Atheist 10 Commandments

Just read a post by Scot McKnight that listed Alain de Botton’s ‘list for life’. Here is the list:

1. Resilience: Keeping going even when things are looking dark.
2. Empathy: The capacity to connect imaginatively with the sufferings and unique experiences of another person.
3. Patience: We should grow calmer and more forgiving by being more realistic about how things actually happen.
4. Sacrifice: We won't ever manage to raise a family, love someone else or save the planet if we don't keep up with the art of sacrifice.
5. Politeness: Politeness is closely linked to tolerance, -the capacity to live alongside people whom one will never agree with, but at the same time, cannot avoid.
6. Humour: Like anger, humour springs from disappointment, but it is disappointment optimally channelled.
7. Self-awareness: To know oneself is to try not to blame others for one's troubles and moods; to have a sense of what's going on inside oneself, and what actually belongs to the world.
8. Forgiveness: It's recognising that living with others is not possible without excusing errors.
9. Hope: Pessimism is not necessarily deep, nor optimism shallow.
10. Confidence: Confidence is not arrogance - rather, it is based on a constant awareness of how short life is and how little we will ultimately lose from risking everything.

Here are a few of the more interesting responses to Scot's post ...

• Interesting… These are great ideals. If there is no God and the world was completely cleansed of all religion, would these ideals still exist?
• I suspect that the world would be much darker without the influence of those who have faithfully taken up their cross and followed in his steps.
• As I understand my history none if these traits were a part of the pre Christian world, except possibly to some degree in Israel.
• Only in the West, do atheists see these ideals a “the way things are” – because Western culture and ideals have been so deeply impacted by Jesus.
• I don’t find them consistent with a true atheist worldview. I have often thought Nihilism is the most honest form of atheism.
• Three principles of significant importance to me as a Christian apologist are conspicuously missing from this list: honesty, integrity, and rationality.
  

What responses do you have towards the list? Do you think they really represent atheistic thought or do they merely present a humanistic spin on New Testament Christian morality and behavior?

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