Liveblogging TLBoAS - Part Two Pages 16-44

Posted by Siamang on: 01.18.2008 /

By Siamang.

I’ve been quite impressed with André Comte-Sponville’s “The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality”. So this is the second in a series of follow along blogging as I read this (short, 200 pages, 3 chapters!) book. I encourage others, atheists and Christians alike, to pick up this simple, engaging and positive book. I’m especially interested in what Christians think about Comte-Sponville’s unique tone.





I hope to get a little further than 15 pages this time. I wanted, in the last installment to give a feeling of tone. In this next piece, I want to talk about what Comte-Sponville is setting up. His next section of the first chapter is labled “No Society Can Do Without Communion….” and it’s followed by a section called “…or Without Fidelity”. What does he mean by this?

Comte-Sponville talks about the definition of religion, and ties it to the definition of a society… a group with a set of beliefs that holds them together. Must those beliefs be supernatural in nature? No, argues Comte-Sponville. Humanity, freedom and justice can be ideals, not gods. We can revere them, respect them, even give up our lives for these ideals without personifying them into gods.

Then what does Comte-Sponville mean by saying we need fidelity? How does he define it. Here’s a particularly good passage:

I ceased believing in God long ago. Our society, in Europe at least, believes in him less and less. This is no reason, to use the jaded proverb, to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Renouncing a God who has met his social demise (as a Nietzschean sociologist might put it) does not compel us to renounce the moral, cultural and spiritual values that have been formulated in his name. We all know that, historically speaking, these values grew out of the great religions (and specifically in our own civilizations, the three great monotheisms). There is no denying that they were transmitted by these religions for centuries (and specifically, in our countries, by the Catholic and Protestant churches.) This does not prove, however, that these values need God in order to subsist. On the contrary, everything tends to prove that we need them — and ethics, a sense of communion and fidelity– in order to subsist in a way we find humanly acceptable.

Faith is a belief; fidelity, in the sense I give the word, is more like an attachment, a commitment, a gratitude. Faith involves one or several gods; fidelity involves values, a history, a community. The former calls on imagination or grace; the latter on memory and will.

I just want to interject that I like what he’s done here. For a non-absolutist atheist reader, it’s a breath of fresh air: he has not denied the possibility of grace. Futher, he talks about how religion has shaped our society, and how we absolutely need a heck of a lot of what it brings. This must be nearly impossible for American atheists to see, but it’s probably exactly what a good deal of Europe is facing right now.

Of course, faith and fidelity can go hand in hand — this is what I call piety, which is the legitimate goal of believers. They can also come separately, however. This is what distinguishes impiety (the absence of faith) from nihilism (the absence of fidelity). It would be a mistake to confuse the two! When faith is lost, fidelity remains. When both are lost, only the void remains — or calamity.

He continues with a warning about twin dangers of nihlism and barbarism, and attempts to make the case that communion, fidelity and a distrust of ideological absolutism — religious and secular — are the antidote.