He confronts major questions and frightening prospects: What is the thing I call me? Is consciousness a fluke, a mistake? If there is no God, no Heaven, no afterlife, what prospect other than horror can there be? He has answers, answers not based on positive faith but better understanding of the negatives. Zen applied to and through the modern conventional worldview. Well worth following him around for a while.

But he says something very interesting: that modern atheism is a useful attitude for modern imperialism. "When you hear somebody say, 'Face Facts! When you're dead, you're dead!" watch out! He wants to rule the world!"

Decidedly peculiar, but there's something there. One of the stongest and most deeply held anti-religious arguments is the amount of human misery religion causes. And the argument from hypocrisy is tremendously telling: aren't you guys supposed to, like, do good 'n' stuff? But outside from the gap between profession and practice, is religion really worse than, say, government?

Organized religion does give people new and original reasons to kill one another--but it also gives people new and original reasons not to. You may kill everybody from a different sect--but you may also refrain from killing people of the same sect. Reasons to be brutal--but reasons to be kind as well. It depends on what you're looking for. 

The one thing religion will not bestow, though, is absolute freedom. God may be pliable to a great man's ambitions--but She is not absolutely silent. The world to come may be a wonderful excuse ("Let God sort 'em out") but it of necessity makes earthly power less important. The one thing religion always, always wrenches man away from is perfect pragmatism. 

The two most successful empires in History were essentially atheistic: Rome's religion was perfunctory and convenient, while Confucian China relied very little on the next life or anything but efficient social precepts and, oh yes, the worship of the Emperor. (It's a big clue if you worship the Emperor.) And while the followers of Mohammed swept across the world in religious fervor, neither Alexander the Great, Darius, Attila, Genghiz Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Lenin, nor Mao were religious. (And Mohammed, of course, was quite dead by the time the expansion of Islam began.)

At the base, belief in a larger reality does not encourage human cruelty, the human exercise of power, or human kindness: it doesn't encourage human action at all. The pagan approach to the supernatural, whether it be Egyptian, Babylonian or Greek, did not legitimize any human actions except, understandably, worship and propitiation of those gods. Kings, warlords and conquerors did not ask for instruction but rather for permission to do what they wanted to do anyway. And they were usually willing to pay for it. 

To be sure, there were and are people who, in order to do terrible things to other people, need to be told that God demands it. There has been a lot of evil done in that regard. But there are others for whom all that is needful is that God doesn't vehemently object--and still others for whom all that's necessary is a general sense of optimism. All the Imperial Japanese needed was an assurance that they were the descendants of Gods--while others in the 20th Century just needed to be told that the victors write the history books. 

THere are a number of varieties of atheism, and a number of arguments for it. They range from The Catholic Church Is Full Of Shit to Belief In God is Wishful Thinking to I Don't Know. There are beliefs in the supernatural that look an awful lot like atheism (viz. Mr. Watts) and denials of belief in the supernatural that look an awful lot like fanatical religion (viz. the Marxism of Uncle Joe Stalin). There are science-fictional atheisms that are coupled with blazing technological optimism, while there are philosophical atheisms welded to nihilism and chained to despair. 

And in the midst of all  this is the question that Watts brings up: what sort of person wants there to be no larger reality?

Not the people who don't want the priests and nuns and Bible Thumpers to be right. Not the people who don't want the naive new age hippies and ignorant bourgeois their fairy castles. Who wants there to be no larger forces, no larger bases, no larger meanings?

And one answer is: those who want no impediments.

And that's what Alan was getting at.

It's not just Lenin and Stalin, either: the anemic Victorian piety was designed not to stand in the way of the racial Social darwinism that presented the White Mans Burden, not as the Will Of God, but as a magnificent Progression of the Race by the administration and guidance of its most advanced segment. With all credit and all authority in the White Man's hands. And Like Rome or the Middle Kingdom, impeded by no God or gods.

Watts's Zen/Buddhist/Vedanta approach is an inspiring negativity: not only is there no world, no God, and no life after death, there is no You to be worried about it. My problem is such that I can't even believe in such a cheerful cosmic cynicism: I doubt my doubt.

But I'll tell you something: I beheld Richard Dawkins' decision to dub atheists "Brights". Leaving aside what I consider to be philosophical illiteracy, leaving aside the MENSA-like smugness--You want the evils of this world? The cruelties, individual, serial and massively parallel? All the fear and horror?

You've got it all right there, Richard. That's all it takes.

Face facts.