the atheist worships concepts, The Mechanics of Virtue, aphorism 249

249

Through the worship of God, the priest gained advantage, got even, or got by.  But out of the same motivation the atheist worships concepts.  It is a point worth repeating: he worships concepts by that same mechanism which formerly as a theist he had worshipped gods.  Now he worships the gods of Extreme Honesty and Integrity as they appear upon the screen of consciousness, and as if there were no projectors to account for them.  

He claims his motive ... his cause.  He draws geometric lines between the projections on his screen and calls this method, “causality.” Of course, he has a motive.  What were we thinking?  It is to secure integrity.  And seeking integrity is the first cause toward the effect of having integrity.

He has his goal, “integrity,” and it is indeed a stimulus toward a display of fearless honesty.  But out of what material has the goal itself been constructed?  The machine took in its circumstance and threw forth a goal which itself became a genuine part of the motive-complex, but which is something altogether different from the conditions and the machine responsible for inserting precisely that goal into consciousness.  The goal is only a late contribution to a stimulus-complex that constitutes “our motive.”

From the mechanical view, his goal is a behavioral consequence; it arrives last.  From the point of view of consciousness, this consequence appears first, and thus appears as a “cause.”  He has his “motive” and his “objective” and that is why he has integrity: because he willed it.  But when the atheist has more integrity than the theist, the hidden drive for superiority has only thrown a convenient projection upon the screen of consciousness, and this drive will be gratified all the easier if the essential parts to this motive remain hidden under this label of “integrity.”


Now what of the hapless fellow who becomes aware that he has no right to any god? ... not even concepts  ... for he knows that they are only conduits for crude discharges of physiological drives.  Now he must give up the notion of “integrity” just as he had given up “righteousness,” and he must include their projectors within his strategy hereafter.  That is, either superiority is a goal hidden from his intellect and therefore “overcome” by his “integrity” ... or he becomes aware of his mechanisms and accepts within his strategy their unavoidable function.  A mechanist does not worship the concept of honesty; he exploits the drive and conditions which produce this effect.

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