Is Atheism a Specifically Western Phenomenon?

[C C]

http://www.the-american-interest.com/201...henomenon/

EXCERPT: We know atheism in its Jewish or Christian context, as a rejection of the Biblical God. What would atheism mean in a Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist context?

Adam Garfinkle, the editor of The American Interest, asked me this question. He told me that he had met a Saudi who claimed to be an atheist: What does this mean? We know atheism in its Jewish or Christian context, as a rejection of the Biblical God. What would atheism mean in a Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist context?

My short answer is: Yes, Atheism, as we know it, came out of a Judaeo-Christian context. But I would slightly re-phrase Garfinkle’s question. The dichotomy is not western/non-Western. It is Abrahamic/non-Abrahamic. It is a rebellion against the monotheistic faiths that originated in the Middle East–Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It makes much less sense in a non-monotheistic environment.

The rebellion is triggered by an agonizing problem: How can God, believed to be both all-powerful and morally perfect, permit the suffering and the evil afflicting humanity? This is the problem called theodicy, which literally means the “justice of God”; in the spirit of the rebellion it is also a demand that God has to justify himself.

[...] In Islam, the most recent in the trio of West Asian monotheisms, the motif of submission to God’s will is at the core of piety. The very name of the faith is derived from the Arabic word aslama–“to submit”. Every gesture of Muslim prayer is the bodily expression of this attitude. Again, it is in Sufism, the mystical undercurrent of Islam, that the austerity of mainstream piety is softened.

[...] Suffering is endemic to the human condition, and so is the urge to overcome or at least to explain it. Different attempts to satisfy this urge are not neatly divided geographically. Theodicy in its full force is unlikely to appear in contexts shaped by the religious imagination of the Indian subcontinent, as manifested in Hinduism and Buddhism (the latter could only arise from the former).

[...] The fundamental assumption of the Indian view of the cosmos is reincarnation–the linked realities of samsara and karma–the endless cycle of rebirths and deaths, and the cosmic law that the consequences of human actions, good or bad, are carried from one life to the next. I would propose that in this view the “Jerusalem” problem of theodicy evaporates.

This is why Max Weber called Hinduism (the same applies to Buddhism) “the most rational theodicy”: The individual cannot thank anyone but himself for his good fortune, or blame anyone else for his misery–what happens to the individual is the (so to speak) mathematically precise result of all his own past actions. The ultimate redemption is being able to escape from the endless death-laden cycle of rebirths. Of course there are very significant differences between Hinduism and Buddhism, and between various branches of these traditions...

[Yazata]

We know atheism in its Jewish or Christian context, as a rejection of the Biblical God. What would atheism mean in a Muslim, or Hindu, or Buddhist context?

Islam is probably more closely related to Judaism than Christianity is, and more continuous with it. Atheism in the Muslim context would be disbelief in the existence of the Judaic/Christian/Islamic God, especially in its 'Allah' cultural form.

My short answer is: Yes, Atheism, as we know it, came out of a Judaeo-Christian context. But I would slightly re-phrase Garfinkle’s question. The dichotomy is not western/non-Western. It is Abrahamic/non-Abrahamic. It is a rebellion against the monotheistic faiths that originated in the Middle East–Judaism, Christianity, Islam. It makes much less sense in a non-monotheistic environment.

It's probably important to point out that most contemporary Hindus are monotheists. While they believe that the divine can and does appear in countless forms, corresponding to India's ancient gods and goddesses, they also believe that there's only one ultimate divine principle, which most Indians conceive of in personal terms.

That does kind of blur atheism's focus though. Would belief in an impersonal divine principle, such as Advaita's Brahman, count as a form of atheism? (We could ask the same question of Western Neoplatonism and even of some varieties of Christian mysticism in which the Godhead is conceived as being beyond all conceptualization.)

Polytheism doesn't seem to be a roadblock to atheism, since denying the existence of multiple divinities isn't really a whole lot different than denying the existence of just one. So it's easy to see how atheism could exist in polytheistic societies. (I believe that the word was first coined by the Greeks in a polytheist context, though it seems to have had a rather different meaning when they used it.)

Buddhism does kind of present a problem for atheism, just as it does for so many other Western intellectual categories. Traditional Buddhism is polytheist. But having said that, belief in the gods was accepted largely because it was widely accepted in India at the time of the Buddha, and not because gods had any central role in the Buddhist system. That's why Buddhism could easily move into different cultures like China or Japan, without challenging the local divinities which many Buddhists continued to honor.

What's happening in Buddhist cultures today isn't so much the kind of challenge from atheism that fills internet discussion boards in the West, as it is the rise of a modernist kind of Buddhism that more or less does away with belief in personalized divine beings, and sometimes the supernatural entirely, treating them as myths and teaching stories.

Interestingly, it was European scholars that helped create this Buddhist modernism in the 19th century. Now that we are in the 21st, many Western scholars in university Buddhist Studies programs have been swept away by the 'post-modernist' currents and are now angrily denouncing Buddhist modernism as a 'colonial' distortion of indigenous tradition. Never mind that Buddhist modernism is spreading in contemporary urban Asia as well, among university educated populations there as a reaction to scientific rationalism.