Virtue Quest

Mike Flynn, author of a few speculative fiction novels, including the fascinating Eifelheim, asks the question in the style of a medieval academic debate.

A quick summary, as I understand his argument: classical virtue theory provides a basis for morality among atheists; but most atheists these days reject, not only God, but also any notion of natural good. Therefore, atheists can act morally, but have largely destroyed their own philosophical basis for doing so.

My take: most of us, with or without God, are hypocrites. I do all sorts of stuff I know is wrong; and when I do good things, I don’t always have good reasons for it. So I would separate out the question into two parts:

1. Can atheists act morally? Yes. Experience shows that most atheists do good stuff most of the time.
2. Do atheists have a philosophical basis for moral behavior? That’s a question we can leave to the academics to debate.

For myself, I find my own motivation for acting morally is usually based on what other people will think of me, rather than religious motives. Not that that’s the best reason for doing anything; but at least it’s good to know how weak my moral reasoning can be.

Today, Ash Wednesday, begins the season of Lent in the Catholic Church. It’s a season of prayer and fasting and almsgiving, imitating Christ’s forty days in the desert, and preparing to celebrate his passion and resurrection at Easter.

Some Christian traditions, such as the Orthodox, have a very strict discipline for Lent. We Catholics have it fairly light in terms of required discipline: two days of actual fasting – Ash Wednesday and Good Friday – and no meat on any Fridays. But we’re encouraged to take on other penances ourselves.

So, here’s how I’m going about the whole Lenten thing.

Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving

Prayer is the foundation and the heart of Lent. But not just any prayer. It’s a prayer of testing. Jesus went into the desert to be tested, so this prayer is for strength and endurance in the face of testing, in the face of temptation. It’s also a prayer of abandonment to God. It’s giving him permission to test me, and to challenge me in ways I haven’t necessarily planned for.

So, I’m taking up an old form of prayer: the Liturgy of the Hours. I’ve prayed this way before, and I’ve taken a break from it for a little while. But it’s very appropriate for Lent because it constantly recalls me to the very basics of my dependence on God.

As for fasting, I’m going to give up salty snacks (like chips and peanuts and such) as well as desserts at home. These are things that I really do long for, that I’ll notice are gone from my diet, and that will remind me that “man does not live on bread alone.” And that’s the main point of fasting: to rely on God’s care at a fundamental level. I don’t make my own food. God, ultimately, is the one who feeds me.

Also, on the not-so-foodlike-stuff level, I’m giving up computer games. I enjoy the heck out of them, but they too easily distract me from what’s truly important in life.

I’ll be honest: I don’t quite know what to do about almsgiving. I do make regular charitable donations from my income. I probably could devote a bit more money to it, but I don’t have all that much to give. So I’ve been thinking about doing some kind of volunteer work. I know there’s plenty that needs doing. Just not quite sure where to focus.

If you have any ideas, I’m open to them. I figure I’ll talk it through with my spiritual director when I next see him.

In any case, giving alms is like the other two Lenten disciplines: it forces me to put my trust in God. Not only that I can make do with less, but that God can give great things to others through me.

I don’t know how many of my readers celebrate Lent, but if you want to share what you’re doing, I think it would make great conversation in the comments box!

Some sectors of the web are astir over Brit Hume advising Tiger Woods to abandon Buddhism and embrace Christianity:

I don’t know Hume and have not followed Woods much. But I have had conversations with many of my friends about whether it matters which faith or religion one follows.

Faith as a noun and as a verb

Some of my friends think that the important thing is to have faith – any faith at all. They think that spirituality is a fundamental part of human life, and that it’s not healthy to neglect or avoid it. But the actual content of that spirituality, whether Christian or Buddhist or Native American or some mixture of anything one finds, doesn’t really matter.

What’s important is to have faith rather than what faith one has; the verb of faith trumps the noun.

At the same time, the recent controversies about politicians (such as Patrick Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi) claiming to be faithful to the Catholic Church while opposing some moral teachings of the Church indicate that content – at least by name – really is important.

In other words, the verb defines the meaning of the noun.

Meanwhile, traditional religions such as the Catholic Church teach that the noun should guide the verb. That is, one’s actions should be based on the content of one’s belief. And, moreover, the quality of one’s belief can therefore be discerned in one’s actions.

But don’t they all teach the same thing?

If the content of various religions was the same across the board, there would be very little conflict between religions, and almost none within religions. But this clearly is not the case. Content matters a great deal to a great many people, and for good reason.

I am a Catholic myself, and have done some academic theological study. I admit to being woefully ignorant about Buddhism or Islam or most other major world religions, but I do know that they differ from Catholic Christianity on a basic level.

Catholic teaching, for example, says that our ultimate destiny is communion in love with God. Buddhism, on the other hand, teaches that our ultimate goal is to end they cycle of rebirth through extinction of oneself. Islam sets forth a paradise including a vision of God, but that seems to maintain an absolute separation between God and the believer.

These different visions of ultimate destiny tend toward different attitudes toward morality: a Catholic approach emphasizes love and hope; a Buddhist approach stresses peace and equanimity; Islam sees morality as duty.

Learning from differences

Now, I’m convinced that no religion could have prospered for centuries on end without some insight into the truth of human nature and the world we inhabit. So I think there’s a great deal that the Catholic Church can learn from other religions, and vice versa.

