Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (23 page)

Confucius is credited with coining the earliest version of the Golden Rule: “What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others.” You may also recognize it as one of countless variations of that ethical principle found in cultures around the world.

Whether Confucianism is a philosophy or a religion is a source of perpetual and mostly pointless debate. You can call it either one. But even if you consider it a religion, it is (like Jainism and some forms of Buddhism) a nontheistic one.

Visiting ancient India: 320 million gods and none at all

Say “religion” and “India” and most people will immediately think of Hinduism, and maybe even picture Shiva, the god most likely to win a tickle fight. But although 80 percent of Indians identify as Hindu, the last thing you should associate with this fascinating corner of the globe is any kind of religious uniformity. India is hands down the most religiously diverse region of its size on Earth and has been for millennia. Included in this tapestry of various beliefs is a thriving atheist tradition at least as old and honorable as the atheist voices of China.

India has been the birthplace of an impressive number of religious traditions and identities. Buddhism, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Jainism all started out in India and continue to have a huge presence, but India is also home to:

125 million Muslims

25 million Christians

60 million people who specifically identify as nonreligious

I focus on the three most prominent ancient Indian religions in these sections to show that each has included a healthy presence of nontheistic belief.

Doubting like a Hindu

Hinduism, which is the largest religion in India, is unlike any other religion on Earth. Most religions have a starting point, a founder who hears voices, or claims to have found gold tablets, then spreads the word. Inevitably, the religion splits into two or ten or a hundred sects over disagreements in doctrine or practice. But Hinduism goes the other direction, bringing a wide variety of ancient Indian religious traditions together under a single name.

Hindus (or even Indians) didn’t coin the term “Hindu.” Arabs to the west of the Sindhu (now Indus) River used the term for all the various foreign peoples on the other side of the Sindhu. Like “barbarian” or “gentile,” the word “Hindu” started life as one of those words that’s usually accompanied by a vague, hand-waving gesture at “those people over there.” And Hindu wasn’t even a religious category at first, which also helps explain much of the diversity it ends up containing.

Unlike the early Christian church, which held conclaves in its early centuries to decide on an orthodox core of beliefs, the many religious groups under the Hindu umbrella didn’t lose their different traditions and beliefs. Individual freedom of belief is a given, and the idea of blasphemy or heresy is pretty much unheard of. A Hindu may believe in one god or other divine being, or many gods — up to 320 million by one count — or no gods at all.

So you can see why a lot of effort throughout Hindu history has been devoted to describing and cataloguing the many branches and colors and shades of Hinduism. One big division is between those schools of thought that accept the authority of the ancient Veda scriptures (known as
āstika
schools) and those that don’t (
nāstika
schools). It’s not as strange as it sounds, really; even Christian denominations vary a lot in the emphasis they place on the Bible’s authority — although Hinduism is radically different in Christianity because both the āstika and nāstika
sides include some completely godless branches.

Samkhya,
the oldest of the six main schools of Hinduism, entirely rejected the idea of gods, whereas followers of the Cārvāka system of thought were busily writing critiques of theistic belief 2,500 years before atheism hit the
New York Times
Bestseller list. “Do not perform religious acts,” said one text from the third century BCE. “There is no heaven, no final liberation, nor any soul in another world . . . While life remains, let a man live happily; nothing is beyond death.”

Around the same time, the
Purva Mimamsa
school laid out a more agnostic philosophy, saying the evidence for gods was insufficient, and that even if they do exist, humans can get along just fine without them. (Some scholars actually describe Mimamsa as more of an
apatheistic
branch — they don’t care whether gods exist or not. Either way, they figure, there are more important things to think and talk about.)

Laughing at gods with Buddha

Buddhism was even more specifically atheistic at its start than Hinduism. Many scholars trace Buddhist atheism right to the horse’s mouth, Gautama Buddha, who clearly rejected the idea of a creator god and was described as laughing uproariously when his followers said (as followers often will) that he himself was a god. Some forms of Buddhism do include reference to superhuman beings, or
devas,
but these have neither the powers nor the other résumé items typical of gods.

Buddhist teaching often includes the specific caution that theistic beliefs and the desires that accompany them can get in the way of achieving
nirvana,
the total freedom from suffering that is the goal of Buddhist practice. Instead, like several other Indian and Chinese philosophies, Buddhism emphasizes the relationship between what people do and what effect that has on the universe — summed up (and ridiculously oversimplified) in the Western phrase, “What goes around comes around.”

Doing no harm with the Jains

I saved my favorite for last.
Jainism,
an atheistic religion founded around the same time as Confucianism, gets my vote for Best Religion on the Planet. Based on pacifism and nonviolence toward all living things, Jainism was around centuries before Samkhya. Jains reject the idea of supernatural beings, including a creator god, and have written some of the most direct criticisms of supernatural belief and defenses of atheism ever produced. (See
Chapter 5
for one of my favorite passages.)

Once the dominant religion in southern India, Jains are now a fairly small minority in the country — about 6 million out of 1.2 billion people, or one-half of one percent of the population. Despite their numbers, Jains have had an outsized influence on Indian life in areas including ethics, literacy, and law. Such ethical concepts as
ahisma
(nonviolence) and
karma
(action that decides one’s fate) are traced to Jain origins, and the oldest libraries and much of the most influential literature in India are Jain in origin.

Whispering doubts in Ancient Greece and Rome

Greece and Rome were hotbeds for ancient philosophy.
Ethics
(which deals in the difference between right and wrong, good and evil)
,
meaning and purpose, the nature of existence, beauty, logic, politics — all these and more were fodder for thinkers in both cultures. But the voice of unorthodox religion, not to mention any hint of atheism, wasn’t welcomed and was even punished in Greece and Rome.