So of course I am feeling ambivalent about posting that bit about atheism. For one thing, I only have about a dozen regular readers and I don't want to lose any of you. But also because it has caused a fair amount of dissonance within me. I've come very close to deleting it several times, not because I didn't mean it, but because I don't think I quite said what I meant to say. So here is a brief second attempt.

In some way that I can't quite articulate, at this particular moment in my life, acknowledging my atheist thoughts has become a necessary part of being a believer. The tension between the two of ways of thinking (believing and not) feels like two sides of the same coin. They arise organically out of each other. I find some comfort in various OT stories: Jacob is blessed by God after wrestling with him all night; David is perhaps more beloved by God than any other character, yet he sins egregiously and repents from the bottom of his heart (Ps 51); Job shouts defiance at heaven, and yet in the end, God is pleased with him and blesses him. It occurs to me that all of those times in the prophets where God says (through the prophet) that it isn't empty sacrifices that he wants, it is human beings' hearts-- all of those times may be a reflection of something very simple: God wants honesty from us, even if that honestly involves speaking thoughts that aren't orthodox.

This is coming very close to me sounding like I'm patting myself on the back for having heretical thoughts and that's not what I mean to do at all. So maybe I should just stop. It's just that some days it feels like an act of faith to stand before God, courage in both hands, and say "I don't believe in you."

AB

I've been trying off and on for a year and a half now to write a post about letting go of expectations about what God "should" be like. It's a difficult task for those of us who were raised with very specific ideas. It was going to be called "forgiving God," because in spite of the blasphemous sound of that phrase, that is often what it feels like. But that post isn't going anywhere, in spite of my long-term efforts. So maybe that's all I need to say about it, or maybe more will come up later. So... moving on.

What I've been thinking about recently is atheism. The word has such a slanted, loaded meaning in our culture, especially because of the very vocal appearance of a number of prominent atheists in the last few years (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, etc). In some circles it seems to mean the same thing as being un-American, immoral, and a devil worshipper, which is absurd, of course.

But honestly, their take on it is not particularly appealing to me-- in part because while their stated ideas are provocative and often convincing, their motivation on a personal level often seems to be something like an inability to forgive God for not being what they expect him to be, and perhaps more obviously, an inability to forgive believers for believing in God anyway. I'll confess that's a pretty biased statement about their work that is based on a very limited reading of their books, and hearing a few interviews. But read the first chapter of God is Not Great and see if you don't find that the prevailing sentiment is not so much the freedom of letting go of religious ideas but anger--even bitterness--at the (perceived) stupidity of people who complacently accept meaningless ideas about God. They seem both angry and gleeful to point out the ways in which God cannot possibly be like what is advertised by the religious establishment, but at the same time they are unwilling to acknowledge that God might be something entirely other than that. In the end, I find them unconvincing. Trumpeting that the God of Sunday School piety doesn't exist is so self-evident as to be boring, if you ask me.

But it doesn't change the fact that atheism has become a viable alternative for me in the past few months. I don't think I mean the term in the same way that they do, because when they use it, it seems to have an automatic pejorative meaning toward religion and spirituality, and I don't feel that. I still can't deny my own experiences with spirituality-- both in the past and present. But neither can I deny the part of me that just doesn't think there's anything out there, and certainly not anyone.

It's almost like two separate compartments in my brain: the part of me that believes implicitly in the spiritual experiences I've had, and the part of me that thinks it's all utter nonsense. I'm going to assign this to right brain and left brain, respectively, just because I need something to assign it to, not because I have any proof that's really what it is. It's just what it feels like. When I'm thinking with my right brain, spirituality and connectedness and a wholistic approach to my experience feels completely and utterly right and natural. When I'm thinking with my left brain, that right brain thinking seems absurd. Even silly. Which is one of the reasons I've had a hard time posting recently. It is becoming more and more difficult to overcome that "This is DUMB" feeling.

But I wrote a paper a couple of weeks ago for my Bible as Lit class about the Book of Job. I argued that the reason why God approves of Job at the end of the story is because Job refused to stop asking questions until he was satisfied. He held onto the contradictions until he felt them resolve. Like a Zen koan. And God was pleased with him.

So I'm trying to do the same, and my right brain is trying to trust that God (or What I Think of as God) will be OK with that, because he/she/it was OK with it when Job did it. while my left brain wrestles this out.

AB
Behold, You desire truth in the innermost being... (Psalm 51.6, NASV)

atheism, the new religion

In the last couple of months, I've listened to interviews with controversial atheists Sam Harris (once) and Richard Dawkins (twice), and also read the recent column Mr. Harris syndicated nationally. I haven't read their books, though I do plan on reading The End of Faith, which has been sitting on my shelf for a year now. I'm mainly responding to Harris. Richard Dawkins strikes me as someone who enjoys fanning the flames, being at the center of a storm of controversy -- someone who relishes stirring things up. I just don't have a lot of energy for that. His arguments seem to me to be as much about getting his fifteen minutes of fame as anything else. But while that element is present in Mr. Harris's arguments, I find them much more interesting and thought provoking. 

