'The Starry Heaven above Me, and the Moral Law within Me.'

('Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me.') - Kant

I have to say, I love atheists. Or at least I love the bright ones. Because, look, they are maintaining a consistent position: either a thing is provable solely by reason, in which case I will believe it, or is not fully accessible to rationality, and then I won't. And if I'm anything (which at my weight is not always certain) I, too, am some kind of Enlightenment-style humanist in many, many ways. Maybe it took me a long time to admit it, but I'm out and proud now. The only catch in my case being that I don't believe humans are the end of it, nor that everything that does or could exist is necessarily comprehensible to or articulable by human reason. Our reason could have limits, just as our sense of smell does relative to a dog's, or a bear's. And, certainly, relative to anything having unlimited powers of every sort.

But I understand the position. And the last point would be an absurd speculation from a rationalist point of view, since what would my reason know about the existence of such anythings? I also think that there are many breeds of atheists, particularly of the Enlightenment variety, who agree on many basic premises about the inhering dignity of man with those who arrive at that position due to a belief about the divine source of that dignity. In either case the 'Man is born free' position holds, and each appends from his perspective the implied-moral-imperative second clause without which the beginning is nothing but a quaint and inert metaphysical claim.

However, the group that does drive me nuts, and has since I was in high school, is the 'spiritual but not religious' crowd, the mass migration of which to Big Sur, the Napa Valley, and beach huts in Costa Rica would leave the greater Seattle area bereft of 70% of its tax base. The rationalist atheists have it hard, and they know it, and they take their responsibility seriously, because they realize it's up to them to figure things out. If one cannot rely on any Authority beyond one's own logic to give guidance, the responsibility is great and the burden a heavy one.

By contrast, the 'spiritual but not religious' people often accept their 'authority' from a multitude of sources: it doesn't have to be right, as a religious person might say; it doesn't have to add up right, as a rationalist might; it just has to feel right, the standards for which are as varied as the number of soi-disant gurus and self-help books in the world. What to me is more chilling to me than the unpleasant aesthetics of that reality is that this 'spirituality' can be as devoid of ethics as the user wishes.

An atheist indeed can be a maniacal Machiavellian egoist, to be sure, but I'm not talking about them, and I have encountered few in my personal experience. I think at the same time that far too many shade-grown-coffee-drinking hemp-clad 'yogis' and would-be bhikkhunis end up, in their ever-fluid quest for self-development or self-enrichment, becoming terrifically self-involved egoists themselves. If, admittedly, extremely bendy ones.

It seems to me that at base the one belief that unites most of these 'spiritual' individuals is this: there is a Power, some sort of divine something, and I owe Him/Her/It/They/Us some form of recognition, but it is up to me to discern what shape this recognition might take in my case. All too rarely does this Divine Power impart an ethical code, because ethical codes are the province of religions, and the 'spiritual but not religious' eschew religion, and religious authority, as being inherently oppressive. But while 'feeling good' is a reasonable criterion for adjudging the after-effects of a yoga class or colon cleanse, it is nonetheless insufficient proof of the moral rightness or wrongness of a given act. It is in no way parallel to the fearless and rigourous self-searching that both rational believers and rational atheists must undertake in order to live an ethical life.

Enlightenment thinkers adjured us to use our own minds and pursue freedom, rather than blindly ceding our will and our powers of reason in deference to the dictates of monarchies or the Church. However, were I forced to cede all my powers of thought, I would rather do so to the likes of thinky ethical atheists like Diderot, Condorcet, Hume, Mille, de Beauvoir, Zizek, Clarence Darrow, Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, James Connolly, Harriet Martineau, and James Rachels than to Oprah, The Secret, 'quantum mysticists,' or anyone aiming a burning hank of sage up at me from the Down-Dog asana.