Sin and Some Contemporary Western Philosophers

“ Hence believers can have more than a little to do with the birth o f 
atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith,
or teach erroneous doctrine, or  are deficient in their  religious, moral,
or social life, they must be said to conceal rathe r than reveal the
authentic face o f  God and religion” 1. These sobering words o f  Vatican
II afford us plenty o f  food for thought.
In traditional circles, ‘atheist’ was taken to be synonymous with an 
evil person. Recall the words of  that character  in Dostoevsky’s epic 
The Brothers Karamazov, who affirms, “I f  God did not exist, anything
would be permitted.” The drama o f  atheistic humanism2 assures us that
atheists can be very moral people, indeed. As a matter o f  fact, atheists
like Camus (whose views we will be going into a moment) might even
say that religious b elief is, i f  anything, ‘an easy way o u t ’, in the face o f 
the contemporary disturbing scenario. In other words, some people
are atheists because they want to follow higher and nobler values. This, 
at least, is how they would see it.
In this b r i e f  paper, I want to examine how some well-known 
contemporary atheists have a place for moral life and nobler values
and how they even entertain some kind o f  concept o f  sin, even though
they would never employ the term. I ’ll take some representatives o f 
the atheistic trend in Existentialism and Postmodernism that are not
yet spent forces by a long chalk!