At the heart of both Mr. Harris's and Mr. Dawkins' argument is a firm belief that fundamentalism is the true face of religious belief. Mr. Harris mostly pokes fun at religious moderates; he claims that theologically they are on shaky ground compared to their fundamentalist counterparts. Mr. Dawkins claims that religious moderates make extremism possible, by mainstreaming religious beliefs that are centuries out of date. But who says? They have no way to back that up, it's just their opinion about the religious experience. And it has the added bonus of making their argument 100% easier-- then they only have to respond to the extremists.  

In short, at the same time that they criticize the fundamentalist mindset, they insist that fundamentalists have the only correct way to experience religion. The millions of us out here who have religious beliefs but don't share fundamentalism's strict (biased) interpretation of some ancient text are just dismissed with a jibe about "believing what we want to believe." It's easy to set up the terms of your argument and then insist that that is the only way the discussion can be conducted. Good job, guys. But it ignores the truth of the experience of millions of people on the planet who have deeply-held religious beliefs that are based on compassion and tolerance.

never finished this one but I'm posting it anyway.

OK, so back to the topic at hand. A couple of months ago I downloaded a recording of Julia Sweeney on a radio program called This American Life. She was talking about her experiences with her own and her brother's cancer. I really enjoyed it, and made a fool out of myself cracking up while driving around alone in my car. So I decided I would download more of her stuff. So I found interviews with her on both Fresh Air and To The Best of Our Knowledge (all three of those are great public radio programs, check them out sometime). She was talking about her new one-woman show called "Letting Go of God" in which she describes her experience in first of all coming back to the Catholic church as an adult after something of an epiphany, and secondly her subsequent decision to leave the church because she just couldn't buy it. She now considers herself an atheist. She is, as always, very entertaining and very interesting and she brings up a lot of excellent points to think about. Both interviews are very good.

Recently I've been having yet another of my ongoing periods of questioning everything. I've had a few moments where I've stood at the brink of atheism and looked over the edge and thought about taking the plunge. I think there are people out there who are raised in a religious environment, as I was, who take this plunge easily-- they decide they can't do religion the way they were raised, walk out the door and never look back. But for me, it would be huge. It would be an entirely new way of looking at the world. Even though I left the religion of my youth some twenty years ago, I've never ceased to believe that there is something beyond our conscious selves that we can connect with. I'm not sure what it is (God, Nothing, collective subconscious, who knows). To believe that there is absolutely nothing beyond that which can be perceived with our five senses, would be an extremely different way of looking at things.

But on the other hand, I'm also fascinated by some of the implications. When she initially returned to the church, she did so because she had had a spiritual experience. In a really low moment in the middle of the night following a divorce and illness, she had a profound experience of the presence of what she thought was God-- a sense of light and warmth and connection with all of everything, and a definite sense that there was something/someone there that she had connected with. So she went back to the church she had been raised in (Catholic), and it was her experience of closely investigating Catholicism that led her to leave the church and seek explanations elsewhere. Where she eventually found answers that made sense to her was in science, which led her to become an atheist. So of course Terry Gross asked her, so now that you're an atheist, what do you make of that experience, that spiritual epiphany? And her response was that she now thinks of it as the random firing of neurons in the right front parietal lobe of her brain (or something like that, I may not have gotten the terms right).

Now I've heard this argument before and I don't get it. How does the fact that we now know which neurons fire during moments of profound spiritual experience prove that we're not having the spiritual experience??? That makes no sense. The fact that we know which neurons fire when we smell garlic doesn't mean the garlic isn't there. I'm not arguing with her decision to become an atheist, I'm arguing with her explanation of what happened when she had that moment. Every time I listen to an atheist talk about their beliefs, I get the same impression. They want to believe they're being totally rational and logical, but they have no explanation for spiritual experiences beyond the obvious: neurons firing. And I've had a number of what I consider to be spiritual experiences. So for me to ignore those and say, "Oh, it was just neurons firing," would be as irrational as it would be for someone who has never had a spiritual experience to take a leap of faith just because someone else says so. This isn't saying what I want to say, I may have to try it again later.

The interview from "To The Best of Our Knowledge" also had a couple of interviews with other people in the same program. And with both of the atheists interviewed, the inconsistency seemed the same. The part of their argument which is very valid isn't with spirituality, it's with religion, and with people who use religion as an excuse to not think. And I think that this is an excellent point and one which all of us who are believers should take very seriously. But it doesn't prove that spirituality doesn't exist. It doesn't even prove that God doesn't exist (which one of them acknowledges). I think there must be some middle ground somewhere, where you don't allow your faith to let you take shortcuts into muzzy-headed reasoning, but you also allow for the fact that there is an element of human experience that is spiritual. So that we work on figuring out what that means instead of just saying, "oh, it's random neurons firing."

So in short (ha! I gues this hasn't been short). OK, so in summary. These interviews are fascinating, I highly recommend listening to them. They made me think a lot. But in the end, they weren't particularly convincing to me in deciding the questions that I'm dealing with right now. I may still end up deciding that there is nothing out there. But neither of these atheists convinced me that their way of thinking is that much more reasonable than the way believers think.

I'm starting to think in circles here so I will stop. I'm sure there will be more on this topic because I've barely scratched the surface.

Oh, joy, you're thinking.

the goose is getting fat....

Aunt BeaN