Hello. Please bear in mind that l live in a secular country (as most nations are), l don’t believe in political religion, and l consider full adherence to religion to be contradictory, because religion has to majorly compromise to fit inside a secular state. My point is: I’m discussing religion as an ideal.
Quick note on definitions of the two beliefs being discussed:
- I speak as someone brought up in orthodox Islam (i.e. the Main Body of believers) rather than a sect e.g. Shi’ism, but l don’t think it matters.
- Atheists may say their belief is a lack of belief in religion, but that’s not the traditional definition. Traditionally, it was a positive belief that there is zero quantity of Gods. Moreover, a chair is a lack of Theism. Is a chair Atheist?
I feel Islam trumps Atheism in the form of Secular Humanism (as opposed to the Hard Nihilism side of Atheism) as follows:
1. Only religion has legitimate claim to morality. Non-religion is a squatter in the multi-chambered mansion of morality.
That is because there are two core logics: Theist and Atheist. Theist logic admits to infinity, Atheist logic does not. At that level, they are not strictly Theist or Atheist.
However, as the logic becomes clothed in the flesh of reason, it pans out as Theist and Atheist morality as follows:
ATHEIST MORALITY (JUST ETHICS REALLY):
(i) If the universe is finite, or even if our existence is finite, we will die and then nothing. Therefore, for there to be “something”, is sentimental, pointless whimsy. The only logical response is suicide, i.e. cut to the chase and arrive at the conclusion (death) pronto. Not even walking to one’s death would be acceptable, taking time walking would be sentimental, one must sprint to their death. This Hard Nihilism as l imagine it, is the only reasonable form of Atheism.
(ii) We each have a soul, and that soul can only be explained as a fragment of God’s infinite soul, like a finite arc of an infinitely large circle. That soul wants to live because life-urge is of the opposite logic to suicide and so the life-urge is of the logic which admits to infinity, just as suicide is of the logic which rejects infinity. The soul is of infinity, and thus opposes suicide, and thus urges to life.
(iii) Therefore as a subconscious concession to infinity, because all humans have a soul, the Atheist might live for pleasure: the undulating levels of cortisol and neurotransmitters, along a time axis = a forestalling suicide for the pursuit of pleasure, and thus a person will bide their time from one high to the next.
(iv) This of course leads to depraved acts, e.g. a morbidly obese person (living from tasty pizza to tasty pizza) could grab someone’s baby and bite its head off and chew the brains - not that they ever would, but this would be a gross illustration of hedonism, it is not reductio ad absurdum, because the absurdity follows via logic and reason, l think reductio ad absurdum is only a logical fallacy if the reductio itself is illogical.
All vices become logical as per Thrasymachus justifying the tyrant, for the tyrant lives life to the max, and gets things done in the world, and eventually creates societal equilibrium - Goodfellas: “one day some of the kids from the neighbourhood carried my mother’s groceries all then way home … outta respect”. Even then, it’s inescapable that the only worthwhile happiness is infinite happiness that goes beyond death, so we boomerang back to the logic of suicide we reject infinity.
(v) Societal living demands constraints. So we end up with ethical codes of good living and because nobody can sincerely fully commit to the codes of good living (e.g. Humanism) whilst rejecting God, we have laws that take the ethical codes to a bare minimum. The police enforce these so that’s the hard limit.
THEIST MORALITY:
(vi) If infinie God exists the our existence is contingent on his, and thus potentially infinite so long as he wills
(vii) In fact, Islam promises that our existence winds up in infinite heaven or hell
(viii) If infinite God exists, then greed and rivalry in material increase are delegitimised, they are illogical given infinite resources
(ix) In fact, all vices become illogical. Virtues are realised, morals are legitimised, logical. The soul is listened to.
(x) Islam teaches that no soul is tasked beyond what it can bear - Qur’an 2:286.
Therefore Islam has legitimate claim to Morality and its code of conduct IS attainable.
2. No matter how sweet an Atheist code of conduct may be, it is philosophically illegitimate, i.e. has no basis in reason or logic. As such, it is impracticable.
3. There are 2 ways l can think of that a code becomes impracticable:
(A) Nobody will believe in it in their minds, they’d be in disqueting doubt about it
(B) Nobody can financially accomodate / physically perform what is required
4. Humanism may set out a nice pattern of behaviour, but for the Atheist it’s just an ethical code and even as an ethical code, it’s impracticable because:
(A) The Atheist logic is that, as we are bounded by finitenes, it’s all pointless. Suicide is the hard logic. Moreover, the Soul will be paradoxically crying out for life. The result will be an extended time axis (instead of instant suicide) governed by vices instead of morals. In other words: Worldly Hedonism, living one’s best life, gorging on pleasure, as per personal tastes. Thus the mind is in disquieting doubt, due to the layers of contradiction (suicide vs. soul wanting life vs. hedonism vs. code of Humanism vs. legal limitations) under a Humanist code of ethics.