I also know that, despite the differences, we hold many things in common. Most (if not all) world religions seek to draw the individual out of him- or herself to an attentiveness and care for others and for the world itself. This means we can collaborate on all sorts of philanthropic or environmental projects.

But in the end, reality is one; and different religions describe it in contradictory ways. It really matters whether we reincarnate, or whether we rise again in Christ Jesus. It really matters whether we are allowed to eat pork or any meat at all or only vegetables.

It is theoretically possible that all religions on earth are wrong; but at most, one is right. So I see nothing but good in sorting out exactly which one – if any – is true.

I love etymology, the study of the origins of words. But it doesn’t take much study to discover that “holiday” is just “holy day” mashed together. Now, that’s easy to swallow for a religious person. There are even some who deliberately abstain from the shopping and decorations and caroling and what not that pervade the last couple months of every year, focusing instead on the particular celebrations of their religion. But is there anything genuinely or universally holy about the “holiday” season?

Holy days in the secular world?

I mentioned in an earlier post that Thanksgiving really strikes me as a holy day. And, being a Catholic, Christmas is of course a big deal for me and my family. But these two days are, I think, holy in very different ways.

Thanksgiving is holy in a kind of universal way, while Christmas is holy in a very specific and particular way.

See, Thomas Aquinas proposes that religion is a natural virtue, not one that depends on any particular creed or belief. He considers it a sub-virtue of justice. He doesn’t mean by this that a court should find you guilty of not spending enough time on your knees or of missing church on Sunday. But he does mean that everybody has a duty to respect and honor the holy and the divine.

And one of the main ways of honoring the holy and divine is through festivals and celebrations. We give thanks for the good things that we have received, and we give credit to the power beyond ourselves which has given those good things to us.

Even if we don’t all agree on the name that power goes by, it is a matter of justice to acknowledge that we have not and could not make or earn or create all the good things we have by our own power. And that’s something that even atheists and Baptists should be able to agree on.

And they do: by celebrating Thanksgiving Day.

Religious religion

Christmas, on the other hand, is a particularly Christian holiday. It’s only because the vast majority of the early American colonists came from Christian backgrounds that government offices and banks and most other businesses close for Christmas.

For myself, I celebrate Christmas because I believe that God became human and was born of the Virgin Mary roughly two millenia ago. I know Jews who celebrate Hanukkah because they believe that God once blessed their temple with light and continues to bless their people. I don’t know people of other faiths well enough to speak for them, but I expect that they celebrate various feasts for similar reasons: because they see some particular way that the holy and divine has touched this world, and perhaps has touched their lives directly.

The virtue of religion

By setting aside time, and by celebrating with special foods and with songs or dancing or trees or costumes or any kind of ritual – by dedicating some part of our lives to religious celebration, we build the habit of keeping in touch with those parts of reality which are beyond our ability to know completely, the source of good and the ground of our existence. This is the virtue of religion: to acknowledge and to honor the holy and divine.

For my small handful of international readers, this week the U.S. is celebrating its Thanksgiving holiday. It’s one of the few holidays on the national calendar that truly deserves the name: it is a day dedicated to a holy act – giving thanks for the good we have received.

The attitude of gratitude

I find it ironic that a festival for giving thanks has both taken deep cultural root in the U.S. and even has become a civil holiday. Why? Because “the American dream” is so rooted in self-reliance, in pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps, in the notion of independence. The American ideal is to take what one earns rather than to receive what one is given.

But I think most people – American or otherwise – are too wise to believe all that. I’m certainly aware of how much I have been given without a hint of deserving or earning on my part: my very life, to begin with; my education; the love of my friends and family; the benefits of growing up in the late twentieth century in the wealthiest nation on the planet.

I think there are two ways to show gratitude: first is to rejoice at the gift, and to celebrate the one who gave you the gift; the second way is to use the gift, to unwrap it and give it a place in your life. In other words, when Grandma gives you a sweater, you tell her “Thank you” and then you wear it the next time you see her.

Developing the virtue of gratitude

For much of my life, I felt guilty about all the gifts I’d been given. I actually hated my birthday and Christmas because I had done nothing to deserve the presents I received. I somehow felt like they weren’t actually mine if I hadn’t earned them.

In other words, I’d let the “American ideal” overcome the natural order of things in my life.

Needless to say, “Thank you” did not come easily from my lips – until I realized that gifts are the most natural thing in the world. I realized that gifts always come before accomplishments or “earnings”. And that almost all the anxiety and frustration in my life came from refusing to receive anything as a gift.

So, over the past few years, I’ve been practicing the virtue of gratitude. I don’t mean just saying “Thank you.” I mean pushing aside that feeling of unworthiness and focusing on the goodness of the gift. This is even true of gifts that I don’t want or that are useless to me: I can focus on the love that someone is expressing by giving me something.

And, like all virtues, it grows with practice. By receiving small gifts, physical gifts, I find it’s easier to see the less tangible gifts. I find it’s easier to rejoice in my family, my friends, even co-workers and colleagues. I find it’s easier to see what is good in my church, my country, my home. I find it easier to give thanks for my own life, and I want to use my life for a good purpose.