This is an interesting video. It popped up on my feed weeks ago, but I didn’t watch it, largely because I’ve found western atheism vacuous beyond its ardent critique of dogmatism and fundamentalism. However, after a comrad shared it and offered some insightful remarks, I decided to watch it.
The speaker, Britt Hartley, addresses some things that I concluded over a decade ago after the heady days of the so-called “new atheism” of the mid to late 2000s and early 2010s, and my own participation in this discourse. While I considered (and consider) the critique of dogmatism, fundamentalist thinking, and the political economy of religion critically important, I came to fear that many atheists in this context had also hastened to discard many things which were vital and meaningful–such as the ethical insights, rites of passages, community celebrations, and ways of making and finding meaning in life which generally occur in the context of religions. What’s more, I found some (though not all) of the Black atheists whom I encountered to be hopelessly Eurocentric, and thus unable to engage in any meaningful reflection on the lingering value of African/African Diasporan spiritual practices to both our daily lives and our liberation struggle.
I came to realize that even the idea of “atheism” becomes somewhat complicated in relation to the various ways in which “divinity” itself is constructed within African and African-Diasporan cultures. That is, while disbelief in the God of the varied Abrahamic religions represents the rejection a type of ontological and political absolute wherein belief is the sole means of avoiding damnation, these same logics were and are largely absent within African/African Diasporan traditions wherein “divinity” entails an entire range of things from natural phenomena (i.e., rivers, storms, the Earth etc.), cultural ideals (i.e., truth, honor, harmony, etc.), as well as human will/consciousness. Herein, the very idea of atheism, being one who disbelieves in a god or gods became for me incompatible with non-Western notions of divinity, which entailed many aspects of divinity that I greatly appreciate–the character that I strove to exemplify, the natural environment that I and every other human being relies upon, and the human potential that I sought to embody. In this formula, the divine was not and is not ever external to the human being, but is a fundamental aspect of one’s nature.
Finally, I was reminded that within our traditions, spirituality is largely a matter of practice in contrast to belief. The practice of mdw nfr (good speech) or iwà pẹ̀lẹ́ (gentle or good character), respect for Asase Yaa/Ala (the earth), honoring my ancestors, or observing and celebrating the cycles of life (birth, puberty, adulthood, marriage, elderhood, ancestry, etc.) or nature did not necessarily require any belief in the supernatural, but did require an ability to apprehend and appreciate the sacred.
So, yes, I agree that Western atheism is a spiritual dead end, especially for people of African descent. I argue that our indigenous traditions offer a deep well of wisdom and insight. Further, I think that the various traditions that we have approached and effectively “Africanized” are also capable of yielding appreciable insights.