(B) It could be financially unfeasible, i.e. whatever your code is, l could add All-You-Can-Eat free chocolate per person. Also, if your code is that everyone has a right to self fulfilment, then who pays for the Young Offenders’ Rehabilitation Project’s Africa safari? It’s the taxpayer. Or the central bank prints more money, and to keep inflation down, we exploit another country with trade tariffs or mining rights etc. Just so our arsonists can find their happy whilst on a probationary correctional course (aka the expensive African safari).
5. What about conduct in non-standard harsh situatons? Islam teaches the best conduct in its scripture and thus its believers are (according to Islam) “the best Ummah” (community) that ever lived. A crucial test of this is war. We can look at various communist and secular conflicts, as well as the conduct of Muslims in wars of religion. All the mass casualties l seem to recall, are from secular conflicts. Muslims don’t do atrocities either - the famous terror group people speak of today (to name them is to acknowledge them) are considered “a collection of sins in Islam” i.e. they do whatever is against the religion. Pakistan’s butchery in Bangladesh’s War of Independence is debatable. Many Hindus were slaughtered - but so were many Muslims fighting for independence, and the intelligentsia were systematically killed off, and Pakistan wasn’t recognisably an Islamic caliphate as such - this is not a “No True Scotsman” fallacy, it really was not, and is not, an Islamic caliphate and its actions were prohibited by Islamic rules of war. So yes there was a lot of killing but it was essentially political, secular, with religous overtones, not even undertones but overtones. Note also that most Muslims consider nukes to be against Islam as they are absolutely indiscriminate and Muslims aren’t permitted to kill noncombatants, and if a person kills an infant they almost certainly will never get even within smelling distance of heaven.
If we look at this list: List of wars by death toll - Wikipedia
Here are the top 33, but the list goes goes to 130, with #130, the White Lotus Rebellion being a religious conflict in China which claimed 0.1 million lives.
We see the following overtly secular conflicts, in order:
#1 World War II - 70–85 million killed
#2 Mongol invasions and conquests - 20–60 million killed [The Mongols were Tengri Shamanists, their victims were overwhelmingly Muslim, Christian, Confucian, but it wasn’t a religious conflict as such, because the
#3 Three Kingdoms - 34 million killed
#4 Taiping Rebellion - 20–30 million killed
#5 Manchu Conquest of China - 25 million killed
#6 World War I - 15–22 million killed
#7 Conquests of Timur (he was supposedly Muslim but he destroyed all of the Islamic empires around him, he also destroyed Georgia and defeated Russian Muscovy a few times l think, but his prime victims were other Muslims) - 7–20 million killed
#8 An Lushan rebellion - 13 million killed
We see the following overtly religious conflicts, in order - including conflicts between religions and communism:
#9 Spanish conquest of Mexico - 10.5 million killed [Christians on the attack]
#10 Russian Civil War - 7–10 million killed [Atheists on the attack]
#12 Crusades - 1-9 million killed [Christians on the attack after initial Muslim invasion, the atrocities were mostly if not all done by Christians]
#13 Thirty Years’ War - 4.5–8 million killed
#14 Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire - 7.7 million killed [Christians on the attack]
#15 Reconquista - 7 million killed [Christians on the attack]
#20 Deccan wars - 4.6–5 million killed [Muslims vs. Hindus, unsure of the dynamics, but Muslims may have begun hostilities]
#24 French Wars of Religion - 2–4 million killed
#27 Soviet–Afghan War - 1–3 million killed [Atheists on the attack, Muslims rebelling]
#28 Delhi Conquest of North India - 0.5–3 million killed [Muslims vs. Hindus]
#32 Ethiopian Civil War and Eritrean War of Independence - 1.75–2 million killed [Atheists on the attack, though to be fair Haile Selassie was a lunatic]
#33 Russo-Circassian War and Caucasian War - 1.5–2 million killed [Christians on the attack, the mostly Muslim and minority Christian Circassians were nearly exterminated, it was a genocide]
Muslims were conceivably only attacking in #20 and #28.
