seems somewhat dangerous to me; if we are asking culture to make a radical change, it seems healthy for us to be somewhat mindful of the place that God currently takes up in culture. Not just what this construct of human beings is doing poorly, but also what this construct might be propping up or what desires in human beings it manifests.
Even though looking at God in this way is not anti-theistic, it doesn’t seem to prioritize God above people. It is to look at God as a manifestation of people, to examine what we can learn about human beings from the way their construct of God functions in culture. Because if we’re humanists, the ideas that human beings construct have some importance, insofar as we are pursuing the construction of ideas that protect equality, especially where these ideas necessarily lie outside the bounds of bare scientific fact – as the concept that human beings have equal value does.
Hopefully that makes a bit of sense. I may talk about this more later, but for now, thanks for reading.
P.S. I have a Patreon, in case you want to help me keep doing what I’m doing.