"I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt not have false gods before me."
If God exists and you worship anything in his place, then that thing is a false god and you are an idolater. But if God does not exist, and you worship anything at all, then you are also an idolater. Or so say I. For idolatry entails worshipping something unworthy of worship, and if God (or some other Absolute such as the Plotinian One) does not exist, then nothing is worthy of worship.
Now atheists typically pride themselves on 'going one god further.' Thus they typically say to the Christian, "You reject all gods but the Christian god; we just go one god further." So, consistently with his atheism, an atheist cannot worship anything without falling into idolatry. He cannot esteem anything absolutely. If he makes a clean sweep with respect to all gods, then he cannot make a god of sex, power, money, science, the Enlightenment, the state, the withering away of the state, the worker's paradise, the atheist agenda, nature, the revolution, humanity, himself, his mortal beloved, not to mention golf and Eric Clapton.
A consistent atheism, one that eschews all gods, may prove to be a difficult row to hoe. The atheist will be sorely tempted to fall into idolatry, making a god of nature, for example, as some environmentalists do, or of science, or of the Enlightenment project, or of the 'crusade' against Christianity or religion generally. If there is no Absolute, then nothing may be legitimately viewed as absolute. Our atheist must also avoid nihilism, the denial of value to everything. The atheist must find meaning in a world in which nothing is absolute, nothing holy, nothing worthy of total commitment or ultimate concern. Nice work if you can get it.
Can one live a meaningful life without God and without idols? Without an Absolute and without illicitly absolutizing anything relative? I doubt it. I suspect the atheist must fall into some sort of idolatry and end up worshipping nature or the state or the defeat of superstition or something else obviously unworthy of worship. Why must he? Because we are all naturally inclined to find life worth living in pursuit of values that transcend us, values that are not transient, contingent, and parasitic on our flickering wishes and desires. Thus I conjecture that atheists and metaphysical naturalists who do not succumb to nihilism live in a state of self-deception in which they attach absolute value to things that their theory tells them cannot have absolute value. Perhaps they should acquiesce in the nihilism of Nietzsche's Last Man.
Can an atheist live life to the full, keeping up the strenuous mood, falling neither into idolatry nor into nihilism? William James (1842-1910) would, I think, demur. In "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life," we read:
The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of existence its keenest possibilities of zest.
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