Muslims were being attacked in #12, #14, #27, #33
Sorry but a quick edit - this might be of interes - in response to somebody trolling me, here is my cataloguing of info about Islamic conduct in war, and the rewards of Paradise, including females that are a new non-human creation, and martyrs being transformed into green birds
6. Islamic conduct even extends to our treatment of the natural world as we are told we are custodians of the earth - flora and fauna - hence Muslims have a halal slaughter code, limitation of war to defensive, respect for the environment and the habitats of wildlife (e.g. the Qur’an teaching about King Solomon and the Ants, which is also reflected in the Bible)
7. The Qur’an is not extreme and it exhorts to moderation such that it is better than the Bible and Atheism in those terms. Recall that after the suicide Hard Nihilism would demand (in my opinion), the next most reasonable thing from the POV of Atheist logic is extremism, gorging on pleasure, including gorging on violence, the exercise of limitless unbalanced force.
8. As such, l would say that Atheism is the root of extremism and fanaticism. It’s presence in religious ideologies is what causes them to break with religion and turn to petty acts of extremism, fanaticism. Atheism is effectively the death cult that Atheist often accuse Islam of being (suicide being the only purely logical conclusion in Atheism - coincidentally, suicide is forbidden in Islam) even if it is not thought to positively be a belief system by its proponents.
9. Atheism cannot admit to objective knowledge. I’ll admit, mathematical axioms and logic are objective. However, Reasoning surely leads regressively to Logic, which in turn is based on mathematics. Without admitting to a First Cause, Atheism cannot admit to the end of the road of Reason, whence the objective Truth is reached, i.e. no route to Logic via Reasoning. Atheism is thus necessarily restricted to Lore rather than Data (nod to Star Trek TNG). I’ll admit this is obscure and shakey ground and l may receive a shin kick here.
10. Atheism does not have a claim to Justice. It can only derive its laws as hand-me-downs from Religion and perhaps also Utilitarianism, but faulting Utilitarianism is easy. Whether you see Utilitarianism as being for / agains Idealism and for / against Rationalism, it is inescapable that you are the only person you know to exist, even though you didn’t create human language and cannot psychically control others, there is always a workaround to restore Solipsism to the throne (or at least a type of Solipsistic Henotheism, where other key individuals are permitted to share power with you, but you don’t acknowledge the existence of anyone else - that’s basically how friendship circles work these days, and definitely how street gangs work). So, Utilitarianism is in free fall. It’s a road, not a station. A road to materialstic Tyranny, solipsism enthroned.
Furthermore, as for modern secular laws deriving from Religion (at least in my theory), only Monotheism has given us any basis for modern laws (disregarding Utilitarianism for now), because in religion, Law comes from a revealed Scripture, and revealed Scripture only comes from Prophets, and there were only ever Monotheistic Prophets, there were never Polytheistic Prophets. I’ll admit, Zoroaster was a prophet of Dualism, but maybe that’s not polytheism on a technicality that poly begins at 3. Also, who was Zoroaster even? Do we know for sure? He’s lost in time, just as the core of Hinduism, which is Brahminism, which could be argued to be monotheism. So, sorry for rambling but the point is, l think secularism has grandfathered laws from Monotheism. And Atheism must follow suit.
11. Limited Ecumenicism in Islam: Islam has a degree of ecumenicism / universality built-in (though it’s the only religion Muslims believe God will explicitly accept), in that it teaches that all infants are Believers (Moomins) and thus innocent, and thus it’s a sin to deliberately kill a born infant (abortion may be acceptable up to approx. 12 weeks l think, but at that stage, the soul is breathed in to the foetus by an angel), except if perhaps during childbirth it is killing the mother and so forth. Surely rings true in all good hearts. Does any other belief system teach the sanctity of all infants? Some explicitly deny this. Some belief systems have no problem with infanticide of children of a “lesser god”. Also: Islam teaches that there can be non-Muslims in heaven, albeit ideally people who lived before Islam.
12. I’d be interested to know how Islam’s view of gender roles compares with Humanism? As l see it, these days a married man lives in fear of the wife cheating, triggering a messy costly divorce, and then after that, he has to FURTHER relinquish at least half of his home (after it is sold). A single male fears a spurious rape allegatoon, which where l live, can very easily lead to being arrested followed by invasive tests. Even if the female is found to be lying, she only gets lightly punished, the impression l get is that her penatly will be non-custodial. So, marriages don’t succeed, babies don’t get born.
13. Islam is emphatically - no, absolutely - anti-Materialist - because its core paradigm is that we are created just to worship an infinite God. Infinity is antithetical to materialism, as is a life dedicated to worship. Atheism seems to me to be predicated on Materialism, as without the Divine, there is no higher reality, thus nothing to transcend materialism. Also, if reality is finiite, then the Divine cannot exist, as the Divine is defined as infinite Actual, among other definitions.