Having plumbed a new low in North Carolina politics–and, let’s face it, a low in NC, the home of Jesse Helms, is by default, a national low–Elizabeth Dole has managed to lose her senate seat, perhaps primarily by accusing her opponent, Kay Hagan, of being (gasp) an atheist.
Well, in point of fact, she lost by merely occupying her senate seat instead of actually doing anything productive for the state and nation, and by being more closely associated with her husband’s home state of Kansas than with her native state. But still, the political ad, which New York Magazine, in their supplement entitled “Our Super-duper, Ultrasimple Election-Watching Guide,” called “the single worst ad by any candidate in 2008″ did not help her desperate cause.
This development is really kind of encouraging to one who has lived in the state for almost 40 years–not that North Carolina political ads continue to be so debased as to leave only disgust in the minds and hearts of thinking people everywhere, but that this last foray into the muck has not succeeded in bringing victory. This stuff usually works great here! What happened?
Well, Hendrick Hertzberg laid it down pretty well in his blog posting in the New Yorker. He explained what we all knew–that the charge was false. If any of it had been true, North Carolinians might have bought into the ploy, but somehow, maybe just because Kay Hagan is a female, North Carolinians knew the Dole campaign ad was a tissue of lies.
Among the positives in these developments reside a hefty group of negatives, however. Just as when John McCain sought to win points by gently chiding a woman who had called Barack Obama an “Arab,” this entire discussion has bumbled into the morass of unconscious bigotry so deeply ingrained that almost no one can see it. McCain’s statement that the woman was wrong, that Obama was a “good family man,” revealed that he believed “Arabs” to be anything but. The nation looked on approvingly, themselves not realizing that the vast majority of “Arab” men, or Muslim men generally, are also “good family men.” Thus, in North Carolina, a politician seeks to defame an opponent by linking her to atheists, and the state rejects this ploy only because it is untrue, not because it is preposterous to believe that atheists, by definition, must be immoral human beings and unfit to govern.
A citizen, writing to the Raleigh News & Observer editorial page, notes, like a cry in the wilderness, that Godless isn’t immoral. Certain facts remain through all of this that might give people reason to examine their bigotry on this point, unconscious though it may be. One is that the various cultures of the world have arrived at startlingly similar views of what constitutes moral behavior.
Customs and cultures may vary widely; they may become confused with morality in many people’s minds; but the basis of true morality emanates from the same basic core around the world. The other is that there are good, solid reasons to behave morally. If one’s only reason to behave morally is the fear of divine retribution in the afterlife, well, I can see how one could suspect atheists of a closeted immorality. Take superstition out of the equation, however, and one still finds that dealing fairly with one’s fellow human beings is demonstrably better for everyone than doing otherwise. Would it were that many of history’s powerful Christians had known and done just that; instead, aggrandizing and empowering themselves, they cloaked their basic immorality within an outwardly pristine mantle, and millions died at their hands–their clean, well washed hands.
Give me a moral atheist any day. Moral Christians and Muslims exist, too, I’ll bet. The problem is that blindly hewing to doctrine so frequently produces people who can’t see through the superstition to the morality at the core of their particular religion. They stop at the doctrine, and stopping there tends to lead to bigotry instead of deeper insight. This is perhaps the advantage of atheism in producing moral individuals. Having rejected doctrine, they find a need to dig deeper; thus they have perhaps a better chance to find the morality at the core of not only religion, but of their own humanity.