Atheist Empathy, or “How I Got My Conscience Back.” [View All]

I’m going to tread in dangerous territory with this entry. For one thing, I’m going to lay bare a lot of the inside of my brain. And I’m always a little wary of making myself too vulnerable in front of the impersonal, anonymous world of the internet. For another, I’m going to admit something that will make a lot of Christians do a little happy dance — something that might make some non-believers a little uncomfortable. But I’m going to end up in a very beautiful place. I hope my gentle readers will take the whole journey with me, and quote mine this piece sparingly. ’Cause I’m going to give the haters a couple of gems.

Here’s the first. I believe an atheist materialist morality begins with the assumption that no human has “inherent value.” However, I believe that beginning with this assumption allows us to reach an endpoint of human empathy and sympathy unattainable by theists. More directly, I believe that beginning with no intrinsic value in life, we can actually have MORE respect and love for our fellow man in the end.

Here’s another gem for the haters: I believe that humans are nothing more than very intelligent animals. If we think of them as “lab rats” — that is, detach ourselves from empathy and examine their thoughts and emotions as nothing more than reactions to their environment, they become incredibly predictable. More importantly, we discover that what we think of as a human’s “character” is little more than an aggregate of their (predictable) reactions to environmental stimuli over which they had no control.

In a nutshell, this is what a lot of social science is all about. We do studies where we get a large sample of subjects, put them through some sort of environmental manipulation, and observe the results. The (in)famous Milgram Experiment is a great example. The people who “shocked” their “peers,” even when they were apparently in great pain and distress? They were not bad people. They were just people. And if we were to replicate the experiment a hundred times, we’d probably get very similar results in all cases, even though we’d have a completely new group of subjects every time. And that’s exactly the point. The Milgram Experiment and studies like it prove that each of us really is very much like all the rest of us.

http://livinglifewithoutanet.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/atheist-empathy-or-how-i-got-my-conscience-back/

Thought-provoking conclusions.