Atheism’s Greatest Lie is That Religion and Society are Separable
When today’s thinkers pontificate that the future of religiosity amidst the post-modern situation of the 21st Century is one wherein it becomes obsolete, they fail to keep in mind that religion has thus far, established the societal conditions that paved the way for the interrogation of its own role in human society to occur in the first place. It was from the crux of questioning the authenticity of existence that hierarchies could be justified and consequentially, birth modernity. This metaxical crossroad brings to mind the thesis of Anatoly Lunacharsky, “[y]ou must love and deify matter above everything else, [love and deify] the corporeal nature or the life of your body as the primary cause of things, as existence without a beginning or end, which has been and forever will be.” The fact is that the process of deification mothered human civilization, and as such, religion will remain an inseparable guide to humanity for the foreseeable future.
Religion possesses the Earth like a spectre, exposes the authenticity of life for all its inhabitants, and establishes what is tangible in the relation between the mortal and that which is beyond mortal. The aspiration for an objective truth (i.e. the best way to live life) was born out of a fundamental desire to achieve divine virtue; it has shaped politics, history, economics, science, the arts, and all other important aspects of organizing human society. Law, the backbone of any society or government, was recorded to have first been introduced by the Babylonians — and even they believed that a divine being of boundless justice, Shamash, gave their king, Hammurabi, the covenant that they pledged to abide by.
Consequently, it is not surprising that the reality of man and his future is one which conceives the obliteration of the ego as a general historical point. To most religions, ego does not matter. From the deserts of Jerusalem to the mountains of the Himalayas; from the authoritative dicta of the Bible to the archaic pedagogy of the Vedas, it seems that the human conception of achieving a divine state of existence almost always involves detachment from the primordial (often fleeting) desires of man, acknowledgement of the temporal nature of suffering, and determination of the best methods of alleviating the burdens of those who one permeates existence with. The condition and needs of the self are rightfully cast aside in order to exalt the character of the society as a whole.
Atheism exalts the authenticity of existence without the presence of the divine in bypassing the ritual and virtual sacrifices demanded by religion. It perceives imagined enemies to the development of man by immortalizing the corporeal nature of ego. By challenging the very structural relevance of religion, the emergent philosophy, ideology, conscious culture of atheism destroys itself, obliterates its own essence, and denies that the foundations of religion’s pedagogy is a precondition of atheism’s conceptual existence. As a result, the total erosion of a religious lifestyle is near impossible to achieve. Organizations are condemned and the authorities of sects are challenged but alternative hierarchies or pedagogical traditions dissimilar to that established by religion are scarcely presented. Indeed, this is why a collective oblivescence of the Analects from the civil structure of East Asian societies or a vicissitude of politics on the Arabian peninsula without blame being cast on the historical attitude of one particular ethnic group towards another’s during the succession to Muhammad seems to approach the unfathomable.
Thus, the most important question that will concern the next 20 to 30 years is not whether or not religion will play an influential role, but rather, will religion preside over the affairs of the society of tomorrow in the form of a violent, exclusive imposition of a universal truth or pervade humanity through a benign, inclusive assimilation of the truths of all faiths?
As a tree cannot survive without its roots, human civilization, especially post-colonial Asian civilization, will not progress without religion because whilst our names for God differ by and large from place to place, our shared nature as human beings — that of a tendency to belong and submit — will ultimately stay the same.
