For how can life be sacred when there is no G_d? The consequences of an atheistic worldview are only slowly being realized by Western society. It is a bit like trying out a new drug, created from scratch within the laboratories of pharmaceutical companies: we have signed on for the short-term benefits (no more superstition, more freedom, no more devil, no more the threat of eternal suffering, and the ascendancy of science and objectivity as the way to understand the world) but we cannot grasp the long-term effects until they have had time to play out in our culture.

With a theistic world view, specifically a Christian one, it is suggested that all people are flawed, due to the doctrine of original sin. It is also a matter of belief that we can be saved from our sin through the grace of G_d — this is the “good news” at the heart of the New Testament. We are told that we are loved by G_d, and that the highest commandment is to share this love with others.

This is a powerful story that works on many levels to address the guilt and shame that comes from the way we are raised. There is a difference between the two: guilt happens when you feel you have done something wrong; shame happens when you feel you *are* wrong, broken somehow down to your very core. Part of me feels that if we all used better parenting techniques these feelings would stop invading the core of everyone’s psyche, addictions and compulsivity would fade away, and our world would become perfect at last. Another part of me feels that these feelings of shame are precisely what is meant by original sin — that it is the ability to differentiate ourselves from the world, from animals, and finally, from other people that brings us such enormous suffering — and that this paradox sits at the heart of what it means to be a human individual.

In this sense, our shame transcends anything except the theological. And without a belief in G_d, or a power that can bring us back into union with all things, we have no way to escape our suffering (which may, in fact, simply be another word for sin) except through playing games of domination and subordination with the people around us, and in making things of this world our higher power — drugs, sex, work, violence, righteousness — to take the place of the G_d that we have so successfully shuffled into the twilight of our collective culture.

It may be that all large-scale forms of human organization act only in their own interest and without a conscience or empathy for others, as suggested by Niebuhr in his book Moral Man and Immoral Society. Without a sense of our connectedness, what else is there besides power plays and the desire to win? What greater goal can there be beyond the maximization of material profit?