Atheism and the Eternity of Money
“I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” – Frank Lloyd Wright
At church on Sunday, an atheist stood up and talked about what our community (not the LGBT community but the Unitarian community) meant to him. They call this section of the service the pulpit editorial. I love a church that grants an atheist airtime.
At times I struggle with the notion of God, although I’m not quite ready to come out as an atheist. However, I’m comfortable sharing my current beliefs: I think humans should focus on the here and now, because this quite possibly could be the scope of our existence. If there is an afterlife, then lovely… that’s like getting a gift with purchase at the department store. But I’m not counting on it.
The minister then gave her lecture (it would be unfitting to call it a sermon) and the theme was: we are responsible for heaven on earth. What does this mean? Well, the blogger at Plonkee Monkey wrote a post last week called: Atheists Should Tithe that explains this perfectly.
He writes, “Actually I don’t mean that atheists should tithe at all, I mean that humanists should donate a reasonable proportion of their income to charities, but it wasn’t as catchy.”
“An atheist is strictly speaking, a person who doesn’t have a belief in God. This statement implies that atheism says nothing about morality or how one should live one’s life. However, many atheists would also consider themselves humanists. Humanists basically believe that humans are on our own in the world and that we need to make the best of it. This means that humanists specifically rule out appeals to deities of any kind. This is why I really mean that humanists should be doing something.”
“If you are a humanist, this existence is all of the life and experience you are going to get. It also means that:
- Nothing is going to improve the lives of the poor and suffering, if nobody, anywhere does anything about it.
- Nobody is going to save the environment if some humans don’t do it.
- People are going to die early from disease and accidents unless some people do something. And when they die, that’s it.”
So what’s the point? Independent of whether we believe in an afterlife or not, we should spend our money to make the world a better place now. Jeanine and I were embarrassed when our accountant asked for the amount of our charitable donations last year. So we have a goal to be more generous in 2007. I’ll write more about this in an upcoming post.
In the meantime, feel free to read some of my other thoughts about this business of God.
July 18th, 2007 at 7:39 am
[...] A few other bloggers continued the discussion on their sites including David on Finance and Gather Little by Little. Back at Get Rich Slowly some of the comments spiraled into Christian-bashing and missed the point of FMF’s post. After all, a personal finance blog is supposed to be “personal” and if someone’s personal faith influences how they think about money, aren’t they free to write about it. I’m not a religious person, but even I read FMF’s blog from time to time and when he starts quoting scripture, I typically skim over those passages much the same way I skim an article written by Suze Orman where she assumes all women are idiots when it comes to money. Move on, right? [...]
November 11th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
[...] has been some coverage on this blog and others on tithing with a twist, using the word as more of a humanist’s spiritual investment [...]
May 12th, 2008 at 4:28 am
[...] You also have to be pretty studious outside of school to memorize scripture. Of course, I wasn’t quite as diligent as one of my sisters who memorized several books written by the disciple known as Paul and for this she earned the top spot on the church Bible Quiz team. I know, it almost sounds cult-like. Well it was. But it kept me on the straight and narrow until I graduated from college and started questioning everything from my sexuality to an afterlife. [...]