The Godless Delusion:

A great many people want the finer things in life for free, especially if they should learn that others have those things. That’s well and good if one assumes that “all are equal in the eyes of God,” yet in the voice of someone godless it just screams “self-worship”. For example, it’s become a fashion for the atheists to say that, if a man should serve his neighbour *merely* out of love for God, then such a service is not genuine, for no one ought to *need* belief in God in order to serve man; one only needs the love of man. That “love of man” is easy to imagine if one loves oneself, and self-love is a frequent aspect of self-worship.
 
Yet consider this example: that a classic hero loves his parents for their virtue, holds the Laws which govern his Society to be a sacred institution, and reveres the values of his culture and its heritage. Now, should this man be burdened with a younger brother who abuses all these things and people which the hero cherishes as sacred, it is natural that such a man would feel no sympathy for such a traitor. As a favour to his mother, he might bail the brother out of prison; as a favour to the Law, he’d hire him to work within the mailroom of his legal firm, though he would never let the deviant ascend beyond this station. Should he learn that this same deviant has relapsed into crime, he’d persecute him with a vengeance peppered with the passion of a son who lost his father to a traitor. He would even die a martyr, should he fail to bring this deviant to justice, though his martyrdom would ultimately spell the ruin of his enemy.
 
Yet should this enemy desire friendship, those who can relate with such a scoundrel would not feel the hero’s indignation but the villain’s envy. They would vilify the hero just to glamorize the villain. They would take the ego of the deviant to be their only moral compass and so navigate the moral drama by its needle. They would say, “He never *really* loved his baby brother; he was *only* doing it for Mother,” or, “He never *really* wanted Baby Brother to succeed; he *only* did it for the Law.”
What I’ve recounted here is more than just the story of Saul Goodman, but the story of modernity. Now, notice how consistent this interpretation of the story is with that of atheism: “It was never *really* for the love of man, but *only* for the love of God.” Of course, if one assumes that God is not important (since one has assumed His nonexistence), it is natural to fetishize the love of man in place of Him. Yet take this to its ultimate conclusion now, beside all other forms of similar negation. “It was never *really* for the love of man, but *only* for the love of Law,” say all the anarchists, who “should not need” the Law to count themselves among the righteous. “It was never *really* for the love of man, but *only* for the love of parents,” say the adolescents who reject their families. The feminists would say, “It wasn’t ever *really* for the love of woman, but the love of sex and propagation,” and progressives say, “It wasn’t ever *really* for the love of human beings, but tradition.”
 
All of these positions make the same assumption: that a “man” is independent of the things that man holds sacred, yet he is *entitled* to the love of those whose idols he destroys and spits upon. The reverence which men like Chuck McGill may feel for any form of social structure or legitimate authority is not “real” love, but “only” blind allegiance, so the individual is justified in tearing down all idols, then demanding love and, if it is not granted, vilifying those who would not grant it like they’re misers and “not really human”, for they have betrayed the “basic sympathy” we ought to feel for one another. Yet if it is reverence which makes this basic sympathy a possibility, then only by the price of reverence can sympathy be earned.
 
It's for this reason that to give one’s sympathy away for free is inadmissible. The nihilists will ultimately suffer more, as Jimmy does, than those who hold things to hold value. Once upon a time, to be an atheist was noble and courageous, like a daring march into a godless universe, unsheltered by the coziness of past illusions. Now it is the repetition of the new illusions to the point that they grow old. There is no God that hath endowed us with the “rights” which we enjoy, and yet we are to cling to the illusion that such rights continue to exist. There was a time when feminists aspired to the heights of men, to prove that they could be as strong and virtuous without the constant patronage of patriarchy. Now a woman’s strength is measured only by a man’s defeat, and she would rather be “like most girls” than to set herself apart as great and worthy of a man’s affection. Once upon a time the anarchist believed that, underneath it all, we had some basic well of intuition which would unify us as a species in the absence of a bureaucratic State. Yet now that concept is another superstition which the atheists have deemed “disproven”, and the anarchists are merely fighting to preserve the benefits of government whilst hiding from the risks that they might yet be sacrificed. There is no Greater Good in nihilism, but the villain is a popular enough cliché that anyone who claims to seek the Greater Good might yet be labeled “evil”. Yet the “evil masterminds” contrived by idiotic writers are not truly masterminds; their evil lies in their stupidity, an echo of their authors, and it is the idiotic audience which, seeing their atrocities, assumes that it’s the evil of intelligence.

[({R.G.)}]

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